I Do Not Think This Movie Means What You Think it Means.

Somebody shot at the police on the North Side. That's a terrible situation. Leave it to the commenters on the PD website to make the worst of it.

Charles P. thinks everyone who runs from the police should be shot with a machine gun. Really:

He also, of course, calls for an expansion of the police department. At least he doesn't call for sending in the National Guard, which is a disturbingly frequent suggestion by conservative PD commenters. You know, the principled, small-government non-racists.

I like to think that stltodaybunny read my previous post on code words, and is trying to send me a message when he / she talks about "PUNKS":

Bring in the National Guard because the niggers have no self respect!

But the discussion thread's winner-so-far is very obviously Captain Spaulding, who appears to have seen District 9, but completely missed the point of its unsubtle commentary on Apartheid:

So there's the good Captain, watching District 9 and thinking to himself "Yeah! Awesome! Lock up those prawns!" I thought the anti-Apartheid message was laid on pretty thick, myself (setting the movie in South Africa? Really?), but I guess it wasn't thick enough for those who are sympathetic to the idea of quarantining an entire population in the first place.

It's also interesting that the white people who abandoned the city in the previous decades have adopted the Tea Party "take our country back" rhetoric to pretend that blacks have stolen it. Just like they used ACORN to steal the White House. Maybe Sarah Palin can hold a rally at the Edward Jones Dome where everyone can dress up like para-military tough guys and show those commies / blacks / libruls that we're going to take the Second Amendment into our own hands. Or, you know, send in the guard while we watch on TV.

Welcome, Racists...

Well.

So a racist who can read found this little corner of the internet. He posted a thread about my post about "thug" as a code word on a hideous racist forum, which I refuse to link to here. Click on through to see the comments his friends posted. They are quite proud of themselves for posting comments, and they should be. They brought the rhetorical PAIN. Or teh STUPID. Whichever. They're bragging at their forum about leaving "choice words," although they're unclear about what the benefit of doing so might be. One speculates that I'll delete the post soon, but that's not going to happen. I wouldn't want all of my (several!) regular readers to miss out on the horrible, horrible things these lowlifes have to say. That said, I have deleted a few comments.

In the interest of pretending like there is a productive debate to be had with avowed racists, I'm going to come up with a few commenting rules, which I reserve the right to never follow. But here's what I was thinking as I was deleting comments just now:

1. Don't link to offensive websites. I'm not going to drive traffic to your filthy forums, however minimal a boost in traffic you might receive by linking on my site. If the link is in the body of your comment, I'll delete that. If your handle links to something offensive, all evidence of your comment having ever happened goes into the ether.

2. Don't incite violence or say other things that could potentially, in my wildest imagination, expose me to liability.

3. Don't just post for posting's sake. Flooding the site with "choice words" for the purpose of creating a flood is stupid and obnoxious and pointless - I'm just gonna delete them. I know that's really what went on in the code words thread, but if an actual conversation ever happens here, comments that don't contribute will get axed.

4. Don't post anything that will make me want to take your comment down. Stupidity is probably okay (just see the code words thread for proof of that), but plenty of other stuff won't be.

5. I would say "Be nice," since that's just kinda something I think people should do, but that will be too frequently ignored to be enforced.

I might fisk some of the racist bullshit in the coming days. I might not. But, in any case, welcome, racists. It will be fun to make fun of you and sad to know you exist.

Update: I closed the comments on that thread because it was really starting to piss me off and I think everyone gets the idea.

The PD Trolls Its Commenters

Oh my god you guys.

The PD is officially trolling its own racist commenters.

Also, there is an argument going on in the comments about who floats better. To wit:

It all starts when Dick_Butcher (seriously? Is this Lorena Bobbit's screen name?) gets a bright idea:

jrjohnso has a sense of humor about the whole thing:

Dick's all BAM! Science up in yo grill!

flifishun lol's:

happypatb actually read the article:

Real Talk from a trio of posters:

jrjohnso is WAY too logical for an stltoday.com commenter:

Dick misses pat's peace offering, and he takes his ball and goes home (also: he went to grad school, motherfuckers!):

rahda4 might not have read the rest of the debate. He just throws out some weird quote from a person no one else had heard of:

Okay, so pat didn't actually read the article. He / She also says pointless stuff:

jr is not ready to let it go just because Dick stomped out of the thread:

sandisland misses the point and says there just might be something to this whole "buoyancy" thing:

It's insane.

Also, there are people in that thread who are, insistently and without irony, defending slavery. I know.

Their Lives Don't Matter

One person was killed - i.e. is now dead - and many more were wounded Sunday night in a series of shootings in St. Louis. Many people and their families are in tremendous physical and emotional pain right now because of what happened . One human being lost his life. Countless others lost a loved one or had to watch their loved ones suffer. This story is sad. How to solve the problem of violence in St. Louis is up for debate, but anyone who reads the story with a shred of humanity in his or her heart, I think, would have to feel something. Not the delightful commenters on the story about the shootings at stltoday.com, though. In a word, ugh.

bassmaster asks a rhetorical question (which he ends with a period) about leadership:

And he answers it by asserting that leadership is finding a way to use armed forces to "wipe out these thugs."(We all remember what "thug" really means, right?) Death sentences all around! Live next to a "thug?" Well, you're either with us or against us, so unless you welcome the troops like liberators (to show your loyalty, you could tear down a statue!), you can expect to get killed too. After all, their lives don't matter.

The ugly sentiment continues in a disgusting streak of four comments (stltoday's new "old comments at the bottom" default is really annoying, btw). Snag, mr.westcounty, Farik Al Akeem, and ramsrevolution each demonstrates his odious hatred for his fellow human beings with his comment in this string:

There seems to be some disagreement here about whether a "show of force" is needed or whether the police should "redeploy" elsewhere and guard the people whose lives are worth protecting. There is also a semantic difference here between the terrible people who want to lock the "thugs" up in a dungeon and the terrible people who want them to be killed. They certainly agree on one thing though: their lives don't matter. They're "animals" who should be put away for life. Violence in a neighborhood where black folks live? "Almost no problem with" it. "Why is this of any concern?" Their lives don't matter.

Their lives matter so little, in fact, that we should actively seek to end them by, apparently, building walls along arbitrarily drawn lines (What constitutes "the North Side"? Is it about the density of the black population? A certain high enough "thugs" per square mile ratio?) and creating some sort of apocalyptic scenario in the areas of the city we have deemed unfit for continued habitation. Build a wall and distribute guns. They didn't even do that in District 9.

It goes on. bign thinks he's being hilarious:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA ITS FUNNY BECAUSE THE BLACK PEOPLE THEY DIED. Their lives don't matter.

TheUnderboss and our old friend drumming umpire have back-to-back comments that really take the cake in the "I don't give a goddamn about human life" department:

drumming umpire, TheUnderboss 12 july.egg

TU has decided to import the new right-wing OMG! du jour and blather on about the "New Black Panthers" and how they want to kill babies. Those militant "thugs" are "the ones to look out for." Who gives a damn about blacks killing blacks. Their lives don't matter.

And, really, what can I say about DU? He seems to have decided that not only don't the lives of black folks on the North Side matter, but neither do the lives of any of those silly liberals who would be stupid enough to live within a nuclear-bomb's-kill-zone of them (incidentally, read the whole thread for some "interesting" perspectives on why living in the City is teh sux or teh roxorz). They're shooting each other? Nuke the bastards.

The high school policy debaters I judged this year liked to strengthen their side by making the case that their opponents' plan - which always involved increasing some sort of social services - would SURELY lead to nuclear war. That line of reasoning is obviously specious, but perhaps I didn't give it enough credit. I like to think that nuclear annihilation is mostly off the table. Most people, I like to tell myself, are completely against using nuclear weapons in response to pretty much anything but an attack that was itself nuclear. But reading bullshit like du's - even though I don't think he would actually pull the lever to drop the bomb on the North Side - makes me realize just how much nuking the bastards is on the table for many, many people in our ridiculous country. I remember hearing idiots talk about dropping nuclear bombs on "The Middle East" after 9/11. As long as we have the warheads, we'll have the idiots who want to use them. Reading even a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that people deserve to die in a mushroom cloud because of their proximity to the black part of town reminds me of that fact, and it depresses me.

Our lives don't matter.

IT IS NOT BLACK HISTORY MONTH SO ALL YOU BLACK PEOPLE NEED TO BE QUIET

St. Louis Is Full of Racists Presents: Fake Guest-Blogging From Fake Tim O'Neil, Not-Really PD Writer!

Oh, hi. Didn't see you there. It's me, Tim O'Neil. I'm just working on a story for the PD. It's about a prominent black lawyer from the early twentieth century, Homer G. Phillips. His story is pretty interesting, really. He was an early civil rights leader, advocating for blacks even when segregation was mandated by law. He is perhaps best known for

Oh, good. The racists are here. Hi, cardinals_99. Weird how the logo in your avatar is from the wrong Cardinals. Or maybe you're from Arizona. They appear to have plenty of racists there. Anyway, yes, you're right, February is Black History Month, but I'm really quite sure that doesn't mean that February is the only month in which we can discuss history involving black people. The other eleven months aren't, like, reserved for discussing the history of white folks. I just happened to find this guy interesting and thought I'd share his story with the readers of the PD.

Anyway, Phillips is probably best known for the time he proved insurance fraud by bringing the actual coffin used in the fraud into the courtroom. Turned out it was filled with cement and . . . Oh. Oh dear, it's shamwow.

Well, it seems that you all are just directing your claptrap at one another, which okay. But I feel compelled to let you know, shamwow, that not every story about a black person that portrays him or her in a positive light is about white guilt. Having good people as members of your race is not a zero-sum game, after all. It's really pretty stupid to assert that a positive article about a historical black person of note is about white guilt. It's like you racist weirdos just look for excuses to make racist com-

Sigh. -ments. drumming umpire! So glad to see you again! Your ruminations on "negro culture" are insightful and valuable. It's really neat how you can say, with a straight, racist face, "I'm not a racist!" since you praise the "good work" of MLK and Homer Phillips. Why, back in the olden days, blacks were better. Not like they are today, with their devolved culture and all. Thanks for your contribution, DU.

Now, back to Homer Phillips: sadly, he was murdered on Delmar Boulevard in 1931. His killers were unsurprisingly acquitted, which exemplifies the "justice" that existed in our country back then.

jaminator, you're not funny. I really don't understand the tone of your comment, but I do think it's sort of interesting how you're kind of arguing with drumming umpire, above, who was waxing nostalgic about the way black folks used to be, before they had equal rights to whites. Ah, those were the days. Not in your mind, of course. Blacks were even getting shot on Delmar back then! HA HA HA! Never mind that Homer Phillips was probably killed by a couple white guys. BLACK PEOPLE SHOOT EACH OTHER LULZ.

God, you racists make writing an article really hard when I'm forced to reply to you in the middle of it. Can't you just pipe down for a min-

"Big White Daddy"? Seriously?

I give up.

If They'd Just Stop Committing All Those Crimes, They'd Stop Getting Pulled Over When They're Innocent

In 2009, blacks were 62% more likely than whites to be pulled over in Missouri. Countenance Blog, predictably, doesn't think this is a problem. Noticing that this has occurred, in fact, is just "peddling the no-snitching culture." He actually argues that to vote for a Democrat is to do that, but his argument is mostly unintelligible to me (the person writing Countenance Blog refers to him/herself as "Blogmeister," which leads me to believe he's a he, but I could be wrong). It seems to go that many Democratic policies, like ending racial profiling, "[support] black crime." How, he doesn't say, which, I suppose, is why the argument is unintelligible. I think the next tortured leap goes something like "supporting black crime is what no-snitching does, so Democrats, who support black crime, are basically not snitchin'." Or something. Behind the whole post seems to be the idea, popular among white people, who don't have to deal with the negative effects of racial profiling, that if those damn minorities would just stop committing crimes, they wouldn't get pulled over when they're innocent.

Predictably, this view is espoused ineloquently in the comments on the stltoday.com article.

jeepmom is back, and she's characteristically ugly:

Her reasoning proves way, way too much. If, as she claims, a person having a particular characteristic makes him or her more likely to have committed a crime, then it would be okay to seize on that characteristic and ONLY harass people who have it. After all, it's just good police work to hassle the people who are more likely to have committed a crime. Why have the cops been wasting their time pulling over any white folks at all? Doing so will only MAYBE net you a bad guy. But running a black guy through the system is much more likely to come up with something good. It's like making sure all the brown-skinned people in Arizona have their papers in order. It's not like the red-head with the sunburn just hopped the border fence, after all. jeepmom's twisted logic, carried to its endpoint, would have one race (or people having some other characteristic deemed to have a correlation with crime) harassed by the cops to the exclusion of all others.

And the crazy thing is that I'm not sure that jeepmom would object to living in that world, provided that white skin was not the characteristic in question.

molly3, who is a horrible person, probably wouldn't object to a policy like that either:

Ick.

If you want more examples of racists cheering on racial profiling, read the rest of the thread. Then, if you're really brave, you can move on to the "discussion" that resulted from this article about young car thieves.

I had plans to write a long post about why racial profiling is wrong, but suddenly I've realized that a) you've most likely read that post before somewhere else and b) I sound ridiculous above, making arguments that refute jeepmom's "logic." So I'll just say that racial profiling is wrong for many reasons, but, since St. Louis is full of racists, it's going to continue to happen here, with the support of a large portion of the community. And that sucks.

Code Words

Update: That's enough, trolls. Comments closed. See here for some rules if you feel like commenting elsewhere.

Finals and paper are behind me. I've moved to St. Louis and started work. Here's hoping blogging picks up.

Albert H. Nobles, an 18 year-old resident of north St. Louis County, was shot and killed near Fountain Park early Tuesday. Why is he dead? The proximate cause was two bullet wounds, but really no one knows for sure. No one, that is, except for jim63129:

Jim knows that walking in neighborhoods where black people live at times when he is not personally out and about is tantamount to signing your own death warrant.

But Jim's heartless assessment of the situation is not, by a long shot, the worst thing a racist had to say in the comment thread accompanying the sad article linked above.

sue_nokomis gets the Worst Person... In the Thread! Award for her racist drivel, currently the final comment in this traveshamockery of a thread inspired by the death of a child:

Never mind that her statistic, like 43.6% of all of statistics, is made up on the spot. Never mind that it is wildly inaccurate (something like 10% of young black men are in jail, a statistic that is frightening and awful, but not for the reasons Sue would say it is). What is outrageous and racist about her comment is that she uses the fact that 40% of black men are in jail as evidence that her racism is justified. Whatever outrageous percentage of young black men are in jail, they are there because of our society's authoritarian streak and its institutional racism. So Sue is using what sane people would recognize as evidence of racism to justify racism. Racists love circular reasoning.

Sue wins the thread. But what I would really like to do with this sad situation is to demonstrate that racist white folks have come up with a new word for "nigger." Obviously that word is not used in polite company, and I'm willing to bet the mods at stltoday.com delete any comments that contain it. So racists have to use a code, one that's broken so easily that even racists can figure it out. I'm sure there are plenty of words that substitute for the n-word in polite conversation among whites, but the one I want to focus on today is "thug." "Thug" pops up a lot in threads discussing black people who have committed crimes, black people who have been victims of crimes, or, really, any crime committed in a neighborhood perceived to be black.

Let's examine its use in this thread.

Conveniently, it pops up in the very first comment, from The Ark:

Go ahead and just throw a "nigger" in there in place of "thug." The meaning of the post hasn't changed at all. We broke your code, The Ark!

The word pops up again a little ways down, in a mostly unintelligible and completely insane post form ChinacatSunflower:

Who knows what on earth CS is getting at, but swapping the words in this one seems to change her tone. So chalk one use of "thug" up in the racially neutral category.

It doesn't really stay there for long, thanks to NotFromHere:

This comment in mostly incoherent, but "niggers don't spend enough time at a target range to be accurate" sure has a nice ring to it, and I think it's pretty much identical to the point NFH is trying to make. It at least sounds like the punchline of a joke at a Klan rally.

DLstl can't use the n-word while pretending to praise MLK, so goes with the t-word instead:

It really is sad that black people have only used the civil rights movement to enable themselves to act like a bunch of niggers.

RedRonin is participating in a debate about guns, which pop up in response to these "black kid gets shot" stories about as often as the racists do, which is to say every time:

I'll give his use of "thug" the benefit of the doubt and a score of racially neutral.

kedgman gives us a quote straight out Alabama in 1962:

"Some nigger gets cocky..." Goodness gracious. This guy is a one-man lynch mob. Which isn't to say that he doesn't have friends - he probably does, and that makes him even more scary.

Saving the best for last, chad_rn's comment, the last one (so far) to use "thug," takes the racist code word cake, and, honestly, gives sue_nokomis a run for her money:

So simple. So ineloquent. So obviously wishing he could say "nigger."

I wonder if there is a racist MSWord macro for making this type of substitution easy and automatic...

You Know Who ELSE Was a Fascist?!

Finally, the long-awaited fascists.

Once again, I'm looking at the comments in response to this story on stltoday.com. I've covered the racists and the gun nuts already. Let's bring it full circle with three commenters who don't just blame, like the racists, and don't simply advocate violent self-defense, like the gun nuts, but actually offer a proactive solution to reducing crime in the city.

First up is guns n camo, who makes the transition from racists and gun nuts to fascists a smooth one:

guns n camo is not ready, like the commenters we'll see in just a moment, to demand that the government start killing black people. But he is ready to impose the death penalty on them. At least the ones out after dark. After all, there is absolutely nothing good that they could be getting up to at that time of night. So guns n camo cheers his fanciful vigilante on as he imaginarily imposes death sentences on the real people committing guns's fictional crimes. Or at least fictionally doing things guns doesn't think they should be doing. Is there another meaning for "choreboy" besides the popular line of scrubbers? Urban Dictionary is, uh, no help. Is there a Racist Dictionary somewhere I could check? I'd like to know exactly what guns thinks this person was doing at 4 AM that made him deserve to get shot. Because buying a scrubber and a lighter doesn't really do it for me. But, then, I'm not a proto-fascist racist who thinks that shooting people on the street because of the timing and content of their activities is something to cheer about.

Our first real fascist is Ask Grandpa, who isn't quite as violent as guns n camo, but who is ready to move beyond lone vigilantes imposing justice on the city:

As Grandpa typed this on his laptop in the County, I guarantee you he wasn't smiling to himself and imagining the National Guard rounding up a bunch of white gang members. But racial issues aside (I'm sure if he read that, he would say he wants white gang members up too), I find this mentality really, really frightening. I just do not understand how anyone can be okay with the idea of uniformed, armed soldiers marching into an American city with orders to "round up anyone gang affiliated." I think it's directly related to the idea that it's okay for uniformed, armed American soldiers to march into cities in in Iraq and Afghanistan and round up anyone "terrorist affiliated." I like to think it's a BIG step from soldiers in Kabul to soldiers in St. Louis, but for someone who thinks like Grandpa, it might not be. "Terrorists" and "gang members" are both firmly in the "other" category for him, so he doesn't care what happens to them. "Rounded up" by soldiers and locked up without trial? No problem! That kind of thing, you see, just doesn't happen to white dudes in St. Louis County. Never will.* It would be just as easy for Grandpa to sit in his easy chair and cheer on the soldiers in his TV marching on St. Louis and gittin' the bad guys as it is for him to do it now as they march on Kandahar. It takes principles to stand against oppression that will never reach you personally. It takes an authoritarian nature and white privilege to advocate attacking an American city with American soldiers.

But if you thought Grandpa was a fascist, just wait until you see what Garfield the Cat had to say:

Goodness gracious. Thank you, Garfield, for making the analogy I drew above explicit. He says he wants "police [to be] able to treat thugs like soldiers treat terrorists." He is calling for his own community to become a "quasi-police state." But not even when we've invaded a foreign country do we hold public executions! This comment is truly stunning to me. I don't know if my saying this proves Godwin's Law, since this is just my blathering and not much of discussion, but Garfield would have fit right in in Nazi Germany. Substitute "Jews" for "thugs" in his comment. It's unbelievable.

Now, I obviously have no proof whatsoever that these three commenters are members of the Tea Party. But I doubt they'll be attending any Organizing for Missouri meetings in the coming weeks. And if put these people in the context of the political movement of which there is a good chance they're a part, their authoritarian mindsets and calls for fascism become even more unbelievable. They're too busy painting little mustaches on pictures of Barack Obama and railing against "Big Government" to realize what exactly they're advocating with regard to the city. Affordable health insurance for millions of Americans? Big government. Government troops marching on an American city? Just gettin' 'er done. It would be comical if it weren't so frightening.

There are people in St. Louis who have dedicated their entire lives to improving the city. They work on a daily basis to end violence, to teach children, to assist people in poverty, to beautify the city's buildings and green spaces, to minister to their flocks. They have solutions to this problem. They're working hard to implement them. But people like Garfield set their efforts back every time they make comments like this, because it perpetuates a toxic mentality. It's a mentality that says that people in the city are the "other." It says that they deserve to be shot, whether it be by their neighbor or an agent of the government. It says, in other words, that there is no hope for them. Those of us who know that isn't true need to do everything we can to prove them wrong.

*Or will it?!?!?!?!?! Dah dah duuuuh!