Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/07/man-charged-after-spitting-in.html
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Stay classy, Florida.
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Really fine people you’ve got there.
But it’s so hard to place blame on just one source, because the bullshit goes much further back. Sure, the stupider-than-fuck occupant one, the right-wing media, and QAnon type conspiracy theorists are all spoon feeding these dolts non-stop quantities of alt-right bullshit, but this guy has clearly been stupid for his entire life. And he’s not alone.
I’d look back at least decades to the schools that were supposed to teach him basic life lessons. Schools that were deliberately starved for funding by garden-variety, selfish Republicans; schools that allowed morons like this to pass through them untouched by knowledge. Stupid grandparents raising stupid kids who spawned their own larvae-of-very-little-brain.
And now we’ve got DeVos spreading the cancer of stupidity farther than ever before. Twenty years from now, the children of the people failed by the schools she’s destroying today will be just as stupidly spitting in the faces of other people.
The right wing isn’t an ideology, or a “valid viewpoint”. It’s the societal equivalent of a coronavirus.
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Assaulting a child. There’s not much lower than this.
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Let’s hope he doesn’t catch the Rona in jail. 
2020 is enabling some supreme assholes, for sure.
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I think it‘s even worse than the coronavirus.
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You didn’t have to say he was from Florida, we could have inferred that from the rest of the article.
I don’t know what it is about Florida that seems to make people want to take everything stupid one step further than the rest of the country.
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I would not be surprised at all if some scientists discovered that right wing extremists are different from others down to DNA. The way they don’t care about other humans, even those who they have never met, can’t be among the tracts of a civilized species.
Friends aside, I already started calling them an inferior race during arguments, just to have them taste some of their own medicine, to their surprise, but although those are just words, I wonder if there are actually scientifically demonstrable differences making them so antisocial.
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Yeah, at least the virus doesn’t deliberately make itself incompetent, or go looking for innocent victims.
The headline should read “Florida Man” instead of just man.
And what about a charge for endangering the welfare of a child?
Anything Goes in Florida…
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Maybe it’s like that fungus that takes over the brains of ants and affects their behavior. Or the parasite that infects rodents and makes them lose their fear of cats.
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There are probably a whole lot of microbes that do things we haven’t figured out yet because they don’t cause severe illnesses. But my money is still on a failure of parenting and education, we spend too long unlearning bad lessons from childhood, and slightly less than half of active voters haven’t bothered.
Friends aside, I already started calling them an inferior race during arguments, just to have them taste some of their own medicine, to their surprise, but although those are just words, I wonder if there are actually scientifically demonstrable differences making them so antisocial.
I try to be careful to maintain the distinction between calling their ideology inhuman, or their behavior abhorrent, as opposed to calling the people inferior. Dehumanizing the opponent is a fascist technique.
It makes it much easier to commit violence when you see someone as “less than human.” That strategy was used successfully by the media in Rwanda to convince Hutus to commit genocide against Tutsis, Pygmys, and others. That’s clearly not a path anyone should follow.
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I completely agree, my point in fact is for them to hear someone describing them as they would with their targets; they don’t expect that.
There was an episode from a movie adaptation of The Twilight Zone which brings it to the extreme: after a night in a bar where a right wing Nazi extremist argues with every possible person he sees as an enemy (immigrants, Jews, gays etc.) he is transported to an alternate reality in which he is now a target of the Nazis. What I’d hope is that the, albeit minimal in this case, change of perspective would have some effects to them.
Doesn’t it have something to do with Florida laws which make it easier to report these incidents?
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IIRC, yes.
But it’s much more fun, at least to me, to imagine Florida as the oil sump for all the recklessly stupid in the US.
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The whole death cult meme- I see it now.
Fuck this asshole.
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You basically hit the nail on the head was thinking the same thing with this poster
Pity that a truly fitting punishment, having his jaw wired shut for a year, would be considered cruel and unusual.
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