Charles Blow on the ill-aimed rhetoric and misplaced goals of the current bigotry.

The hot new game of the hour seems to be Overwatch — it looks fun and very well done, and a lot of my online friends are playing it. But I’m not even tempted. Zero interest. Don’t even want to try.

Why? Because it’s a multiplayer game, and hell is other people.

I used to play World of Warcraft, and what finally drove me to give it up was that there were big chunks of the game I could not play — not because of what Blizzard had done, but because I’d have to team up with assholes, and it was incredibly frustrating to have to drop out of a group because someone in it was a homophobic racist with a mouth. Note: and it was always me leaving voluntarily. I never once saw a group kick out the bigot.

Actually, it was something Blizzard did: the absence of any policy against hate speech is a kind of action, too.

You may notice a wild proliferation of parentheses on social media lately — that’s because it was discovered that white supremacists have been flagging the presence of Jews by bracketing their name with triple parentheses, so everyone is mocking them by putting our own names behind triple parens.

I thought these racists were already pathetic, but I did not know how low they could sink.

It’s worth noting that the internet’s anti-Semites hate when their culture is appropriated by their opponents. For example, when internet users started repurposing Pepe the Frog, a previously racist meme, a white nationalist lamented:

Most memes are ephemeral by nature, but Pepe is not… He’s a reflection of our souls, to most of us. It’s disgusting to see people (‘normies,’ if you will) use him so trivially. He belongs to us. And we’ll make him toxic if we have to.

Which makes stealing the bigots’ signature symbolism for Jews all the more fun.

Say what? This is Pepe the Frog.

If that’s a reflection of their soul, that reflects very badly on their souls. Also, the character was part of a webcomic created by Matt Furie, so they actually don’t own it.

It’s the only decent thing to do. It’s a thuggish sport that allows thugs to rise to positions of privilege, and fosters an environment of brutality and viciousness.

Or, if that’s too radical for you, shut down the football program at Dietrich High School in Idaho (warning: tale of gross racism and rape at that link). They’ve lost any right to ever play the game again.

It’s another story of an airline passenger reporting “suspicious activity” and holding up a flight. In this case, the nefarious act was…doing mathematics. A woman complained about the swarthy man (he was Italian!) scribbling obscure marks intently on a piece of paper. I’m not quite sure why a terrorist would precede an attack by doing a bunch of calculations. Maybe she remembers this cartoon.

Yeah, you never can trust those sneaky math people.

Wait. The office right next to mine is occupied by a statistician…and the one across the hall by a mathematician. I’m surrounded! I should go to the division chair and beg to be relocated to a safer office, but she’s a statistician, too! They’ve taken over!

Yeah, that word is an ugly remnant of 18th century racist classification schemes, and Franchesca Ramsey is describing it accurately.

But doesn’t everyone already know all this? Why…oh. I just read the youtube comments. OMG. “Cultural marxist” and Milo and Sargon and hate everywhere. I’ve been ignoring the youtube commentariat for so long it is shocking how flamingly racist they are. Apparently there are large numbers of horrible people who have targeted Ramsey specifically for focused bigotry.

I thought she was very good, and I’ll have to watch more of her work.

I am a sociocultural failure, I know. But I don’t have a subscription to either HBO or Tidal, so all I’ve got are tiny snippets. One thing I’ve heard more of is the strident yodeling about “Becky”, which is nicely explained on VSB. It’s telling, as well, that there is more irritation about a brief remark that is perceived as a slight against white people than several centuries of ongoing oppression of black people.

It also reminds me of something I experienced a few times when I worked at Temple University. There were a couple of occasions when the subway and trains were out of service, and I had to walk home to the northern suburbs…which meant strolling through North Philadelphia, which is a rough neighborhood, poor and neglected. I am a white professorial looking dude. I didn’t fit in. I startled a few people, I know, who were curious about me, and they’d ask. And that’s where the worst thing that happened to me in a black neighborhood occurred.

They all called me “Bob”.

Maybe it’s just a North Philly thing, but apparently the stereotypical white person is named “Bob”. I can sort of see it, I guess.

But otherwise, you know, I was unconcerned. I was walking through black communities, which are no more supportive of muggings or robberies than the white communities I was walking towards. And I could not get outraged at the trivial thing about a stereotypical name, because, as VSB explains…

There are two schools of thought on what qualifies something as racist. The first is that something is racist if the act stems from either a belief of racial superiority or a position of constructed/structural racial superiority. (Or both.) The second encompasses all unfavorable acts which might be race-based. Basically, one school of thought is right (the former) and one is wrong (the latter).

I agree, the first definition is the right one. “Becky” or “Bob” are not a danger to anyone. So why is that what so many people are concerned about?

And I know, I’ve got to find a way to watch Lemonade.

This is what this profiling nonsense comes down to. Khairuldeen Makhzoomi boarded a Southwest Airlines flight, and had a conversation on his cell phone with a relative.

On his way back to Berkeley, Makhzoomi, a loyal Southwest premier rewards member, boarded his flight to Oakland and called his uncle in Baghdad to tell him about Ki-moon’s event. At the end of the phone call, conducted in Arabic, Makhzoomi said goodbye to his uncle with the phrase “inshallah,” which translates to “if God is willing.”

When Makhzoomi hung up, he noticed a female passenger looking at him. Once he made eye contact with her, she got up and left her seat.

“She kept staring at me and I didn’t know what was wrong,” he said. “Then I realized what was happening and I just was thinking ‘I hope she’s not reporting me.’”

Minutes later, an airport employee arrived to remove Makhzoomi from the airplane. Makhzoomi was escorted onto the passenger boarding bridge where he was met by three security officers.

Yep. He was kicked off the flight and interrogated by the FBI. This is rank madness. If anyone should have been kicked off, it’s that paranoid woman who reported him for speaking a foreign language.

Southwest Airlines released a statement about the event.

A statement from Southwest Airlines says that prior to departure, the flight crew decided to investigate potentially threatening comments made by Makhzoomi aboard the aircraft.

We wouldn’t remove passengers from flights without a collaborative decision rooted in established procedures, the statement reads. We regret any less than positive experience onboard our aircraft. … Southwest neither condones nor tolerates discrimination of any kind.

Yeah, right. Then perhaps they could tell us all what the potentially threatening comments that informed their decision to refuse service to a customer might have been?