Victory Soap v. 2.0

Rand Simberg over at Transterrestrial Musings has a few trolls who are real pieces of work. One of them had been busy slamming Southerners. The discussion was actually about the Democrats' current complaint -- that calling their party "the Democrat Party" instead of the "Democratic Party" was an insult. This reminded me of the way Arabs are always screeching about the most ridiculous things, that no normal person would get insulted over:

So are you saying that Democraticistics are as anal-retentively touchy as Arabs are?

Mr. Clever Troll responded with:

As opposed to Southerners?

Here is what I said in reply:

Oddly enough, both cultures are honor/shame cultures. Florence King pointed out that the South had such a checkered past that it evolved cultural attitudes to compensate for its basic lawlessness -- sure, there was slavery, so the way to be a good person was to be kind to slaves. And so on. So despite the fact that you meant it as an insult, I do acknowledge that there are elements of Southern American culture that are similar to traditional Arab culture.

Which is why, considering how much compassionate, progressive, liberal Northerners hate the South and use it as their all-purpose whipping boy for everything that is bad about America, it is so odd that* they are willing to give Arabs (and other Muslims from similar cultures) a pass on their behavior.

If only American Southerners were all sexy exotic foreigners instead of lumpish, Northern-European-descended white people. Oh, and no blacks ever seem to actually live in the South and participate in the culture here; they're just trapped in "virtual" slavery, what they all really want is to move to cool, non-prejudiced places like New York where the n-word is unknown and they can live in peace and equality. (I had earlier pointed out that the most egregious examples of racism I'd ever seen had come from people from up north. Troll didn't like that much.)

Okay, I'm really out of here now. Don't forget the fundraiser!

*I forgot to put that in the original post too. Oh well, it's an old post.