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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   34277 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Puerto Rico is a political entity; supporters are human beings. Puerto Rico has so much corruption that its anti-corruption laws created new industries of corruption. Its former governor was arrested on bribery recently, and in only six months, 10% of all mayors were arrested for corruption. Calling the place garbage is a normal way of describing such a cesspool of corruption. Let’s also dwell on that last phrase: a cesspool is for storing sewage, the worst kind of garbage. Trump himself has called America a “cesspool of ruin” due to crime, and DC a cesspool of corruption — was he being racist against Americans here? Obviously not.

This is all a very normal way of talking about things, and the distinction between entity and ethnicity is important. If Puerto Rico wants to be part of America then it needs to handle the bants — calling New Jersey trash or an “armpit” has been common for decades. It’s shocking to me that some people care more about how we describe a horrible place than that this horrible place is within the domain of America. Why not acknowledge it is garbage and focus on how to fix it up?

Puerto Rico also literally has a trash problem (because its government is not just corrupt but incompetent)

True, but I have about as much faith that Tony Hinchcliffe was joking about a legitimate solid waste management problem (which is, at best, only really only funny to an audience familiar with its existence) as I do in the administration's apostrophe in the Biden transcript.

Do you know Tony Hinchcliffe? He goes for obscure refences all the time. Sometimes he verges on "too online" with his comedy he goes with references so niche. The first part of the joke is in fact a reference to the fact that there is a literal giant island of trash in the ocean. Why wouldn't the punchline be about Puerto Rico's notoriously dysfunctional waste management?

Because it's a joke that's been done many times with different islands as the punchline. I've heard the same joke with Australia or the UK as the punchline.

Yeah - the point of the joke is to clown on an island you don't like. The reason it was a gaffe isn't that Hinchcliffe told a rude joke (Trump being happy to say worse things than that is long since priced in) - it is that he read the room at a Trump rally and thought that Puerto Rico was the right island to clown on.

calling New Jersey trash or an “armpit” has been common for decades

100% confident that if Trump referred to Detroit or Baltimore or maybe even Louisiana as "trash" or similar this would be cited as a white supremacist dog whistle, for unsurprising reasons. Who, whom all the way down.

But that's because it's Trump saying it. A comedian calling detroit or baltimore or louisiana a 'dumpster fire' or 'trash' is not controversial.

I am sceptical.

A comedian calling West Virginia a mountain of white trash wouldn't make anyone bat an eye.

The term “white trash” is a fascinating insult in this day and age. Trash or garbage is something discarded after its usefulness has ended.

The “Rust Belt” is full of towns which were thriving industrial concerns until unions inflated the cost of their labor, companies offshored production, and the towns were reduced to service economies. Discarded after being used up.

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