Venting thread

[Moose-tache]

I'm worried that labeling Robert Aaron Long as a "white supremacist" is going to encourage people to ignore some important questions about the nature of sex work. The fact is, while we know Long sought to kill women and sex workers, we don't have clear proof yet that he targeted them because of their race. I don't say this to wave away racism, but just the opposite. Long chose Asian sex workers because they were the easiest target. Instead of going to a sketchy neighborhood and waiting by the side of the road he could just look them up on Google. You could put ten massage parlors into your GPS and hit them all one-by-one. If a killer set out to murder as many sex workers as possible in a short period of time, his victims would always be mostly Asian, regardless of his motivations. Calling him a white supremacist lets us all pretend that we're not to blame for making Asian sex workers more vulnerable than other sex workers. It's a nice assumption that lets us all feel good about ourselves without acknowledging the problem.

[MacAnDàil]

He did say "I'm going to kill all Asians." so there is certainly a race element in there, as well a sexual urge/hardline religion conflict. I remember reading about a similar conflict among some Daesh terrorists active in France, but I can't remember who exactly or the details.

[malloc]

Got a really nasty gash on my chest the other day. The pain has subsided, but it will undoubtedly leave a grotesque scar.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I hope the injury heals and the scar comes out much cooler than you're expecting it to.

[Linguoboy]

I wish I had some gnarly scars from my misspent youth. That one little one left from the time I tore up my entire abdomen isn’t even visible any more.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I still have a barely-visible one on my ankle from where I had to have surgery to get a pin put in. I used to be much heavier than I am now, so when I broke my ankle (as a teenager, it's been more than fifteen years now — my, but I feel old typing that), it really did a number on it, and some letters, and some non alphanumeric symbols also. It seems to be quite healed now, though. Would that I still had such resiliency.

[Moose-tache]

He did say "I'm going to kill all Asians." so there is certainly a race element in there

[citation needed]
I've been looking for this quote for days and can't find any evidence of it.

[Travis B.]

He did say "I'm going to kill all Asians." so there is certainly a race element in there

[citation needed]
I've been looking for this quote for days and can't find any evidence of it.

The attribution is from the Chosun Ilbo, a Korean newspaper.

[linguistcat]

Also, there is no evidence that any of the women at the massage parlors were sex workers, let alone all of them. Not that it would excuse his actions if they were. Only that if he was out to kill sex workers, you'd think he'd be sure they were in fact sex workers. We only know that HE thought they were sex workers, which aligns with anti-Asian stereotypes and fetishization. Even if he isn't a white supremacist, and even assuming his intentions were not racist, his actions were racist and feed into white supremacist thinking.

[Travis B.]

Also, there is no evidence that any of the women at the massage parlors were sex workers, let alone all of them. Not that it would excuse his actions if they were. Only that if he was out to kill sex workers, you'd think he'd be sure they were in fact sex workers. We only know that HE thought they were sex workers, which aligns with anti-Asian stereotypes and fetishization. Even if he isn't a white supremacist, and even assuming his intentions were not racist, his actions were racist and feed into white supremacist thinking.

Even if he never said "I'm going to kill all Asians", this is what makes his thoughts and actions racist, even if he was not out to kill Asians because they were Asian per se.

[malloc]

I hope the injury heals and the scar comes out much cooler than you're expecting it to.

Unlikely. There is no cool story behind it, only my carelessness and impatience. It will always remind me of my shortcomings.

[Linguoboy]

I hope the injury heals and the scar comes out much cooler than you're expecting it to.

Unlikely. There is no cool story behind it, only my carelessness and impatience. It will always remind me of my shortcomings.

That's why you have licence to make one up.

About a decade ago, I broke my foot in perhaps the dumbest way possible. When I told a friend of mine (who works in marketing), she was like, "We need to do better". And we brainstormed until we came up with a tale about kicking a baby through a window to save it from a bear. (Or from a fire? Perhaps it was from a bear on fire.)

[Rounin Ryuuji]

A scar doesn't need a cool story to look cool.

[malloc]

A scar doesn't need a cool story to look cool.

Does anyone actually think scars look cool, though? It strikes me that celebrities never have noticeable scars. Presumably they go to great lengths to hide any blemishes like that whenever they occur.

[Ahzoh]

I think it depends on the size and placement of the scar

[Civil War Bugle]

It's not very visible anymore, but several years ago I got a bad cut just below one of my eyebrows and was told I looked "badass" by an opposite-sex acquaintance sometime during the period when it still was stitched up. I would prefer to have had avoided the injury in the first place, but given that I had a wound which required stitches, I was happy to have one which apparently improved my looks.

[Ares Land]

Does anyone actually think scars look cool, though? It strikes me that celebrities never have noticeable scars. Presumably they go to great lengths to hide any blemishes like that whenever they occur.

How about Harrison Ford?

That said, yeah, there is an expectation that we should go through life unblemished and always looking like a Ken or a Barbie doll (as appropriate) -- it's not very healthy.

I got a few scars, and disappointingly not even one of them involves a shark, an orphanage or even a bear on fire. That said, people don't care about these and in fact rarely notice them.

[Moose-tache]

He did say "I'm going to kill all Asians." so there is certainly a race element in there

[citation needed]
I've been looking for this quote for days and can't find any evidence of it.

The attribution is from the Chosun Ilbo, a Korean newspaper.

Thank you for this. If my Korean is right., the article attributes the quote to "an employee" at Gold Massage Parlor, but I can find no other evidence that this testimony ever took place. More to the point, people in this thread have said that he shot Asians because he assumed that all Asians are sex workers. This makes no sense. He looked up "happy ending" massages on the internet and drove thirty miles to get to these places (fun fact about Atlanta geography: to get from Cherokee County to downtown Atlanta, you actually drive past some of the biggest Asian neighborhoods). This idea that the shooting was ultimately about race is pure speculation at this point.

A larger issue was pointed out by people who said that regardless of his internal motivations, he ended up killing Asians, and so that's what makes his actions racist. I agree (as I pointed out in a previous post) that it's not a coincidence that most of his victims were Asian, and there is Racism with a capital R at work here. But it's important not to conflate two types of racism. The inherent inequality within the sex industry is not a crime that can be laid at the defendant's feet in court. Charging killers with crimes that they can't be proven to have committed is a good way to let murderers go free.

The reason I'm so touchy about this is because I was really strongly affected by the George Zimmerman case. The prosecution had an open-and-shut case for murder 2 (He deliberately confronted Trayvon Martin, and during the altercation he deliberately shot and killed him). But he was charged with Murder 1, and the prosecution simply didn't have any proof of prior intent, i.e. that Zimmerman's intention to kill Martin came before the confrontation, not after. So the jury had no choice but to let a killer go free. That's the sort of tragedy that happens when prosecutors go ahead with charges they know they can't prove. I hope this guy rots in prison for the rest of his life, but we're not making that more likely when we attribute deep social inequalities to the personal motivations of specific individuals. Systemic racism is everyone's responsibility, and our responsibility can't be dissolved away by a killer.

[Linguoboy]

Does anyone actually think scars look cool, though? It strikes me that celebrities never have noticeable scars.

The moment I read this, I thought, "Sounds like a Buzzfeed listicle!" (This one is actually from Bored Panda, but that's the very definition of a distinction without a difference.)

26 Celebrities That Have Visible Scars And The Stories Behind Them

ETA: I shouldn't be surprised to find that Prince William has the poshest scar story I've ever heard.

[linguistcat]

Also for the most part, movies, magazines and tv show a very very specific form of mainstream beauty standards. Even if most people agree that those people are attractive (and not all do!), if you get outside of that even a little, the ideas of what is attractive broaden quite a bit. Get down to personal taste, and lots of people, though maybe not the majority, find scars cool and attractive, especially for guys, but even on some women too.

To turn to the actual use of this thread, my sleep pattern has pretty much stopped being a pattern. Even trying to get to bed at the same time every night, taking my melotonin to help me sleep sooner and all, I have woken at different times each day this week ranging from 4:30 to 10 am. It's not helping me with the rest of my schedule either.