Re: Bowser
Incidently, I hope that Bowser takes great comfort in the fact that the move has resulted in Lee suddenly claiming that he "won" and using this "win" to declare that racism is a realistic and forward-looking philosophy. Ah, the Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again
Does it matter what Lee thinks? Do the ends justify the means? There are thousands of men in Japan who believe a women should walk two paces behind a man, does the fact that they believe that justify hating these people?
The enlightened® response to ignorance is compassion, not hatred.
Bowser, has on more than one occasion pointed out RL often flames folks mercilessly, more often than not Lindy, and to his credit, such injustice he spotlights. He bears no culpability for the thoughts of Lee or anyone else.
Bowser can take "great comfort" in the fact that he doesn't support a double standard, where folks whose ideas or beliefs are different from the norm, find themselves the targets of hate-rhetoric.
You don't combat hate with hate. Lee's views can only be changed by Lee. Once he finds that broad strokes deny one the pleasure of nuanced racial relationships between intelligent people, he will eventually come to realize how one can't use statistics or demographics to create anything other than generalizations.
I wish Lee had a chance to talk with Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell for just a half hour or any one of a million other wonderful, nice and intelligent people who happen to have a darker complexion than others. Denigrating the minority for the acts of the majority or judging a group based upon the statistical averages will only lead to a distorted perception of the whole. All Frenchmen are not rude. All Dutch aren't degenerate. All Iraqis aren't illiterate.
If Group A contains many 3's then it does not follow that every member of group a is a 3.
Likewise if one is looking for a particular number and one avoids looking in Group A because at a cursory glance there were many 3's, one may never find the solution to a particular problem.
Anyway, I think this sort of discussion is far more likely to change or broaden Lee's outlook than RL's flame. Just because Lee holds the view that wholesale discrimination is acceptable, one doesn't prove him wrong by turning around and discriminating against him and others like him.
;-)
Here I am, defending Bowser from his fellow liberals....oh the shame...the shame!