But "racism" is an abstraction, a label applied to what Roseanne did — which was to tweet "muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj" in reference to Valerie Jarrett.
We don't know what motivated those words. Perhaps it was real racism, but it could also have been a wild, reckless urge to outrage or a confused angry silliness. What was Roseanne's emotional state at the time of the tweet, and does it have any relation to any of the known side effects of Ambien?
The American Addiction Centers website discusses the possible cognitive impairment that Ambien users have experienced, and I'll just excerpt some of the things that could be related to a stupid expression like Roseanne's:
Difficulty concentratingSanofi's snark is first rate, but it doesn't exclude the possibility that Ambien was Roseanne's problem. That said, blaming Ambien sounds lame — and yet, ironically, making a lame excuse could be caused by Ambien. Lame excuse-making could be the result of confusion or disorientation or impaired judgment.
Disorientation to place or time
Loss of emotional affect...
Excessive sedation
Confusion and disorientation...
Hallucinations
Impaired judgment
Aggression
ADDED: The NYT addresses the question whether Ambien could caused the severe lapse in judgment or break from reality that could explain Roseanne's tweet?
So-called working memory — the mental scratchpad where the brain manipulates numbers, names and images — may shrink temporarily.... Yet these effects, taken together, have much more in common with sleep deprivation than with Tourette-like outbursts of insults and epithets. Tourette’s episodes typically arrive as a deluge and generally have no rational connection to the person’s usual behavior....AND: Roseanne's offense is chiefly to have violated a particular well-known social norm against any suggestion that a black person looks like an ape. Looking at a human face and seeing likeness to an animal is very common. We often think someone has a "horse face" or looks like a chicken or — in the case of Mitch McConnell — a turtle. Apes have the most resemblance to humans, so this common way of seeing animal faces in humans is most likely to happen with apes. Donald Trump was famously called the son of an orangutan, and George Bush was often pictured as a chimpanzee. I had a colleague at the University of Wisconsin Law School who posted on her office door a set of pictures of George Bush and chimpanzees making various faces. It was stock humor at the time. But everyone is supposed to know that you just do not do that with black people.
Many people have reported hallucinations while taking Ambien... daydreams so vivid they are like waking dreams — before the person snaps back into the here and now. Sleep scientists suspect that at least some of these reactions represent “mixed states,” when mental processes of the slumbering brain leak into the patient’s waking hours...
Roseanne transgressed that social norm. Had she forgotten about it? I doubt it, but comedy often involves an outrageous transgression. What's one thing you absolutely should not say? That's a question you might use to brainstorm a comic routine. Shock the bourgeoisie is the old artist's credo. But the bourgeoisie shocks back. You get the consequences. Some jokes won't be taken. "Roseanne" is/was a network sitcom.
But the question here is: Could Ambien have caused it? And I'm saying that the only cause needed was the destructive impulse to violate a strong social norm that has to do with race. I do understand the argument that the racial idea had to be in her head before it could have exerted pressure to leap out, but if she'd kept the idea to herself, like so many other people who are aware of the strong social norm, she wouldn't be in any trouble at all.
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«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 242 of 242In Jordan Peterson's late 1990's opening lecture on "Maps of Meaning" taught at Harvard said that at the end of the course he wants the students to believe that evil lives in each of us and that if in the right place and time would have become Nazi concentration camp guards.
The amount of victim-blaming on this thread of a teenage genocide target doing whatever he needed to survive is despicable. I guess that's why Jews are so much successful than the people engaging in this revamped Der Sturmer shit: They value survival and their youth above some silly pretend exercise in whatever empty nationalistic pride and cutting off of one's nose to spite one's face that could have been achieved by a young George Soros deciding to die rather than to live. Maybe if your people were like that you wouldn't be lagging behind them by 15 average IQ points or whatever it is.
Nazi alert: Vance is a notorious conspiracy monger.
Yes, a kid from a people with no army, no country, stateless for 2,000 years, didn't do enough to sacrifice himself for the sake of national pride. The national pride of a people without a nation or state at the time. Makes total sense. Japanese Kamikazees had a strong military and an emperor to support them. Jews had nothing of the sort. And yet, these right-wing wackjobs think that more lemmings among them would have been the proud, nationalistic thing to do because - hey, state or not, Jews should just do the right thing and die for the sake of the Nazis (and whoever else's) sins. That is anti-semitism of the rankest sort. Almost as rank as what's heard at the U.N. from everyone who thinks Jews shouldn't have a state. Or worse, that Jews should have offered themselves up in an act of national sacrifice without even having had a nation-state. You people are as sick as the Israel bashers.
Wars can twist people.
This is not some new concept.
My great-uncle was a prisoner of the Kempeitai, and one of the few survivors of their dungeons.
He testified at Yamashita's trial.
The experience did him no good. Post-war, he became one of those who afflicted everyone else.
There were a lot like that.
National Socialists (NAZIS) were social progressives who were rabid diversitists, including denying individual dignity, and painting individuals by the color of their skin; they were Pro-Choice and normalized abortion rites, coincident with the Planned Parenthood protocol in America, which tortured and eliminated millions of lives deemed unworthy; they were fanatical social justice adventurers, and were known for elective wars, opening abortion fields, and forcing catastrophic anthropogenic immigration reform. Still, they were second to communists and other left-wing regimes in the total body count, and social and economic discontinuities that elevated the number of displaced and aborted.
Consider the many Jewish terrorists of 1940's Palestine, holocaust survivors mostly.
Whatever your position on Israel, there is no real controversy about their atrocities.
Or, PP, you know, he could have said that he felt a little guilt instead of how proud and happy he was watching his tribe getting hauled off.
You know? He said the happiest time of his life was the year he was watching Jews getting hauled off.
Who's the anti-semite here? He's the one who has said, "if not me helping the Nazis, then someone else would have!"
He openly has sided with the Nazis here. And yet you defend him and say that I'm the Nazi? I don't ask for him to have died. I just think it's reasonable to not, you know, cheer the side putting your friends and family to death. Maybe that's just me--you apparently think that helping an enemy round up your family and send them to the camps is a-ok.
“It makes you look like racist loons to millions of people.”
Indeed. Some of us have been saying this to these people here for years now.
wwww said...
Dear Holocaust deniers,
You are calling me names because you know it's messed up to blame a 13 year old Jewish boy for the Holocaust. This is not just about George Soros. It's about everyone who tries to blame 13 year old Jewish boys for the Holocaust. You blamed a Jewish kid for actions taken by Nazis. You blamed a Jewish kid in hiding for the confiscation and thieving of the Nazis.
Dear wwww,
I'm taking a shit right now, but when I'm done, I'll take you to task. Right now I'd like to know one thing. Are you Jewish, or is it some of your best friends who are Jewish?
Buwaya,
You're a fine fellow, but deep down there's always something with you and the Jews. Terrorists! You should be so lucky to be terrorized by such terrorists.
Racism is a social construct.
Vance,
Do you have any idea who is Jewish here? You assume liberals are anti Semites. Do you ever in your wildest dreams think many liberals are Jewish? You sound positively deranged.
Look it: for a brief moment in time, on a thread that turned into a debate about a 13yr old hungarian in the 1940s, the president p guy and michael k - usually gentlemen who dont agree on anything, including gravity probably - both stated / agreed that there is sufficient evidence that roseanne was nuts long before a tweet went out.
The nation is not lost!! It is a long road back, surely, and there will be a few twists along the way, but there is surely a consensus from which to work from.
Here's a neat thought: blame the person who did the thing and assign no guilt whatsoever to people who did not do the thing. Imagine the possibilities.
George Soros did some terrible things. If you want to use his age as a defense, please, by all means, defend the indefensible. He described himself in terms that are hard to reconcile with an aggrieved soul. The 14 year old collaborator might get a pass but the adult describing how he felt at the time cannot.
His politics as an older person cannot buy indulgences.
Racism is a social construct.
It is. We saw that in South Africa, where a terrorist faction was given moral license to torture and abort competing factions of the same diversity (i.e. color) class, while social justice adventurers opened abortion fields targeting the native population to end "separation". That said, while bias is intrinsic, prejudice has social (e.g. diversity) roots.
wwww told me "I can't believe people are blaming a 13 year old boy for what the Nazi's did. I did not think you'd do that."
I didn't do that. I didn't think that. And I'm well versed in that war. But what Soros did do was pretty bad. The people defending him? -- I don't care about them. Perhaps Soros buys their friendship. He is behind a lot of the trouble and sorrows in the world.
@wwww, I've been busy, and I see that you replied to my comment. Sort of. Time to treat you to a fisking.
1) Chelsey [sic] Clinton is not married to George Soros or any of his relatives.
Stipulated. Chelsea Clinton is married to Marc Mezvinsky, son of a controversial Democrat politician and a notorious embezzler who still owes millions in restitution to his victims. The younger Mezvinsky founded a hedge fund, Eaglevale Partners, that went bankrupt after losing 90% of its value.
2) Soros was born in 1930. He was 14 years old May 1945.
Stipulated. He was born in August of 1930. Comes under the heading of interesting but so what?
The Soros family went into hiding when the Nazis came to town. Because they were Jewish.
Not immediately. At first George's father cooperated with (and some would say collaborated with) the Nazis. A surprising number of Jews did the same, and eventually many found themselves on a cattle car headed for an extermination camp after they were of no further use to the Nazis. George's father was wiser, and managed to find a safe hiding space for himself and his family.
(wait - maybe people don't know this, just like they think Valarie Jarrett was a Muslim Iranian instead of a Christian African American? )
Valerie Jarrett was born in Iran to American parents. My own take is that she, like Obama, had fond childhood memories of life in a Muslim country that later clouded their respective judgements regarding Muslim countries in general and, in Jarrett's case, Iran in particular.
The family split up and took other identities, because they were Jewish and the Nazis wanted to kill them.
Stipulated. Reading about the Nazi "final solution" is still sickening. I've read that Hitler insisted that troop trains taking much-needed soldiers to the front were shunted to side tracks so that trains full of Jews destined for concentration camps would not be slowed down. Ditto trains full of supplies like food and ammunition intended for the soldiers in the front lines.
Soros was not living with his father. George Soros was placed with a guardian family. Because he didn't want to get killed by the Nazis because he was Jewish. The Soros family took false identities. George pretended to be a great god-son or something of this guardian. He was unrelated to this guy. He pretended to be related because he was Jewish and needed to hide from the Nazis so they did not kill him. He was 13.
Stipulated, but so what? Many Jews were hidden by sympathetic anti-Nazi Christians during the war. How does this excuse what George and his father did before they went into hiding?
3) People are reading strange stuff on the internet. [sic]
Stipulated, and I would include you, particularly. Also most people capitalize "Internet."
4) People thought Valerie Jarret [sic] was a Muslim Iranian and not a child born of Christian African American parents. I'm shocked.
So be shocked. What has Valerie Jarrett to do with George Soros? Did he pay part of her salary?
4) People believe in Pizza Gate. Shocked by this too.
So be shocked. That doesn't excuse the collaboration of George and his father, does it?
Look, I don't know what I would have done in the same situation, and I don't know what you would have done. During wartime lots of people do despicable things to survive. In your eyes apparently that makes the things they did less despicable. In my eyes it makes them understandable, but no less despicable. Here you and I part company.
“Jarrett is not a Muslim, but Barr has a history of hostility to Muslims. Barr initially tried to deflect on Twitter, saying “Muslims are not a race,” which ignored the anti-black racism in her original tweet."”
Not only is Jarrett not a Muslim, her great grandfather was Jewish. Barr is only doing what the majority of conservative commenters here do all the time, read sketchy sites that peddle conspiracy theories and internalize them, so much so that they cannot believe anything else despite all the evidence to the contrary from mainstream publications. Then they spread these conspiracy theories on the right wing sites they comment on. That is how misinformation and propaganda becomes the “truth” to those who would rather believe a lie than the actual truth from someone they hate.
“Valerie Jarrett was born in Iran to American parents. My own take is that she, like Obama, had fond childhood memories of life in a Muslim country that later clouded their respective judgements regarding Muslim countries in general and, in Jarrett's case, Iran in particular.”
Valarie Jarrett’s family left Iran when she was 5 years old. How many fond memories could she have made in her 5 years there?
“Stipulated, and I would include you, particularly. Also most people capitalize "Internet."”
Petty.
What is needed in 2018, apparently, is a list of people who can be called Nazis (directly or via poorly framed innuendo) without there being any public sanction, and then a second list of people where - if a nazi reference is made - you can jump all over the accuser.
Basically two sets of standards I guess. Cause let me tell ya, if we start condemning everybody who made nazi references since oh say 2016, there'd be shorter lines at the grocery store.
While we're at it, maybe we can do the same for accusations of latent Jacobism or tendencies to support the Optimates or whoever the baddies were pre Julius Caesar...
Valarie Jarrett’s family left Iran when she was 5 years old. How many fond memories could she have made in her 5 years there?
You have no fond memories of the early years of your life? I remember the swing set my father built for me. I remember the family cats. I remember our neighbor bringing me a toy horse when I had tonsillitis.
I feel sorry for you.
“You have no fond memories of the early years of your life? I remember the swing set my father built for me. I remember the family cats. I remember our neighbor bringing me a toy horse when I had tonsillitis.
I feel sorry for you.”
I’m sure little Valerie was so influenced by the Muslims in Iran by her 5th year of life that she secretly joined the Muslim Brotherhood years later.
“I remember our neighbor bringing me a toy horse when I had tonsillitis.”
So you became an ear nose and throat doc as an adult? How did those memories shape your adult life?
@wwww, for some reason blogger swallowed my response and re-response to your 8:42 comment. Is anyone else having a problem like that? So for the third time -- which you will perceive as my first time -- thank you for the pointer. I plan to check it out. My information was that it was George's father who was a member of the Judenrat and that he involved George in his activities before they went into hiding. I will check out your reference.
Blogger also swallowed my snarky response to Inga. You see, she thinks that I think that Valerie Jarrett is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but I happen to know that that's untrue. Jarrett is a member of Hamas. ;-)
My point was that people should read sourced material. I would like to get some sourced material. I am generally interested in how people escaped the Nazis. I am curious how they escaped.
Generally, they escaped with help. My wife's mother's father was a German who helped Jews get out of Germany, and one of them sent back a thank you letter, which was intercepted by the Gestapo. He had some political pull which helped him get sent to the Eastern Front as a Wehrmacht soldier instead of to a concentration camp, and he did in fact survive the war. Helping Jews escape or hiding them took enormous courage, as the penalty for getting caught was usually death.
I dont think you need apologize wwww for your long post. You seem sincere in wanting to outline why you stated what you did, by showing your work, as they say round here.
And your comment about how people seem prepared to act in partisan fashion very quickly against you, as if there is no middle ground, is something I would bet those who disagreed with you on this post would chuckle and agree quite readily with.
This is a post which started about a successful actress - the anchor to a #1 tv show - who both president P and michael k AGREE has been nutso for a long time, despite her success in entertainment - who, in an apparent ambien fueled 2am mist, typed 140 characters, which led directly to the immediate cancellation of the #1 show. The next day.
Which, in what can only be thought of as farce,then led to 2,300 hours of media commentary and probably 2M facebook posts and tweets. Including one from the President asking why Maher still has a job? In between tariff talks and NK meetings I guess. My goodness. More fuel! More media comments!
Yes, immediate jumps to partisanship.
My best guess of what’s going on here is that libs are conflicted about money: They can’t take money from “I’m with her” because she’s tainted; they can’t take money from the asshole Soros because he’s tainted too. Libs occupy a small patch these days.
Bought a bag of corn to pop to watch at this bit of ennertainment.
The Right lionized a volatile Jerk. Sanofi are evil French Pharma Pimps, and this sort of snark is the same thing I had to deal with while trying to get proper medical care Over There.
I didn't do that. I didn't think that. And I'm well versed in that war. But what Soros did do was pretty bad. The people defending him? -- I don't care about them. Perhaps Soros buys their friendship. He is behind a lot of the trouble and sorrows in the world.
Just another form of die juden sind unser unglück, there. Just as casually posited as all the other anti-semitism.
Other than that, the 8:42 comment, and many others like it, stands as a testament to all that the right-wing anti-semites here can't and refuse to get right. Calling out kids and other survivors for not figuring out ways of perishing more "honorably", "patriotically." Pretty astounding, to anyone of normal intelligence and morality. As I said, the right-wing and left-wing anti-semites aren't really all that different. The left-wing anti-semites think there shouldn't be a Jewish state and that whatever said state does is wrong and the right-wing anti-semites think there shouldn't be a Jewish people or nation and that whatever they did must have been wrong - apart from dying for a cause that wasn't their own and in an act of defiance that preserved precisely no state or power or means of collective survival intact. Just individual Jews saving their own lives, which the right-wing pieces of shit all over this blog apparently find to be contemptible. Says all you need to know. They don't even know why they are wrong, let alone so atrocious. It's because of people like them that even was a Holocaust in the first place, so willing as they are to just make individual Jews out to be villains for the crime of continuing to exist in spite of how many else of them were being killed.
It takes a right-winger to invent the charge of "insufficient patriotism while facing genocide." Talk about futility.
I just want to make sure I understand my right-wing anti-semitic friends here correctly. Basically you hate George Soros for not doing enough as a young kid to make sure that he died in the Holocaust genocide, right? Just want to make sure I've summarized your despicable position accurately.
Is there a drug that causes its users to be statists? If so, that might be the one drug I'd be in favor of outlawing.
I could add that if there is a drug that induces statism, Pee Pee is probably mainlining it; but I suspect he's already on enough drugs as it is.
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