Well, ok, it’s probably not literally the worst Twitter conversation ever — you’ve seen Twitter, right? — but you have to admit it’s pretty awful all around.
In one corner, we have @apurposefulwife, “alt right” racist and defender of “Traditional Family Life and White Culture.”
In the other, manosphere clown @aaron_clarey, a dude who proudly identifies himself as an “asshole.”
Let’s get ready to rumble:
I hereby declare both combatants in this ideological battle huge losers.
The screenshot isn’t mine; I ran across it on Twitter, but unfortunately lost track of who originally posted it. Nonetheless, the tweets are real, and you can find the full discussion between @apurposefulwife and Mr. Clarey archived here.
Here are a few other recent Tweets from both of them. Such charmers!
https://twitter.com/apurposefulwife/status/688567891273199616
https://twitter.com/apurposefulwife/status/687298001920917505
https://twitter.com/apurposefulwife/status/686678320109387776
https://twitter.com/aaron_clarey/status/684856576419627008
https://twitter.com/aaron_clarey/status/686295836897210368
https://twitter.com/aaron_clarey/status/672849385722478593
https://twitter.com/aaron_clarey/status/686572810114850816
That last one is a warning to anyone tempted to buy one of his ebooks, not that anyone here will be.
If you run a Google search on Wife’s avatar, the very first result is a Holocaust denialist site. I was expecting a random FB page or stock photo site, but this is actually less surprising.
@ Alan,
Its early naughts for me, lower secondary school specifically, that comes to mind.
Hmm, let’s see… do you take this wo/man… for richer for poorer… in sickness and in health… as long as you both shall live…. love, honour and obey….
Nope, nothing about getting fat in there. Unless you wrote your own (questionable) vows or signed a bizarre pre-nup (which isn’t legally binding anyway), you can’t cite “violation of contract” if you ditch your wife for the inevitable changes in her metabolism.
Spousal abuse would be, oh say, dictating that your wife never age or gain weight, on pain of consequences.
Aside on the grammar stuff: anyone else here read Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The Deluxe Transitive Vampire? That’s a very fun and informative grammary. (Her books on punctuation and style are pretty good as well.)
I’m a POC who “talks white” (my father is white and I’ve been in the States for most of my life) and I’ve had people ask me where I’m “from,” so, yeah.
That “thank a white person” meme makes me want to go out and start hitting random people with the heaviest hardback edition of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” I can find. Here’s a free TL;DR for you pasty bigots: the scientific discoveries of Western civilization were a serendipitous combination of geography, geology, climate and politics that had nothing to do with skin colour. Furthermore, as a humanist, I regard the fruits of those discoveries as the birthright of every human being on the planet.
Oh, those people make me so mad. “Einstein had white skin. I have white skin, so I must be as smart as Einstein!” “Beethoven had white skin. I have white skin, so I must be as musically gifted as Beethoven!” It. Does. Not. Work. Like. That. Let’s see your scientific theory or your symphony. Oh, you don’t have one, but you say your skin colour gives you free membership into the talented people club anyway? Get bent.
“Hitler is white. I have white skin, so I must be as much of a murderous asshole than him !”
Actually, I have a better opinion of Hitler than of thoses guys. Which don’t mean that Hitler isn’t one of the most repulsive human ever. On the other hand, the things I do appreciate on Hitler are mostly why he have been a lot more dangerous than thoses bozos will ever be.
Also, we don’t know for sure who invented writing and in how many place it was invented, but I am pretty sure none of thoses place were in Europa, by white people.
Hitler was one man. He would not have been able to do what he did without being enabled by people who think like this.
Pushkin was white, so I… oh wait…
@Cat Mara
There is actually a longstanding theory that Beethoven also had some African ancestry (some go so far as to speculate his mother was a “Kammermohr”, and African slave at the Prussian king’s court). It is highly speculative (much more so than with Pushkin or Dumas, whose African great-grandparents are identified), and most specialists disagree, but it has (through some more strange speculation that Beethovens ancestry led him to have an intimate knowledge of polyrhythmic traditions from West African music) led to a fantastic musical interpretation (emphasizing the rhythmical qualities) of his piano sonatas.
Unfortunately, the original website of the project seems to be down, but here’s the background:
http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2015/jun/09/beethoven-african-roots-beethoven-was-black
and here a more friendly commentary and interview with one of the musisicans, including an example from the album:
http://africasacountry.com/2015/06/are-beethovens-african-origins-revealed-by-his-music/
‘Turn of the century’ to me definitely means ‘turn of the 19th-20th century’, but if I am using it in conversation I will usually clarify it as ‘turn of the 19th-20th century’.
@ Bernardo & Cat
Ah ninja’d on the Beethoven thing,
I find the “Thank a white person” meme especially confusing since it was not all that long ago that Greeks (progenitors of modern philosophy, much of math, and developers of democracy), Italians (Latin, Rome, the Renaissance), and other southern and eastern Europeans would not have been considered “white” (after all, “the w*gs start at Calais”).
This Twitter conversation reminds me that I haven’t re-read Jingo lately. Thank you, Terry Pratchett, for skewering idjits like this.
@Alan
😉
@Tulse
of course, all great civilizations were basically white for these fartnozzles, no matter how far south they were situated. Because if it was a great civilization, it had to be white. (I mean, racists in the 19th century theorized that the Ethiopians had to have some white blood in them, because how else could they have maintained such a high-standing culture?).
Just as Einstein used to be so loathed by their ilk that the Nazis supported all kinds of far-out “alternative” theories (Hollow Earth, Glacial Cosmogony) just so they didn’t have to admit that a Jewish physicist had revolutionized our understanding of the Universe, and now he’s just counted as “white.”
Jackie:
Have you ever been to Cornwall?
Here’s a much better Twitter conversation for anyone who needs brain bleach after the one in the OP.
(mild spoilers for SW:TFA)
“Christians built America”. Uh-huh… Who built the railways? And no, paying a pittance to those who do the work doesn’t count as actually doing the work. Didn’t slaves build much of Washington D.C.? And no, owning those who actually built it doesn’t count as building it.
Oh yay there’s another Aurini? I’m probably more excited about that than I reasonably should be.
http://www.quickmeme.com/img/c5/c526f47bba453481bd091517ad02ae359cd77a0c61f9af1733e3fe07e7119ecb.jpg
That’s true today, but I find it fascinating how malleable racism is, as the mere notion that Italians or Poles or even Irish are “white” would have sent white supremacists in a tizzy not too many decades ago. Back in the day, “white” really meant “Anglo-Saxon”, and not just light skin tone.
Yup, and a free African American astronomer was one of the two original surveyors. Also, while L’Enfant is technically a Christian, I’m not sure whether these two would count a Catholic Frenchman among their superduper cultural heritage.
@ moggie
Oi! Things Cornwall invented before everywhere else include: the steam locomotive, the concept of incorporated companies, the Davy Lamp, and, if my Cornish friends are to be believed, the aeroplane.
(Must confess, am waiting for a little more evidence on that last one)
@Tulse:
yes, the twists and turns of different forms of racism in the last two centuries are baffling, particularly since racists claim these categories as essential, superhistorical factors. One can usually correlate changes in racist ideology to specific social changes, but sometimes it’s just weird and convoluted.
The Nazis, for example, had huge problems in the Western part of occupied Poland when they tried to categorise who was Polish and who was German, and a lot of Polish resistance fighters used this confusion to get German passes which allowed them free(-er) movement.
@ Bernardo
You’ll well know that the Nazis tied themselves in all sorts of knots over this. The dilemma being the tension between two contradictory aims.
Trying to expand the German Reich by arguing that lots of people in the countries they wished to take over were in fact ‘ethnic Germans’
Trying to limit ‘German’ status on highly selective grounds such as ancestry appearance, behaviour, lifestyle etc.
And that’s before we get to all the messing around in Tibet and trying to show that the Japanese were somehow ‘Aryan’ and therefore worthy allies,
It would be bewilderingly hilarious if not for the horrible consequences that arose.
Thanks to all who responded to my little survey. The results were interesting. I thought there might be a split based on age (maybe that will arise if I’d asked people born in the 21st century)
I wonder if the results are because people will have *originally* heard and used the term in relation to 19/20th and that just stuck. Or whether, as pandapool said it just sounds more old timey.