“I don’t accept any mistakes on a forklift. And I expect them even less when you’re working forced overtime, because the longer you’re operating the forklift at a time the deeper your focus should be”
the vile shitbag warehouse manager who paid a lot of money to repaint all our forklifts just so she could scream at us about the tiniest scuffs.
fuck you Jean, but also thank you for radicalizing me
“Monkeys are brown because they eat bananas. You know how flamingos turn pink because they eat shrimp? Well monkeys eat bananas and bananas turn brown” -two dead ass serious girls I met
“People didn’t use crossbows when trying to siege a castle because the bolts fly in a straight line, so they fly over castle walls” -college history professor, about to be surprised gravity existed in the middle ages
When I read the news for the past 17 months or so, I swear it gets dumber every day.
Once in Kindergarten I overheard two adults talking. They were concerned about kids drinking from the same cup because of … AIDS. That day I learned that even adults could be ignorant. I definitely knew that AIDS could only be transmitted through blood and specifically not through spit.
I didn’t know about the other way but after hearing about AIDS in the news my (I think) brother assured me that it couldn’t be transmitted through spit.
This is how everyone gets mono.
united states is a democracy
“The reason they call them “flu shots” and not “flu vaccines” is because they aren’t vaccines.”
I’m still reeling. I’m still trying to process how someone that I otherwise respect can say something so phenomenally stupid
I knew a girl that was convinced that ~90% of planes crash…
I had to ask her “do you really think they’d keep making them if almost all of them killed people?”
Who did she grow up to vote for?
Almost certainly Trump. I’ve lost contact with her and her husband, but the brief interaction I had with him a few years ago he mentioned communist Democrats so I have to guess they’re magoos.
I was certain that i was asking a rhetorical question — but not at all surprised to be literally correct…
some people still believe in the moon landing is faked, subsequently any of the news that reported on spaceflight. i know some asian people that believe this sitll.
This happened a while ago. A guy started a war half way across the globe and caused major problems for himself and most of the worlds population. He tried to pretend he won that war, but he didn’t. Starting a war for no reason, or worse, to deflect from some embarrassing crimes he committed, is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
I’ve mentioned this one before, but it’s worth retelling.
I briefly knew a guy, absolute hick ass trailer trash, who said a large number of incredibly dumb things to me, but this one stands out. He once told me that Southern Baptist was the one true religion, because, and this is a direct quote, “His name is John the Baptist, not John the Catholic!”
And for him that was a QED moment.
Dumbest motherfucker I’ve ever encountered.
At first I was gonna write “Why didn’t you explain to him why Baptist church is called like that?”, but then I remembered cases when people say something so profoundly stupid to me, that I judge they’re too far gone to warrant any explanation. If it was someone with a half-working-brain I’d still try in a friendly way to give them some more context and expand their thinking, but there also such people (especially if they are some blowhard personality) that you just put a mental note to stay very far away from them out of caution.
I was at a trailer park party once as a non-white person in the south.
Apropos of nothing, I was approached by probably the skinniest human on the planet. Like, he was so skinny you couldn’t tell if you were looking directly at his bones, or if his skin was actually a paper thin covering over his bones. He was so skinny, he could have performed in some sort of advertisement explaining how the price of a cup of coffee could to help feed the starving southerners.
After scanning my periphery to see if I could identify the Necromancer that was animating this creature, this person told me, of their own volition, that in church they had learned that white people were made by God and therefore had souls and black people evolved from monkeys and therefore did not have souls.
In his mind, this was a way of reconciling the truth of evolution with the faith of his church.
He had no idea that he had just lobbed the most racist thought that I had ever been exposed to in my entire life at me.
This is extremely close to what the Mormon church told their followers for a long time. Cain slew Abel. God found out, marked Cain, and cast him out of the garden… The Book of Mormon states that the Canaanites (Cain’s children) were cursed by a “blackness” descending upon them. Yes, that was interpreted in the most racist way possible.
The Mormon church used to officially preach that Cain was marked by being turned black. So black people were descendants of Cain, and therefore couldn’t officially be part of the church. Black people being accepted into the church is still a relatively recent thing, and only because of massive amounts of external pressure. The church didn’t disavow their racist teachings until 2013. Literally less than 20 years ago. There are fucking high schoolers who are older than black people in the Mormon church.
This really makes me wonder what would make a black person want to join the Mormon church. Like… these people had to be pressured for decades into accepting that you even have a soul… and you what to join them?
Hasa deega Ebowai
the most racist thought that I had ever been exposed to in my entire life
Damn, the white southerners have started behaving themselves since I left a couple of decades ago if that’s the worst you heard! Barely even joking, I’ve met so many people where I live now who are from the south that say ‘I just had to get the fuck out’. Gorgeous places, tiny clusters of great people, and vast swathes of shit straight out of Deliverance.
On one hand, I think what makes it so deeply racist is how genuine it is. It doesn’t sound like he’s saying it with an explicit intention to hurt, but just as a “matter of fact” that he thinks this.
On the other hand, that could also be a bit redeeming: If he honestly believes what he said (I can’t even make myself repeat it), but doesn’t hate black people for it, is he then truly racist or just deeply misinformed? To be fair, there’s a decent overlap between the two. I’m arguing from a “don’t attribute to malice what can accurately be explained by stupidity” standpoint.
The thing about it to me that is racist is that it is specifically black people. Like, I was not emotionally equipped to ask him what his church thought about Indians like me and Asians.
Or what happens when a white person and a black person have a child? Does the child have half a soul? Like, if somebody is predominantly white but 17 generations ago, there was a black person in their family, do they have like a piece missing from their soul?
Or what if they got it wrong? What if white people evolved from monkeys and black people were made by God and so white people don’t have souls?
After all, genetically, the only pure humans with no Neanderthal or Denisovian or other hominid ancestor genetics in it are black people.
How do you test for soul? How can you evaluate the soul percentages?
It’s so beyond the pale that I was stunlocked. I honestly wish I could go back and ask these questions.
First of all, to be perfectly clear, I have no intention of defending this person. As far as I can tell from your description, they’re probably a raging racist.
Regardless, I think the discussion around where the line between stupidity and racism goes is an interesting one. In my mind, racism requires malice: It requires that you actually see some group as less worth than others, or otherwise dislike or hate them. The counter-example (which I’ve actually met in the wild once) is a person that genuinely believes that some group is less adept in some way, but that still argues that they have the same inherent worth as others.
To put it bluntly, it’s not controversial to say that some people are smarter/taller/stronger/faster etc. than others, while still acknowledging that all human life has the same inherent value. Does it make someone a racist if they hold that stance, combined with a belief that <insert group> is less adept at <insert skill/property>? I would argue not, because (as previously stated) in my mind racism implies that you believe some people are inherently worth more than others, and that belief is not really tied to any measurable property. Basically, I think a true racist uses “they don’t have a soul/ are less intelligent / etc.” as a post-hoc justification for a hatred they already hold.
I experienced both benevolent and antagonistic racism as a brown kid in the south.
The antagonistic racism was never so much like, get out of here, you darky, or calling me names or anything, although I have been called a “plains n-word” by an old white fuck in South Dakota, so there’s that.
But the antagonistic racism I most commonly experienced was being followed around stores.
So much so that it gave me a complex. It happened so often that I would go to a grocery store, or to some retailer, and I would be browsing around, and the people that worked there, which were always white people, would check in on me constantly, always watching me, following me around, staying six to ten feet away from me at times throughout my entire sojourn through the establishment.
But I, being a young kid, didn’t find any malice in this. I just thought, oh, maybe, I don’t know, maybe they’re time travelers, and I’m gonna be so awesome in the future that this is their opportunity to see me without changing the timeline.
But getting away from the south and magically the following me around in the stores thing completely and totally stopped so abruptly that it made me reevaluate what was going on. I’m like, oh no, they were watching the darkie because they thought he was gonna steal shit from them.
But on the flip side, I also got benevolent racism where they thought I was better than them because I was a Native American. They would ask me things like, can you actually talk to horses? And what’s it like being able to control the wind?
And what sucks is I’m really good with animals, so to some degree I could talk to horses and they would just sort of get me, but it’s not like I could understand what they were saying.
And the very first time I ever fired a bow and arrow I hit a bullseye.
So the instructor was like, if you do it one time, it’s luck, you do it two times, it’s skill, so I fired again and I hit another bullseye.
So you know, I’m doing my ancestors proud.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about. I’m sorry for the crap you experienced, and I think it’s good of you to be able to recognise the naive and/or positively loaded presuppositions people have for what they are. Honestly, I think it’s way too common that people will interpret others in the worst possible way, and see slights where none was intended. It looks like you’ve been able to do the opposite, and interpret others in the best possible way, and I think that makes the world a far better place!
I am struggling to think of anything a human being could say that would be more racist than:
“This entire group of people are soulless homunculi, p-noid zombies, there is nothing going on behind their eyes, when they die they just die.”
Oh, they can throw in a lot more racist stereotypes and racial slurs! Not doing that to your face is what we’ve been conditioned to accept as progress for the south.
I mean, I struggle not to think that about conservatives.
“If I heard it in church, it can’t be bad, it can’t be wrong.”
In his head, you are now the non-white friend he can claim he has to prove he’s not racist.
(Also, username checks out…?)
I did pick that name for a reason.
I had a community college psychology professor who worked in psychiatric research outside of teaching ask the class, “What is the shape of consciousness? What do you think it is?” He put a clever look on his face and his eyes scanned every perplexed student in the room to see if anyone could produce the simple, obvious answer to the question, “What is the shape of consciousness …”
Finally he broke the suspense and enlightened us all. The shape of consciousness, according to a man who holds a license to practice medicine, is an oval. It’s an oval because you have two eyes and therefore your field of vision is elliptical.
Fuck the blind lmfao
It’s okay to eat them because they don’t have any feelings.
This guy is either a Gene Ray or a Jaden Smith follower.
Don’t worry about a thing. Every little thing gonna be alright.
This is my comment to you.
I want the big things to be alright as well!
“The free market will come up with a solution.”
Whatever Donny tweeted most recently.
That AI will make jobs.
