I recently got bored and played a joke on Southern Fried Science a few days ago...my usual PC-tard schtick,* see the comments. In any case, the author of the weblog suggests that I was being unkind at his expense. I won't stop playing these sorts of jokes (see this Greg Laden comment thread), but I figured it would be a mitzvah to send some traffic his way. It takes some courage for a privileged white male to attempt to abolish cant when it comes to discussion about race in this nation of cowards.
* My usually method is to not think about what I'm typing, but just stick together random things I've heard or seen said and attempt to keep some sort of syntactic coherency. Usually people make some sense out of it.
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Thanks, Razib.
If I, as a new blogger, might humbly make a suggestion- if you had indicated somewhere that you were being sarcastic, I probably would have found it more funny. Maybe that takes some of the fun out of it, maybe I'm just really gullible, I don't know.
I also enjoy mocking extremists on both sides- I hope you'll read Southern Fried Science and see some examples of this- but I try to indicate that I'm mocking and not being serious.
Anyway, I appreciate you sending traffic our way.
Maybe that takes some of the fun out of it, maybe I'm just really gullible, I don't know.
i think i'm really good at faking PC-tarditude, so i wouldn't say you're gullible. check this out.
It can be funny, but it seems a bit cruel to waste people's time that way. I imagine I'd be pretty irritated if I spent 10 minutes responding to your posts before realizing.
And sadly, sadly, your posts are not obvious trolls... I wish humanity as revealed to us by the internet were rational enough on the whole to make such trolls obvious; it is not.
And sadly, sadly, your posts are not obvious trolls
but that's why there's an upside with arguing against me. if you're a white male you better sharpen your responses to such trollery, because unlike someone like me you don't have a viewpoint from the colored commanding heights when this sort of tardishness starts raining down on you.
Will the real "Arafat Kazi" please stand up.
Will the real "Arafat Kazi" please stand up.
that wasn't me! though there is one thing that person stated in there which suggests they have read my stuff before, so i wouldn't be surprised if they were putting on too....
It's all consistent with those cruel glasses you wear.
If WSM had decided to ban you from his blog before you could perform your "good thing", would that make it a bar mitzvah?
Razib,
Please keep it up. I think South Asians are uniquely well-suited to puncturing PC attitudes on race. The success of South Asians in America despite their darker skin directly undermines the widely held view that America is some horribly racist country determined to keep the black and brown people of the world down.
Not that I haven't known South Asians who've tried to play the race card. An Indian guy I knew in college got a lot of sympathy mileage out of having been called a sand n***** a few times growing up in small town Virginia. He was the son of a doctor and one of the richest families in town and his bus driver, a poor white man with bad teeth who drank too much, called him names a few times.
I think he mainly used the story to get liberal white chicks in bed - which actually isn't a bad reason come to think of it.
Oh, he's a rich doctor now himself, of course (and married to a fellow Indian doctor). So he somehow overcame the horrible injustice of racist America to transform himself from a humble wealthy doctor's son into ... someone ever wealthier. A true underdog story.
I get the impression (not justified by any actual data, of course) that sciencey, skeptical sorts tend to be worse than random ones at detecting sarcasm.
They've even named this (putative) deficiency Poe's Law.
I wonder how much it's due to the bizarreness of the beliefs being satirized and how much it's due to the inability of some people to tell the difference.
Anecdotal example: Caltech (super-nerdy place) gives its admitted students a writing placement test. They are to write a response to one of a few given articles. My year, one of the articles was satirical. This was lost on me, but I didn't find out about it until a humanities professor who reviewed them complained that about a third of the admitted class had responded to that paper as though it were serious.
Of course, I thought the article's arguments sounded just like those of someone I knew, but I suspect that's just because I lacked the ability to differentiate them that most people seem to possess.
By the way, I always get a kick out of your "PC-tard shtick" but if I hadn't seen it here first, I'd probably have been taken in by it.
Hey Razib, thanks for the linkage and good laughs. For the record, I love all shenanigans that set off WhySharksMatter.
Sokal-ed again!