It's always the gun's fault

[Strings]

>The Black KKK is enforcing the same crippling standards as its parent organization. It wants to keep black men in their place - uneducated, outside the mainstream and six feet deep."<

That's actually not a bad statement, taken in the right context

[Hawkmoon]

By the way . . . have any of you guys read Nicole Brown-Simpson's latest book describing her life with OJ?  I reckon it'll be a chart topper.  Lady has a real sharp wit, pointed and incisive insight.  Really cutting edge stuff.  I recommend takin' a stab at reading it.

Say what?

Nicole Brown-Simpson has been dead for years. How can she be writing books?





(Yeah, I know -- "ghost writer")

[ArfinGreebly]

Say what?

Nicole Brown-Simpson has been dead for years. How can she be writing books?



(Yeah, I know -- "ghost writer")

Nah.

Never happened.  There was no gun involved.

Costas said that without a gun, they'd still be alive.  Just using his logic to fix reality.

[Regolith]

Say what?

Nicole Brown-Simpson has been dead for years. How can she be writing books?

That's the point.   

[Frank Castle]

I believe the NRA is the new KKK. And that the arming of so many black youths, uh, and loading up our community with drugs

 

http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2012/12/robert-farago/kansas-city-sportswriter-jason-whitlock-nra-is-the-new-kkk/
 

[Hawkmoon]

Nah.

Never happened.  There was no gun involved.

Costas said that without a gun, they'd still be alive.  Just using his logic to fix reality.

10-4

Been a tough day, and I'm not that quick on a good day. Ya got me.

[longeyes]

More background, including another woman and a Bentley:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/chief_other_girl_uULWUcuM7p4tJb2PLeaITP

[Hawkmoon]

He had a $1.9 MILLION contract for just THIS year ... and they were having financial problems?

You can take the boy out of the ghetto but you can't take the ghetto out of the boy.

[Ron]

He had a $1.9 MILLION contract for just THIS year ... and they were having financial problems?

You can take the boy out of the ghetto but you can't take the ghetto out of the boy.

A quote like that, using the word boy in that context, is not only counterproductive but is IMHO a comment that can be considered racist.

 

[longeyes]

I'm too old to play linebacker. I've lost a step, in fact I've lost the whole staircase.

[ArfinGreebly]

A quote like that, using the word boy in that context, is not only counterproductive but is IMHO a comment that can be considered racist.

Meh.  If the player was white and the word "boy" was used, nobody would care.

I've heard grown women, of whatever color, say "you can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl."

But if that same expression involves a boy, we have to be all sensitive and stuff.

Political correctness:  linguistic fascism.

[longeyes]

We have a class of people who specialize in opening old wounds.

[Perd Hapley]

Meh.  If the player was white and the word "boy" was used, nobody would care.

I've heard grown women, of whatever color, say "you can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl."

But if that same expression involves a boy, we have to be all sensitive and stuff.

Political correctness:  linguistic fascism.

Avoiding the word "boy," when referring to black men, is not political correctness. It is knowing how the word might be received, and wisely choosing another term. It doesn't make Hawkmoon a racist, but it could lead to misunderstanding and he'd be better off not using it.

The fact that other people of other colors call each other boy and girl doesn't change the fact that those terms may connote specific things in a certain situation.

IOW, history is a female dog.

[SADShooter]

And yet he wasn't a man, in the meaningful context of dealing with his choices and the attendant consequences. This is the heart of the discussion, ignored in the hand-wringing over "gun culture", race, and the other superficial distractions drawing focus. We persist on exempting groups or classes, be it by race, profession, whatever other excuse, from standards of moral or ethical behavior. The results are sadly predictable.

[SteveS]

And yet he wasn't a man, in the meaningful context of dealing with his choices and the attendant consequences.

Why not?  He was a man.  He was a bad man who did something really horrible.

[SADShooter]

Why not?  He was a man.  He was a bad man who did something really horrible.

Sure, if the definition of manhood, or adulthood broadly, stops at capacity to sire offspring and earn a paycheck. My contention is that it should mean more than that, in developing the emotional maturity to make good choices, or deal with bad choices by means other than murder and/or suicide. By extension, the groups we put on pedestals courtesy of a popular talent, e.g. athletes, actors, other celebrities, are more susceptible thanks to being told they are "special" from an early age and given latitudes the rest of us don't get. Will Lindsay Lohan, for example, have to kill someone before her repeated dangerous behavior is seriously addressed?

[longeyes]

The whole culture has been infantilized, and we have de facto children running our government.

[Hawkmoon]

A quote like that, using the word boy in that context, is not only counterproductive but is IMHO a comment that can be considered racist.

It IS a quote, might I remind you.

Substitute "young man," if it makes it more politically correct/less racist. The concept remains the same -- giving money to people who don't have any morality doesn't magically imbue them with morality.

[Hawkmoon]

Why not?  He was a man.  He was a bad man who did something really horrible.

He was a male of the species homo sapiens, but he wasn't a mensch.

[longeyes]

The Peter Pan syndrome is not about race.

[Ron]

If you guys want to pretend that using the word "boy" to describe an adult black male is not inflammatory then so be it. The history of the use of "boy" really isn't in dispute where it concerns southern colloquialisms. Context is important and in this case I felt the need to call it out.

Personally I try and avoid the inflammatory language. I can be against ghetto thug/gangsta culture without resorting to historically derogatory terms. 

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/11/racist_language

[ArfinGreebly]

I am annoyed, nay, greatly irritated, that the hijacking and/or proscription of a word seems to be connected to a "ratchet" process; once a word is "bad" or "forbidden" it becomes lost to the standard lexicon, sometimes entirely, sometimes in certain contexts, never to be recovered to its former status as a generic term, notwithstanding that it remains in every dictionary and continues to have all its original meanings.

This idea that words can become "contaminated" and somehow radioactive, with a half life of 1.75 civilizations is repugnant to me.

It is, frankly, idiotic and a form of cultural tyranny.

I can't say that I'm "feeling gay" because I don't "own" that word any more.

I can't say "Negro" because I am not, myself, a Negro.  I can't say "boy" if a person is a certain color.

Clinical terms like "moron" and "idiot" are at risk of becoming proscribed, as are "fat" and "ugly."

And once a word is "on the list" it is lost to the language, and censors do really stupid things like round up Mark Twain's books and redact them for political correctness.

It becomes increasingly difficult to call a spade digging implement a spade shovel.

I want my language back, dammit.

[Ron]

I call BS ^

If you use the word boy while referencing both a black man and the ghetto it is pretty obvious what the intention is by the context.

Words have meaning. Boy has a particular meaning when used in a context that harkens back to pre civil rights.

You may not like it but that is the way it goes.

Just suck it up and continue to be gay.

[ArfinGreebly]

And what if I'm sitting in a coffee shop with four or five co-workers, all dressed in biz casual, a couple of them are black, and I let loose with a quip that "you can take a boy out of the South (where *I* used to live) but you can't take the South out of the boy."

I'm white.  And if every other person at the table is white (or even just non-black), nobody gets offended.  But with a couple of black personnel at the table, I now have to discreetly discover whether either has ever lived in the South, lest I offend.

There's not a ghetto within miles, and every one of these guys is employed in the tech sector, but I still have to self censor.

Why the hell can't our education system -- which has managed to indoctrinate whole generations into a "deserving" mind set -- eradicate the stigma from a word that was abused fifty or a hundred years ago?

Why is it that *I* was raised to know that I own the knobs that control my emotions, and the rest of society still believes "offended" is caused by "the other guy?"

What the hell?

Someone calls me a "geek" or a "nerd" and I just roll with it.  Someone calls me "stupid" or some other denigration, and I check to see if there's some justification for it or whether this is simply his way of disagreeing.  They're my emotions, and I get to calibrate where my "anger threshold" is, and what the triggers are.  I don't have to like it, but I need to know who owns how I feel.

And yet, for some reason, we continue to conduct ourselves as though we have some genetic connection to Pavlov's dogs, unable to marshal our feelings, emotions, and responses, and always at the whim of some careless word or phrase.

Humanity needs to friggin' grow up.  Or at least achieve some small measure of enlightenment.

After thousands of friggin' years, isn't it about time?

[Ron]

You have to choose what hills are worth the fight.

If using the word boy, in the context of black men and the ghetto offends some then why push the issue?

Is the point to offend or is the there another point? A point that can reach a wider audience without needless distractions like inflammatory language.