How to Unleash Your Inner Bigot...

DUBLIN – “Rugs are oriental. Restaurants are oriental,” one of the boys corrected us over Christmas.

“People from the Orient are Asian.

“And by the way,” he continued, “using the word ‘retard’ is politically incorrect, too. It’s regarded as insensitive.”

Sensitivity may be a useful quality. But like government and heroin, it quickly reaches the point of declining marginal utility.

But we’ll come back to that… below.

2008, Redux

Billionaire speculator George Soros has joined those of us who anticipate another 2008-style crisis.

“Investors need to be very cautious,” he told an economic forum in Sri Lanka yesterday.

In particular, Soros reckons China is headed for more trouble.

China has a major adjustment problem. I would say it amounts to a crisis. When I look at the financial markets there is a serious challenge which reminds me of the crisis we had in 2008.

After losses last year… and with the Dow down 5.2% so far this year… the insiders are selling. The smart money is clearing out. You have to wonder what kind of money is still buying – the retarded money?

We don’t know. But we suspect we’ll see some direct intervention by the Fed before this phase is over. We suspect it will follow in the footsteps of the Bank of Japan and go “full retard” – buying stocks to keep the market from collapsing.

But this is Friday. And on Friday, we reach into the archives to fetch out something timelessly offensive.

A Cynic’s Guide to Insensitivity: How to

Unleash Your Inner Bigot

“We haven’t insulted anyone lately,” said our friend Addison Wiggin recently.

Today, we make up for it.

Not that we really want to insult anyone. As another friend, Christoph Amberger, reminds us, pecunia non olet. (Money has no odor.) Whether it comes from an Oriental or a retard, it smells the same.

But we have lately come to the conclusion that we live in a world of delusion. Even our insults are largely phony and preposterous.

We look down the list of epithets and slurs on the list of the Racial Slurs Database and laugh. The “slur count” has reached 2,163, and is growing daily. But most are just silly and ridiculous.

Did you know that it is considered a slur to call Canadians “51st Staters?” Or that in Russia, Jews are known as “cosmopolites”?

If that is the best bigots can do, we will soon lose all respect for them.

Bigoted Terminology: Slurs

Long-time readers will recall our mentions of bog-trotters, huns, frogs, canooks, and West Virginians.

The words sound so harmless; we use them affectionately, like calling a tall friend “shorty.”

On the list of slurs is “brown sugar” – used for a black woman.

Why would that be a slur?

We don’t know.

Likewise, “Eskimo” is supposed to be a bad word. We don’t know why. Nor do we know why “gypsy” is derogatory. Or why in Britain it is supposed to be offensive to refer to someone from Scotland as a “jock.”

On the other hand, there are some words even we dare not use. Some are vulgar or mean. And there are some that seem perfectly innocent to us, yet get readers worked up into a lather.

We refer to people from China as “Chinamen.” The phrase seems straightforward enough. But there seems to be a lot of people who don’t like the sound of it. They would prefer to be known as “Chinese people.” Or even as simply “Chinese.”

This troubles us on two levels. First, we are amazed that people think they have the right to police the use of nouns that others use to describe them.

If that is the case, we announce herewith that from this moment forward, we want to be known as a “smart-man” or “handsome-man.” We will regard everything else as offensive.

The other problem we have is that the words people find to describe themselves are not merely idle flattery, but also generally dull and barely grammatical.

Regards,

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning

Originally posted at Bill Bonner’s Diary, right here.

P.S. Bill expects a violent monetary shock, in which the dollar — the physical, paper dollar — disappears. And he believes it will be foreshadowed by something even rarer and more unexpected — the disappearance of cash dollars.

Many Americans don’t see this coming because of what psychologists call “willful blindness.” But Bill has taken the extraordinary step of assembling the full shocking details in a special report. To get full details on what Bill calls the “Great American Credit Collapse”, click here right now.