She really is dumb as a box of hammers. Stupid fucking douchewipe. Man, her kids are gonna have a few issues.

Funny. I’ve actually been to the Czech Stop. It’s located in West, Texas which is south (not north) of Waco by at least an hour (it’s on the way to Austin). They do baking there, but mostly the place is a gas station and truck stop. If you’re ever passing through, try the kolaches (kind of like a Czech danish). They’re not bad.

I didn’t get the impression that the locals would be the liberal tolerant sort.

I’m always surprised that quite a few people - even on the left - find Malkin attractive. I wouldn’t fuck her with Kate O’Beirne’s dick. Speaking of Kate, I see William Buckley died this morning. I’m scared to go to The Corner to witness the garment rendering that must be going on over there today.

The linked article that malkin is seething about is actually very interesting. Although most of the citizens who viewed the scene were either hostile to the supposed muslim woman or passive about it there seem to have been three patrons who stood up for her–one a guy whose son is serving in iraq and two women (one of whom was muslim) who not only demanded to speak to the manager in her defence but also walked out with her in a show of solidarity. The most interesting thing of all about the piece is that the writer included the viewpoint of a member of the “sting” team who was watching from behind the hidden camera. Her perspective included her own experiences of having been insulted, threatened, and even assaulted for being muslim and not knowing what happened after she herself was forced to walk out of stores/away from the conflict. She had always comforted herself with the (now seen as false) belief that other customers *would have supported her* if they’d only known what was going on. Now she saw that after you leave the store the other customers are quite likely to give the offending attacker lots of praise. On the other hand, she was moved to tears by the sight of the women who walked out of the store in solidarity with the actor who was attacked.

I think reading the actual article makes me more ashamed of malkin than I was just reading the usual snark. No one could read the actual account of the sting operation, and the experiences of the muslim camerawoman, and not be shocked and sickened by the pointless, childish racism displayed by the bystanders. And no one could read of the moving instances of customers standing up for her and challenging the actor/clerk without being truly proud of wht it is to be a thinking american fighting for all our rights. And yet Malkin loves the idiots and despises the true patriots. What a pathetic woman she is. When the day comes again that we are at war with people who look like Malkin, she’ll be looking around for those true patriots to stand up for her rights but she and her ilk will have driven them from the public sphere.

Malkin will now drive to TX and declare there is no such place as The Czech Stop.

You know, if Michelle hadn’t been fired by Fox she would have had her own 60 minute hate show by now.

Sadly, yes.

Sorry to be the contrarian here, but when did Sacha Baron Cohen take over at Primetime Live? Staging an event and recording the reactions of a few bystanders is news?

Here, I have an idea.

Let’s stage a situation where an actor posing as a prominent news person reports one bogus story after another about one of the candidates running for President of the United States. We can record the reactions of all the other “news” people and make a report out of it.

Am I the only one that cannot get passed Mailkin as an almost illegal immigrant hating her own people? I mean if she went to the GOP club, she’d be made to use the service entrance. WTF is wrong with that moron?

Am I the only one that cannot get passed Mailkin as an almost illegal immigrant hating her own people?

Along similar lines, I can’t help but wonder how she would have felt about torture when it was Filipinos getting tortured.

Perhaps we can get Michelle to audition as a high school cheerleader and secretly record the decision-making process amongst the local version of the Mean Girls.

You know, if Michelle hadn’t been fired by Fox she would have had her own 60 minute hate show by now.

Sadly, yes.

You know how when an 11-year-old girl is totally head-over-heels in love with a boy and she writes “Mrs. (Her First Name) (His Last Name)” over and over on a piece of notebook paper? When she got fired from Fox, she tearfully burned dozens of notebooks filled with “The Malkin Factor” on every page.

I could see if she was objecting to the tactics — I agree this is very Jay Leno territory. But Michelle and her mouthbreathers are upset that the piece is trying to make Muslims seem human instead of terrorists. If they had an actor playing a Muslim clerk spewing anti-Semetic insults to an actor playing a Jewish customer, they would be beating off to the video clips.

Well said, Aimai.

My own fallback, when I can’t think of anything more coherent on the spur of a WTF moment, is “Your mother must be VERY proud of you.”

It’s not even Jay Leno, it’s juvenile Gotcha. If I watched more of this stuff, I’d never leave the house for fear of being involuntarily included in some goddamned little impromptu psych test. I’m cynical enough about my interactions with other human beings, I can only imagine how much worse it would be if I suspected more of them were stalking horses for TV cameras.

As you note, it’s interesting that considering the various actual ethical problems with this kind of thing as a general tactic, that Malkin’s bunch grabs for the specifics (It would have been okay if it was a Jewish person! Or a W supporter!) in making their objections.

I could see if she was objecting to the tactics

I think she is objecting to the tactics. And whether she is or not, I am.

A network TV “news” organization has uncovered a handful of yokels who hold prejudiced, bigoted views about people who are different from themselves? Well, hell yes, then. Let’s take ol’ Bubba Dumptytruck who was minding his own business having a coffee and a strudel and out the sonofabitch for his hatefulness and xenophobia on the national teevee.

You know, I don’t agree with the people who gave a big thumbs up to the actor portraying the sales clerk. I’d like to tell myself I’d show the same bravery as the women who stood up for the actor-customer. But the network has used its vast resources to hold up to scorn a tiny handful of people who were going about their business and just stumbled into this little play-acting scene. Maybe these people do hold hateful views about Muslims–but without Primetime Live to stage this scenario, they likely would have just kept their opinions to themselves.

This isn’t journalism, it’s bullying. Americans believe hold all sorts of beliefs. Some of us–or our family members or our friends–believe things that are stupid or ugly or bigoted. I don’t think that warrants a national TV network staging an event to try to make them reveal themselves on a coast-to-coast broadcast.

But its much more subtle than “they’ve discovered a handful of yokels…” quakerinabasement. Actually, if you read the piece, its a fairly interesting look at the way muslims experience our silence in the face of social harrassment.

aimai

I object to these sort of gotcha scenarios as well. I think they’re very much counterproductive to the supposed purpose of promoting tolerance through shame — they make ordinary people feel targeted by the elite liberals and their fictional Lapdog Media, and they make the liberals and media people feel increasingly self-righteous and smug about the rest of the country, even though 99.9999999% of them weren’t involved in any of this.

I think it says enough about the technique that if Malkin fans staged any of the scenarios she mentioned in her post, such as the professor at a university wearing a W shirt, she and her minions would amplify every critical remark and screech for years about how it proves every liberal out there is Josef Goebbels’s spiritual heir.

But its much more subtle than “they’ve discovered a handful of yokels…”

Only if I’m not the yokel caught on camera.

aimai, I do understand what you’re getting at. My beef is with staging an act of intolerance using actors, then capturing the reactions of unsuspecting bystanders to make the point.

Without the staging, I doubt the bystanders would have gone out of their way to offend anyone. If keeping our failures to ourselves isn’t good enough, we’re all in trouble.

Shorter Malkin; Stop pulling back the curtain on my supporters! They no likey the sunlight!

It all boils down to what my mom once said (although, at the time, we all - she included - thought she was kidding):

“Never do anything in public you wouldn’t want Allen Funt to put on TV.”

Is it worth noting that silence doesn’t mean we’re on the side of the harassers? In that circumstance, I probably would have not said anything. Not because I hate Muslims, but because I have PTSD and I absolutely shy away from loud confrontations. I associate yelling with someone getting hit, and so when the volume goes up, I blank out. This doesn’t make me an intolerant yokel, it makes me someone still trying to deal with very bad messes in my past. Likewise it doesn’t make someone intolerant if they’re autistic or mentally ill in some way and don’t understand what’s going on. Nor does it make them intolerant if they have a hearing problem and can’t hear what’s going on.

Lots of people would be silent in the face of this for reasons that have nothing to do with bigotry and everything to do with the way people who are very much like each other interact.

It may very well be a moral failing, but should not be held up to ridicule by people who have no interest in understanding why specific people act as they do.

So this kind of gotcha scenario, aside from treating people like guinea pigs and aside from allowing possibly inaccurate generalizations, also has the potential to further screw up people who are already emotionally screwed up. After seeing something like this go on, you can bet I’d be headed back home to hide from people for the next couple days. I can’t imagine I’m the only one. And anyone who found out this was a setup and they individually were being judged on spontaneous reactions to unexpected situations may very well assume the same thing is happening the next time they see a situation that seems to call for their intervention, and that may very well make them even less likely to intervene next time.

I’m specifically referring to the ones who didn’t say anything, not to the ones who offered praise to the bigot actor, which is itself problematic in different ways as Quaker and Sophronia point out.

It underestimates people’s ability to sense bullshit and it averages out on-camera phoney with off-camera reality. Here’s a thought experiment - clerk hands someone a donut with their bare hands. Isn’t that risking an epidemic? Cholera? E-coli? Death to the elderly and the infirmed?
Where are the SWAT teams? Is anyone going to jail for that?