In article , Delta Nine
wrote:

Darren Garrison wrote:

On 3 Apr 2004 22:16:02 -0800,
(theoneflasehaddock) wrote:


Yes there is a lot of political correctness gone mad.I believe that you
still talk about "Black berries", Here some of the Politically correct
brigade insist that they be referred to now as "Bramble fruit".
Short people are "Vertically challenged"
People with a disability are not disabled they are "Differently able."
And it goes on and on


The funny part is, most people who are part of the PC-protected groups have
no interest in their PC names. Most black people I know want to be called
black, not "African American" as that implies that they're not American
born. Most deaf people I know are deaf, not hearing impared (hearing
impaired implies difficulty hearing, not total lack of hearing ie deafness)
The African American one brings to mind the white South African born kid
who got in trouble for applying for some sort of "outstanding African
American student" award because he wasn't black. Even though he had better
claim to the title "African American" than any American born black kid. I
mean, shit, he was ****ing *born in Africa*

Political correctness was just as much of an attack on free speech as the
people who believe that saying bad things about Bush is tantamount to
treason. More so, actually, it's been building up for a longer time and
has had much more sway than the recent war on terror trend.

Remember the financial advisor in DC who had to resign for using the word
"niggardly" just because it sounds similar to "******" Nevermind the fact
that niggardly shares no origins with ******, and has a perfectly
acceptable use given the context. It means "stingy" or "miserly" and is
completely acceptable to use when talking about finances.

See, that's what political correctness is about: It doesn't matter if
you're right or not, it only matters if people are offended. Well guess
what? There's nothing in our laws that imply you have a right not to be
offended. In fact, with freedom of speech you're pretty much guaranteed to
be offended at some point in your life. People just need to get a thicker
skin about it, and not try to coerce others into not offending them.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: People are stupid.

A lyric, not by Woody Guthrie:

"Let your voice be heard, even though you're stupid
You can have a word, like any other fool
You've got as big a right
As anyone who's bright
So let your voice be heard."

People who have the "people are stupid" philosophy of life tend to leave
out the most significant stupid person when tallying who are these people,
which of course would start with the individual with that philosophy. As
long as you're not REALLY saying "Everyone is stupid except me" then I
will agree with you, because the rant above is one of the stupidest I've
seen on UseNet this week, & that's really going some. Even though I
actually do embrace the philosophy that people are stupid, I wouldn't
exclude many people at all, certainly not you or myself. Cuz even on the
rare occasion when I'm the smartest person in a given gathering, that
still needn't be exactly smart.

You've mistaken politeness for political correctness, & you've ranted on
irrationally. If you approach all of life like this, I hope no one ever
gives you a bucket of phlegm, because you'll be mistaking it for
Budweiser. Now to me politeness is a personal choice, one I frequently do
not choose, but people who do choose it I'm not going to mistake for
******s who wish they could impose their differing standard on me.

That said, underlying your loony-tunes rant against your own straw dog
called "political correctness," it is at least true that it's a stupid
idea to insist a Kaffir Lily can't be called a Kaffir Lily because on a
completely different continent Kaffir is a hate-word spewed primarily from
the trashy mouths of a bunch of butt-ugly honky-eqivalent Afrikaaners. One
might avoid the word if one seriously desires to be excessively polite
even in contexts when only a putz would get offended, that's fine, but
that does make it laughable that Ceroid of all people should pretend it
mattered to him, since he's not one to suffer our fellow fools gently.
Frankly if I went into a nursery & asked if they had any Berg Lilies, they
wouldn't have a clue what the **** I was after, & when they figured out
what I really meant & corrected that to Kaffir, that'd just be a pushy
set-up to talk about what the word means on a different continent to a
specific class of racist whites -- whites so low in the class structure
that no self-respecting Bantu would condescend to reply to such physical &
mental dwarfs.

If not for the World Wide Web, to anyone who'd never been to South Africa,
Kaffir means "a pretty flower from somewhere in Africa," nothing more or
less.

The Arabic word actually means "rejector of Truth" or "believer in lies,"
i.e., unconverted to Islam, a believer in some other faith, or an Infidel.
So the biggest dumbest Kaffirs in Africa are those ugly-ass honky
Calvinists. Among Islamic peoples it is still used to mean a Christian, a
Hindu, an atheist, anyone who has had the opportunity to convert to the
"Truth" but has refused, & it has no racial meaning at all. In medieval
East Africa after long contact with Muslims, even tribal peoples borrowed
the word to mean "all tribal peoples," as there'd been no universal
trade-word for aboriginal peoples collectively.

The word was in use for CENTURIES before white south african racists began
to use it like the equivalent of American white trashoids' use of the word
******. Curiously, when modern fundamentalist Islamic nutcakes use the
word "Kaffir," they even today do NOT mean black folks, let alone African
aboriginal peoples; it still means "Infidel" & 99 times out of a 100 when
they use the word, it is to describe someone who is a white christian or a
non-Moslem in India. In India there used to be Kaffir clubs for white
Europeans living in India, the word being unknown as a racial epithet but
well known as a synonym for Heathen -- to be a member of the Suicide Club,
the Philistine Club, or a Kaffir Club was to be a person of bohemian
disposition out for a good time.

If Ice T says "******," when Lenny Bruce said "******," if Mark Mathabane
calls himself a "Kaffir boy," if I fill this paragraph with the words
"******" & "kaffir," that's totally different from someone waving a
Confederate flag, putting on a white hood, & saying let's go kill some
******s, or climbing out of their pig stye covered in pigshit & calling
for a new Fuzzy Wuzzy War to reinstate Apartheid.

So too a gardener who loves their kaffir lily is not the same as some
Dutch ****** descended from filth & filth to this day looking REAL hard
for an excuse to look down on ANYone lest they have to face their own
actual social reality.

Out of mere politeness & self-preservation, on any journey to South
Africa, one should not be asking about the Kaffir Lilies, but might want
to call them Berg Lilies or River Lilies or get all fancy-ass & call them
by their Bantu name khahlana, as it really would otherwise & indeed be
like saying ****** Toes while walking over to visit President Clinton in
his Harlem offices. But since the word neither inherently in its origin or
in its continuous multiple meanings has the racist context it has for the
most ugly-ass Calvinists in South Africa, the word is not necessarily
tainted for use elsewhere in other contexts.

If a Muslim calls me a Kaffir, I know he's a fool who hates Jews &
Christians & Hindus en masse; if a Dutch South African calls native
peoples Kaffirs, I know he's a fool who projects a justified self-hatred
on his betters; but if a gardener speaks of their Kaffirs, I assume they
love flowers. Really, to assume some South African visiting in North
America would be offended by the name Kaffir Lily is to make the horrible
& perhaps racist assumption that such people are so fabulously low-IQ as
to be unable to see there is no longer any context whatsoever for the word
to mean anything but a flower. The day may come when Kaffir Corn, Kaffir
Plum, & Kaffir Lily are no longer used names, but it must first become
common knowledge that the word can be hurtful in some distant place when
used by the sorts of white people most of us would not want in our houses
-- & how much better to rob the word of its power to hurt, instead of
spreading that power around the globe by "educating" people to its power.

I'm reminded that among some local Northwest tribal peoples, the word
"Ahu!" is a shout of praise, shouted from the audience to a speaker on
important topics. I attended a peace rally & as the Native American
medicine man spoke, friends in the audience shouted "Ahu!" periodically, &
afterword a Japanese Buddhist monk in his flowing robes & shaved head got
up to speak, but he was so tickled he couldn't speak for thirty seconds, &
then explained in his heavy accent that in his country, "Ahu!" means
"Stupid!"

So anyone who wishes to clean the word "Kaffir Lily" out of their personal
vocabulary because, hey, this is the world wide web, & it really is like
hanging out at least partly in South Africa -- then for that choice I say
"Ahu!", hooray!, how polite you are. But if someone just thinks it's a
vulgar word in every context & nobody should use it anywhere ever who
isn't a racist, then to them I also say "Ahu!", stupid!

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/