Yeah…sometimes. Most of the time they are lying and bloody well know it.
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Which destroys their credibility and makes them sound more than a bit dim. Sometimes I wonder if they fool only themselves.
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I worked with a neo-nazi one time who wanted to go live in some small town in Germany where supposedly they didn’t let non white people live but who claimed to be into neo-nazism for the politics and not the race (never asked him what he meant by that, didn’t want to talk).
He also liked some lousy heavy metal station where every song existed basically as a metaphor for oral sex. The sad thing is I’ve known people even dumber than this guy.
Hmm, this was in 1998, I bet the last 17 years have not been kind to his already wobbly mental equilibrium.
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It’s possible to turn it off?
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wow reading the list of all his posts made me sad.
this guy has a lot of hate for a lot of different groups of people.
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Sometimes Eastern Washington makes me embarrassed to call myself a Washingtonian at all.
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might have something to do with them usually not being the sharpest tools in the shed.
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“No offense, but [incredibly offensive statement]”
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Why yes, yes it is.
No, that’s simply rude.
What’s the difference? Well, for a few hundred years we justified slavery by saying that black people aren’t fully human - that they are sub-human and should be subjugated by the ‘superior’ races for their own good. After Darwin we began to use gorilla and monkey to describe the ‘inferior’ races. Calling a black person a monkey or a gorilla is a throwback to that era and is clearly intended to de-humanize them.
Calling an ugly white person a gorilla is rude but does not have the baggage of several hundred years of oppression.
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[quote=“sg1969, post:50, topic:61924”]
To me, the answer should be no for both, because it has nothing to do with race.[/quote]
I was making a similar point earlier. But rather than an automatic “no”, I would replace it with “not necessarily”. Without knowing more about the person who says it, and what they mean, there might be no reason to assume that it is.
Wouldn’t the “reality” of a question depend upon who you ask, and what they say? As @Mindysan33 mentioned, there has been a long history of people using faux-Darwinian rhetoric to try rationalizing real racist ideologies. Just because the relationship is not based upon anything real does not preclude some people from using it.
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“Hey… don’t paint all neo-nazi members with the same brush! I’m only into it for the politics, not the race stuff, that has nothing to do with it.”
“Oh… uh… what about their politics are important to you?”
“Getting rid of the blacks and jews.”
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There are other ways to interpret this which drive bigots crazy(er). If other races are so much older than whites, I can claim that this indicates that they had a huge head start, meaning that they are more accomplished. Respect your racial elders, young’un!
Also, many bigots tend to be quite proud of their religious affiliations. So if they complain about races being living fossils I can always suggest that “we” as Christians (Ha! as if…) might be theological fossils compared to new 20th-21st century religions. After all, the new traditions are going to be that much more sophisticated.
Oh, they do. They just don’t like when they’re called on it. I’ve lived long enough, traveled a fair amount, worked with a wide variety of people and have watched the evolution. These kind of folks have been marginalized for the most part - as they should be - and it’s created some interesting rhetoric.
My favorite thus far was something along these lines (corrected for spelling and grammatical errors) from a teabagger -
“This mayor isn’t the problem, it’s the president! He’s created the atmosphere to rile up all this hate!”
“But I’m not racist.”
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Nothing to see here. No racism here! Move along…
And thank Bog for that.
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Why not? It would be easier to have even the tiniest bit of respect for people who have some strength of conviction, some pride in what they believe, rather than cowardice.
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It’s kind of a small victory. Even complete bigots have got the idea that being labelled a racist puts you beyond the pale of acceptable opinion for the vast majority of people.
Therefore they retreat to being racist, but finding ever more convoluted and desperate ways to explain why their particular brand of bigotry is “not racist but…”, that telling phrase.
It’s another one of those almost tragically amusing things, watching people tie themselves in rhetorical knots and coming up with more and more fevered verbiage to explain why this particular bit of prejudice and bigotry doesn’t really count as racist.
And then, at the other end of the scale, you have this guy.
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Well, the racism of avowed racists is at least out there in the open to be dealt with directly, while the racism of more politically “liberal” folk is harder to deal with because they don’t even realize they’re being racist, and because it counters their political identity so directly. But between those two groups, I certainly don’t have more respect for the former, since the latter at least have good intentions.
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