If you don’t want to be called racist, then don’t say shit like this.

Presented without comment:

“I do find it amazing and entertaining that one of our stickers has become a racist thing,” Ms. Smith told Forbes.

She even tried arguing that the dictionary does not define the “N-Word” as racist. Wisely, Friedman posted the actual definition from dictionary.com, which says the word, “is now probably the most offensive word in English. Its degree of offensiveness has increased markedly in recent years, although it has been used in a derogatory manner since at least the Revolutionary War. Definitions 1a, 1b, and 2 represent meanings that are deeply disparaging and are used when the speaker deliberately wishes to cause great offense.”

Her protestations aside, Ms. Smith appears to have removed the bumper sticker from her site. Under the  ”Anti-Obama” section of the site (advertised as her No. 3 bestseller), you’ll now only find a sticker reading, “I was Anti-Obama Before It Was Cool.”

In what may be a reference to the controversy her other bumper sticker has caused, the description below reads, “Show the world how you feel! (but be careful, you may hurt someone’s feelings).”

Ms. Smith then goes on to argue that President Obama is “not even black,” but rather, “a mixture of race.” When Friedman asks Smith if she thinks the N-Word is offensive or derogatory, she says no, but then claims that she herself does not even use the word.

“I have kids here around me that are black kids. I call them my own kids. I’ve helped black families…to guide them in the right direction,” Smith told Forbes. “We like to laugh and have a good time. That’s our way of life.”

[Emphasis mine]

 

Someone else who needs to go away

For a little while there, I was very happy in the state of never having to hear anything about She Who Must Not Be Given More Attention. And now she’s saying something absurd about how the first African-American POTUS wants to go back to the way things were pre-Civil War (yeah, I got nothin’), and she’s once again appearing in the online spaces which I like to visit. Why is she appearing again, you ask? Because trainwreck-loving left-leaning bloggers can’t look away. Not that I fault anyone for being a left-leaning blogger who enjoys a trainwreck here and there—I mean, hello, Pot and Kettle!—but why do we have to keep coming back to the same trainwreck over so many years?

Going to wash my brain out with some Cute Overload and LOLcats. Back in a bit.

The Onion does its job way too well.

At first I was about to get all indignant over this latest display of womb-controlling dumbassery, but, you know what? Fuck it. The forced-childbirth movement has never let a nasty fact get in the way of a fabulous fever dream, so we might as well point and laugh when people like Rep. Fleming (R-eally?) think it’s TRUFAX.

 

You control the words in your book. You do not control the reviews.

Today Rule17 retweeted his post on Taleist about the train wreck that took place when Jacqueline Howett got a 2-star review for her novel The Greek Seaman. It wasn’t a particularly harsh review; blogger Big Al said it was a story very well told, but difficult to read because it’s full of spelling and grammar errors. This did not have to create a big problem for the author; a good proofreader can straighten out the errors, but there’s no substitute for being able to tell a compelling story.

The way the author chose to respond to the review, however, has caused some serious problems for her.

You obviously didn’t read the second clean copy I requested you download that was also reformatted, so this is a very unfair review. My Amazon readers/reviewers give it 5 stars and 4 stars and they say they really enjoyed The Greek Seaman and thought it was well written. Maybe its just my style and being English is what you don’t get. Sorry it wasn’t your cup of tea, but I think I will stick to my five star and four star reviews thanks.

Does it get better? Oh yes. Oh fucking yes.

My writing is fine. You were told to download a new copy for format problems the very next day while they were free at Smashwords, so you could choose any format you wanted to read it in and if their were any spelling mistakes they were corrected. Simply remove this review as it is in error with you not downloading the fresh copy i insisted. Why review my book after being told to do this, and more annoying why have you never ever responded to any of my e-mails?

That sound you hear? That’s my head smashing into the desk.

The Taleist doesn’t mention this part, but Big Al does reply to Ms. Howett in the comments:

I received the email on 2/7 asking that I download the a new copy of the book, which I did. I verified in my library software (Calibre) that this was the version I had and read. However her note above as well as the email mentioned formatting. At least when I talk about formatting I’m referring to issues of conversion from the source (a Word .doc file or whatever) into an eBook so the text flows correctly on the Kindle and so on. I say no issues I would attribute to formatting.

Which means that Ms. Howett is mistaken first in her attitude and second in her assumptions about the blogger’s actions.

Taleist goes on to explain how, by throwing a tantrum at Big Al’s blog, the author brought herself a raft of new 1-star reviews at Amazon and turned a whole lot of potential readers off of ever reading her book. Whereas, if she’d left well enough alone, she could have gone on to sell some books and earn some decent reviews.

I take it a step further than that.

This is the behavior of someone who has no business being an author.

If you don’t want to be called racist, then don’t pull racist shit.

Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church has been given the smackdown by their denomination’s governing body and will just have to find other ways to promote the unity of their church body.

Did the church itself change its mind on the issue? Not really.

Stepp said the Sandy Valley Conference of Free Will Baptists declared the vote on Thompson’s resolution null and void during a meeting on Saturday.

The former pastor of Gulnare got the church members to pass a resolution that says, “We don’t have a problem with those people, we just don’t want them marrying our girls!” and the Sandy Valley Conference effectively took the matter out of their hands. It doesn’t matter if they’ve changed their minds, it doesn’t matter whether the sudden uproar from all four corners of the Earth has persuaded them that cross-racial marriage should not be considered a bad thing, and it doesn’t matter whether they’ve considered that the resolution they’d passed was a really crappy message to send to their church secretary about his family. In this case, it’s not their decision. Their church WILL NOT bar interracial couples from church membership, as long as they’re a member of the Sandy Valley Conference.

On the one hand, I don’t think they actually have to worry about any interracial couples trying to join their church any time soon. The message has already been sent that the church environment will not be a welcoming one. On the other hand, at least their current pastor has his head screwed on tight w/r/t race relations.

The response to having All the Internet gape in horror at them has been thus:

[Pastor Stacy Stepp] said he told church members on Sunday about the decision and proposed a resolution to promote “peace, love and harmony.”

…

Stepp said about 30 people who attended church services voted on a new resolution that welcomes “believers into our fellowship regardless of race, creed or color.”

Where were those 30 people, I wonder, when the anti-interracial-couples resolution was passed 9-6?

I would like to note that the new resolution is not exactly a reversal of the previous one. In spirit, yes, but in letter, not really. Former Pastor Thompson would probably argue that he’s not racist, and the effect of the resolution was not racist, because it wouldn’t have stopped people of color from joining the church—just as long as they’re not married to white people.

Realistically, if you actually believe that all racial groups are human first and foremost, and that all groups are equally good and worthy, and that it’s the variation between individuals that really means something, and that no one group needs to be protected from contamination by another, then you should have no problem with people of different colors getting married and having mixed-race kids together. And if you have no problem with their families, then you should not have any problem attending church with them.

However, the new resolution is about welcoming believers. It doesn’t say anything about their spouses. It shows that the church has been reprimanded, but not that it’s thinking differently.

 

We’re not racist, we just won’t stand for any mixing of the tribes!

Via Rawstory and HuffPo, we get news of Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church in Pike County, KY, where all seemed perfectly fine and ducky until lifelong (and white) church member Stella Harville brought her Zimbabwean fiance, Ticha Chikuni, to sing a song with her at a church service.

What is the result, you may ask? Why, church members voted 9-6 to pass a resolution that their church does not condone interracial marriage!

Sayeth former pastor Melvin Thompson, author of the ridiculous resolution:

“I am not racist. I will tell you that. I am not prejudiced against any race of people, have never in my lifetime spoke evil” about a race, said Thompson, the church’s former pastor who stepped down earlier this year. “That’s what this is being portrayed as, but it is not.”

Melvin Thompson seems to think that if he runs around with the goalposts in hand, we won’t notice they’re missing. He is mistaken.

“Parties of such marriages will not be received as members, nor will they be used in worship services and other church functions, with the exception being funerals. All are welcome to our public worship services. This recommendation is not intended to judge the salvation of anyone, but is intended to promote greater unity among the church body and the community we serve.”

What is that I don’t even.

“Intended to promote greater unity among the church body and the community we serve”?

Perhaps I’m missing something because it’s almost midnight and I haven’t had any coffee since mid-afternoon, but, is there any message here aside from “don’t make us uncomfortable”?

The church congregation is all-white, and I suppose this resolution is their way of letting it be known that they intend to keep it that way? To paraphrase Irshad Manji, they’re not concerned with unity so much as uniformity.

If the church body’s “unity” depends on keeping interracial couples out, then I guess their identity demands that they keep a safe distance away from those people. (But they’re not racist, no, of course not.) If they keep seeing well-adjusted, loving couples like Stella and Ticha, they might end up thinking that the separation between white people and black people (as well as Asians, and Latinos, and Natives, and Middle Eastern folk, and, and, and…) is an accident of history rather than a hard line carved in stone. They wouldn’t like that; they like their hard lines and don’t like to revise their categories and hierarchies.

I suppose that, with their belief in Biblical inerrancy, the Free Will Baptists don’t accept evolution by natural selection. It would probably not put me on their good side if I told Mr. Thompson and his fellow non-racists that all of humanity started out in sub-Saharan Africa. Guess what, Thompson? We are all Africans!

Newt Gingrich, what is that I don’t even.

What exactly is this asshat trying to accomplish when he says shit like this?

I think what makes us different, and what makes us in some ways, when we have good leadership, much more ruthless and much tougher than any other country in world, is we don’t send soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen to war. We send our children. We send our fathers. We send our brothers and sisters. We send our mothers. And therefore there’s a preciousness to this decision unlike any other country I know of.

(I hesitate to call him an asshole; an asshole is useful.)

I’m sensing several layers of Wingnuttery being piled up here. If I’m not mistaken, Newt is telling this audience that,

1. Unlike any other country he can think of,

2. Americans recognize our armed forces as our family members, and furthermore,

3. That makes us more powerful and ruthless than other countries, so

4. We’re Number One.

I suppose it would be too much to ask of a GOPer to consider that after racking up thirteen figures’ worth of debt on invading Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe we should base our national self-worth in something other than our ability to wage war.

Does he honestly mean to say, though, that other countries don’t love their military personnel as family members? Does he think all other countries only enlist troops who don’t have families who love them? Or that everyone outside the USA ceases to love their relatives once they join the military?

Better yet, does he also really mean to say that America tops the charts in military might because our servicemembers are so much more loved by their families than in other countries, and not because, say, of the percentage of the federal budget we devote to defense?

Not that I assume Newt only says what he genuinely believes in front of his campaign audiences. I have no doubt this was a carefully crafted message tailor-made to suit his audience’s prejudices. That doesn’t make it less reprehensible, though. Regardless of how deeply the candidate believes such things, people do choose to listen to their messages, and those messages have consequences. I’m sure it must be very comforting to believe that American casualties in wars that we orchestrated from the ground up are so much more tragic than, say, the deaths of Iraqi and Afghan civilians and combatants, because we’re the ones who love our troops.

If you’re going to behave like a raging asshat to a bartender, pay in cash.

Dan Savage rounds up the info on some dumbshit named Andrew Meyer who lives in Kent, Washington and left a disgusting note instead of a tip to a bartender. Derek Erdman interviews the bartender in question and gets even more dirt on this idiot who insulted a woman at the same time as giving her his name and credit card number. He refused to tip her, wrote “you could stand to loose [sic] a few pounds” on the payment slip, and stole the tip jar money right in front of the manager. I expect this person could be diagnosed as a sociopath.

The ultimate mistake here was that he not only refused to compensate the bartender for her work AND insulted her appearance, he did so while paying with a credit card. Which is turning out to be a really, really stupid move. If you’re going to abuse a service worker, here’s a pro tip: do not give her a record of your full name and credit card number. Here’s another pro tip: do not go back to the same establishment again, because servers tend to remember faces, and if she’s there again, you won’t want her to have access to your drink. However, since you behaved the way you did, now your name is getting passed around between bartenders and bar owners all over Seattle, and you can expect to have a very hard time finding a place to drink in the future.

I once got worse treatment than this from a customer when I was a waitress, but fortunately for the asswipe in question, Facebook didn’t exist at the time. A person who works for Microsoft really ought to be more cognizant of what people can do nowadays with Internet access.

Steve Jobs > WBC x infinity

These people are so fucking pathetic.

Westboro Baptist Church announced plans Wednesday night to protest Steve Jobs’s funeral, sending the message out. . .wait for it. . . via Twitter for iPhone.

What do they have against Steve Jobs, you might ask?

Can someone please tell me what they mean by “taught sin”? Was Apple an especially gay-friendly company? Did Steve Jobs tend to say way too much about loving your neighbor? Or was it just that he was too much of a proponent—and an example—of making the most out of your limited time here on Earth?

I get what they’re saying about “gave God no glory,” though. Shirley elaborates:

This is what’s bothering them. Steve Jobs led a full, noisy, productive, powerful life. He did something great for humanity: he made things that people could use, and he made those things to work really well at doing things that people wanted to do. He made things so well that he got people trying new ways of doing things they’d always done, and they left the previous ways behind. He was endlessly creative, curious, competent, and fearless. All that, and he had no use for the “I just want to thank God” narrative. He made all those things happen, and then he had the nerve to give himself the credit.

Westboro Baptist Church are nothing but a nuisance and a parasite. They contribute nothing except the noise they make in drawing attention to themselves. They should be so lucky as to be let within a mile of Steve Jobs’s funeral.

GASPing in disbelief.

Am I always the last one to find out about these viral email sensations?

Jezebel brings us the news of Keara O’Neil making the mistake of bringing her bridesmaids into a GASP store to shop for dresses. Ultimately, she just shouldn’t have gone into the store in the first place. No, seriously, that’s what area manager Matthew Chidgey says to her in response to her complaint of obnoxious, inappropriate treatment by the salesman. I’ll boil it down to save you the Teal Deer and spare you the atrocious grammar:

Poor Fatty:

It’s YOUR FAULT that Chris behaved like a jackass to you because you suck way too hard to spend your money at our business. You should be so lucky as to aspire to emulate the likes of Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry. We hire people like Chris to get rid of customers like you. Don’t darken our doorstep again.

Please note that Chidgey’s assertion that Chris is a “retail superstar” who is “too good at what he does” and knew that Ms. O’Neil and her friends wouldn’t buy anything before they even showed up at the store is directly contradicted by Ms. O’Neil’s account of Chris’s behavior, which involved inappropriately badgering her to buy a particular dress. He was unsuccessful, because she and her bridesmaids walked out empty-handed. To label this person a “retail superstar” is to use a definition of “retail” which is unrelated to doing business by selling clothes.