For those who leapt up on the outrage bandwagon

[TPFKA@W]

and The Hoosiers set up Gary to keep you guys out

We created Gary just for Michael Jackson.

[Joe Guy]

Speaking of old noose...

Placerville, which is a town off Highway 50 that many of us here in the SF Bay Area have visited on the way to Lake Tahoe Nevada, is referred to by many as 'Hangtown', which was its original name. I wonder how long it will take for the outrage to spread and for people to demand to change the name of at least one existing business and apologize for offending people who might be offended if they have no clue of the origin of the town's original name.

Last time I looked, this guy was still hanging around there...

[Scooter]

Because people who want to see Confederate monuments taken down, and who are angered when confronted with lynching imagery, are only doing so because "they have no clue of the origin" of those things.

[Joe Guy]

Placerville has no "Confederate Imagery" that I'm aware of but I haven't been there for a few years. The 'Hangtown' name had nothing to do with racism against anyone. If you are interested in researching it, here is a link.

In the meantime, I'm doing my anti-racist part by working hard to stop using the phrase, "Hanging around". After that I'm going to try to phase 'Black Friday' out of my vocabulary. I've recognized that I need to be reprogrammed so I can quit offending people.

[Scooter]

Placerville has no "Confederate Imagery" that I'm aware of but I haven't been there for a few years. The 'Hangtown' name had nothing to do with racism against anyone.

So why raise the prospect that anyone would be clamouring to change the name? Oh yeah, that's right, in order to invalidate the movement to do so in those cases that do have those connections by inventing slippery slopes out of whole cloth.

[Joe Guy]

So why raise the prospect that anyone would be clamouring to change the name? Oh yeah, that's right, in order to invalidate the movement to do so in those cases that do have those connections by inventing slippery slopes out of whole cloth.

I heard someone comment on Hangtown yesterday on the radio. I didn't hear the context or continue listening to find out. I "raise the prospect" because, given its nickname, it's an easy target and it seems likely to become an issue. Why would I want to "invalidate the movement"? If anything, I would like to see the movement focused on the many real problems instead of people searching for something to offend them. You may have noticed that I've mentioned that idea more than once. Maybe not.

[Long Run]

Placerville is the county seat. Gold was discovered in 1848 a few miles away. At that time, hanging criminals for serious crimes was typical. They played up this history, much like other gold country towns. Nothing to do with recent discussions.

[Scooter]

I heard someone comment on Hangtown yesterday on the radio. I didn't hear the context or continue listening to find out. I "raise the prospect" because, given its nickname, it's an easy target and it seems likely to become an issue.

Translation: I pulled the notion right out of my ass.

I would like to see the movement focused on the many real problems instead of people searching for something to offend them.

And of course, something is only a "real problem" if you believe it to be, and anyone focusing on something that doesn't qualify for your definition of a "real problem" is only "searching for something to offend them".

I'm guessing the circularity of your argument escapes you.

[Joe Guy]

No. It’s not an argument. I heard Hangtown mentioned on the radio and thought what I thought. And I didn’t give a definition of a “real problem”. I just thought I wouldn’t be surprised if we start hearing news about problems with Hangtown (Placerville) from people who have hang ups.

[dales]

Speaking of old noose...

Placerville, which is a town off Highway 50 that many of us here in the SF Bay Area have visited on the way to Lake Tahoe Nevada, is referred to by many as 'Hangtown', which was its original name. I wonder how long it will take for the outrage to spread and for people to demand to change the name of at least one existing business and apologize for offending people who might be offended if they have no clue of the origin of the town's original name.

Last time I looked, this guy was still hanging around there...

I wouldn't worry about it, Joe.

The only people that got a good neck-stretching there were horse thieves and claim-jumpers.

[Gob]

1a0e0d585e0c6b4e151b2d8a835175d4.jpg (7.85 KiB) Viewed 1616 times

[Scooter]

Perhaps those who have the luxury of finding it "funny" should consider themselves fortunate that it isn't their existence being dehumanized and threatened, for doing nothing but living their lives.

[Gob]

Who says they don't?

[MajGenl.Meade]

And of course, something is only "amusing" if I believe it to be, and anyone focusing on something that doesn't qualify for my definition of "amusing" is only "searching for something to amuse them".

I'm guessing the circularity of my argument escapes me.

FTFY

[RayThom]

As long as the Placerville hanging dummy/mannequin remains a White guy I doubt if there's any cause for alarm or outrage.

OK, the noose is surely symbolic of Black oppression but what about the gas chamber, or electric chair, or lethal injection, or even state approved and certified gallows? They see an inordinate number of (often innocent) Black victims. Should these devices of individual destruction also be banned?

A slippery slope indeed.

[Econoline]

From NY Mag:

Trump Can’t Turn Bubba Wallace Into Colin Kaepernick
By Will Leitch

This August, it will have been four years since Colin Kaepernick, then-quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, began choosing not to stand for the national anthem before NFL games. It’s worth remembering that Kaepernick did not announce his intentions in a press release, or an extended Twitter thread. He just stopped standing. It took a while before an NFL.com reporter finally noticed and asked him about it after an exhibition game on a Friday night.

It’s impossible to know how people would have reacted to Kaepernick’s decision had we not been two months away from a presidential election in which one of the participants was Donald Trump. But everybody freaked out over that August weekend. Kaepernick dominated cable news, his own players union chief openly disagreed with him, and by Monday, Trump had already started braying about how Kaepernick should “find a country that works better for him.” You sensed weakness in the NFL’s reaction the second it came down. “Players are encouraged but not required to stand during the playing of the national anthem,” the league said — exactly the sort of mealy-mouthed statement tailor-made for Trump to jump all over. He’s been going on about Kaepernick and the NFL ever since.

But Kaepernick’s banishment from the league — and it shouldn’t be classified as anything other than that — left Trump without one of his convenient villains. The NFL has since apologized to its players for how it treated Kaepernick and the protests he helped spark (though there haven’t been any apologies forthcoming to the man himself). And now, public sentiment has shifted so far toward the ex-QB and his cause that there are two massive media conglomerates making stories about his life. In 2016, Trump could push the NFL around; in 2020, he can’t. (When Roger Goodell is standing up to you, you are at a moment of profound weakness.)

As we’ve seen with Trump in every other realm over the last two months of virus surges, ill-fated grasps at cosplay totalitarianism, and plummeting poll numbers, his attempts to revive his aged magic tricks in this election year have the increasingly desperate look of an ’80s rocker trying to fit into his old leather pants and belt out the faded power-ballad hit without popping the buttons. But this is the only tune Trump knows how to play. So, astonishingly, on Monday morning, he did this:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/sta ... rnick.html
Has @BubbaWallace apologized to all of those great NASCAR drivers & officials who came to his aid, stood by his side, & were willing to sacrifice everything for him, only to find out that the whole thing was just another HOAX? That & Flag decision has caused lowest ratings EVER!

There is something inherently demoralizing about still having to dissect the rotted logic of a Trump tweet, more than three years into his endless presidency. And the simplest explanation for this one surely remains the most accurate: This guy is really racist. But Trump’s message is probably still worth unpacking, because it speaks to just how much he appears to have lost the ability to read the room. Going after Bubba Wallace isn’t like going after Colin Kaepernick in 2016; it’s like going after Tiger Woods in 2005. It might even be stupider than that.

To review, on the off chance that you, New York reader, are not up on your NASCAR: Bubba Wallace is the only Black full-time driver in the notoriously good ol’ boy world of American auto racing. He was also one of the leading voices, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, pushing the sport to ban the Confederate flag from its events. (NASCAR, unlike most other major American sports leagues amid the pandemic, has been up and running for a few weeks now.) This led to a backlash from some — maybe even most — of the sport’s fans, including a few who rented a plane to circle above a NASCAR event displaying the flag and the phrase “DEFUND NASCAR.” The sport stuck to its stance, and Wallace was widely heralded and embraced by his fellow drivers. (One NASCAR truck series driver — who had never finished higher than ninth in a race — quit because the flag was banned and widely mocked for it.)

But then the story took a dark turn: A noose was discovered by a member of Wallace’s team in the stall for his car at Talladega Motor Speedway in Alabama. The NASCAR community instantly rallied around Wallace (including NASCAR legend Richard Petty, a man who had said in 2016 about Kaepernick, “Anybody that doesn’t stand up for [the flag] ought to be out of the country. Period.”) At that day’s GEICO 500, all the drivers walked alongside Wallace’s car, leading to a moment as moving as any in NASCAR’s history:

https://twitter.com/Rachel__Nichols/sta ... rnick.html
NASCAR drivers & crews join to push @BubbaWallace's car to the front of the grid at Talladega. Richard Petty, age 82, is at the track for the first time since the COVID outbreak, to support Wallace. This sport is making it clear who it stands with, and who it does not.

Note, already, how dramatically NASCAR’s embrace of Wallace contrasts with the NFL’s initial reaction to Kaepernick. And that embrace extended to leadership, not just Wallace’s colleagues. As NFL reporter Mike Freeman noted back in 2016, “Texts coming in from coaches, players, front office execs from around the league on Kap. So far every player backs him. No coach/exec does.”

But what happened next mattered even more. After an investigation, it turned out that the noose had in fact been in that stall since October of last year, which led some NASCAR fans (and, needless to say, Trump supporters) to believe that the controversy was ginned up by an overeager Wallace staffer, or even Wallace himself. But NASCAR once again did not waver: It announced its full investigation, released a photo of the noose (which was absolutely, 100 percent a noose, and not one that appeared in any other driver’s stall, according to the NASCAR investigation) and quoted its president Steve Phelps saying, “Bubba Wallace and the 43 team had nothing to do with this. Bubba Wallace has done nothing but represent this sport with courage, class and dignity. It is offensive seeing anyone suggest otherwise.” One NASCAR official told The Wall Street Journal, “We certainly know the difference between a simple hand loop and a noose.”

In other words, NASCAR not only didn’t feel Wallace (who, again, never saw the noose in the first place) owed them an apology, it never took issue with the initial story. NASCAR — an institution whose then-CEO publicly backed Trump in 2016 — has clearly drawn its line in the sand: It supports Wallace, the Black Lives Matter movement, and getting rid of the Confederate flag. It quickly rallied to Wallace’s defense after Trump’s tweet, too. The best-selling merchandise in Nascar.com’s shop right now is Wallace gear, with the #blacklivesmatter hashtag in huge letters right across the front. (Even larger than the sponsors’ logos!) NASCAR, in this moment, is notching some of its biggest television ratings in years. Wallace is the best thing they have going right now. Wallace isn’t standing against his league’s wishes and values: He’s representing them.

That Trump does not realize this — that he thinks Wallace can in fact be his new Kaepernick — shows how truly lost he is right now, how little skill he apparently has to read a room anymore. If Trump is trying to use Wallace as another bit of ammo in his culture war, he will be doing it with a rapidly dwindling army of supporters. While a (declining, but real) majority of NASCAR fans are against banning the Confederate flag from events — though younger fans are mostly in support of the ban — Wallace himself remains beloved by NASCAR executives, drivers, and fans. There is a loud, vocal minority of NASCAR fans who yell “Hoax!” at Wallace online, something Wallace has admitted “pisses him off.” But the idea that the noose was part of some Jussie Smollett–style setup existed only in the fever dreams of conspiracists, or racists, or both. You know: people like Trump.

There is nowhere for Trump to go with this. NASCAR doesn’t believe the noose was a hoax; the FBI doesn’t think it was a hoax; the vast majority of the sport’s fans don’t think it was a hoax. (It wasn’t a hoax.) The president is talking to no one but himself. It is one thing for Roger Goodell to no longer need to kowtow to Trump. It is quite another for NASCAR to follow suit. Trump isn’t just wrong about Bubba Wallace; he’s wrong about the viewpoints of wide swathes of people who used to be his supporters. The president is now looking at a sports organization whose founder ran George Wallace’s presidential campaign — and which is now far more enlightened than he is on race. If there’s anything positive to come out of this whole sorry episode, it’s that Trump has only hastened that divide.

[ex-khobar Andy]

I do the NYT crossword online and there is quite a little community who follow the daily commentary on the puzzle. This column has hints for the newbies and occasionally 'the story behind the clue' and that sort of miscellany. The comments from the cruciverbalist community are always interesting. The puzzle is pretty easy on Monday and gets harder through the week until Saturday. The Sunday puzzle is not particularly difficult - I reckon it's Thursday-ish - but it is bigger. (My daughter gave me a subscription for Christmas.)

The puzzle comes out at 10PM Eastern the day before it is printed and people like me jump on it and try to get it done that evening.

So Tuesday's puzzle came out last night: it was soft even for a Tuesday and I had it done in 10 minutes 20 seconds which is a few seconds shy of my best ever Tuesday and almost 9 minutes better than my Tuesday average. There are people who claim to do a Tuesday in 3 minutes and I can't type it that fast even if you spotted me all the answers. You can keep track of all your statistics on the site.

30D "It may be in the autumn air". Three letters. Once you realize the first letter is N (29A is "It helps make you you" - obviously DNA, to give you that first letter) so I filled in NIP and moved on to the next clue. All well and good and when I was done and got the gold star I went to the column. I am not one of these people (I am told they exist - shock! horror!) who goes to the column or (gasp!) Wikipedia to get help while doing it.

Deb Amlen who writes this daily column had this to say:

30D. This was an unfortunate entry in an otherwise very entertaining puzzle. The word NIP — while clued to cold weather in this puzzle — is offensive to Asian people, particularly those of Japanese descent.

Now, there are people who don’t mind seeing a word that can also be a racial slur in a puzzle if it’s clued as a different meaning, and there are people who don’t want to see a racial slur spelled out in a grid no matter how it’s clued. We don’t use a word that is a racial slur against Hispanic people and then clue it as a cleaning product, so why do this?

Well. There are a huge number of comments on Deb's column and I'd guess half of them are reacting - both positively and negatively - to her point about this word. I think I'm in the camp of those who have watched enough WW2 movies to be generally aware of this word and its derogatory meaning which may have been appropriate in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor but not 30 or 50 or even 79 years later. But we see no reason to abandon a perfectly good word mostly used to describe either a slight chilliness or a little drink or a small cut.

People generally try to stay out of politics when they comment on the crossword. But it is the NYT. We have not, for example, stopped using the word 'colored' (regardless of how it is spelled) because it is no longer felt to be appropriate in one specific context. The n-word is never used because it has or had ever only one, highly offensive and not context-dependent, meaning.

I'd be curious what you think.

[MajGenl.Meade]

I think some people are total arseholes. And I'm not being niggardly in saying so.

[Scooter]

There was a lot of anti-Japanese hatred in Canada during WWII and immediately afterward (as in the U.S.), but it dissipated quickly, along with the use of slurs like "Nip" (whereas anti-Chinese slurs, more ingrained in our history, seem to have persisted). I don't buy into the notion that words of innocent origin and intent become offensive on the basis of one or two people from the purportedly offended group objecting to their use. If the word "nip" used in completely unrelated and inoffensive contexts is supposed to be offensive to the Japanese*, I'm pretty sure we would have had some inkling of it before being lectured to about it by a white woman who writes a crossword column.



*It's amusing that Amlin, in her zeal to avoid offending anyone, has decided that a slur used exclusively against the Japanese must necessarily be offensive in all of its benign meanings to all Asian peoples. In her mind, I guess all Asians think alike.

[Big RR]

Suppose the clue had been " a small bite from a dog" or a small drink" to avoid the connotation with a nip in the air (and a connotation to japanese air attacks)? Would those uses of "nip" also be offensive?' These words predate the use of "nip" to refer to japanese persons (and if I'm not mistaken Nip dervies from Nipon, which is still used; one Japanese national airline is called ANA, All Nippon Airlines). I can see how some may take offense to the term being used to refer to them or Japanese people generally, and such use should be avoided (to avoid offense), but to expunge it from the language is just silly when the word is used for so many other things completely unrelated to the Japanese. For examle, many WW2 propaganda films and publications called the Japnese the "yellow peril" but we do not avoid using yellow of peril as words.