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"I’m not accusing anyone of being a racist, but…
“I am not a racist, but…”
Both work the same way. The prefixed claim declares what follows to be harmless, but once people have spotted the pattern, they tend to stop listening at the “but”.
No matter how racist the townsfolk are, they are perfectly correct if they think Cohen’s character is accusing them of being racist. And I am glad that they still feel offended by that term, rather than wholeheartedly embracing it.
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That is literally the opposite of what happened in the clip.
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Welcome to Mark’s posts on BoingBoing. He excels at posting old content without stating how old it is. Sometimes he posts things that have already been posted on BoingBoing, itself!
In thus case, this is from Cohen’s show which came out a long time ago.
Can’t tell if you have a problem with that, but I don’t. This place doesn’t claim to be a “news” outlet, and as for repeats, I often missed it the first time around (or I’ve forgotten it). Thus, what does annoy me is the several commenters who always appear who seem to think they’re doing a Gotcha or something by pointing out that a post is a repeat.
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I don’t think that’s a real audience. They seem too coherent and orderly.
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Since that was literally one of the excuses used to disenfranchise people of color…
Exactly. Always how it works. And as @Melz2 notes, who gets to decide, why the people already in power, and who is that, overwhelmingly? Elite white men.
Ah yes, the old “we can’t do anything because this is just how people are” truism… Let’s not be so lazy in our thinking here, huh? Plenty of people have been raised with tons of bigotry and managed to learn new patterns of thinking. The human brain is amazingly changeable, even right to the end of our lives. We CAN and DO change and improve…
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Fucking A.
They must have missed the memos:
Mark doesn’t care.
Cory does NOT care. (That cannot be stated emphatically enough.)
And the regular members of the community don’t really care, because this is not a news outlet; it’s a social forum we frequent because we enjoy conversing with one another about current events and interesting/weird stories.
Real talk; giving up before you even think about trying is some serious complacency, which likely comes from a place of privilege.
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And there will always be people who call out and actively oppose bigotry.
And there will always be people who shrug and say there’s nothing much to be done about bigotry.
Think carefully about which one of those people you want to be.
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I wonder if these people ever met an actual muslim.
Which IS a problem. Under the Erdogan government Diyanet uses its imams to influence and spy on turkish migrants.
Also in 2016, Diyanet instructed affiliated imams and religious instances to collect detailed information on the Gülen movement. It handed 50 intelligence reports from 38 countries over to the Turkish parliament.[
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I also don’t find his stuff funny. I see him as more of a muckraker (but not in the ‘classic’ sense), and someone who forces social commentary.
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I still don’t like it that so many mosques are built with turkish (or worse, saudian) money. Having big churches being built in your country payed for by some foreign power is scary to me. It’s not just mosques by the way. The Scientology churches are scary as well, or european dependencies of american evangelists.
Whoever pays decides.
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Would you prefer tax dollars being used to pay for them?
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Why not the paritioners? I live in more rural NC so practically ever church is some form of Christian, typically Baptist or Methodist. You can find churches worth several million sitting in places where the average home price is less than $100k. Perhaps they are being fronted money, but it is never something I’ve heard anyone complain about. From my understanding the local mega church is pretty straight forward that you are expected to “give” a percentage of your income if you want to attend, perhaps that is all hearsey, considering I don’t attend church and all.
Just as those who were raised poor and then escaped poverty have difficulty understanding why others don’t do the same, those who were raised in ignorance and then figured stuff out have difficulty understanding why others don’t get a clue. It’s a funny blindspot because normally we’d assume that someone from a particular background could speak authoritatively on it, but often the experience of transition creates an even stronger bias than someone with no relationship to the background.
I’m not saying it should be tolerated. But it should be understood as a product of many factors outside the individual, rather than simply a personal choice born of some character flaw. The reason you abandoned the world-view you were raised in is not because you just “made a choice” like some nietzschean ubermensch. It was because of many intersecting social, personal, economic, etc factors which made it possible for you to figure stuff out.
I say this not so we can be more tolerant or morally relativist toward racism. Obviously fuck racism and fight the people who perpetuate it. But we must always recognize why people hold the ideas they do and understand how they can be changed.
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Actually, yes.
Of course I’d rather not waste tax dollars on superstitions. But it seems the lesser of two evils.
Maybe something like the german system, where everybody lists his religious affiliation on the tax forms. Though that is a lot harder for mosques because here is no overarching organization like for churches. And if you list ‘atheist’ your money would go to scientific research?
I’ve spent plenty of time in Kingman, AZ (work). The audience is absolutely legit and not populated with shills.
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