The regulars over on the Men’s Rights Subreddit are currently getting amused and/or outraged by the existence of a book titled “Girl, Get That Child Support,” a guide to help single mothers track down deadbeat dads and get the child support they are owed. A few of them were apparently so overstimulated by the book’s title, and a reference to “Baby Mamas” in the subtitle, that this little conversation ensued:
Note the upvotes and the (scarcity of) downvotes. And the complete lack of anyone saying “hey, you’re being racist assholes.”
The Men’s Rights Movement, the “most significant civil rights movement of the 3rd millennium.”
Hint, btw: I don’t do that.
Speaking as a musician who picks up languages very quickly and is pretty good at accents, I think being a musician has a LOT to do with it, although it’s a little chicken-and-eggy – I’m not sure whether I’m just inherently good at both singing and hearing/replicating accents, or if one of them caused the other, or if both of them contribute to each other in a feedback loop (which seems most likely to me).
I’m sure a huge part of why I’m pretty good at accents, though, is that I’m not just a musician, I’m specifically a classical singer – which means I have to sing things in a whole lot of different languages, which means I’ve spent quite a lot of conscious time and effort listening to things like how to properly roll an R in Italian, or how soft to make the “K” sound in Finnish, or the difference between “ou” and “u” in French. For obvious reasons, having to know how to go “ou” instead of “u” for your job tends to make one pretty good at hearing the difference between “ou” and “u.”
(Where I suck hilariously, though, is in losing my own accents once I have them. I’ve been teased by native francophones for my bizarrely-accented French more than once. It’s not that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with it – it’s just that I had five French teachers in six years, who were, respectively, from Alsace-Lorraine, Belgium, Provence, Senegal, and Paris, and I picked up their intonations well enough that my accent apparently sounds like all of them at once (plus my own American accent to boot, of course). Apparently this is a wee bit confusing to listeners trying to figure out where I’m from. :-p )
@chibigodzilla,
I don’t like to give out the name of my city online because it’s kind of small. But it’s in the southern part of Ontario, and yes, it is near the great lakes. 🙂
Unrelated, wow, this thread exploded…
You know, IS, if you wanted to call a commenter out on their ableism, you could have just done that. Except it’s clearly not what you wanted to do, what you wanted to do was derail a discussion of other commenters classism and/or racism.
Also, the notion that politics are unpersonal and not subject to criticism is total fucking bullshit.
If you want to call someone out for ableism, do that, don’t use it as a flimsy fucking excuse to derail their callout of another commenter’s racism, classism, etc.
hm, not sure why that posted the first draft of my comment too like that…whatever…
Ruby: Didn’t you say that people who don’t modify their speech shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t get jobs?
That’s saying one style of speech is superior to the others. You may not (well, obviously not) think so, but you are. Because you are arguing that, in order to avoid discrimination the outgroup needs to cater to the preferences of the in-group.
That, “passing” is the thing to do. You can decry “the need” as bad, all you like, but you are still supporting the system.
indifferentsky: . I hate it and would be tempted to be mean as well, I’m suggesting we do that on posts that warrant it and not carry over to when the person is not doing anything wrong, like when Ruby makes feminist commentary and then someone writes “Ruby: Troll”
If I thought that was happening, I’d say something (I’ve done it before; it went over about as well as might be expected).
But I don’t think that’s the case. It’s not that Ruby is a “troll” in the sense of wanting to stir up trouble, it’s that Ruby takes some fairly extreme (and sometimes completely insupportable) positions, and then refuses to engage with critique.
We all do it to some degree, but Ruby (as with many who are purely trollish) gets really upsent when challenged, engaging in personal attacks, which doesn’t help the tenor of the conversation (as with the claim that the disagreements are related to her politics, and not the arguments she’s making).
So it’s not really fair to the rest of us to say, absent some evidence, that you think we aren’t giving her arguments a fair shake; and just going after her because we don’t like libertarians, or republicans, or greens, or whatever.
And nothing exists in a vacuum. We all get one shot at first impressions, after that we are building on past performance. Ruby is confrontational, in a way which is different from my ways of being confrontational. It’s rare that I get really pissed at someone here, and go into the cold rage of endless typing.
I’ve done it maybe three times. One of those comments got pulled, because I was sailing close to the wind (Iof course think I managed to stay just this side of improper, but Dave didn’t, nor did a couple of other commenters. It happens the target of my ire hit one of the few really sore spots with me… oddly enough someone else did it at the first Seder this passover, which didn’t help with my mood on the night of the second Seder, but I digress).
No one has held that against me. Why? Because I didn’t hold it against them that they disagreed with me.
Ruby does. That’s a short ride to being on the angry train all the time. Which is a feedback loop. NWO is there, he knows he’s going to get savaged on the content of his posts, so he just cuts right to the vitriol. In some venues it might keep the content from being ripped up. Not here.
So he loses twice, and wins once (i.e. he gets ripped up, and his arguments get ripped up, but he doesn’t, in the main, make anyone angry. It’s just a two-year old, throwing a tantrum. Loud, annoying, and distracting, but basically harmless. Basically, because we can deal with it, not beause what he says isn’t foul, and harmful).
No one has to go that road. Most people don’t go down it. But it requires accepting that others can disagree with your ideas, passionately, vehemently, and not be disagreeing with you.
As someone from Texas, I can assure everyone that no, those singers are NOT exaggerating their accent. Just listen to any live performance or track that involves spoken word with John Prine or Jerry Jeff Walker.
Also, my husband can not fake an “American standard” accent to save his Southern hide. He TRIES, if really pushed, but pretty much fails. Seeing him try to pronounce “I” in a way that the locals here won’t hear as “R” is painful. He used to be really self-conscious about it, worrying it made him seem “low class.” Now he worries he’s LOSING his accent from living in Yankeeville!
I, on the other hand, pick up crap everywhere. My time in New Zealand still means I occassionally say “Whereabouts are you from?” or “Sweet as,” and refer to college as “uni.”
Dare I hope this planet is Barrayar? Probably it isn’t.
I NEVER said that all poor people are lazy and don’t deserve state funded medical care. That’s just a strawman argument you used, Myoo, because you hate my Libertarian views.
The reason I said that those who speak red neck shouldn’t expect to get a white collar job is because it’s another accent that gets discriminated against. That’s all. Never did I say I approved of the discrimination. Sheesh!
Yes, I said that we women are geneically programmed to go for men of means. It goes back to our cave grandmothers going for the best hunters. I don’t see why this should be considered anti-feminist.
Ruby:
1: Should people who want a “white collar job” try to emulate american standard?
2: As to why, “women are genetically programmed to go for men of means”, it’s anti-feminist because it’s not true.
What “racism”?
It wasn’t Men’s rightsers who concocted “ebonics”; the preposterous, semi-obscene, illiterate display of black ghettospeak which unfortunately passes for Black “English” in far too many circles.
It wasn’t even American Rennaisance, Stormfront, or National Alliance!
It was people who demanded that real standards of scholarship and literature were “elitist”, that it was somehow “unfair” to expect black people to read, write, and speak like white people, and that White speech (and manners) were somehow a “racist” imposition on blacks.
You are what you show yourselves to be, whether as egalitarian liberal white(?) morons, or black savages…
I’ll take Spearhead, in Mala Fide, and Anti-Feminist Tech, etc. any time! If it makes you feel better, I think that even Stormfront or American Renaissance have an edge on you “ebonics” advocates there! If support for or apology for “ebonix” is support for equality, I’ll take elitism any time.
Correction it’s not anti-feminist. It’s ,misogynist, and anti-woman. It’s not a feminist limited complaint, because it’s not true of women, not just not true of feminists.
Of course, sterilizing sluts, tramps, and other candidates for unwed motherhood–an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure–would solve the problem of “deadbeat dads” permanently, wouldn’t it? So would mandatory adoption of children of such women…
Food for thought!
RE: Meller
Oh my god. I know who you remind me of now.
EDWARD CULLEN GET OFF THE INTERNET. GO SPARKLE WITH DAVID BOWIE.
Seriously, does anybody else see the resemblance? I swear to god, DKM is Edward Cullen!
RE: Ruby
Science still doesn’t explain why my husband is so hot to me. 🙁
Yes yes, you’re obsenely racist, Meller. We already know.
@Falconer
It isn’t. I am sorry to disappoint you. Though, I have seen Barrayar in a friends library.
Roll up, roll up, roll up! See the amazing Mellerman! Born without a sense of self-reflection, he says the most mind-bogglingly stupid things!
AMAZING displays of privilege!
STUPENDOUS piles of racist bullshit!
It’s so WONDERFUL when he shuts up!
Oh Meller. An American talking about speaking “proper English” is not being an elitist, just dumb as bricks. That shit that comes out your mouth is no less a bastardized version of English as ebonics and I find it hella funny that you think it is. It’s just as stupid as thinking there is one American English. But, you know, you go right on with your elitist self. I’m sure there are a lot of people absolutely devastated that they don’t fit your monstrous idea of what it means to be human/American/anything really. Hell, even animals are glad to not live up to your expectations.
Well, there’s this racism…
See, what you’re saying here, in an effort to pretend racism isn’t a thing? It’s what is called “Incredibly fucking racist.”
What racism?
I think that even Stormfront or American Renaissance have an edge on you “ebonics” advocates there! If support for or apology for “ebonix” is support for equality, I’ll take elitism any time.
Asking us to ignore your complete lack of comprehension of the way languages work Really… do you speak Old English? No, you don’t. You don’t even speak Middle English. I’ll wager you can’t speak Elizabethan English, and stumble over Modern British.
You speak, instead, the degenerate diction, and overly schwa-laden, nasally flat, cant of the expat and outcasts who peopled this shore, colored by the words they adopted from their slaves and the indigenous people they displaced.
Even at that, you couldn’t converse wth the Founding Fathers you claim to revere, not without an intense course in the dialect of English they spoke at the time; the words may look the same, but when T. Jefferson said, “sublime”, or, “pursuit” of happiness, he meant something quite different from what you take them to be.
And I’ll wager you could even recognise an honest to goodness Indo-European paragraph as anything more than gibberish.
The problem with you, my dear man, is that you are so blinkered and narrow-minded, what with spending your time praising racists (and pretending that reflects not a whit on you), that you have failed to obtain an actual education, preferring their self-indulgent cant to actual thought.
Oh, thank God, Meller’s being an absurd racist again. I need this so badly; it’s been a rough morning.