[thechat] Stop passing laws (Was: Stupidity should be cured)

deacon b. web at master.gen.in.us
Sun Mar 2 13:10:00 CST 2003


> if anything, we should stop passing seat-belt and helmet laws.

Not the only laws we should stop passing.

I'm involved in the size-acceptance movement. A lot
of people want laws forbidding discrimination.
There's one state and one city with such laws.

I'm arguing that laws like that do more harm than
good. Back when there were no laws against racial
discrimination, bigots had a limited talent pool to
choose from, and the tolerant had a larger talent
pool. When supply goes down, you end up paying
more. One consequence of passing the
discrimination laws has been to reduce the "bigotry
tax". Isn't that counterproductive?

Here in Lancaster last year, an old man was
accused with a hate crime because he yelled across
the street that some woman was a ni gg er. He was
sentenced to 30 days in jail for that. While it's an
affront to me that someone should serve jail time for
exercising his first-amendment right of free speech,
it also occurs to me that it wasn't much of an insult.
He was indicating her racial origin, which strikes me
as being nothing to take offense at, and that he was
a racist. In other words, he was insulting *himself*
rather than her. Shouldn't we *encourage* people to
identify themselves as bigots?

Who was it that said that stupid people should be
required to wear signs?  Andy Rooney? I'm thinking
of sending signs to the judge and the prosecutor.

There was a guy who recently wrote a book on the
word ni gg er, and gave a speech locally about it. I
think it was at Franklin & Marshall, or perhaps
another college. It surprised me that the local paper
would print the word ni gg er in the paper - you can't
post that word to thechat, and surprised me even
more that there could be a fair and unemotionally-
charged story about usage of the word; students
should be issued their signs when they matriculate
in j-school.

Back in the 1950s, I was embarassed that my
grandfather talked about dar kies and blac kies. (It
was even more confusing to me that his best friend
was a black man, a wonderful guy who had been a
buffalo soldier. I challenged him about it once, when
he referred to the damn blac kies, and he said that
Leo was Leo, and he was talking about city
ni gg ers.)

So when the word "black" became the proper word
to use, instead of negro, I had a hard time adjusting.
Black was too close to blackie to be comfortable, at
least at first, until people universally accepted black
as a polite term. But I think instead of black power,
they should have decided on ni gg er power as the
right term to use. It would have really pissed off the
birchers and the klan to call someone a ni gg er,
and have the guy say, "Yes, and proud of it!"  Niger
literally translates as black, and we wouldn't have
had the word ni gg ard discarded from the english
language as being confusingly similar, in the ears of
doofuses and illiterates.

Oh, and size-acceptance?  It's just a slightly more
inclusive term than fat-acceptance. It's not that we
object to the word fat. It's that we think it's OK to
accept folks that are naturally skinny as a rail, and
folks that are inordinately tall, and even those short
people who, as Randy Newman puts it, have no
reason to live.  (I admit having difficulty with the
short part of size-acceptance, but I am *trying*)
Both size-acceptance and fat-acceptance are
primarily concerned with lardass liberation.

And Tuesday is our big day. Whether it's called
Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday, it's *the* holiday
associated with sex, because there's nothing sexy
about going to bed with someone who's all elbows
and angles. You might as well screw a 10-speed
bicycle.

deke


















--
What does the Bible clearly say about dieting?
You shouldn't do it:
 "Therefore I say unto you,
 Take no thought for your life,
 what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink;
 nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on."
                          - Matthew 6:25




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