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Notes -
Chapter 47 in the Warren Files
https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/mary-ellen-turpel-lafond-indigenous-cree-claims
The hilarious combination of white hate and white guilt combines to push affirmative action programs to benefit the "marginalized" but resists categorizing who exactly that is. The result is this sort of thing, a pile of rich, privileged white twits cosplaying Injun to the seal-clapping of the morally righteous class. While we beat our breasts about blackface at a Halloween party, these jackasses are appropriating the affirmative action slots of the people they claim to be supporting with their "activism". These are the people who style themselves the moral superiors of "deplorables".
It’s crazy how many white-looking people I see calling themselves indigenous in places like Canada and Australia. They use their dubious identity to claim prestigious roles and awards, like - have you no shame? And is anybody else seeing this shit? Like can you not see how pale this person is? Some of them even have blue eyes ffs
We need genetic testing for this sort of thing going forward. Native ancestry of 50 percent or greater or no dice
Affirmative action quotas are bad so I support them being reducto ad absurdem'd.
It's only shameful if these people both make a sham of AA by their actions and support AA (the spirit if not the letter) with their words. Because then it's self-serving hypocrisy.
But, like Ayn Rand on welfare, I have no problem with lily-white people taking Abo quota spaces. Because there shouldn't have been any Abo quota spaces in the first place, so this is just taking them back de facto if not de jure.
How offensive is the term "Abo" in Oz? Ive heard it's about on a par with "Paki" in the UK, or "Tranny" in the US. Ie not something to be said in polite company, firable offense if you're in a public-facing job, a kid in school would probably be suspended for taunting another with the term, but not absolutely taboo and referred to with an initialism?
On a scale of the N word (nincompoop) to the N word (redacted), where wpuld you place it? Closer to N, or N?
In the UK and (as far as I am aware) Australia, racial slurs are traditionally treated as slurs rather than swear words. So things like the use-mention distinction and the parody exemption apply (although not in media targetted at children). My white lips have emitted the phonemes n-short i-hard g-schwa while discussing Lee Atwater's political strategy, giving examples of words you can't say on TV, giving examples of words you can say in private but shouldn't, and caricaturing racist gammons. All of these were socially acceptable in the UK.
In terms of relative severity, "Paki" in the UK is as bad as "Nigger", possibly worse. Both would result in a beatdown and/or prosecution if used to insult an identifiable member of the group referred to, and cancellation if used to insult the group generically. In a poll of words that shouldn't be used on TV, "Nigger", "Paki" and "Cunt" come out as far worse than anything else. (Unfortunately this is less obvious from the report than it was in the raw data, which I can no longer find online)
This has probably changed since George Floyd became the current thing in summer 2020 at a time when PMC Brits were very online by default due to COVID and therefore were more susceptible to Septic ideas.
Interesting, I did not know at all that "Paki" is as grave an insult as that in the UK.
Here's a follow-up question: is it used to insult people of Indian background as well?
Only accidentally by people who can't tell the difference. It does apply to Bangladeshis - Bangladesh was still part of Pakistan at the point where the term started being used as a slur in the UK.
As far as I am aware, the term is not a slur in English-speaking communities in Pakistan itself, and only a mild one in other English-speaking countries.
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Although it would definitely be thought of as offensive I don't think the word Paki is considered nearly as bad in the UK as nigger is in the US. It's anecdotal but when I was a kid my friends and relatives casually referred to the corner shop as the Paki shop and not in a manner that seemed to imply any genuine racial hostility on their part, likewise to this day Chinese people, restaurants and food can all be referred to as a chinky. I don't think you could unironically use these words on TV without causing a controversy, but at least people from around where I'm from aren't going to assume you're an unrepentant racist if they hear you using them the way I assume people would if you go around casually referring to black people as niggers in the US. It could be a class thing, my family is all very working class from a very white area.
I also can't ever recall the word Paki being censored when the media discussed racism against Asians, such as instances of "Paki-bashing" in which Asians have been physically assaulted for their race. If racist attacks against black people in the US were referred to by a term which contained the word nigger I'd be very surprised if the slur wasn't commonly censored when the media reported on it.
I agree - the point is that "Paki" in the UK is roughly as bad as "Nigger" in the UK. "Nigger" in the US is worse than both, understandably given the history. I don't know how old you are, but when I was growing up in the 1980's in London, both words were fairly widely used by older people because a lot of older people were racist and it was still socially acceptable to be racist in early 1980's Britain. By the time I was old enough to understand such things in the late 1980's, I knew that the polite words were "Black" and "Pakistani". But the British were and still are much more tolerant of rude jokes than Americans if they are actually funny. We all knew that we were being offensive when we asked "How did the Romans annoy the Pakis" but did it anyway because we were schoolboys telling racist jokes in the same way schoolboys told bawdy jokes.
By the late 90's, you could probably get away with calling a Chinese restaurant "Chinky" outside specific PC circles (I have to say that in the circles I moved in it was always "Chink"), but calling an individual Chinese person that to their face was risky. "Chink" was definitely acceptable in jokes ("You are the weakest Chink. Goodbye"), in contexts where rudeness was expected ("Keep the Chink away from my sister") or reclamatory use by Chinese people. I would not have said "Nigger" or "Paki" at all by then unless I was protected by the use/mention distinction or obviously parodying something.
FWIW, the report I link above puts "Chinky" into the worst of the three categories they use, but it is clear from the comments as well as from the no-longer-online raw data that "Nigger" and "Paki" are worse than the other "strong" racial slurs.
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