Tobold's Blog
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
 
I thought the bitch was white

The excuse of I thought the bitch was white for me summarizes all that is wrong with culture wars, on both sides. Because while people tend to be very partisan about the incident itself and the validity of the excuse, both sides accept the basic premise of it: Whether an insulting tweet of one person to another person is acceptable or not depends on the race (and gender) of the receiving party. Roseanne wouldn't have been fired if her target *had* been white. And I think that is wrong, the inviolability of human dignity should be sufficient argument to act against people spewing hate speech against others or making inappropriate remarks. Those others shouldn't need to be especially underprivileged.

Imagine one coworker telling another coworker, "you have a nice ass". Why is it that in today's society this would be a firable offence if and only if the speaker was male and the target female? Why shouldn't a man be accorded equal protection from such remarks, and regardless of the gender of the speaker? Why shouldn't a white person have the right to be offended (and protected against) if on the receiving end of a Planet of the Apes remark?

Not only do I believe the world would be a much better place if made certain insults and remarks generally socially unacceptable, regardless of who the target is. I also believe that affording certain groups a special protected status will just perpetuate the idea that these groups are somehow inferior. And ultimately it will create another group, that of those who aren't accorded any of these special protection statuses, which will end up being the "safe to insult and harass" group. You'll end up with white men pretending to be Muslim or gay, just in order to be protected from harassment.

Comments:
You are right no one should have to deal with harassment due to their race, gender, etc.

Would Roseanne have been fired if her target had been White? This type of argument is hokey and honestly doesn't prove anything.

See let me do it here.

Would Trayvon Martin have been shot if he was White?

We can go back and forth for hours arguing for or against either one of these questions but honestly that misses the point of the bigger picture.

Let's just agree that all peoples, whether they be white, black, asian, whatever deserve respect and deserve to be treated fairly like human beings.

ALL hate towards any race, (and yes hate towards whites does exist), sex, etc should not be tolerated.

I wish in America, more people would see themselves as part of the same country versus playing for various teams.
 
The groups pushing this offended culture haven't thought about the long game at all.

Assume their position that "white men are all powerful and control everything" is true. Frightening white men with threats of loss of job, character assassinations, virtual lynching, etc. will have a very obvious response. White men will avoid interacting with anyone who is not also a white man. This can only lead to the white men avoiding other groups. Sounds to me like this is a move toward segregation, except this time it is minority groups calling for it unknowingly.

That may not be what these fringe groups want, but it is the result they are driving toward.
 
"Imagine one coworker telling another coworker, "you have a nice ass". Why is it that in today's society this would be a firable offence if and only if the speaker was male and the target female?"

In every place where I've worked since 1982 that comment would have been sufficient to instigate an investigation and lead to apporopriate disciplinary action entirely regardless of who said it to whom. I don't know where you've been working but in insurance, telecommunications and retail bookselling, the three main businesses for which I've worked since I graduated, comments like that have always been completely unacceptable. Race, gender, sexual orientation - none of those would have been required to be a factor. Comments like that would have been actionable per se and should be.
 
There's a conflict here between regulated behavior and human nature. People often realize they may feel things or say things that are generally socially unacceptable, but most people (well, some people) can identify when their opinion is contentious or insulting or what-not and regulate themselves. If you feel like you're not one of these people, then congratulations, you're on one end of the bell curve....but the other end of the bell curve is full of people like Roseanne, who have a hard time telling what is acceptable and what is insulting.

In Roseanne's defense, however, I'll be honest here and saying I didn't know Valerie Jarrett was black either until this whole thing blew up. But Roseanne's blindness is to the fact that her insult was shitty to any human being, which of course was the point of your article; it should have generated negative press regardless of Valerie's race.

I do no think that the solution here is for a regulated society which affords equal protection to all. Eliminate context and you create arbitrary circumstances that will lead to a lowered quality of life, not greater. Imposed Social control is not the answer; good manners and fostering a gradual change in social climate where people start respecting each other again on their own recognizance is the only way this will work.
 
That didn't read right. I'm not suggesting we don't afford equal protection for all, but rather that we don't impose arbitrary equality without context as a rule of law. People need to learn to be better behaved as a matter of culture and principle, not because someone will take their job away, imprison them, or fine them. This will never work if the end result is thought police.
 
Obviously, you are right. But you need to realize that in today's USA, your post itself is "far right". The left now unironically claim that insulting or attacking white people is OK.

Recent event: New York Times (not some nobody lefty blog) hired a woman called Sarah Jeong. Soon right wingers dug up some outright racists tweets (warning: KKK level hate): https://archive.is/EdIoi/d4f5a0cd9c40ac7410071e82a63354d9c58d10b7.jpg

But since it was against whites, NYT choose to just condemn it and keep her. Lefty papers *attacked* NYT for this condemnation, because they believe Sarah was completely OK and disciplining him is supporting white supremacy:
- https://slate.com/culture/2018/08/the-ny-times-response-to-sarah-jeongs-controversial-tweets-blames-bigotry-on-many-sides.html This one is literally regrets that Sarah promised to stop tweeting racist hate, because it was awesome
- https://jezebel.com/new-york-times-capitulates-to-racist-trolls-mad-at-sara-1828062559
- https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/2/17644878/the-verge-new-york-times-sarah-jeong
- https://splinternews.com/the-new-york-times-really-fucked-this-one-up-1828061129
- https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sarah-jeong-new-york-times-tweets_us_5b633c12e4b0b15abaa0e80e?guccounter=1 "The Times had nothing to disavow, and Jeong nothing to regret. "

OK the above are mostly extreme left, "Infowars"-level crap journals, but still, published jounals with editorial boards and advertisements. But here is one from washington post:
https://archive.fo/va7l9 (archive because paywall won't let you read original)

Dear Tobold, the reason why you don't understand how Trump could won is because you are unaware of the lunacy that the liberalism became. Compared to that, Trump is a bastion of reason and civility.
 
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