Shants, you can call me the pc-police or whatever all you want, but it doesn't make your choice of words even remotely OK. I'm sorry that you don't think people with impairments or asians merit the same basic respect everyone else around here is afforded. Basically, it just comes down to you being a) too lazy to come up with anything original to say to insult someone, and b) too lazy to come up with a better way to defend it other than trotting out the ol' "ooh the pc-police are after me" bit.

ha ha!

no worries - as long as you can press the "super-size" button as you man the drive-thru...all in good humor

it's a ****ing joke, seriously. if anyone here thinks that i genuinely have any disrespect toward asians or people with down syndrome -- or any other minority group -- let me know. i am often crass, but i am simply not of the mind to think that epithets and the like can be taken seriously at all. they are absurd. maybe as a total cracker or whatever, i am not in the same position to be offended as many others, but i take it to be the case that people realize that i'm being facetious 90% of the time. that's a bad assumption, it seems. perhaps the internet makes it difficult to convey sarcasm, tone, and nuance. in any case, sticks and stones. maybe people simply don't know me well enough.

if you are of the type to flip out whenever you hear such words, independent of context and intent, then i cannot assuage your objection to my use of such language. people who cannot take such things lightly, when properly contextualized, need to find something more important to worry about. certainly, racist language contributes to to the perpetuation of racism, but only when it is properly contextualized.

also, as far as racial slurs go, "mongoloid" is pretty antiquated and, because of that and its ridiculous origins (that is, in terms of being used to refer to people with downs), seems especially outrageous and virtually impossible to take seriously. i've actually never heard it used as a serious slur. ****ing devo, for crying out loud, uses it.

anyhow, i've spent enough time justifying myself. i hope that most of you, while you may think that i am an *******, don't think that i am a racist.

don't you mean excessively sesquipedalian?

Do you expect me to believe that your keyboard isn't covered with pictures as well? I reckon you've got a picture of 53-11 with a circle and slash through it, a similar picture of a messenger bag, etc.

First off, I'm in no way, shape or form "flipping out," nor do I think I'm particularly overreacting. I'm just pointing out that your choice of words makes you seem like an idiot, and an ignorant one at that. If that's how you want to roll, fine, but don't expect to not get called on it.

Essentially, your argument is that it's OK to use words that you know are insulting, denigrating, offensive, or whatever because people should know that you're joking and that "context" makes everything hunky-dory. ie, we're all friends here so it's fine for me to call someone a [fill in the blank] because no one's going to take it seriously or anything and, like, clearly I'm joking, so everyone should just take a chill pill. Congratulations on becoming the poster boy for easygoing, white, male, heterosexual privilege. Your sash is in the mail.

funny this comes up now. working on the next issue of the magazine we have a piece on "post-racism," which is where hipsters (yes yes i know, you're not…) assume that because of their liberal arts majors and tree hugging vegan shoe wearing meusli eating lifestyles it's ok for them to make remarks that in the average construction worker would be considered derogatory or racist. citing the movies lost in translation and life aquatic as screen examples of the general trend.

shants this isn't about you at all dude. and not saying i don't do it too. it's just interesting, zeitgeist-wse, that this gets raised just as i'm working on the piece.

so guy's, i'm lookin to by a knew fixed geer bike. should i git the bianchi pista or the specialized langster. i want something that doesnt cost alot, but i do knead a front break. so i'm willing to fork out an extra doller or too.

so if i could git any imput or recomendations, that would be grate. it's such a hard decison.

(ducks)

haha

nah - I am not a solely visual learner - I am more a kinesthetic type. I would need to actually "do" versus draw the circle/slash

I think "bike" is a terrible word.
Vague too, since motocycles can also be called "bikes".
Let's start calling it bicycle again please.
Just listen to the sound of it how nice sleek and light it feels - 'bicycles".

Greg is you are reading this - thanks for the inspiration!

well, i guess i'm not done defending myself. i have an hour more to kill at work.

i spent a few years being captain pc myself, calling people out for using "***" in whatever context, explaining that, even if they didn't have anything against *****exuals, that the pejorative nature of the term is rooted in homophobia, being mr. activism whenever i heard a slur in any way, shape, or form. i still do call out my elder relatives when they pull out the term "coloured" or about how they locked their car doors when they saw a black man in their suburban part of town or whathaveyou, because they actually have systematic insecurities and deeply-rooted suppositions about non-white people. i've never been able to get my WWII relatives to stop calling the japanese "nips," but i've brought it up with them on more than one occasion. hell, i still wear my dickies jacket with my aus-rotten "**** nazi sympathy" backpatch. oh, the good old days of being ultrapunkrock. however, to get to the point, i've found that, among friends, not all of whom are white, heterosexual, males (i surprise, i know), there is harmless fun to be had in exploiting bigotry. i know that this might seem impossible to you, but, once everyone (in a group of friends, people you know) agrees that racism is totally ridiculous, and are in a non-hostile environment, racism can be funny -- not because it denigrates people, at all, but because it's so ridiculous that people actually believe that black people are all thieves, or <pick your stereotype>. being white, male, and heterosexual, i am perhaps on suspect territory by default, but, frankly, i see no disanalogy between me finding stereotyping and racism funny and any comic making his or her career on exploiting stereotypes about their ethnicity and those of anyone else. hell, nothing, not even "mongoloids" (ha... ha... ha...), are funnier than honkey-ass nascar white trash and middle-aged white flight suburban parents who are afraid of their kids listening to rap music. i do happen to be part of the most privileged class in american society (and arguably, the world), but typing me as their "poster child" based on a single comment that i've made is no better than any other type of stereotyping.

believe it or not, it really is okay to jokingly make fun of other people, especially when it is non-malicious. every group of friends that i know (not just mine) engages in this to varying degrees. my jewish-vietnamese girlfriend and i enjoy joking about her being a submissive "oriental," and me being some lecherous asian fetishist sketchball, or whatnot. it's funny, because that sort of thing is hilarious. it's hilarious when people see us together and give me looks like "that guy is a ****ing pervert." i take everything with a grain (or three) of salt. the world is too damn funny to get pissed at everything. that said, you have to "fight the fight" when it needs to be fought. i suppose we draw different lines. i guess there need to be hardliners out there, but i am not one of them.

what i will concede to you, mcatano, is that i may have incorrectly assumed that the people on this forum were familiar, and lax enough, to take things in stride and be able to have a little fun at giving each other ****. alas.

eddiebrannan -- i am a total ****ing hipster, based on some definition or another. i'm sure that you are, too. i mean in that in the best of ways. and, yeah, i definitely know that you're not giving me **** directly. just to speak to your point, and i have emphasized this several times, but i really do think that there is a lot to be said about context and intentionality, which is where you are likely to see someone arguing a difference between the construction worker and mr. hipster. whether or not the hipster's prattle crosses over and ends up producing truely racist attitudes, i don't know. that's what we'll find out when people my age are 40 and 50, running, blech, the country.

oh, i actually thought that lost-in-translation was a bit sketchy. **** that noise.

Karstens! Always there when I need him.

It's like an old-timers' convention in here. Quick, somebody get me a battery.

Man, I was totally stoked to get into a grammar thread, but now it became all, like, serious and stuff.

Personally, I hate it when people use "a" in place of per, i.e., writing "miles an hour" instead of miles per hour, for instance.

Also:

i.e. is Latin for id est, which means "that is."
e.g. is Latin for exempli gratia, which means for example.
The mnemonic for this is that eg=examples given.

Oh, and I totally liked Lost in Translation. It's a perfect crystallization of what it's like to be stuck in a place that's completely foreign and familiar in unfamiliar ways, as if someone had read a book on Times Square without ever being in the U.S. and constructed a city in its likeness.

Total BS.

Who got pissed?

What people do in the privacy of their own homes, relationships, circles of friends, etc, is all fine by me. Believe me, the level of "inappropriateness" or whatever you want to call it that exists between me and my friends is fairly staggering and I can see the hilarity in all of it. I also know that if I came to work and started calling people "orientals" or "mongoloids" I'd probably get fired. I know the people I work with a lot better than I know the people who post (or lurk) here.

i have no idea what you're talking about.. so here's a turd mongoloid with a pancake on its head:

http://www.ephemeroi.com/turd-pancake.jpg

ps. as this is the internet, a purely text-based forum, please use the following with caution:
- sarcasm aka 'hipster wit'
- photos of ppl with baked goods atop noggins

that's an odd-looking pancake.

What kind of pancake was that?

You described someone who works near me to a very close T.

I play rap just for him.

He asked me once "How can you listen to that ****? It ain't even music!"

I asked him "How can you watch people race in a circle for 3 hours. It's not even sporting."

To which he replied "Ain't that what your track bike people do?"

Which smarted a little, to which I replied
"Oh, you drink yourself into a stupor and let your kid run amok in the neighborhood and your wife complain about how you don't do **** so she leaves your dumb ass."

To which he had nothing to say.

He removed the #3 sticker off his F250 two days later.

Meanness is the new social lecturn.

Did I miss out on a salty cracker thread? Where the heck have I been? Salty cracker-vs-(insert politically correct and happy happy racial designation) are always the best. Oh! Wouldn't it be great if we were all one shade of grey and enjoyed the bliss of androgeny? We could even have numbers instead of names, but of course we would all have to be number 1, because 2 would be bad.

That's the biggest battery I've ever seen.

We need 2005 battery awards. Where is 165 dammit?