Birthers scare the fuck out of me

[Bruno]

Yes, this is what I have to put up with down here. 

You and me both, Kai.

I don't think it's quite that bad here in Tennessee, but I could be wrong. I'd like to see a state-by-state breakdown.

[Kai]

I guarantee you that SC is one of the worst.

[Captain Utopia]

I guarantee you that SC is one of the worst.

How is life in places like that? Do you have to put up with a general undercurrent of intolerance, or can you successfully form informal communities of friends and like-minded acquaintances to avoid the most of it?

Apparently I live in "One of the most multicultural cities in the world". I don't think about it that much, but definitely if I hear a homophobic or racist comment then it's a topic of incredulous discussion - like the reaction I got from telling a member of the armed forces that I thought the snow looked pretty one day.

[Bruno]

It gets worse.

http://washingtonindependent.com/53396/how-many-southern-whites-believe-obama-was-born-in-america

But how many Southern whites aren't sure whether the president has lied about his citizenship? The "South" defined by the poll includes 30 percent of the country's population, in twelve states: Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. That's around 99.2 million people, of whom 61.3 million are non-Hispanic whites, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. According to the exit polls in those 12 states, 30.6 percent of the voters in this region who cast ballots in 2008 were black, Hispanic or members of another minority group.

According to Del Ali of Research 2000, if you excluded those people from the poll—if you look only at white voters in the South—the number of people who doubt Obama's citizenship is  higher than the 47 percent figure that has grabbed headlines today. "There was no deviation in the number of black, Hispanic, and other voters from one region of the country to another," Ali told TWI. In the South, like everywhere else, the vast majority of non-white voters said that Obama was born in the United States; 97 percent of black voters, 87 percent of Hispanic voters, and 88 percent of other minorities. The extremely low overall percentage? That's due to white Southerners, who dragged down the average with an extremely high level of doubt about Obama.

So what proportion of Southern whites doubt that Obama is an American citizen? While Ali did not release the racial breakdowns for the the South, and cautioned that the margin of error in the smaller sample of 720 people would be larger than the national margin of error (2 percent), the proportion of white Southern voters with doubts about their president's citizenship may be higher than 70 percent. More than 30 percent of the people polled in the South were non-white, and very few of them told pollsters that they had questions about Obama's citizenship. In order for white voters to drive the South's "don't know" number to 30 percent and it's "born outside the United States" number to 23 percent, as many as three-quarters of Southern whites told pollsters that they didn't know where Obama was born.

[Iason Ouabache]

I wish I could say that it surprised me but I've always known that three-quarters of all Southerns were retards. Lincoln shouldn't have put up such a big fight when they wanted to leave the Union.

[Bruno]

What I don't understand about the civil war is how the richest 3% slave-owning southerners convinced all those poor non-slave-owning southerners to fight a war to protect their rights to own slaves.

Were they really that stupid?

[Captain Utopia]

What I don't understand about the civil war is how the richest 3% slave-owning southerners convinced all those poor non-slave-owning southerners to fight a war to protect their rights to own slaves.

Were they really that stupid?

Wasn't it an easy sell though? Something like: "We don't want no fancy talkin' government bureaucrat from the big city, tellin' us how we should live our lives and meddlin' in our affairs, orderin' us about and usin' confusin' words."

Does the exact same tired strategy work today? You betcha!

[Requia ☣]

Well the richest 5% convinced all the poor southerners that they don't want healthcare for the poor... so yes.

[Bruno]

We have a strong "work hard, die poor" work ethic.

God loves poor people moar, y'know.

Also, it builds "character".

[Kai]

I guarantee you that SC is one of the worst.

How is life in places like that? Do you have to put up with a general undercurrent of intolerance, or can you successfully form informal communities of friends and like-minded acquaintances to avoid the most of it?

Apparently I live in "One of the most multicultural cities in the world". I don't think about it that much, but definitely if I hear a homophobic or racist comment then it's a topic of incredulous discussion - like the reaction I got from telling a member of the armed forces that I thought the snow looked pretty one day.

Life in places like this varies, depending on your location. In the college town where I live it's bearable. You have to deal with intolerance outside of the university, but within it's not so bad. People do form communities of like minded friends (or the loca Unitarian Universalist Fellowship wouldn't exist).

Toronto is where I want to live someday. I've been there twice on extended visits and my experiences have been /wonderful/.

[Captain Utopia]

Life in places like this varies, depending on your location. In the college town where I live it's bearable. You have to deal with intolerance outside of the university, but within it's not so bad. People do form communities of like minded friends (or the loca Unitarian Universalist Fellowship wouldn't exist).

Toronto is where I want to live someday. I've been there twice on extended visits and my experiences have been /wonderful/.

Yeah, here the haters aren't tolerated and I guess they exist in their own personal cliques, but they don't seem to organise and as such, sexual or racial intolerance is more of an abstract issue for me. Mind you, I think this changes the further away from downtown you get, and there are university and college campuses dotted all around the downtown core, so perhaps it is just a bit like a large college town?

Also, Torontonians are quite smug about being multicultural and will pat themselves on the back quite frequently.. but if that meme is partly to blame, then that's a small price to pay

[Cain]

In any large college town, racial, sexual/gender and class distinctions will always melt before the one big conflict:  that between students and locals.  Nothing else matters.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I don't think most of these people believe he isn't American.

I think they just feel obligated as republicans to not be able to disagree with a bad thing said about a democrat.

The reverse is often true, as well.  The American people have been divided, just as planned.

[Iason Ouabache]

I don't think most of these people believe he isn't American.

I think they just feel obligated as republicans to not be able to disagree with a bad thing said about a democrat.

The reverse is often true, as well.  The American people have been divided, just as planned.

Ed Brayton was making this point on his radio show last week. There are no solid independent voices anymore which really fucks things up for everyone. There are legitimate reasons to criticize Obama but no one is taking up them up. Democrats are too busy toeing the line and Republicans can't say anything because it is the same shit Bush was doing. That's why they come up with stupid shit like the Birthers and the Tea Baggers and "ZOMG!! Obama wants to kill grandma!!1!"

[Iason Ouabache]

 

Someone with a really old typewriter connections inside the Kenyan government has discovered Obama's really real birth certificate!!!


http://www.infowars.com/shocking-new-birth-certificate-proof-obama-born-in-kenya/