Even if LePaige can duke it out musically, I think his duels are more like this:
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you little son of a bitch socialist cocksucker.
OK, so we have a misogynist insult, and a homophobic insult; I like how “socialist” is just thrown in the middle of that, because you know that in his mind, that one is just as bad as the other two.
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No, I don’t identify as either because I can be very stubborn in my views. But this does not stop others from categorizing me, and they do. But I was lucky to grow up in an area which was so cosmopolitan that I didn’t encounter overt racism towards anybody until my adult years. But for better or worse I have moved around, and currently live in a more bigoted region.
Maybe they didn’t offer a choice, but maybe you made it for them. Your very existence could be seen as proving them wrong.
My parents are both Métis, although they seem to have always tried to identify and assimilate with what they perceive to be white US culture - which I see as them actually trying to appropriate European traditions. As an autistic kid who was always suspicious of social norms, I grew up thinking that my family was weird in this regard. Obviously, the experience of people with African ancestry is different in that there are more visual differences than between Euros and other ethnicities. But the problems can seem closer and more like personal/professional betrayal if people assumed that I was white and then suddenly realized that I am not, that I “tricked” them (with my savage cunning, no doubt). Overt racism I think can be more brutal, but that it can be easier to know where one stands with bigots and have the possibility of maybe sort of avoiding them.
One fun thing about the indigenous perspective is how easily and completely it undermines conservatroll arguments about “going back to traditional American values”, and similar tropes. A position I call, tongue-in-cheek, Nativism for the Natives. All of their rhetoric of tradition and assimilation falls apart with us. Despite this though, I am not hoping for a return to the 13th century or anything.
Sure, I try to do without personal identity, but use social identity mainly for purposes of ease of communication with others. I think that identity tries to make something static which in reality changes quite a bit. That a person is really a network of differing cultures and even organisms. I am not the same cells or matter that was here ten years ago, but I am a product of the same pattern, and this pattern itself also changes over time. Identity is always an arbitrary temporary construct. But people can still even stereotype the avoidance of stereotype, not unlike in Greg Egan’s story “Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies”, and write me off as a flake. XD
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That’s what worries me . . .
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Noooooo, you don’t say!
*lolz
No offense, but my inner-Captain Obvious has gotta do it:
Ah, that explains a lot about the way you communicate your ideas. I was unaware; my bad.
Ob’s.
Despite being very light brown in complexion, my facial features are Afrocentric and Indigenous; full lips, high cheekbones, with loosely coiled dark brown hair; and although I’ve been mistaken for Puerto Rican, Dominican, and a few other variations of the Afro-Latino portion of the Diaspora, I’ve never once been mistaken for or accused of ‘trying to pass’ for White, in all my 4 decades on this planet and in all the different locations that I’ve lived in.
But I can still grok your point; I had an uncle on my mom’s side who had married my aunt in the 60’s but he was passing, and they had 4 children together.
Later when he was found out, he was murdered not too long after, and the assailant was never caught.
It would be nice to live in the world the way that you perceive it, but unfortunately that just doesn’t parse well for the average mere human; we’re mostly primitive, tactile creatures of habit, to whom esoteric existentialism is a fairly new concept.
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It’s not latent at all!
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Yeah… ‘hidden,’ my ass; it’s pretty damn flagrant.
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And fragrant.
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Look, if you want me to stop quoting the Argument Sketch, you are gonna have to stop giving me material to work with.
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Wait, you need to know that LePage said he wanted to shoot the cartoonist to the man’s son, who was attending a school government event. The son asked what LePage thought of the cartoonist and LePage said he wanted to shoot him. Classiest thing he’s done in years.
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Oh! Sorry, I thought it was Being Hit on the Head Lessons in here.
Exits stage left
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TIL today: popo and I are at least distantly related to each other.
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I don’t like 'em. They’re too metallic and I burn my tongue on the heating elements.
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Big chunks of central and inland Maine are basically like stereotypical Appalachia. Tiny little towns of a few hundred to a few thousand. Cars rotting in yards up the mountains. Mills or lumber camps as the only employment beyond small farms. Hidden pot farms and illicit stills.
But even knowing that I can’t figure it out. I have family in exactly that part of Maine. The vast majority are dyed in the wool democrats. Proud union boosters. HUGE fans of Jimmy Carter (he’s the patron saint of born again Christians there). Even the more conservative people I’ve met are more the pot growing Ron Paul type, and seemed to weirdly like Bernie this round.
Some of the younger and wealthier residents are proudly Hill William, rolling coal, masturbating to pictures of Sarah Palin types. But they seem vastly outnumbered.
Perhaps my sample is a little skewed. Both my family, and their surroundings are entirely ethnically French Canadian. But I think the Tea Party friendliness comes down to two things. Turn out issues. Much of Maine is pretty poor, uneducated, and politically uninvolved whatever their disposition. And there are a lot of wacky fringe types up there. Whether the weirder sort of libertarian, or far left new age hippies, they all seem curiously ready to support any candidate who’s sufficiently outside the mainstream. Like I said the Ron Paul and government conspiracy types I know up there were pretty into Bernie this year. And the communes and back to nature types were weirdly into Ron Paul when he was a thing. Seems to make it weirdly easy for outre political movements, independent candidates, and 3rd parties to attract surprising support. Driving split votes and unexpected electoral success.
The only other thing is these same areas are deeply anti immigrant. Big numbers of my otherwise liberal family are deeply suspicious of towns with large Italian populations. The last (and so far only) big immigrant wave in the area was Italians over a century ago. Some of the Tea Party types from that town regularly make a 4+ hour drive to the Canadian border to “patrol” for Mexicans crossing illegally.
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We’re seeing quite a bit of it, and I imagine we’ll see quite a bit more, whatever happens with the elections. It’s the new normal. I also imagine the “alt-Right” will step up their trolling, seeing it as legitimate activism in the context of Trump.
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We’re just a hop, skip and a jump away from going all the way back to Mexican-American War rhetoric and calling Mexicans “reptiles in the path of progressive democracy”.
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When will the stereotyping end? Latin@ people do NOT have heating elements!
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Reflecting on my youth in Maine, and having my family as a social media nexus to several networls of Maine thinking, I actually scratch my head that it didn’t happen sooner. as @Ryuthrowsstuff pointed out Maine has always been Democrat, but a very blue collar flavor. The racism has always been strong, but contained by geographical isolations, political insignificance and demographic homogeny.
Trump gives voice, but a huge part of the pot boiling over was the much publicized migration of Somali refugees in the early 2000s. Don’t get me wrong, I had already heard the words “Black people should have stayed in Africa, then we wouldn’t have AIDs” as part of a casual but private conversation, but thing have definitely escalated as a broad swath of simmering, aimless and scaoegoatless ignorance found the dust particle around which to form a hailstone of hatred.
Suddenly my barely employed, technically not on welfare, teeneage parent relatives had someone to blame for all their troubles. But the Somali migration had juat been the coming out party. Had i not decimated my friend (and family) list, my feed would atill be full of laments about how a child will get a fine for fishing without a license (not true) but an “illegal” will get X sum of money given to them. Its heartbreaking that hateful assholea have taken advantage of this sleeping demon and made it front and center of this timy states national voice. Acadia is really nice though you guys…
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and people wonder why I don’t have a facebook account.
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