Remember yesterday’s foofooraw over the term black hole? I wasn’t sure if the second commissioner in this event was being racist or not.
Turns out he was (sorry about having to link to a Fox site). That video makes it very clear that the first commissioner was using the term black hole to mean the office was sucking down paperwork, and that the second commissioner was being hugely overly-sensitive thinking that it was a racist term.
Also, the judge who asked for the first commissioner to apologize is being ridiculous as well. When you make an actual insensitive remark it’s OK to apologize, but it’s not OK to apologize when a) the comment is obviously not racist, and b) the other person is clearly being a jerk. It was the second commissioner who was being racist, assuming that a white man using the term black hole is making a racist comment. That’s really, really dumb. Note that the first commissioner even went as far as to explain what a black hole is, calling it a “science term”.
So I was right in the first place. I’m glad I looked into this more, as I prefer to give someone the benefit of my doubt. In this case, he turned around and unequivocally proved my original assertion.
As I said in the previous post: we have enough real racism problems in this country, and they’re going to get worse in the coming months. We don’t need histrionics like this demeaning the issue.
… oh, about the title of this post: a twinkie is a term we used to use in Netrek, an online game, for people who did really foolish things. It’s less insulting than calling someone an idiot. And since Twinkies are yellow, I hope it won’t be misconstrued as a racist slur… but obviously any term can be misconstrued if you’re a twinkie, so the heck with it.
