So do you think Larson is being racist for his cartoons? Not trolling, genuinely curious.
I canât speak for everything he ever did, but generally no.
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I get the concern. Maybe Iâve listened to too many podcasts about the Khans that to see them as intellectually deficient savages is so preposterous to me that I may not be accounting enough for how most people receive that post and the range of negative associations they may make. Like the Mongols had one of the most bigly and intricate empires in human history, and they kicked the shit out of ~everyone ~everywhere, and they surely would have razed whatever the fuck âEnglandâ was in the 1200s with half of Williamâs forces if they ever cared to make the trek/voyage to invade that shithole.
If you called them racially or culturally backwards to their face, first theyâd laugh at you and then theyâd roll you up in a carpet and ride horses over you until you were a sloppy joe. And theyâd laugh first because they believed they were the supreme race, it is arguably part of why they were so blithe to do all the genociding (Himmler was apparently an admirer).
I thought it was a reasonably clever post, and it seems unfortunate to me that we have childproof it or nuke it altogether on behalf of people who do not know in what millennium the Khans did their thing (let alone the centuries) because they very probably will make ignorant and problematic associations. Especially when the target of the post is the the idiocy and sycophancy surrounding a moronic dudebro who, when heâs not whining about identity politics, devotes every other podcast to the thousand ways you can murder things with bows and arrows.
eta: holy fuck I have edited this post a lot, sorry
p.s. itâs interesting that Khan in Star Trek was a super genius who quotes Shakespeare
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Intent is key for me.
(Trying to remember what 
boom boxes were sometimes called in my 70s playground)
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Intent is a very dangerous metric as we know the vast majority of racism is unconscious and implicit bias. Intent removes types 2-4 on my list and only leaves behind true overt racists.
Most of the harm caused by racism is not caused by overt racism.
I agree, and this is particularly on point in the current environment. Lazy tropes about illiterate barbarians may be a convenient cultural touchpoint, and maybe they most commonly manifest as relatively harmless stuff like Arnold the Barbarian. However, letting them percolate freely in a culture gives people like Donnie Dumb Dumb an easy image to invoke to stir up real hatred and anger about imaginary caravans of Not As Good As Us people approaching our border (the line between Good Culture and Bad Culture).
Pointing out the implicit racism of barbarian tropes is an overreaction, until it isnât. Thatâs why implicit bias is so vexing. Criticism will always be framed as an overreaction until there is explicit bias, and then everyone is Shocked and This Is Not Who We Are.
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Youâre making the argument that the so-called n-word isnât racist. Thatâs the big roadblock this type of analysis always runs in to.
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For one, I didnât find the thing funny for a number of reasons, one of which was the English. I didnât think it racist that it was broken English though, I thought, lol why are the Khans speaking English at all? Itâs just bad writing and I really donât have any passion to defend it itself lol.
But the point isnât whether or not we âcondone things like this that dabble around the edges of racismâ itâs whether or not things that appear that way actually are. Theyâre all watered down versions of the âniggardlyâ debacle from awhile back and itâs not an accident that Smrk4 used the term âchildproofâ.
I think you should be punished for using the word âniggardlyâ but for an entirely different reason. lol fancy play syndrome using fancy pants archaic words like you have a list of them you memorize to trot out to seem smart and clever
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too late i saw the popup!
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You shouldâve went with your first instinct to just ignore something that makes you feel uncomfortable and confused.
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Lol that second post doesnât really expound on it but the wind is out of my sails now. Just go with PocketChads plan of making all the 100k+ words in the English language into the âe-wordâ or the âz-wordâ etc. It can double as a fun game trying to decipher simple communication.
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The comment about the n-word is separate from that. Iâm saying that if your analysis amounts to exploring the roots of something, youâre gonna have a big problem considering the biggest, baddest word followed a different etymological path. Thatâs all. It amounts to me saying there isnât a one-size-fits-all solution to every problem, and if me saying that sounds controversial, I dunno, good luck I guess.
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Where?
Yeah, that second post was me being shitty and I wouldnât go to bat for it; should I delete it?
But generally no, I donât need to make up things. I actually engage with people, here, there or wherever, on a human level so I know what people think and feel because I, ironically, wait for it, actually read and listen to what people post, and donât embrace the social atomization of modern capitalism whilst thinking Iâm opposed to it.
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I donât know what this means.
Maybe Iâm confused too about the plot of the conversation, but Iâm saying we already have a solution for not saying the n-word, along with the what and why and how we donât say it, and we already have a solution for not doing broken English used to mock Native Americans and immigrants and foreign visitors; the point is that any remotely thorough analysis of both wouldnât result in a grand unified theory going forward.
I mean, I donât fault Clovisâs motives here at all, people just disagreed with his specific conclusions in this specific instance, and if I had a grand unified point it would be that itâs totally bizarre people genuinely, immediately couldnât tell the difference between those two things, that in modern discourse everybody has a built-in question-begging to their views on anything. I mean, people itt arenât saying, aw, come on, canât we be a little eentsy teentsy racist, as a treat?
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I guess I shouldâve put âinadvertentlyâ before âmaking the argumentâ.
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I mean, Iâd hope so, but Iâd also hope people understood you simply didnât know how phonetics worked.
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Yeah, but why would you intentionally keep mispronouncing something if you didnât have an ulterior motive?
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I think you are reading a bunch of intent into my argument that isnât there. I donât think the joke writer was trying to be racist. I donât think the vast majority of people who do racist things are trying to be racist. As I said, I only assume intent for type 1 in my example.
Nobody here is asking to be a little bit racist. However, that doesnât mean we arenât a little bit racist from time to time, myself included.
That is what makes this so difficult.
Hereâs a thought experiment:
What do you think would be the reaction here, there or anywhere if I went HAM over people using the terms âhealthy/unhealthy foodâ and/or âjunk foodâ?
If you recall itâs not just pedantic nerd rage that bothers me about those (lol I wonât lie and say thatâs not a part though) itâs that theyâre disgusting anti-scientific 1st-world-privilege phrases that only exist because of the gluttony and waste of USA#1. People are literally actually starving right now in the world (not, like, oh noez, the grocery store is too far away and doesnât have an abundant produce section) and other people are out here calling actual food âjunkâ and denying it has the most âhealthyâ benefit ever, that is, the healthiness of being alive and not dying. Itâs sickening and it offends me to my core, only the slightest hyperbole there, and I donât think saying all the rap lyrics come close to that level.
Follow up question: Iâve voiced this view many times yet people still use these terms; what should my reaction be?
Follow up question #2: What do you think the reaction will be to this specific post right now lol?
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