All you’re doing is saying that you’re okay with homophobia, because it’s important to take a stand against anti-Italian bigotry.
Not a good look.
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Did you watch how the interaction started? I’m going to guess no, as that part of the conversation is conspicuously absent. Is it possible the other person started out being belligerent and in a deliberately provocative fashion, and then only started filming (or edited out the start) when he was toned down and when Cuomo was getting riled up?
Cuomo didn’t do well, and spoke stupidly. It’s not a good look. He’s apologized for doing so. I think rewarding the Jesse Waters wannabe who filmed him is not making the world a better place.
some days I’d like to think I did with all 3 of them. Others I am astounded they actually made it this far. They are all good young people. And any credit I get for dadding, my wife also gets for momming. Kudos to her as well, either for us being excellent examples or terrible warnings…never sure which on any given day 
When we had our sit down the thing we both expressed was that we end up feeling as helpless as our kids in those situations. There is literally no recourse for us and them but to take the “abuse” and I threw that on the superintendent and said “You have to be the gate keeper on this. You certainly don;t want my kid beating on every kid that does that. It’s not going to do any good if I go beat up or insult that kid’s parents. The only thing that will help is if YOU educate the other kid. Positive lessons, negative punishments. Whatever means you think are best…but its on you to change their behavior, because we can’t. All we can do is console our own children, empathize and understand what they are going through, and be there for them.”
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Er, I don’t think I’ve ever heard “punk bitch” as a homophobic slur. I usually hear it along the lines of “get up, you punk ass bitch mutherfucker”. Basically, cram all the offensive words you can think of into one sentence. Would “bitch punk” be better?
But then again, I apologize if I offended since I know some people can be sensitive about these things. When I was a kid growing up as a white minority in a predominantly black neighborhood I was called a cracker once. I asked them “what, like a Ritz?”. When I got home and my dad explained, I just laughed and said they should call me a saltine next time.
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To be fair, that’s also debatable, as far as colloquialisms go;
In my part of the world, growing up in the hood, ‘punk-ass’ meant a coward who can’t fight, (and everyone is fair game for being called “bitch” in a fight. )
The gay peers I had who were out definitely didn’t fit the term the way we used it; they could and did kick serious ass… because they had to, as a matter of survival; being ‘out’ in the 90’s in the Midwest as a teenager was some hard shit.
Long story short; calling people names is wrong, period; and nobody in the video is “right.”
I feel bad for the kid, though; she must be mortified.
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Calling a guy a punk bitch is a homophobic slur.
Some people may be so de-sensitized to it that they don’t connect-the-dots anymore, but calling a man a bitch (in the context of cursing them out) is a mixture of sexism and homophobia with a long history.
Getting punked in prison doesn’t mean people were sat down for a nice round of listening to some fresh split-LPs from the UK.
Context is key, the same way that girlfiends calling each other bitch isn’t sexism, but a woman’s male boss saying it?
Slurs aren’t used because they’re always accurate… gay people were also called limp-wristed whether their wrists were limp or not. It’s still meant as a slur.
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I never said I was giving the Fredo-throwing guy a pass. He’s a jerk. I figured it was pretty much understood by everyone in this discussion that Cuomo didn’t start this, he was provoked. I chose to skip over the behavior of the person who set out to be a jerk and focus on Cuomo’s behavior. He had other choices on how to handle the situation. As someone who makes an living as a tv personality, he should have had a plan on how to deal with jerks. His work, by design, attracts them.
And the thing about Fredo being the same as the n word. That is ridiculous.
So for the record, the guy who started the altercation is a jerk and should also have behaved better.
In future please don’t try to put words in my mouth.
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The thing is, almost ALL the characters in The Godfather were Italian and Fredo was the only one portrayed as a dumbass who sold out his family. So you could say the movie stereotypes Italians as mobsters or hotheads or whatever, but it doesn’t stereotype them as dumbasses.
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would calling Cuomo a dumbass be defamation of character or definition of character?
asking for a friend. 
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We’re way off topic here; those are conversations that are too complex and need their own thread.
But speaking of the subject at hand:
When even dumbass ‘45 Junior’ knows what’s up, that’s really sad. (Though in true dipshit fashion, he totally missed how ironic his own reply is.)
And don’t EVEN get me started on Katrina P throwing in her worthless 2 cents, when she’s usually all too happy to be one of the right wing’s token “good negroes.”
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I’ve taught self-defense, with avoidance and de-escalation techniques as your first go to moves. That said, I’m not in the public eye, I don’t deal with continual harassment, I have never dealt with paparazzi and actual trolls in my personal space. If I’m having a tremendously bad day, I don’t know that I’d never go off on someone who managed to get under my skin. I’ve found myself, online, absolutely infuriated by an internet troll who managed to push my buttons. Sometimes I’ll respond. Even though, intellectually, I know it’s wrestling with a greased pig, just gets you dirty, tired out, and amuses the pig. So I don’t know, 100 times out of a 100, that I wouldn’t do something similar. For people in the public eye, it’s possible this is the 100th time he’s dealt with similar yahoos. Yes, his kid is there, but that also can preclude what I think would be my go-to response, dirty looks and walking quickly away. From NBC news; “It was not evident from the video what happened prior to Cuomo’s reaction.” Cuomo had said on his twitter that he thought “Fredo” was an ethnic slur. Which I kind of disagree with. But if you wanted to make an “enemy of the people” like CNN look bad, finding Cuomo’s sensitive spot and pushing him on it is a good way to go about it. He fell for a troll. I have argued (online) with trolls. Let us make sure we are not making the greased pig happy by not recognizing it was a set up.
I think by everyone sitting around and judging Cuomo, or just observing Cuomo at his worst, whatever we think of jessewaterswannabe, we’re rewarding jessewaterswanneabe. He’s likely made a lot of money out of this. It’s where Jessewaters and James O’Keefe got his start. I didn’t mean to imply you were praising Jessewaterswannabe. It’s inherently shitty to provoke people, not film the part where you’re provoking them, and then film their reaction. Cuomo of course comes across as an ass on this. If someone studied what I wrote, figure out what would bug me, and then surprised me with something that I’m unreasonably incensed about when I was with my family, I might flip out too. I hope I’d be better. I’ve never been in that situation, so I can’t say.
Why? If this happened to someone you knew, and they reacted out of character, however, don’t you think that’s important context?
There’s a lot of hair-splitting going on here. If this topic devolves into what is/isn’t a particular ethnic group, or what is/isn’t a slur, or what is/isn’t considered a slur by you-and-the-people-you-know, this isn’t really going to go anywhere.
My personal $0.02:
If I say something to something with the intent to denigrate them, then I’m being a dick. The level of dickishness I am being depends on many factors including whether or not my intention is to be a bigoted dick or not.
Similarly, reactions are usually considered appropriate if proportional to the slight. If I bump into someone and they tell me off for it, well fine, I can decide if I ignore it or not based on various factors. If they instead use a cultural/racial/ethnic slur against me, well, my response is likely to be proportionally greater. Whether or not anyone else thinks such a statement is a cultural/racial/ethnic slur probably doesn’t enter into my thinking.
In this specific case, the slur-thrower was clearly trying to be a dick. The fact that Cuomo reacted as he did is sort of secondary to the fact that someone was trying to be a dick to him, and he pushed back, no?
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The person who started it, they made their choice to be awful. No point discussing what motivates people to trolley like that. I don’t understand it and I never will.
I do see a point in discussing how people react to provocations like ethnic or racial slurs, particularly the way the US has been. I also see a point in calling out a public figure on bad behavior. He really should have a handle on how to deal with situations like this. Is that a higher standard than for other people? Yeah, it is. But he chose his job and he has chosen the persona he presents.
I think it is valuable to identify what a bad reaction looks like - if only to make us think of a better way to handle similar situations.
I also sincerely find any conduct which Sean Hannity praises to be seriously questionable.
And the thing about equating Fredo to the n-word: we do need to discuss how some insults are worse than others. It is useful to think and consider how saying something like that effects other people.
Also- is this out of character for Cuomo? He has a powerful platform to persuade others to his point of view. It’s worth discussing if we want anyone to listen the kind of person who reacts this way to an insult in public and in front of his minor child.
Edited to correct auto correct
The context in the age of Trump is really important, in my mind. (apologies for the copypasta, from wiki on “Enemy of the People” )
On February 17, 2017, President of the United States Donald Trump declared on Twitter that The New York Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS, and CNN were “fake news” and the “enemy of the people”.[23] Trump repeated the assertion on February 24 at the Conservative Political Action Conference, saying, “A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people and they are. They are the enemy of the people.”[24][4] At a June 25, 2018 rally in South Carolina, Trump singled out journalists as “fake newsers” and again called them “the enemy of the people.”[25][26] Some commentators linked these comments to a mass shooting at the offices of a newspaper publisher in Annapolis, Maryland, that took place only days later, on June 28.[27][28][29] On July 19, 2018, following the critical reaction to his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 15, 2018 in Helsinki, Finland, Trump tweeted “The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media.”[30] The New York Times noted Trump’s use of this phrase during his “moments of peak criticism” and use of the term by Nazi and Soviet propaganda.[31]
So I don’t think it was exactly a random street jerk, I think it’s a Trump supporter (likely not directly affiliated with anyone prominent) who wanted to trolley the libs. He was effective.
I believe the love of Hannity is cancelled out by the hate of Trump/Trump Jr. and every other rightwing figure jumping on Cuomo at the moment.
I mentioned teaching self-defense in an earlier post. It was as a padded assailant, where, for the purpose of the class, we acted as horrible people so women could develop skills to defend themselves. It is not naturally in everyone to get angry enough to defend themselves, but by being verbally abusive to someone, yeah, it’s pretty easy to get them angry. One way to get women to defend themselves was to tell them to imagine they had their children, or a young relative, behind them. It inherently makes your hackles rise. So, a stranger, coming up to someone in front of their family, and acting weird, or unpleasant or insulting, might not bring out the best in people. Yes, he was angry in front of his daughter. I was very good about never swearing in front of mine, for that bit of vocabulary she had to learn from my MIL.
As you said, Cuomo is in the public eye. If this was how he was normally in public, we’d have a lot of these videos. We don’t. Cuomo has not doubled-down on his behavior, he’s apologized. He was the son of a powerful Italian politician who was unjustly accused of being corrupt, because he was Italian. So he has a sensitivity to being Italian that most Italians might not have.
No, again, it’s foolish of him to compare Fredo to the N-word.
Cuomo is doing work that certainly pays well, but he could likely be working less, make more, and not have to go into war zones and not be harassed on the street if he used his connections and law degree to work in law or finance. Objective journalists, which he seems to be, are under attack. Focusing on one idiot on the street getting a rise out of him, for the end half of a conversation that we didn’t see the start of, seems silly to me.
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Gonna regret this, but… is that not what Cuomo does when claiming that for all Italian’s “Fredo” is their “n-word”? He’s speaking for all Italians everywhere, right?
From my distance – not Italian – it would seem to me that using “Fredo” to describe someone would be to attack their intelligence/competence, and not their ethnicity.
But again, I acknowledge it’s not my place to interpret the law on how “Fredo” is to be perceived by the ones who have been “Fredoed.”
What I gathered from the confrontation is that the guy who called him “Fredo” absolutely knew what he was doing, and was hoping for the reaction he got. Way to play into the trolley’s hands, Cuomo.
A better tactic would have been to laugh heartily in the trolley’s face, point at him and say, “Get a load of this idiot!” and walk on. I know, that’s far, far easier said than done when it’s something that pushes your buttons of course. But some effort hiding or disabling your buttons in the first place seems like time well spent. As it is now, this is going to be everywhere.
As someone commented earlier, “Do you want to be called Fredo? Because that’s how you get called Fredo.”
I think the idea of someone having their own personal “N-word” is just an excuse to be able to fly off the handle when that word is used.
“You can’t call me 'Nazi”'! That’s my own personal N-word!"
"Nazi, please.
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You are correct that there have been times when Italians were not considered White. This time is not one of those times.
“White” essentially means “not the other”. In centuries past that excluded Swedes, the French, Italians, and so on. But gradually all these ethnicities have been subsumed into the conglomeration. The Irish and the Italians were possibly the most recent (unless you believe that Jews are now considered White). But they’ve been in the in-group for a few decades now.
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Why regret it? You aren’t wrong.
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Usually when I comment on something like this, I get torn to shreds. Thanks for not doing that.
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This.
Regardless what ‘side’ he’s on, Cuomo is NOT some downtrodden minority; he’s an affluent person of privilege with a platform.
Your only ‘regret’ should be that I’m totally stealing “Nazi, please!” and will probably make it into a meme.
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