iheartchaos:

One of the dangers of crowdsourcing some of your game development is that every now and again, you’ll get someone doing stupid shit just to be an asshole. In the latest version of Minecraft (since fixed), if you choose Afrikaans as your language, you would see the above menu screen, saying “You are a NIGGER”. Oops.

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jaimelesbananes:

sometimes I just want to punch the internet.

On a blog, a blogger who likes to see racists get their comeuppance, but tries to deal in facts and dislikes made-up stuff presented as real, called their readers over.

“If you would be so nice to click the link, I have reserved a page for you to see why I am exhausted by the same urban legend about racism on a plane being recycled over and over again.”

None of the blog readers were shocked to see the link, and nobody gave a standing ovation to Poeat, who is all too easily annoyed by small things.

wellthatsyouropinionman:

”Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens.”

“And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller, writer, musician, filmmaker. Being black is like serving as Hoke, the driver in ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ except it’s a kind of TV series lasts the rest…

Check out the comments below the article, too…

qbits:

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer

Date: 26 January 2012 Time: 10:29 AM ET

A new study finds links between low intelligence and racism, prejudice and homophobia.

There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

“Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,” he said.

Controversy ahead

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

“They’ve pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics,” said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. “When one selects intelligence, political ideology andracism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it’s bound to upset somebody.”

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience. 

“The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this,” Nosek said, referring to the new study. “It’s not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists.”

Brains and bias

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured. 

In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100.

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as “Family life suffers if mum is working full-time,” and “Schools should teach children to obey authority.” Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as “I wouldn’t mind working with people from other races.” (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson’s work can’t speak to this “underground” racism.)

As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

“This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice,” said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

A study of averages

Hodson was quick to note that the despite the link found between low intelligence and social conservatism, the researchers aren’t implying that all liberals are brilliant and all conservatives stupid. The research is a study of averages over large groups, he said.

“There are multiple examples of very bright conservatives and not-so-bright liberals, and many examples of very principled conservatives and very intolerant liberals,” Hodson said.

Nosek gave another example to illustrate the dangers of taking the findings too literally.

“We can say definitively men are taller than women on average,” he said. “But you can’t say if you take a random man and you take a random woman that the man is going to be taller. There’s plenty of overlap.”

Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

“Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order,” Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low intelligence. “Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice.”

In another study, this one in the United States, Hodson and Busseri compared 254 people with the same amount of education but different levels of ability in abstract reasoning. They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link. 

Simple viewpoints

Hodson and Busseri’s explanation of their findings is reasonable, Nosek said, but it is correlational. That means the researchers didn’t conclusively prove that the low intelligence caused the later prejudice. To do that, you’d have to somehow randomly assign otherwise identical people to be smart or dumb, liberal or conservative. Those sorts of studies obviously aren’t possible.

The researchers controlled for factors such as education and socioeconomic status, making their case stronger, Nosek said. But there are other possible explanations that fit the data. For example, Nosek said, a study of left-wing liberals with stereotypically naïve views like “every kid is a genius in his or her own way,” might find that people who hold these attitudes are also less bright. In other words, it might not be a particular ideology that is linked to stupidity, but extremist views in general.

“My speculation is that it’s not as simple as their model presents it,” Nosek said. “I think that lower cognitive capacity can lead to multiple simple ways to represent the world, and one of those can be embodied in a right-wing ideology where ‘People I don’t know are threats’ and ‘The world is adangerous place’. … Another simple way would be to just assume everybody is wonderful.”

Prejudice is of particular interest because understanding the roots of racism and bias could help eliminate them, Hodson said. For example, he said, manyanti-prejudice programs encourage participants to see things from another group’s point of view. That mental exercise may be too taxing for people of low IQ.

“There may be cognitive limits in the ability to take the perspective of others, particularly foreigners,” Hodson said. “Much of the present research literature suggests that our prejudices are primarily emotional in origin rather than cognitive. These two pieces of information suggest that it might be particularly fruitful for researchers to consider strategies to change feelings toward outgroups,” rather than thoughts.

“He was somewhat thin-skinned a little tense to say the least… I was trying to be very calm.”
Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ)

Huh, a racist white woman from Arizona wags her finger at a black man, then criticizes him as being oversensitive. Go figure.

yourealllame:

I can’t believe I found this. like really ?

The anti-immigration lobby claims it’s not racist, that they only care about the law being broken.

Well, 18 U.S.C. § 333  states:

Whoever mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

Say No To Currency-Defacing Racists In The U.S.A.

Hey, Tumblr community, meet one of your neighbors…

im-perfectly-me:

They come into our country and take over our language. ESL? English is a SECOND language? Hell no. English is the FIRST language of America. If American’s went to Mexico, they would throw a pissy fit if we tried taking over Spanish with English. Why would we let you guys into our free country just so you can fuck it up again? America is full of dumb bitches being fucked up the ass. Some free country, I can’t even voice my own opinion at my school without being threatened to “get jumped”. Go to LA, those are real gangs. Not pussy ones in Salem, Oregon. Don’t get me wrong, not all Mexicans are like this. The majority of them are, though. I don’t care if you call me racist because everyone knows I am. I give props to the smart Mexicans, the non-“gang-bangers”, and so on, too, though. I’m fine if you speak it at your house or something but you shouldn’t be speaking it because you don’t know English. K. Have common sense.
Don’t get me wrong, I definitely don’t think Americans are any better. Take a look at this post for instance, it’s so horrible, intolerant, and racist. Every race has their flaw, no matter what.

You know it’s going to be good (read: very very bad) when a post is titled “rant about Mexicans.”

Another gross phenomenon besides the “I’m not racist but…” - the young, proud racist white girl. They’re all over Tumblr.

randomthoughtsarerandom:

This guy is a writer for a local newspaper and I was shocked to see this on his facebook page and then I had to roll my eyes when I saw the “I’m not racist, but…” caption for the photo. 

wannabechomsky:

I’m not even going to address his ties to white supremacist organizations, the newsletters, etc., because I’ve found that his supporters will just deny, sweep under the rug, deny some more, and claim irrelevancy until they turn blue in the face. So this post will not be concerning Paul’s personal character, but rather his policies.

Let’s start with the big one: he wants to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He has said that “the rights of all private property owners, even those whose actions decent people find abhorrent, must be respected if we are to maintain a free society.” He holds the right to private property above the right to not be treated as a second class citizen, the right to discriminate above the right to not be discriminated against. This is not obviously not in the interest of those being marginalized, especially because the majority of private property will naturally be held by the group in power, i.e. those doing the discriminating.

Similarly, Paul has written that victims of sexual harassment in the workplace should just find new jobs. Women aren’t a minority, but they are the main victims of this behavior and a marginalized group in general, so I’ll include them here. This stance reflects the same zeal to protect the oppressors rather than the oppressed as his opinion on the Civil Rights Act.

Paul’s defense of the right of the powerful to crush the powerless continues in his economic policy. He’s awfully fond of the free market for someone who supposedly predicted the housing bubble, which was caused by the lack of regulation of derivatives and lack of consumer protection against predatory lending. Capitalism without government regulation works to the benefit of the haves at the expense of the have-nots and leads to the concentration of wealth in the empowered group. Paul also supports phasing out social and entitlement programs and believes that those who can’t pay for medical care will find a way to “work it out” based on the altruism of others. He doesn’t believe in protecting the lower classes from the modern bourgeoisie, and he doesn’t believe that the government should provide them assistance, because obviously kind-hearted doctors and the like will take pity on them. Right.  Now, neoliberalism is detrimental to the people of middle and lower classes regardless of whether they’re minorities, but the majority of people identified as minorities fall into those brackets, so it does harm them, although not exclusively.

Related is his lack of support for workers’ rights. Paul wants to abolish the minimum wage, because that will totally lead to better standards of living for the poor and not the complete, unchecked exploitation of them, right? He voted to zero-fund the Ergonomics Rules of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which is the part “assessing those work-related factors that may pose a risk of musculoskeletal disorders.” He doesn’t believe in protecting the working class against exploitation and harm imposed by employers.

Basically, Paul’s policies would be disastrous for the lower and middle classes, into which most members of minority groups fall. On top of that, he opposes anything protecting such marginalized groups from further discrimination.

Supporters of Paul are quick to cry “But he’ll end the War on Drugs!” Yes, that is true, and the War on Drugs IS terribly racist and also pointless and a waste of money. I agree that it should be ended. But Ron Paul’s support for the end of current drug policy is just a drop in the bucket as far as minorities are concerned. This ONE policy of his would help some members of minorities, yes, but his overall platform would be incredibly harmful for all members of oppressed and disadvantaged groups.

There’s been a lot written about Ron Paul, and I urge everyone to seek out their own information, but for me, this articulated my problem with the candidate better than I could, and beyond just the obvious issue of the racist newsletters.

betheonetowalkinthesun:

THIS is an example of why I am so ready to leave this close-minded, racist, ignorant town. 
Australia is MULTICULTURAL. Has been for a while and people really have to start getting used to the idea by now don’t you think? We should be embracing the difference and unique-ness of each culture in our world, in our country, not singling them out as ‘Un-Australian’ because they don’t follow this religion, don’t look like that or don’t talk thatway.
To me…being Australian means to be accepting, to have fun, to be HAPPY! 
Quit spreading negativity.  

This gem was waiting for me at my inbox this afternoon…

mybeautifulwretches:

“you know the loudest and most vicious against him haven’t arrived to that opinion from great reflection and reasoning about his platform”.

you are a moron. what you are doing is called ‘playing the race card’. most likely, you havent done any reflection or reasoning on his platform because you assume anyone who doesnt like him is racist.

What is racist is that you called a condemnation of racism “playing the race card.”

Also, don’t write into me calling me names.

That is why my clean, clear, pristine, blank block list now has one name on it.

whitecapwaters:

Woah.

Hold up.

Yeah, hold up… can someone send me a list of these white devil movies for my Netflix queue?!

meganphntmgrl:

TW for racism. Also contains spoilers.

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Click through for a criticism of whitewashing in the Marvel comics world.

I did not create this graphic, but I sure as hell agree with it, so I reblogged it. I’ve looked through a lot of the reblogs that followed, and of course, I’m happy that many came from me (the more attention for my blog, the better, right?). 

Besides my readers (and the batch of readers from STFU Conservatives) who got the point, there were also people who responded who totally missed the point. 

“Are you saying I’m racist because I don’t like Obama?”

I thought my addendum to the text covered that. There’s people who just don’t agree with his politics, and race has nothing to do with it for them.

But that’s not who the points in the graphic are talking about. Those aren’t the people who perpetuate the myths (well, maybe some of them would disagree with the part about the economy or “big government”).

Anyway… I don’t respond to every post that disagrees with something I’ve posted. It’d be a waste of my time to chase down every blog that disagrees with mine (I’m not even going to respond to all the blogs that personally attack me, since most of them are liars or willfully ignorant anyway). 

But I had to share this one…

[TW: racial epithet, ableist slur]

s00p3rn00b:

This is fucking retarded. If you honestly think the reason people hate Obama is because he’s black, then you must be a dumb nigger. I respect President Obama, despite the color of his skin, but he hasn’t done anything for this country.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but looking at this kid’s blog, he’s white, right? 

How do we feel about him using the “N” word? I’m sure I don’t like it.