Racists upset that Miss America isn’t white enough

Not all racists are objectively stupid and not all stupid people are racists. But holy crap some racists are prone to saying skull-fuckingly stupid things. Then they compound their public racism and stupidity by being oblivious to how staggeringly racist their pronouncements are. Say what you will about the Aryan Brotherhood, at least they tend to be honest about who and what they are.

The latest expression of this racist stupidity came when the winner of the 2014 Miss America Pageant (yeah, that’s still a thing) turned out to be not white enough for a number of Americans. Miss New York, and now Miss America 2014, is Syracuse, NY born Nina Davuluri. Possibly worse than being brown, she had the audacity to be the offspring of people with a name that simply doesn’t sound white enough.

And fuck anyone who says the responses were anything but racist. If Miss New York had been a first generation American who was blonde, blue eyed and named Anderson with parents from Sweden none of these idiots would have batted an eyelid. The simple fact Nina Davuluri is brown-skinned with a surname they don’t recognise is all these morons need to justify saying she isn’t American.

Twitter fairly exploded with the indignation of these ignorant racists which doesn’t surprise me. What does blow my mind is these idiots live in such a self-absorbed bubble that they clearly didn’t realise there would be any negative response to their profoundly offensive racism being vomited across a public forum. Several sites have collected choice examples of their bigotry, collecting gems such as calling her, an Arab, a Muslim, al-qaeda, a camel jockey and a terrorist – none of which even have the dubious saving grace of being factually accurate.

At least some of the bigots accurately grasped Davuluri’s Indian heritage. It’s probably a matter of personal taste whether you are more disgusted by the bigots who think she’s Arabic or the bigots who realise her family is Indian. Myself, I find it too tough to call which group is more offensive.

While I’m not into witch-hunts myself I did get some amusement from seeing how many of the Twitter accounts that have been publicly shamed have been deleted or switched to protected mode. I’m sure they’re outraged at the fact that people actually disagreed with them and regard their public outing as bigots as an infringement of their civil liberties. Which it obviously isn’t. The right to free speech is NOT the same as not same avoiding any responsibility or consequences for the shit you dribble. And if they’re not claiming free speech they’re claiming anyone who criticises their bigotry is kowtowing to political correctness.

The same people who say they should be allowed to say whatever hateful thing they want to regarding any minority are invariably the same freaks who invoke “9/11” as something holy that must not be sullied. In fact, several of these utter fucking morons said that allowing Nina Davuluri to win Miss America so close to 9/11 was some sort of horrific insult. This would be a moronic even if she was Muslim but we come back the she is, in fact, not Muslim. I’m sure these morons would mutter something along the lines of “same part of the world”. This glosses over the fact that Ms Davuluri was born in America, not India but even if she had been, it’s worth pointing out (seeing as the majority of these drooling idiots thing Iraq was responsible for 9/11) Paris is closer to Baghdad than New Delhi is.

Still, brown people – fuck ’em, amirite?

At the end of this, I’m left with one question: why does it appear that the Miss America crown is being nailed into the winner’s skull? That shit looks painful.

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TitStare app is everything that’s wrong with Tech Industry

Over the weekend a couple of Australian developers presented their tastefully named “TitStare” app at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. In case you’re having trouble imagining what the app is for, there is no hidden subtlety. The developers said the app would let you “take photos of yourself, looking at tits” and allow men to look at women’s breasts whenever they wanted. 

Because if there’s one thing women are always telling me it’s that men never stare directly at their breasts. And men are really deprived if they want to stare at some tits. The certainly aren’t displayed larger the life on every second billboard. And they’re almost impossible to find on the internet.

This is of course all just a joke and everyone should laugh it off. That’s right, at an extremely high profile conference for an industry that is plagued with negativity and outright hostility towards women, when someone presents an app called “TitStare” and provokes chuckles from the overwhelmingly male audience there’s no problem. It’s “a bit of a laugh”. Tongue in cheek. Not at all an indictment of the rampant sexism in the technology industry.

I call bullshit.

I particularly call bullshit on the pathetic “apologies” given by the developers. Saying “If we offended anybody it was unintentionally done” does not absolve you – it defines the fucking problem! I’d actually have more time for the developers if they aggressively defended the app and told people to get over themselves. At least they’d have some integrity then. They’d still be tools. But they’d be tools who stood behind their actions. Presenting something like “TitStare” and saying you didn’t know it was offensively sexist makes you a self absorbed moron, so secure in your privilege that you’re unaware of the level of privilege you enjoy.

To their credit, TechCrunch offered a direct and unequivocal apology, owning their failure in letting the presentation happen. But I call bullshit on them saying they would screen all ideas before they are presented from now on (which gives them the excuse that this app was only presented because there was no screening process in place). Are you telling me that if someone developed an app called “Lynch the Nigger” they wouldn’t be stopped from presenting? Or even if there truly was NO screening are you telling me nobody would have crash tackled them from the stage before they got halfway through presenting an app with a name like that?

But TitStare wasn’t that offensive. It was simply a bit of tongue in cheek fun. And totally demeaning to women. But that’s business as usual. And it’s everything that’s everything that’s wrong with the tech industry.