The Daily Show‘s Aasif Mandvi had an interview with a North Carolina Republican party official Don Yelton about why the state was passing new restrictive voting laws. He couldn’t seem to believe his ears at what the man was saying.
(This clip aired on October 23, 2013. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
It does not surprise me that there are people who want to rig the rules so that minorities and anyone else who might vote for the opposing party are kept out. What surprises me is that they are too dense to realize that they should keep these views to themselves. This suggests that they live in a community where such views are not shocking and can speak openly of them.
His comments were apparently too much for even the party to stomach and the man subsequently resigned his post. He now says that his comments were ‘taken out of context’ (that all-purpose excuse) by the TV show and that although he was forced to resign by the party, it was because they are ‘gutless’ and that he doesn’t want to be part of such a wimpy group anyway.
*North* Carolina, not South. Look, we have enough stupidity to live down without taking on North Carolina’s.
Regarding the title question: you haven’t spent much time in the Deep South, have you?
Having lived in the Florida Panhandle for 2 1/2 years, which is really an extension of Southern Georgia, I can testify that the number of ignorant people down there is prodigious.
and
The south is the Tea Party heartland. It also rates low in any socioeconomic statistic you look at and high in any social problem statistic you look at.
They may not be tired of being poor, ignorant, and uneducated but the rest of the USA is getting sick of it.
And yeah, I know, I know. Not everyone in the south is Tea Party material. I feel you pain, even out here on the west coast. I have a hard time imagining what it is like at ground zero.
One of the great crusades of the current Tea party US House is reducing food stamps and federally subsidized school lunches.
This will heavily impact…children, who are too young to go out and forage or work. And they simply don’t care.
The question in the title, Mano; rhetorical, right?
The problem with ‘out of context’ is that sometimes, the remarks are just bigoted and offensive and the context only makes it more clear.
Just remember what George Carlin said:
or what Frank Zappa said:
You know, in total fairness, his comments almost certainly were taken out of context. That’s how interviews generally work -- comments are edited and pared down to the bare minimum to get across a point. Sometimes it’s done honestly, sometimes it isn’t. As such, any TV interview needs to be interpreted with some salt.
But in the case of the kinds of things this guy was saying, there are no contexts in which they are okay.
Ayup.
…and the results are predictable.
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-and-worst-states-at-math-2013-10
IIRC studies have shown that socioeconomic status is a better predictor for school success than talent.
There’s a difference between stupidity and ignorance. Ignorance is curable, stupidity is not. Richard Dawkins makes a distinction when he states that one who rejects the theory of evolution is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked (but he didn’t want to consider that).
I answered “Yes” before reading past the headline. An old engineering adage says build something to be fool-proof and nature will build a better fool.
Sorry about that! It has been corrected.
That was one of the most precise explanations of the problems with these votings laws I’ve seen. And hilarious. It demonstrates how much more effective precise, understated satire is than thundering outrage in winning arguments.
Related: Jonathan Rauch describes:
The Case for Hate Speech
How Anita Bryant, Jerry Falwell, and Orson Scott Card have advanced the cause of gay rights
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-case-for-hate-speech/309524/
“…
Lately, people have been asking me why so much has happened in America, seemingly so suddenly, to advance gay equality generally and gay marriage specifically. It’s a good question, with some obvious answers. Demographics are one: younger people who are more relaxed about homosexuality are replacing older people who harbor long-standing prejudices. Also, as more gay people come out of the closet and live and love openly, we are no longer an alien presence, a sinister underground, a threat to children; we are the family down the block.
Those are important factors. But they don’t tell the whole story. Generational replacement doesn’t explain why people in all age groups, even the elderly, have grown more gay-friendly. Gay people have been coming out for years, but that has been a gradual process, while recent changes in public attitude have been dizzyingly fast. Something else, I believe, was decisive: we won in the realm of ideas. And our antagonists—people who spouted speech we believed was deeply offensive, from Anita Bryant to Jerry Falwell to, yes, Orson Scott Card—helped us win.
In 2004, when I was making the talk-show rounds for my new book on gay marriage, I found myself on a Seattle radio station, debating a prominent gay-marriage opponent. After she made her case and I made mine, a caller rang in to complain to the host. “Your guest,” he said, meaning me, “is the most dangerous man in America.” Why? “Because,” said the caller, “he sounds so reasonable.”
In hindsight, this may be the greatest compliment I have ever been paid. It is certainly among the most sincere. Despite the caller’s best efforts to shut out what I was saying, the debate he was hearing—and the contrast between me and my adversary—was working on him. I doubt he changed his mind that day, but I could tell he was thinking, almost against his will. Hannah Arendt once wrote, “Truth carries within itself an element of coercion.” The caller felt that he was in some sense being forced to see merit in what I was saying.
…”
Sadly, what FTB is known for, outside of your blog and maybe one or two others, is thundering outrage.
Oh! See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm1R2aIm9Po “FTB Feminists and Atheism”. Amusing.
raven #4, I’ve crunched the numbers on the recent shutdown, the “suicide caucus” of Republicans who advocated it and the “survival caucus” of Republicans who helped end it. Those names are from some New Yorker articles on them, which mapped where their districts are.
Republicans from the ex-Confederate states tended to be members of the suicide caucus, while Republicans from the then-Union states tended to be members of the survival caucus. So the ex-Confederacy gets the blame for the recent shutdown.
Are you in Pensa-bama?
@15 It’s worse than that. The Tea Party is just the old Confederacy with a new name.
Xpost from today’s Ed Brayton Mississippi thread.
The ugly open secret is that the Tea Party is mostly the old Confederacy with a new sheet over it. 63% are from the South with the rest scattered, mostly in rural areas of the midwest and west.
The Civil War ended 148 years ago. They haven’t been able to move on though.
Yes.
Believe it or not, the answer to that is always yes.
And Yebus da nonexistent do I wish it weren t so. But ’tis.