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Being a racist while having a soft skull

Meadmaker said:
77 year old guy drives through Dunkin' Donuts drive through, complains about bad service, stops car, gets out, and calls the manager the N-word.


Could be a black guy, but.........I'm going with my gut on this one. I think it was a white guy.
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The racial slur wasn't actually identified in the article. It's been assumed that it must have been the n-word, but that is an assumption, not a fact. There are many other racial slurs that could have been used.
 
Meadmaker said:
77 year old guy drives through Dunkin' Donuts drive through, complains about bad service, stops car, gets out, and calls the manager the N-word.


Could be a black guy, but.........I'm going with my gut on this one. I think it was a white guy.
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We also don't know it was the "N" word.

Though why this would be relevant to the thug overeacted is beyond me.
 
cullennz said:
We also don't know it was the "N" word.

Though why this would be relevant to the thug overeacted is beyond me.
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I don't like to assume the worst in people in general, but are you playing dumb here? While it's true that, in an ideal world, words would never provoke a violent physical reaction. But that's not really reflective of reality. Surely that concept can't be incomprehensible to you?

I'll throw in a preemptive obligatory I'm not endorsing violence here just in case also.
 
Sorry if these points were raised earlier but I haven't careful read the entire thread.

It isn't an endorsement of violence to note mitigating factors, and yelling in someone's face is a mitigating factor to receiving a simple punch. Using a racial slur or the like is also a mitigating factor. Someone mentioned that being like blaming a rape victim for what they were wearing. This really shouldn't need explained but that's abject nonsense. The 'fight or flight' mechanisms activated by such provocations is simply nowhere near as controllable as lust. This is even disregarding the intention to provoke 'lust' often being absent, and neither (manner of dress and lust) not actually factoring into things much at all. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug, being a thirsty git is not.

I don't think enough of cishet white men really understand that using certain insults are going to have more of an impact because they are inherently a threat. The nature and history of these insults is tied to violence and misdeeds against the impacted community. When I was in high school wrestling, I got quite a lot of stupid from people for my long hair. I had the luck of being larger and stronger than anyone in my class besides my best friend, which meant I was never too concerned. One day one of the upper classmen said I should cut my hair because 'you look like a fag,' which didn't bother me because I didn't see a damn thing wrong with being gay even though I wasn't, until he finished the sentence with, 'and you know what we do to fags'. This invokes the inhuman crimes done against the lgbtq community. It labels you as something society and it's agencies devalued enough to sanction real violence, officially or unofficially. You are other than fully human. The white dudes who called me the N word for walking out of the black neighborhood were not calling me black; they were threatening violence. That is how 'just insults' like the N word work. And the T word. And the C word. They are a threat of the crimes of history being acted on again.

And of course there is a non-negligible chance that the black manager calling the police would be killed by them. This perfectly reasonable concern about the dangers of using other forms of redress matter.

Someone mentioned 'duels' earlier and how today's system is better. This isn't an argument in any way that there still aren't problems with today's system. Ironically laws around defamation gained popularity as a way to reduce the prevalence of dueling. Civil and legal mechanism for redressing 'just words' reduced violence. 'But freedom of speech! Sticks and stones!' Maybe if more people felt safe to use other forms of redress there would be less violence.

But that sort of cancel culture would be unacceptable. What kind of woke snowflake wants a world like that?
 
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Emily's Cat said:
The racial slur wasn't actually identified in the article. It's been assumed that it must have been the n-word, but that is an assumption, not a fact. There are many other racial slurs that could have been used.
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I've seen other news stories since. It was the N-word. (At least according to the articles.)
 
tyr_13 said:
The 'fight or flight' mechanisms activated by such provocations is simply nowhere near as controllable as lust.
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The "fight or flight" reaction is a response to fear or threat, not anger.

The manager asked the guy to repeat what he said. He's going to have a hard time convincing anyone that he felt threatened.
 
smartcooky said:
Fear causes adrenaline to be released.... so does anger!
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But the "fight or flight" response is, specifically, a response to danger, fear, threats....not people who make you mad. Anger can provoke an impulsive attack. It causes "fight". It does not cause "flight".
 
smartcooky said:
Fear causes adrenaline to be released.... so does anger!
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It's the twinkie defense all over again. "He triggered a release of adrenaline! I have no control when there's adrenaline coursing through my veins! It's the victim's fault I lashed out and killed him!"

My view is that people who react like wild animals, and use their wild animal reaction as a defense, are not much better than wild animals, and should probably be put down like wild animals.
 
theprestige said:
It's the twinkie defense all over again. "He triggered a release of adrenaline! I have no control when there's adrenaline coursing through my veins! It's the victim's fault I lashed out and killed him!"

My view is that people who react like wild animals, and use their wild animal reaction as a defense, are not much better than wild animals, and should probably be put down like wild animals.
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Christ on a ******* bike, just calm down. You appear to be suffering an adrenaline surge cause by rage

"Fear causes adrenaline to be released.... so does anger!" was merely a factual observation... I neither implied or said anything other than that.
 
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Meadmaker said:
The "fight or flight" reaction is a response to fear or threat, not anger.
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Anger is also a response to fear or a threat. So...what was your point? Do you know the primary feeling motivating the action?

The manager asked the guy to repeat what he said. He's going to have a hard time convincing anyone that he felt threatened.
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Well I'm glad you know how they all felt. Asking someone to repeat a threat, or an insult, is not evidence they did not feel threatened any more then it is evidence they did not feel insulted.

More to the point, yelling in someone's face is a threatening action regardless of if it actually makes the person feel threatened. Obviously.
 
tyr_13 said:
Anger is also a response to fear or a threat. So...what was your point? Do you know the primary feeling motivating the action?



Well I'm glad you know how they all felt. Asking someone to repeat a threat, or an insult, is not evidence they did not feel threatened any more then it is evidence they did not feel insulted.

More to the point, yelling in someone's face is a threatening action regardless of if it actually makes the person feel threatened. Obviously.
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Obviously enough for a jury? I'm thinking no.

If he can convince the jury that he was in fear, and that a reasonable person would have felt fearful, and that was the motivation for punching the septuagenarian, he'll get off.

If I were able to place a bet on the trial outcome, my bet would be that the fear factor will not even be placed into evidence.
 
Meadmaker said:
Obviously enough for a jury? I'm thinking no.

If he can convince the jury that he was in fear, and that a reasonable person would have felt fearful, and that was the motivation for punching the septuagenarian, he'll get off.

If I were able to place a bet on the trial outcome, my bet would be that the fear factor will not even be placed into evidence.
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It would come in at sentencing where mitigating factors are generally considered.

Punching someone yelling racist insults in your face is going to be a mitigating factor.

The age or infirmity of the deceased will be an aggravating factor.

The possibility of the old man being armed won't be considered, even though for a cop it would have been enough to completely justify capping the manager even if the manager was the one who called them.

The race of the manager will get him statistically 5x the sentence of a white man doing the exact same thing.

EDIT: And how reasonable a jury will be does nothing to argue against the truth of my points.
 
theprestige said:
It's the twinkie defense all over again. "He triggered a release of adrenaline! I have no control when there's adrenaline coursing through my veins! It's the victim's fault I lashed out and killed him!"

My view is that people who react like wild animals, and use their wild animal reaction as a defense, are not much better than wild animals, and should probably be put down like wild animals.
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I know you can do better than that glib reasoning...
 
arthwollipot said:
For dog's sake, people. Google tailors your search results. Two people in different parts of the world will never see the same results from the same search.

You should all know this by now.
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Agreed.

I also know that I, and others, have pointed out that many racists use the word "thug" to justify racist murders, every time it's used on this forum in a thread about an unarmed black person being murdered, or when they're recorded yelling during a football game, or are invited to the White House by President Obama to recite poetry, or when they kneel during the national anthem, for the past decade.
 
arthwollipot said:
For dog's sake, people. Google tailors your search results. Two people in different parts of the world will never see the same results from the same search.

You should all know this by now.
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A lot of us have known this for so long that we've been using proxy searches for years. No bubble, no filter, because the search request is anonymous and not tied to our IP.

When I search 'thug', 'violent thug' and the other variants, I primarily get the definition of violent lawless criminal type. News articles describing thugs are overwhelmingly white. Black guys appear openly embracing the term, usually as stage/street names. Not much at all in terms of being a racist dogwhistle. Couple articles about how it is a racist term in some circles and how President Obama uses it. I think some posters have pretty unusual browsing histories to think this is very common. It really doesn't seem to be.
 
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