I sort of told him the kinds of things that I had been hearing about them, weird racist stuff, and he told me that he knew about most of what I was talking about. And I just said to him, “look, you know I’m Jewish so I think you know that anything like that you hear, whether to Jews or anyone else, isn’t something you…

I don’t mean to make fun, I guess I just think it should pretty much always be a no brainer that you don’t celebrate traitors who fought to keep black people enslaved, whether we’re talking about individuals like Lee and Davis or the whole shebang. It’s all the same damned impulse that needs to be crushed.

You can be equally troubled by both. It’s easy, I’m doing it right now.

And what if I don’t find it funny? Because I don’t, and I worry about normalizing that sort of shit. I don’t like it any better when South Park does it, but I think because it’s Cartman doing it it’s always been fairly obvious that it’s meant to be a negative aspect of his character. Dismissing this sort of thing as…

I don’t know that I think he did anything wrong myself, but I know that his intentions can be hard to suss out for his typical demographic. He has people hold up signs saying “Death to all Jews” as a “social experiment” and suddenly a lot more kids think its funny to say things like “death to all Jews” thinking it’s…

Well, much to his credit and my relief, he said that he doesn’t watch that kind of thing anymore, and I believe him. He’s a quiet kid so people often underestimate how sharp and well-informed he is about stuff like this. I did.

It’s bigger even than that. When we went to my in-laws house for Easter it was the first time I’d seen my 15 year old nephew since all this shit with PewDiePie and JonTron went down and all that. As the person who introduced him to video games I felt compelled to sit him down and actually ask, “Look, are you…

I’m not sure what he THOUGHT he was doing, but his catcher definitely wasn’t ready for it. He set up low and outside. Looked to me like maybe he was aiming for him and it got away a little. Now, the fact that it can “get away a little” and nearly take off a guy’s head is reason enough to never do this dumb shit,…

It looks a little silly but if I had arms like either of those guys I would probably never wear sleeves, I don’t care what they say.

Well, I agree with you as far as the representation of working class people in popular culture. I was more speaking to the people who were criticizing him for talking about that as a rich guy. However stupid his particular views might be he IS speaking to some degree with the life experience of blue collar people in…

You’re right, poor word choice by me. I should have said that he probably didn’t have many experiences with the involuntarily homeless

Well, I think in his case it was more or less voluntary. He dropped out of community college and my memory of his background gets a little hazy from there, but in every interview he’s ever given about it he seemed to think it was great fun, which smacks to me of someone who thought it would be romantic and cool to be…

His mom worked at a supermarket and his dad was a miner or something like that. Obviously he’s at a certain point now, and there’s a level of privilege that allows anyone to get away with voluntarily living homeless in Hawaii, but he DOES come from a blue collar background.

Well, he did live homeless in Hawaii after growing up in a blue collar family, so maybe he’s not totally blowing smoke.

Bit of a stretch. The headline is a little click bait-ey but it just says that he “says video game addiction hurt his career” which is what he says happened. The title doesn’t necessarily imply that the video games themselves are at fault, which seems to be your hangup.

This. Even in Washington DC there are designated protest zones. The government can’t necessarily stop you from speaking but the can tell you where you can and can’t do it.

I also suspect that’s there’s a not insignificant number of people out there who may be of mixed heritage without realizing it.

Well yeah that too. I’ve tried and can’t come up with a situation where it would be appropriate to ask someone that directly even if I suspected. Hell I wouldn’t even want to ask someone something as simple as “are you Chinese or Japanese” unless I was absolutely sure the situation called for it. But then again, I’m…

I think any white person who tries to stake out a position on either side of that line, are they or aren’t they, should probably think really hard before they hit that blue “publish” button.

Right, and having grown up on the west side of Chicago with black friends, neighbors, parents’ coworkers, etc. I’m well enough aware of that that I’m not going to pick her out of a lineup and go “white lady” no matter how much my gut might scream that at me.