When I was little, I was routinely threatened with being sold to the gypsies. By my loving parents, of course. (Trust me, if you had raised me you too would think long and hard about selling me to… well, no. GIVING me to the first willing taker. The fact my parents resisted it goes to show you they were loving.)
This was all the more disconcerting since at the time, given the tight borders all over Europe, the only gypsies I knew of were in Enid Blyton’s books (yes, there were Portuguese gypsies, but not in that section of the country so much.) The threat went along with coming home and finding my suitcases packed and being told I was being sent to some boarding school with a name like “Ladies of punishment.” (Shuddup you.) And no, I don’t know if it worked. I know it worked on my kids. (World’s worst mother. Trust me.)
But here’s the thing, for the longest time, it was said that gypsies kidnapped children. (Though why they would, I have no clue.)
Of course, in the late twentieth century this was derided as racist. And surely none of us can understand why they WOULD kidnap children. All we know is that there are stories of children sold for adoption and children trained to rob, and that too is part of the gypsy legend.
Honestly, if 10 years days ago you’d told me that gypsies kidnapped children, I’d say you were nuts. They are strangers in the lands they live in which makes them suspected and unlike the other minority culture known to stick out, they aren’t usually industrious or productive of much of anything.
So, they are resented. (And sometimes with reason. For one, they don’t recognize land property as such and will squat in formerly productive lands, which – NOW – the EU won’t let you evict them from.)
But the last week has rocked my certainty. A blond little girl not of their stock has been found living in a Roma camp in Greece, and now another one in Ireland.
Does this prove that all Roma kidnap children – or traffic in drugs, or steal –? No, of course not. Again, remember we are the ones who do not engage in group guilt or group punishment.
This is not even race — even though “racism” has been invoked against anyone suspecting gypsies of anything – note they are DNA testing the second little girl, because she COULD have been born to those parents (even if not in the hospital they said.)
This is because though (at least this set) originating in Romania (and even there, perhaps being a culture that refused to assimilate into the settling cultures when we became agriculturalists) they have of course mixed with every population in Europe. They’ve also absorbed wholesale some groups during upheavals. In Elizabethan England, dispossessed farmers often became “counterfeit gypsies” and then joined real bands, over time.
I confess I’m not an expert on Roma, and I’m not even very well informed. Part of this is because the information available on Gypsies is wildly contradictory. (And yes, I know they object to the word gypsies. But if I don’t use it, half of you won’t know what I’m talking about. At any rate, I’m tired of the war on words.)
One of the best books I’ve read on Roma (Bury Me Standing) traces their origins to a sect from India in pre-historic times. But the article above seems fairly authoritative (as do other books) that they’re from Romania.
I’ve read books about the Roma that illustrate many of the admirable things about the culture. Yes, there are some, among them the looking after your own part. And honor and honoring tradition — both of which can be rendered bad or good in practice.
BUT I’ve also read an awful lot of books idealizing the Roma, too. Until travel became more common, they were often all that the Europeans had to do the turn of the “Noble Savage” and they did. They still do in one notable series of regency romances.
And as you can see in that article, the authorities refused to even CONSIDER that the Roma might have taken children. I can see it. These policemen went to the same European schools I did. There is the “this can’t be true, because people are prejudiced in this exact way.” There’s the “They’re reverting to their grandparents’ type.”
But look, just because people for years suspected the gypsies of stealing children, it doesn’t mean they don’t.
Yes, most of the time, historically, it was probably, again, just “the strangers in our midst.” And perhaps parents really gave difficult (or simply children they couldn’t support) to the gypsies. My parents had to have got the joke somewhere.
However, these days, any culture that’s international and peripatetic and extremely internally loyal is at risk for becoming involved in illegal stuff. When you add in their rejection of such things as the right of property of other populations (not unusual in hunting-gathering cultures. Or even early herding cultures. Ancient Celts — and modern Maasai — believe all cattle belongs to their people and therefore no other populations can legally hold it.)… you have to wonder if your blinkered grandparents were right SOMETIMES.
No, this isn’t a call for widespread racism, or even culturalism. One of the better politicians Portugal has seen had a body guard of gypsies. (It didn’t save him from his plane being sabotaged, but there it is.) They owed his family some favor way back. I very much doubt they were stealing children and dealing drugs and robbing stuff in his entourage. There have been notable athletes of Roma ancestry who are gallant and honest and whose idiosyncrasies amuse the public (the Portuguese star soccer player whose entire family camped on his lawn for his wedding – in a neighborhood filled with the equivalent of McMansions.) I don’t see any of them turning to drug dealing or child-stealing.
What I’m trying to grope for here is gypsies – and every other cultural and racial minority – are HUMANS. That means you find every type good and bad among them. Yes, culture can make them prone to some sins, but I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts some Arab fathers would rather cut off their own hands than honor-kill their teen daughters, and others use the culture/religion as an excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway.
There is this sickening tendency in political correctness to dehumanize the victims of past prejudice and make them into painted saints.
No?
You try telling anyone in the US that some black person is lazy. (This btw is a highly localized stereotype. In Portugal black people are held to be MORE industrious. Hence, in Portuguese you get “To work like a black” as an expression. Yes, you do get “to work like a Jew” too.) You’ll be lucky if you’re only accused of racism and aren’t forced to do the public apology dance.
Yet, undoubtedly some individuals who identify as black or have African features/coloration are lazy. Black people are made of the same stuff we are. (In fact, in the US most of them are what is technically known as “Caucasians” genetically speaking. We’re a very mixed people.) Some of them will be lazy, just as some of them will be industrious.
And yes – gives her Huns the beady eye – some Latinos and – particularly — Latinas are excitable. (Get over it, okay? I have a rolling pin.)
And, apparently, some bands of Roma go seriously to the bad and steal children. WHY shouldn’t you be able to say that? And why shouldn’t the police investigate those suspicions to begin with? (Saying they can’t hide a blond child is nonsense. There is hair dye.)
Isn’t it turning your ancestors prejudices on their head to hold that now, of all people in the world, these people will be exempt of what they were so long accused of? Isn’t it a form of prejudice, particularly when you attribute to some group the inability to sin? (Or to be racist, or to be annoying, or to be…)
I mean, I hate to tell you this, but any group over say ten people you care to define contains examples of just about every virtue and every vice humanity has come up with. Take science fiction writers for instance (no, really, take them. I don’t want them. For one they would eat me out of house and home, and that’s not an unmerited stereotype.) You’ll find people who are decent, kind and well behaved. And you’ll find the scum of the Earth. And sometimes, depending on the day, they’re the same people.
Political correctness is in fact a form of prejudice. It makes a group of humans into “other”. Just because you’re putting your virtue rather than your sin into the other doesn’t mean you make them any more human or care any more for them. You’re still treating a whole group of people as a) homogeneous and b) not human. You’re treating humans as things.
Worse, when you come across the bad apples – and you will. EVERY group has bad apples – you then either hysterically deny it, or, after a number of them, you turn and decide your ancestors were right after all.
Look, it won’t even take much. Take the situation above with the children and the Roma camps. Say that the second little girl also isn’t Roma. Then have a few more show up. It won’t take much. Five or six along the length and breadth of Europe will do it.
The rest of the Roma camps could be as innocent as lambs. Authorities might even continue to repeat “there is no such thing as gypsies who snatch children.” In fact, it’s worse if the authorities continue repeating that.
Five or six cases in all of Europe is all it will take for the next time a child disappears somewhere, the rest of the population to go nuts and tear up a gypsy camp and destroy everything and kill the inhabitants.
And then the authorities will talk about prejudice and clamp down harder, which will make things even more explosive.
The mechanism is akin to when you’re a kid and you fall in love with someone for the first time. If you’re like me, you don’t even know the guy. He’s just someone you see in the train, or the coffee shop, but you invent a whole set of qualities for him. In your eyes he can do no wrong, because he’s not a person but a sort of painted saint.
Then you see him do something bad. It doesn’t take much. Teasing someone. Or perhaps acting like an ass, as teen boys do, with his friends.
Because your painted saint image didn’t have any give, didn’t allow for him to be human, it shatters. You experience this as a personal betrayal, and now you attribute all bad things to him.
Integration from above, combined with a good dose of “noble savagism” to which European/Western culture has been prone since the Romantics (does any other culture in the world do this?) has left our society with entire groups of people treated like painted saints. Which is as bad as treating them as painted devils. And makes us vulnerable to the worst kind of racist/culturist outbreak.
Because one image shatters, you won’t go “Oh, they’re human after all.” No, you’ll flip to the opposite.
And which group – which individual – can live up to complete sainthood? The image will shatter. Sooner or later.
Start now to amend your thoughts, because I bet some political correctness has penetrated them. Impossible not to. Start thinking and talking of people, even cultural and racial minorities as HUMANS.
No group is composed exclusively of saints. We shouldn’t allow that dellusion to continue. Nor should we allow demonization to occur. We should think of and treat humans as humans, each different and each good or evil or yes.
Will that help?
I don’t know. Political correctness is a blight brought on by perversion of language and corruption of ideas. Language and ideas ought to correct it and hopefully save us from flipping into the opposite stereotype and into injustice and insanity.
If it’s not already too late.
According To Hoyt 
I’ve been following the story (in an English paper, for pete’s sake) and remembering how distrusted the gypsies were when we lived in Spain, and how very obviously they were ‘others’. In Spain, I think they were suspected because of the perception (based on personal experience usually) that they were extremely casual about respecting the private property of non-gypsies.
It seems in this case as if there might be a tie-in to a black market adoption racket. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least that there were elements in the international criminal community as well as individual gypsies in it up to their necks. Where there is a big profit for performing a service – such as providing adopted children to parents who want them very, very much – there will be people willing and eager to meet that need by snatching babies and toddlers and ‘disappearing’ them through a loose network like that described in the various stories. Law-enforcement and the media both pooh-poohs the very suggestion only gives the criminal networks additional cover.
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Cognizant of the dangers of relying on popular fiction as factual source, I note that in L’Amour’s novels we often see “Mover” as a slur. In any community there will be distrust of transients, if only because they are less familiar and are not invested in the status quo.
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Of course in L’Amour’s novels that slur generally came from folks he was portraying as pretentious and overly full of themselves. I also couldn’t but recall the character “the Tinker” who was almost certainly Roma and seemed to possess metal working skills that may have originated in India.
Of course in more recent history we have the “Okies” Oklahoma farmers driven from their land by the dust bowl climate event most of whom eventually wound up in California. Movers one and all.
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Well, some tinkers were Roma, but Tinkers were Irish. Confusingly, the Irish that Tinkers spoke sometimes included some Roma expressions; but then, so did the thieves’ cant and the Regency gentlemen’s slang. Horsetraders used to pick up a lot of words at horse fairs, particularly.
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The Tinker in the Sackett novels Lar is speaking of specifically states he is a gypsy in Lando. He is also described as dark skinned with yellow eyes a ‘strange looking man.’ But yes most tinkers were Irish, I suspect not only horse fairs were to blame for Roma expressions, but also the fact that for wandering travelers many times the most convenient (and safest if you had a good relationship with the Roma) places to stay were gypsy encampments. Because there was very little law to protect a landless stranger, he was pretty much fair game to whoever came across him, so staying with others in a similar situation, that would watch your back was only wise, there is safety in numbers after all.
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The Irish Traders also feature in The Sky-liners, albeit indirectly.
The observation about “movers” being a slur was not intended as endorsement, especially as most of L’Amour’s novels feature such movers.
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Regarding the “adoption racket” comment: there are reports of authorities in the UK intercepting a Somali girl being transported to Britain for the “harvesting” of her organs. If one can there be much doubt there are many? Somewhere Larry Niven is looking at his Future History date book and muttering.
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Organ transplant recipients need highly trained specialists to get the transplant and then highly trained specialists to treat them for the rest of their lives. You know how AIDS was first identified? A bunch of male homosexuals got diseases that were normally found only in recipients.
So that story seems a bit — iffy.
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Well, there is for sure an organ harvesting industry in the Third World, particularly in India; and there’s even a blood-harvesting industry in South Korea and other places, because young blood or kids’ blood really is chock full of good stuff. (Shades of Elizabeth Bathory, except that they have an incentive to keep the young blood donors healthy for repeat custom.) So all you need is a black market organ team, possibly even operating out of the NHS if they’ve picked one of the really notoriously not-paying-attention hospitals.
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You also need a matching donor and recipient, and the odds of a random stranger being a match for the hypothetical client of your “rogue black market NHS team” are quite slim. For this to work, either you need a way to sort through thousands of potential victims to find a tissue match, or thousands of potential customers paying for the privilege of just maybe, as a longshot, getting a matching organ. Or some combination of the two, but I think any way you do it this would balloon far beyond what any criminal conspiracy could plausibly keep secret. People talk. That’s part of the whole “being human” thing Sarah was talking about.
Organ trafficking works in India because organ sales are legal in India; the bulk of the necessary infrastructure for finding a customer willing to pay $10K for this kidney you happen to have, can operate openly. So all you need, in that environment, is a small group willing to lie about just how consensual the acquisition of that kidney happened to be.
Organlegging in the UK? Count me among the very skeptical, unless and until there are more details about just how that was supposed to work.
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There are several documented cases in the US of people being drugged and waking up packed in ice, in a hotel bathtub, with their kidneys removed. Those people have to be on dialysis the rest of their lives, and if I recall correctly one of them wrote of their experience in Readers Digest years ago. How they matched organs to recipients I have no idea, but presumably they had some method.
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Actually that’s an urban legend.
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Draw your own conclusion:
Evil Organ Buyers Victimize Children
By Wesley J. Smith
October 19, 2013 5:31 PM
The first case of a child smuggled into the UK to be organ harvested has been uncovered. From the Telegraph story:
The buyers should be asked: Is your own death really worse than having a child killed or maimed that you might live?
Some would clearly say yes. If that isn’t evil, what is?
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A prime example of why abolishing the death penalty is immoral. Some people simply need killing.
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My own conclusion: Urban legends have inspired people with delusions. The smugglers probably thought they could figure out how to hook into the organ sellers’ network.
One notes that in The Telegraph there’s a lot of talk about otherwise exploited children but only generalities about organ-legging. In particular, no case where a child actually was harvested.
(Not to mention that raiding Somalia rather than the British under class maximizes your chances of getting a dud — no match.)
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This isn’t the first such example that’s been uncovered.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9227137/First-case-of-people-trafficking-for-organs-uncovered-in-UK.html
That link is from last year, and involved an adult female.
I’d guess that it’s covered up by the victim being recorded as a “volunteer donor”– think like those wonderful stories of sons giving a kidney to their dad.
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One notes that even in this case, we have no record of successfully selling an organ — it might have been only an attempt.
And it’s not like murder, where you can hide the body. The medical requirements post-transplant make it much much harder to hide. (And it will be for the lifetime of the recipient.)
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That’s the “wonderful” thing about it, though– other than the money and the questionable willingness of the donor, it is a normal transplant.
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The thing is, the number of transplants is small enough that someone showing up either having taken himself off the transplant list or never having been on it will raise questions.
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As I said before– they could just “volunteer” to “donate.”
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Come to think of it, raising those questions is also known as “taking the patient’s medical history.”
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I’d guess that the Telegraph is being trolled.
Both cases are “broken” by the same newspaper; I can’t find any references that don’t track back to the Telegraph. Both cases seem to be based on reports by child-advocacy charity groups, not law enforcement agencies – the 2013 story mentions a “government report”, but provides no link or details on the report and depends on a charity spokeman to explain everything. No names or other verifiable details, and no explanation of the (as noted above) implausible logistics.
So, there are people who are upset that “Somali girls are being brought to the UK to be sold to desperate infertile couples” or even “…as sex slaves!” doesn’t get the level of outrage they are looking for, and have found that the Telegraph will buy it when they up the story to “…as walking organ banks!”. This last time they found a government report on a generic human-trafficking incident and are saying, “That has all the hallmarks of organlegging – the government can’t see it, but we can, trust us!” Possibly they have convinced even themselves by now.
Organlegging doesn’t happen in the real world, except in the limited case of using more coercive means than the law allows to arrange “voluntary” organ sales in places like India – and even there it is generally fraud and intimidation, not abduction and kidnapping. Claims that there are organlegging rings at work in the UK or US, whether of the “trafficked Somali girls” or the “wake up in a bathtub” variety, need to be backed by direct reference to specific incidents documented by appropriate medical or law enforcement authorities. Which isn’t going to happen any time soon.
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It was in one of the actual Urban Legend books… The wake up in the bathtub one. And while urban legends are always reported in newspapers sooner or later, yep, the reports are vague and in the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) zone.
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If so, then their Foreign Office Minister is, too:
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/combating-human-trafficking-business-and-human-rights
(Note, the gov dot uk site is horrible; I got as many results for organic produce as for ORGANS when I did NOT leave that last ‘s’ out.)
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“Foreign office minister” is kind of like a politician, right? And his lips were moving when he mentioned this?
I’d still like the name of an actual person who had their organs illegally harvested in the UK, or at least was subject to a clear attempt at such a thing. A copy of the police report shouldn’t be too much to ask. Would the gov dot uk site have that? Because one of the things governments do really well is compile lots of documents about anything and everything that happens under their jurisdiction.
This is classic urban-legend stuff. The part where a newspaper is fooled into taking it seriously, and the part where some politician mentions it in passing, those generally happen to a sufficiently popular or alarming urban legend. The part where, no matter where you look or how certain people around you are that this is real, you can’t ever find any verifiable details about an actual incident, not even the name of one person this alleged thing happened to, that’s the dead giveaway.
There’s lots of really unpleasant stuff associated with human trafficking. Some of that can probably be attributed to some Roma/Gypsies. But they aren’t organleggers, at least not here and now.
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I rather doubt they’re going to publish the names of women or children smuggled in as slaves or “organ donors.” Not a thing that would promote their continued health and wellbeing.
Five minutes worth of looking was able to show that it was not just from that news paper– in fact, the politician whose authority would cover it specfically mentioned it in a recent speech. That is not like an urban legend.
I’m reminded of both coydogs and of wolves attacking humans in America; in both cases, they were dismissed as “urban legends” long after anyone should have done so, because the required proof kept growing. With wolf attacks, it took one of the scientists being attacked by healthy wolves he’d been studying and surviving for him to stop insisting it never happened….
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How about the names of the convicted smugglers?
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I’m pretty sure you’ve noticed how they are about “Asian” criminals over there, no? And this is the same country where they bend over backwards to give criminals new identities.
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Gee, who knew, the UK version of the New York Times does read gov’t reports:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/human-trafficking-inter-departmental-ministerial-group-report-2013
The girl was from Somalia, it seems.
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I read government reports too. That one claims that a single case of alleged organ trafficking was referred to the UK government by an unspecified organization in 2012. A brief period of research found that oneof the organizations that routinely refers trafficking incidents to the UK government, for inclusion in the cited NRM statistics, is the same charity that in 2012 peddled an organlegging story to the Telegraph without any supporting evidence. And the NRM report does not indicate that any government body investigated or verified the claim.
This is not independent or official confirmation. This is one source telling the same incredible story to anyone who will listen, without ever providing any evidence any place you or I or Google can find it. That you can find the same story echoing back at you from a dozen different directions doesn’t mean that it is true. It just means that it is a good story. Most urban legends are.
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And after three instances of shifting the goal posts, I’m done. Apparently I was reminded of the “no recorded cases of a wolf attacking” for good reason.
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Well, apparently dismissing it is not working too well, since we’re getting the second level of defense. Like this:
Snagged it from here:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/10/22/239617821/roma-couple-charged-with-abducting-girl-missing-child-tips-pour-in
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There is this sickening tendency in political correctness to dehumanize the victims of past prejudice and make them into painted saints.
And, as you note, the same tendency to dehumanize the opposition. It undermines logic, makes lies of observation, and further isolates the adherents. Not a good path to be on, caught between two inhuman ideals.
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Pursuant to this thought:
Bile spewing assterisk.
Hat-tip Tam at View From the Porch.
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One day I’ll learn not to post links so I can avoid tripping the moderation switch.
Sorry for the extra work, ma’am.
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Limit posts to one link apiece to avoid the moderation queue.
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Ah. Many thanks.
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As a born and bred Southern man, hearing progressives talk secession just makes me smile. Bless their blackened little hearts. *grin*
Mad doesn’t help much when you’re in a cleft stick like we are now. Contrary to what you might hear from those gentlefolks at Salon, anger tends to impede cogitatin’. Leads one to grasp at anything that seems like a short-term solution. With depressingly predictable results.
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I would really love to see the vile progs secede. Just to see the looks on their faces when they realize how little of the country actually agrees with them.
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And how much economic production is not centered in their territory.
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Pfagh – I am still waiting for them to keep the promise they made in 2000 (and again in 2008) and emigrate to Canada … France … Cuba.
Just like their leader, Teh Lightbringer, they’re a lot more talk than action.
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sigh
if only.
The reason why the American Civil War went on for so long was that the North had the factories and the South had the military tradition. Let them secede. We will trample them and have a new Reconstruction. We will wade into the large states and let the loyalist (or red) portions form new states a la West Virginia (though California needs to be several). We will impose stern requirements for welfare and other goodies. We will purge their voter lists and deport the illegals on them.
sigh If only.
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Geez, warn us when you’re linking to Salon. Then I can just assume the worst and be reasonably sure I’m correct without actually having to give them traffic.
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Fair enough. Blind linking to Salon is probably pretty rude. I linked that in the heat of the moment without considering the consequences to good people of finding themselves in the sewer.
In my (meager) defense, that vitriol kinda needed to be experienced in the original for full effect.
Anyroad, abject apologies and pitiful pleadings for forgiveness. I shall endeavor to improve…
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Nyah – anyone dumb enough to click an embedded link without first hovering to see whence it leads deserves to enter the swamp that is Salon.
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They definitely came originally from India. Their language is the Indo-branch of Indo-European, though it split off earlier than any of the languages still hanging out in India.
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I suspect that if we ever get a good way-back-machine and could do the necessary research, we’d find that the Roma started in South Asia, then followed the pattern of so many Central Asian groups and worked west into what is now Hungary and Romania (like the Avars, Magyars, Huns, et al). They probably became associated with Romania because it was 1) close and 2) exotic compared to the rest of Central Europe. Plus they’re kinda like Turks, but not quite, so Romania fit the bill. Note that this is all theoretical and I’m not a specialist on this part of Europe, nor did I stay at Holiday Inn Express last night. :)
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Well, for a time they were associated with Egypt. Hence the name.
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And Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire, and still distant but known. And the Roma get around. And who knows? If enough people asked where my people came from, because, you know, I look and sound “different,” I just might start saying Egypt, Romania, from beyond the mountains, or other things. *shrug* I suspect trying to determine how the Roma got from South Asia to elsewhere is about as productive as trying to figure out conclusively which now Plains Indian group was where in 1550. Lots and lots of tales and possibilities and speculation, a couple stronger or weaker probabilities, but nothing that can be 90% confirmed.
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Oddly enough, Spain also produced Ceferino Jimenez Malla, who was martyred during the Spanish Civil War. When he was beautified, he was the first gypsy ever to be beautified.
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beatified
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Women (and in some cultures, Men) paint their faces in order to appear more beautiful than they actually are, to be beautified. Perhaps Mary’s typing was an instance of Freud’s Revenge? You did introduce “painted saints.”
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where’s that damn “like” button?
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It was here a while ago, but only for maybe an hour– took a good five minutes for the page to load.
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It is all a form of racism — doesn’t matter whether you attribute negative or positive traits you are still stereotyping based on group attributes, not judging as individuals.
It is also an aspect of Mass Media. When was the last TV mystery you watched where the “businessman” or “Fundamentalist Christian” wasn’t the black hat? Certain SF/F authors who need not be named are equally culpable of employing the “evil father” in place of evil stepmothers of the past.
Any way you figure it, judging people wholesale rather than retail is easy and foolish.
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Stereotyping on involvement in a group is not “racism”, it’s “prejudice”.
Racism is forming negative opinions of people based on perceived race.
And it’s not prejudice if it’s built in. Stating that Arabic Muslims oppress their women (or if you want to be more specific “Saudi Arabian Muslims” ) is not racist. It’s not prejudice, it’s a statement based on observation. It may be a value judgment, but it also encapsulates a set of demonstrable observations.
Saying “Gypsies steal children” is not racist because “Gypsy” isn’t really a distinct race. It is also (until now) unprovable. However “Gypsies” have a *LONG* history of being arrested and convicted of property crimes and have been heavily implicated in many fraud rings. Many literally believe that God allows them to steal from non-rom because http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romany_crucifixion_legend.
If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and has no visible means of support it’s unlikely to make good Hasenpfeffer.
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Sorry, my mis-spelling apparently confused you. I should have written the phrase “It is all a form of raaaaacism” to make the ironic usage clearer.
Making value judgments (“Arabic Muslims oppress their women”) based on the mores of one’s own culture (see: ethnocentrism) is fraught with intellectual risk. Arab Muslims might with equanimity declare that Christians abuse their women by failing to protect them properly. As the Ferengi once observed, Humans oppress their females by forcing them to wear clothing.
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You can cut through most of the “intellectual risk” by seeing how the society treats those that they claim to be protecting. Here’s a hint: “stoning” does not indicate a strong concern for the person getting hit with rocks.
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What’s the difference between a Rom buying a kid from a junkie parent, and either keeping it or selling it to someone with more money, and Madonna buying a kid from Nigeria or wherever, other than the involvement of the appropriate government bureaucracy?
This is not to absolve the Gypsies, they as a culture (not as individuals, that I have no extensive knowledge of). Have no respect for other people’s property, no respect at all for laws outside their tribe, and from what I can tell no respect for *people* outside their tribe.
(My MIL had a coat stolen by some gypsies children when she was a tot. Her sister chased them down and got the coat back. This is the limit of my family involvement with them. )
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Madonna employed official channels to perform her adoptions — that is a critical distinction. The nature of those “official” channels may render them no better than the Rom’s purchase, but pushed too hard and you end up in Buckley’s Quandary: Whether you shove the little old lady into or out of the path of a bus, either way you’re pushing little old ladies around.
Might as well ask whether there’s a difference between a tax assessed by the city council and one imposed by the local mafia don. Or between a cop ticketing you for going the wrong way on a one-way street and the local chapter of the Crips or Bloods charging you a toll for travelling their neighborhood.
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Generally speaking “protection” from the local Mafia Don will be less intrusive, less expensive, and will go to a more deserving person than giving money to, for example, the local school board, or about 80% (totally made up number) of city departments.
And if the Crips or the Blood are actually repaving their own damn streets, then certainly they should be able to charge for it. If the
Being able to seize and hold land is the historically approved method of building an empire.
For a short while we tried to rise above that, but the masses eventually have their way, and INSIST on the darkness.
Tell me, what is the difference between Rahm Emanuel and your average Mafia Don?
Between Pablo Escobar Gaviria and Barack Hussein Obama? .
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And just to be fair I should add between Nixon and Idi Amin, other than some dietary nitpicks.
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Nixon wasn’t murdering people.
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Neither was Ida Amin.
Murder is killing in violation of the law (roughly). When the law is what a despot says it is, then he cannot commit murder.
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But Idi Amin sure killed or had killed a lot of people.
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Idi Amin never bothered changing the laws. He just killed the people he wanted to kill. Other people who tried to do the same thing without his orders were still tried for murder. Ergo, he was a murderer.
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One presumes there is more lack of control. Though I wouldn’t entrust a child to Madonna for all the tea in china and some poor Gypsies despite lack of material wealth would undoubtedly make better parents.
By the by, did Madonna get children from Africa? I thought it was Angelina Jollie? (Not that it matters, but now it bothers me.)
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2308382/Madonna-Malawi-When-adopted-children-posed-saviour-So-President-accused-patronising-arrogance.html
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Also, this news story has brought out anecdotal accounts that they steal children in order to use them to beg for them. There are tapes of this child being forced to dance that lend credence to the theory that she was part of the show.
If an official adoption proved to be a way to employ child labor, I suspect there would be a similar uproar.
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You mean like milking cows, gathering chicken eggs, and helping with the washing?
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Yeah. If it can be shown beyond a reasonable doubt that was why you got the child.
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I am minded of one of the premises of Pete’s Dragon.
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Regarding that “boy on the bus” syndrome — recent research suggests that male and female humans develop the neurological circuitry for empathy at different ages, with the boys getting there a few years after the girls. (Girls apparently get there about the same time they develop the ability to birth babies — who’ld’a thunk!)
Implication: girls are naturally going to be attracted to slightly older boys and acquire an early habit of seeing boys their own age as being asses.
It’s almost as if Evolution predisposes us or something.
Not that I am interested in attributing general categorical characteristics to individual components of that class. Exceptions occur and it matters how narrow the Bell Curve tails are, after all.
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It also means that boys will hit an age when they are about as strong and agressive as a “full grown man” but are much less likely to feel empathy with “the enemy” however that is defined.
Ya’ll are smart enough to run down those ramifications.
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This is especially problematic when boys lack an adult male role model (aka: father) to … encourage … self-restraint. And yes, the neurological development of judgment and impulse control also develop later in boys than in girls, rendering treating them as essentially identical and victims of sexual role imposition by society problematic.
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“The mechanism is akin to when you’re a kid and you fall in love with someone for the first time. If you’re like me, you don’t even know the guy. He’s just someone you see in the train, or the coffee shop, but you invent a whole set of qualities for him. In your eyes he can do no wrong, because he’s not a person but a sort of painted saint.”
I think they made a movie about that. It starred Sandra Bullock, and Captain Eisen (from Wing Commander 3) was her boss (RIP).
While You Were Sleeping
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“When I was little, I was routinely threatened with being sold to the gypsies. By my loving parents, of course.”
Different societies come up with different solutions to the issue of extra/unwanted children. In the USA we tend to abort them pre-birth (or sometimes after). Back in the late 1960’s I visited a country where they simply kicked them out of the house to live or die on the streets. The capitol had 40,000 homeless kids on the street when I visited.
The Oliver Twist story was lived out many times over in that city, and pickpocketing was rampant.
If the police caught a kid stealing, they typically hit them over the head with the night stick and dumped them in the nearest trash can. Some survived and others were disposed of with the trash.
There were “orphanages” that took in the best looking of the homeless kids and raised them to be servants of the rich. In theory this was indentured servitude not slavery, and the kids could in theory work off their debt and become free. Don’t know how that worked in practice.
I was with a group that helped the first “American style” orphanage in the country run by a couple of American nurses.
I have been told that things have gotten much better in that country with respect to the homeless kids, but I have not seen for myself.
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Brazil?
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My first thought, as well.
I’ve read some completely unsubstantiated rumors about how the savage-child population was dramtically reduced in short order. I hope somebody has a happier story of the solution.
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Columbia
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I’ve been joking about that here, with a couple of older friends. The stolen heir who comes back as an adult, and maybe gets some help from his adoptive gypsy family when he regains his inheritance from the evil uncle who originally sold him to the gypsies – well, I have actually even read a couple of old stories with that plot, but it used to be the cliche image when people here talked about old adventure movies or novels. And yes, I got the ‘behave or gypsies will take you’ from older people too when I was a child.
Finland does have a Roma minority, and they can be bit of a problem. They do steal somewhat more often than Finns do, but the bigger part of that problem are things like the fact that they do still have the idea of vendetta in their culture so they kill more often than Finns do (mostly each other), a lot of them live on social security, partly because they have a culture which makes them unemployable for many jobs and a lot of them refuse to bend even a little when it comes to their customs, and they can be difficult customers for the social welfare office because of those customs too, for example you can’t necessarily put two Roma families in the same apartment house. So they are not overly liked.
But we have also started to get the Romanian version here during the last years, and they seem to be an actual problem. Lots of criminals seem to come with those groups, and they are a lot more organized and brazen than most of our homegrown ones. One example is the fact that before them there pretty much were no pickpockets in the cities. Now there are, during those months the Romanians are here. Fortunately most of them leave for the winter, though. Frankly, I’d prefer to keep them out of the country, if that was still possible.
What can you do with people who act kind of like a mistreated teen who has decided to go all bad, for real, as a form of rebellion? Most attempts to be nice towards them seem to be taken as a show of gullibility, or weakness, but punishment may very well only reinforce the rebellion and drive them further outside the society they live in but refuse to accept.
And yes, that can end real badly if the majority gets sufficiently fed up with them.
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By the way, one of the customs of our homegrown Roma is the women’s skirt. Nine meters of black velvet, usually worn with a blouse with lots of ruffles and lace. The girl has to decide whether she wants to start wearing it as a teen, and as far as I know the decision is supposed to be binding, once a girl starts using the skirt she is supposed to keep using it for the rest of her life. Also something which makes them very noticeable, no need to make guesses based on facial features or coloring.
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And yes, with the Finnish Roma different families can also be rather different, some can be willing to adjust, some not at all. They seem to be a very clannish society, what family one has been born in can make a big difference.
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According to John Scalzi, if you are not using the phrases politically correct/incorrect ironically, then you are masking racism, homophobia and Misogyny
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Yeah, but who doesn’t?
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Whatever.
I think he (Scalzi) peaked with Old Man’s War.
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I bought that novel because it was advertised as resembling Heinlein, but I still haven’t managed to read it through. Not anywhere close enough, not to my taste.
I used to read his blog occasionally, a few years ago. He does have some talent for snark, unfortunately too often directed at targets I do not agree with so I quit going there.
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Calling that a “peak” is like calling the highest point in Florida a “mountain”.
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I am no longer interested in anything that comes out of that man’s mind.
I would be more direct, but I do not want to offend the hostess.
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I believe the proper response is “blow it out your ear.”
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For you, maybe. I’m much more profane.
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I am followed by two young copy cats, even if only one of them is easily understood without practice.
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I’m sure that that is not the last area in which you are a far better example than I.
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I could do without being made an example of, honestly.
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Do you hear mothers saying: “If you keep making that face, you’ll end up looking like that man.” behind your back too?
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*heh* No, less amusingly with me it’s when I screw up they go “well, you follow the rules all the time– so making your life hell will have a REALLY big effect!”
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Incidentally, hearing a three year old say “It is understood” is so adorable that it will nearly ruin the stern-and-angry vibe you have going.
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Extensive in-depth research studies have determined that words. inserted into young ears at leisure during off moments will inevitably be returned at the most inappropriate and socially awkward occasions.
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Since both the subjects of racism and child copycats is being discussed I must tell the story of a friend of mines little boy (now approaching adulthood). When he was little his parents used to watch COPS every evening, and he would dance around the living room singing with the theme song. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it was usually filmed in the inner cities, so the vast majority of the criminals arrested were of African descent. He was about four years old and in the grocery story with his mother when he seen a black man for the first time, standing in front of them at the checkout line. He immediately started bouncing up and down, pointing, and singing out, “Bad boy, Bad boy…”
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Locally the story for dealing with recalcitrant children is to drive to Lynchburg, home of the Jack Daniels distillery, and buy a used whiskey barrel. You seal the child in the barrel and feed them through the bung hole until the age of sixteen. You then look in to see how they’ve done and decide whether to open the barrel or drive in the bung.
For a brief period when they were preteen the wife and I would make veiled references to our two urchin’s older brother, an entirely fictional entity who’s behavior was so bad that we had to get rid of him. Didn’t work for long, but for a while there we had them going.
It has often been said that it takes a parent to truly appreciate jokes about child abuse. I can relate. I must confess a certain Schadenfreude when the boy with kids of his own calls up and relates their latest transgressions. I generally manage to refrain from laughing out loud, but not always.
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Sweet revenge. Well, I never had kids, but that is the image I try to console my godson’s mom with, sometimes. :)
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Just today, my little angels have jimmied the door to the kitchen at some point during the night, stolen the tortillas that were for breakfast, gotten my “special treat” chocolate spread, stole the toothpaste (thankfully, didn’t eat enough to poison themselves– I acquainted myself with the OD amount the first time they did that), broken into the stuff they’re not old enough to use yet, scattered the kid clothes that nobody fits right now all over the place, squeezed several dollars worth of fruit paste into the cup holders in the car, jumped on the loaf of bread in the cart, tried to chew open the wall mending putty, and jumped on my broken foot roughly a thousand times.
Please note, I’m familiar enough with theology to point out that Satan is an angel…. *Growl, roar, prowl, rage*
The Baby Boy Baron is darling, though.
*sigh* Like my folks say: they’re adorable because it helps keep you from killing them.
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” Like my folks say: they’re adorable because it helps keep you from killing them.”
How do blind people reproduce?
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It’s not the reproducing that is the problem.
Possibly they can’t see the children in order to kill them?
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Verbal adorability.
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Speaking of urban legends ….
;-)
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I’ve read people being snitty about Maria being called a “blond angel.” Perhaps they should remember that theology.
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Duct tape them to the ceiling fan.
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My brother has called before, growling, “How did you get my wife pregnant?”
I’m afraid I was unkind enough to laugh at him as I replied, “Oh, no, big bro. They’re all yours!“
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?
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What I’m trying to grope for here is gypsies – and every other cultural and racial minority – are HUMANS. That means you find every type good and bad among them. Yes, culture can make them prone to some sins, but I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts some Arab fathers would rather cut off their own hands than honor-kill their teen daughters, and others use the culture/religion as an excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway.
Depending on the culture, some desires are easier to indulge in than others…and frequently the “everybody knows they do this” stuff will include that.
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My parents threatened to leave us on the side of the road if the backseat fighting got too bad. And there were a couple times they left us (collectively – it only took once per individual child) on the side of the road. Naturally they pulled back over to the side of the road a few hundred feet ahead, and walked back to get us….
However, the king of this was my grandpa, a very genial guy, who once left my mom on the side of the road during a family trip out west. Actually, he brought her out of the car bodily and left her hanging by her hands from a branch of a hangman’s tree.
Yeah, my mom was a leeeetle bit rambunctious in her day. And so was Grandpa.
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I think the equivalent in the US is “run away to the circus.” I had wondered if the stories of child abduction attributed to elves could be when children were stolen by rovers. (Roma or other types of rovers). I know that in Africa, there are stories of whole families and tribes terminated, but the children of a certain age spared and adopted into the tribe. I think this might have happened in the Americas too– Interesting thought. Roma’s might not be stealing all of the lost children, but a lot of children are still being stolen.
Plus this particular band did steal at least one child. I find the “we were given the child” not an adequate defense. Unfortunately this will make Roma’s the scapegoats for all stolen children– which we do know from cases that many children that have been recovered in the Western States were kidnapped by pedophiles.
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Before he retired, a relative had a sign in his office saying that any children left after closing time would be sold as slaves. He had at least one mother try to take him up on the offer. :) He’s also been known to remind parents that while it is illegal to sell children, the laws about rental, lease, and long-term loan remain vague and subject to varying interpretations.
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Hah … I had a gig in a high-end department store (I worked in the fur salon as a temp employee of the concession which maintained the salon) and now and again I had reason to admonish stray children that at closing time, all unattached children would be rounded up by store security and kept in the store orphanage until they were old enough to be put to work as sales associates. Usually this was enough to attach the children to the parental unit as firmly as if they had been velcroed there, but now and again there was a child and/or parent who said, “Really?!” and looked as if they were considering it as a viable career option.
My daughter (she also worked in the salon briefly – hey, nepotism, what is it good for!?) had a more direct stratagem; she would tell the sticky-fingered young sprouts that the coats – chained to the racks and us sales associates having the key – were actually only sleeping. This was because if they woke up, unchained, they might leap down and eat small disobedient children.
I enjoyed that brief gig.
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And then there’s the lovely sign: “Unattended children will be given a puppy and an espresso.”
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One of my faves. Very much putting the ball back in the parent’s court.
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A drum makes a wonderful gift for somebody else’s child. As do addictive toys that suck the life out of batteries.
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We actually bought some drums for our own children. Then again, these are *real* drums, not the plastic crap often sold as children’s drums, and have nice mellow tones to them.
The quality of the sound is as important as the volume. If the kids are going to be loud, I find it much nicer if it’s in tune.
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My vet has not only that sign, but every parking space in the lot is labeled as some workers, with a sign saying “Cathy’s parking spot, all others parking here will be given a kitten.”
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Made me laugh TXRed
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I know that in Africa, there are stories of whole families and tribes terminated, but the children of a certain age spared and adopted into the tribe. I think this might have happened in the Americas too– Interesting thought. Roma’s might not be stealing all of the lost children, but a lot of children are still being stolen.
There are a fairly large number of well documented examples of the “kill everyone but the kids young enough to train and old enough not to be a trouble” (sometimes women were “spared,” too) in American tribes. The old movie trope wasn’t out of the blue.
I don’t suggest looking into it unless you’ve got a strong stomach. I wish I could forget some of the first hand accounts I read.
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Yep – there is a collection of captive narratives by Gregory and Susan Michno – “A Fate Worse Than Death.” I bought a copy, and read it as part of the research for my frontier novels. I actually couldn’t read more than about two or three chapters at a stretch. Every one of them began with a stomach-churning account of murder, robbery, abduction and rape.
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Then you get stuff like Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream solemnly discussing how few women were gotten back from captivity — not only completely omitting that a good number ended up in New France marrying Frenchmen (or — horrors! — becoming nuns) but also arguing it proved the niceness of the tribes. Without even a mention of Stockholm Syndrome.
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Yea– I learned some of this when I was in South Africa. I heard from soldiers who used to guard the South African northern border. You needed a strong stomach after hearing some stories that happened in the 70s and 80s.
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I’d like to force feed these stories to some people who go all googly over African leaders. Tom Smith rhapsodizing over Nelson Mandela made want to spit.
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Me too–
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Not just tribes. Consider the Mountain Meadows massacre.
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*muses* Part of why I like this place is that the far more frequent but non-PC examples are brought up, and only later on are historical one-offs mentioned, and we’ve yet to hear a “well CHRISTIANS are the same with their Indian Schools!” (Heck, this group would probably recognize that “zomga, how horrible, you taught them how to be able to make something of themselves in the dominant culture” is somewhat different from killing all the men, raping the women and enslaving the children.)
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Twenty or thirty years ago, an effort was made by a number of historians and others to track down as many accounts and survivors of the Indian schools as possible and get the Indians’ stories. To the surprise of many of the researchers, a number of the former students said, in essence, “Yeah, it was rough, and could have been a lot better, but we learned a lot and ended up more successful than we would have been otherwise.” Some of the survivors who still detested the schools allowed that most of the Anglos and other teachers had meant well and had thought they were doing the best they could for the children.
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My grandfather did run away with the circus, so there is a grain of truth to that line.
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lol– I thought of it– several times. Instead I ran away to the Navy (a family tradition).
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There’s a British politician, the son of circus people, who ran away from the circus to join the accountants.
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Wait, Terry Pratchett DIDN’T MAKE THAT UP?!?!
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That was my thought too.
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Oh, yeah. Indeed, I heard of the politician in discussions of Pratchett, giving his source.
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That is too cool!
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My great-grandfather (born in the 1800’s in the rural South) was supposedly always worried that his blond granddaughter would be kidnapped by the gypsies. (This would have been in the 1950’s, and there were still “hobos” around at the time because one broke into their house. And I’ve also heard tales of the gypsies in the same area around that time period and a little later.)
There was a TV show not too long ago that had a story line involving gypsies in Florida . . . . I think Julia Roberts’ brother was the “boss” of the gypsies and his blond niece was trying to leave the lifestyle.
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Finder was the show– It only lasted a season sadly.
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Sarah, You forgot to add “and I know how to use it,” to the “I have a rolling pin.” :-)
Foxfier, my adopted sister used to call her Mother, and say’ I’m sorry.” Her Mother would reply. “For what?” Her. “Everything.” :-) I’ve long been convinced that until you really _know_ how it can happen, you’re not really a parent.
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I have been known to call up and tell my mom that I understand something or other that they use to do….
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“The threat went along with coming home and finding my suitcases packed and being told I was being sent to some boarding school with a name like ‘Ladies of punishment.’”
;)
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“Yet, undoubtedly some individuals who identify as black or have African features/coloration are lazy.”
There may be a medical component to that stereotype. Poor blacks in the southern USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries rarely owned shoes. Southern USA is home to a number of parasites including hookworm. Hookworm larvae in the soil enter humans through their feet. Hookworm parasitism of the intestines causes anemia, adverse metabolic effects, and neurological problems. People with severe infections would be too fatigued and ill to work hard.
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A simpler explanation (and not in any way contradictory) may owe to the fact that a slave has incentive to not be industrious, a fact our enlightened advocates of Marxism elide by proclaiming that in their new world there will be no property so there can be no slaves.
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There’s no property except that we all belong to the government.
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But poor whites in the same time period also couldn’t afford shoes. If anything there would be a link to poverty rather than race.
I would lean toward a more socioeconomic explanation. Blacks at the time would never be able to advance in society beyond a certain -low- point. So there’s little incentive to work harder than the bare minimum necessary to provide a basic level of comfort.
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I recommend Black Rednecks & White Liberals by Thomas Sowell for a more thorough explanation.
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Making this same point is how I made my far-left sister cry, something that I am quite proud of.
My personal struggle is to avoid conflating the fact that Liberals do not think with the idea that they cannot think. I’m far too likely to presume that anyone with liberal opinions is an idiot useless for anything other than mocking for my personal entertainment rather than someone who can be convinced.
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Reading this about the Roma- or the Gypsies- brought back some old, old memories.
I come from what a lot of folks call white trash (even though we are people of swarth). Mom grew up in a trailer, and my grandparents moved around a lot. There were folks who said, with some reason, that the boys in that family weren’t to be trusted. A quarrelsome, uncouth, stealin’, violent, untrustworthy bunch- that was my uncles and cousins. Yes, there was- and is- a lot of internal family loyalty. But to much of the rest of the world, we were a nuisance. I have cousins who live that way to this day- one in particular I wonder how he’s not got himself killed yet. We’ve all become used to being stereotyped.
There are reasons why we stereotype, and it can be useful in a limited way. Guy in uniform with a blue bar with five stars, staggered, on his fruit salad? Probably less likely to be the guy that tries to blow up the plane than the fellow with the ratty beard, crazed stare, and Steve Urkel pants. Ask any bouncer. Or veteran policeman. There’s a reason and a use for it. It’s pretty well hard-wired into our brains (visual cues are the strongest for us).
We still have to temper that instinct to stereotype with some good ol’ practical wisdom lest it get out of hand. That is why we treat people as important in and of themselves, and actions in the context they occur. Only after sufficient experience can we reliably say. “this guy is a total d-bag,” or “this gal is trustworthy.” Our criteria for trust must be rational: if this guy is telling me all sorts of stuff that makes me feel good, but is stealing from me, trying to hit on my girlfriend, crapping on my front porch and kicking my dog, he probably ain’t a decent sort. This is but one problem I have with nearly all politicians past a certain level. At some point they reveal that despite what they say, they actually think I’m a clueless idiot with no concept of history.
Our founders had this sort of wisdom when they set about creating this country. The balance between the stereotype and individual judgment is what I mean, not thinking their people were idiots with no concept of history. *grin* There was no intent to create a nobility or any other sort of protected class, all men are created equal and considered so under the law. The state, the very machinery of government (the… collective? *chuckle*) is subordinate to the individual. It exists to protect his rights and freedoms from oppression both foreign and domestic. At least, it is intended to do so.
The law does not care whether you’re a d-bag or a nice guy, it works on actions not intents. That’s an idea that has practical application for every individual in his life outside the court system, too: we try and judge folks on what they *do* not what we might think they *are.* So the folks I read about in the news that allegedly kidnapped that child? They should face kidnapping charges if the evidence demands it- not because they look like Gypsies.
We have a rich culture of self-reliance and stubborn individualism in these United States. I’d be happy to see more folks leveraging that and not blindly following the nearest rabble rouser. It’s not too late. I even think there’s room for cautious optimism. I never thought I’d see a progressive talking of patriotism and love of America- but I saw it today. Maybe that’s a step in the right direction. Whether they (or we) know it or not. *grin*
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For whoever’s still following this thread: there was actually a very recent genomic analysis of the ancestry of the Roma. It’s on an open-source journal, so anybody can download the article and read it. Or at least decipher it. ;^) Long story short: the Roma are indeed descended from a relatively small group of people who fled India, in about 1150 A.D.; but since then, they’ve acquired largely European ancestry. The article itself is here — http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0058633
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I figured they’d have mingled along the way.
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It’s all those wives of squires, bosses and the like who run off with the Gypsy Laddie (aka Black Jack Davie.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZzmPbzwZ1o
Not that there’s anything wrong with that — I gather it is a staple of something that starts with “p” and rhymes with thorn.
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