Damn, the copy on my blog disappeared. Luckily I had it saved. Perhaps someone should alert them to the existence of the Streisand Effect?
Maybe someday people will realize that trying to get those dumb things they did off the internet is like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Aww… Dumb fucks don’t understand that we make backups of things they want to erase. It’s still on Youtube anyway.
This wasn’t a Mike Masnick post, it was Tim Cushing.
As sick as we all are of this copyright shyster culture that’s hijacked the business of content, it just keeps on coming and coming and coming, in ever more inane, incompetent ways. So it’s the victimized bully culture, just the latest incarnation of - “I’ll sue you so fast, your head will spin!” Way to go, KTVU, put another log in the fucking bonfire, why don’t you?
Way back in the 80s Scientology was abusing copyright to shut up critics, erase their own history and pretend that they didn’t say what they said. Not a new thing but just less labour intensive with computers and all.
At least they know enough to be ashamed of what they said? Am I setting the bar too low again?
Why “racist joke names”? Wouldnt “racist false names” be more accurate?
I think calling these names “racist” is a lazy knee-jerk reaction. We have been constructing amusing English names for a very long time. e.g.
Tim Burr
Seymour Bust
Rick O’Shea
Ben Dover
Dumas & McPhail (a real law firm!)
When we observe or construct these names, are we suggesting that English names are in general ridiculous? Are we mocking our culture when we do this? Are we in effect being racist about ourselves?
The answer to all three questions is no. If we are not mocking our own culture when we construct these names, why then should we suddenly jump to the conclusion that people are being racist when then construct foreign names that are amusing? It’s not just amusing peoples names that we construct, we do it with town names and all kinds of other things. It is a quite general phenomena and its root is certainly not in racism.
In Japanese, the name “Garry” sounds like the word for Diarrhea. If your name is Garry, and Japanese people giggle when you tell them your name, should you be outraged and damn them as racists? I think not. The worlds languages are rich and diverse and there are always going to be amusing names and combinations of names.
The component parts of names in all languages open up a combinatorial explosion of amusing possibilities and we should not be too quick to accuse people of committing hate crimes just because they came up with an amusing name.
Wonderfully, beautifully, accurately said.
What a shame that we live in a world where people need to be reminded not to reflexively feel negative… but given that it apparently is such a world, at least sometimes for some people, bless those who refuse to be drawn into the cesspool.
I’m with you on the linguistic analysis, but “racist about ourselves” is definitely on the other side of the abstraction into intellectualisation river, apologies.
Racism is a massive issue, and although this incident doesn’t encourage attacks on Koreans or orientals in general, it reflects and propagates a derogatory view, that maybe kids see, and they carry on with it.
We can’t be racist about ourselves, with the exception of inciting people outside your apparent ethnic community to dislike / mock etc your own community.
It’s a kind of rule of heterogeny - you can laugh within your cell at yourself, but laughing at others isn’t on.
Racism usually turns invisible when you don’t consider context. People make fun of English names in some jokes but not simply in response to England being in the news - you wouldn’t expect to see this should BA lose a plane. When a Korean plane goes down and people react by making jokes about Chinese names, that’s not really the same thing.
Fortunately, the Internet Archive is making television a medium of record – precisely to insure that news broadcasts become a reviewable and reference-able part of public discourse.
The clip in question is archived as part of the TV News Search & Borrow service:
http://archive.org/details/KTVU_20130712_190000_KTVU_Noon_News#start/240/end/270
We can’t be racist about ourselves
We certainly can. I can for example quite easily perpetuate negative stereotypes about British people. That would be racist. However, since I am British, most people would probably agree that I have a licence to be racist about my own “race”.
it reflects and propagates a derogatory view
These names were constructed of course, but it is quite simple to find real examples of amusing restaurant names in various foreign countries. With so many languages and names, it is almost inevitable that amusing words and combinations of words will pop up. Laughing at them isn’t racist.
Continuously harassing someone about their name would of course not be acceptable.
I can assure you that plenty of sick jokes pop up all the time about these disasters. It’s not just a western phenomena. If it had been a British plane that crashed, people would probably have struggled to come up with amusing names though.
Chinese happens to be very rich in names that sound like useful words in English. Names like “Wong”, “Tu”, “Yu”, “Chu”, “Ting”, “Sum” etc. This is why people make up these names. It’s not out of malice towards that part of the world, its simply because the nature of the language makes it possible.
It’s good that people are far less tolerant of racism and sexism today, but people are also far too quick to condemn and assume malicious intent.
This is all well said, though I’m not sure I agree. What I do know is that you are entirely missing the point. The point is that a plane crashed, three people died, thirteen people were critically injured out of 131 that were hurt in some way, and this station decided it’s a good time to make jokes about Asian names. Racist or not it was wrong and insensitive. This is not a case of someone just having a laugh and others raining on the parade by calling them racists. This is more like someone telling fart jokes at a funeral (and then trying to make people forget what an ass they are.)
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