JustAnandaDourEyedDude
Addicted to Fun and Learning
Thank you for your candid feedback about my previous post in this thread. I am in agreement with you. What I wrote then, I wrote thoughtlessly and somewhat in a hurry, and immediately went shopping for groceries because stores close earlier now, thought while I was shopping that perhaps I should not have used such careless and potentially offensive language, and that I should clean up or delete the post entirely, quite apart from Thomas' strict injunction that there was to be no political debate at all in the thread. However, by the time I got back home, the admins of ASR had locked my ability to edit or delete any of my posts, though they were kind to not ban me from ASR entirely for a violation of the TOS. Thus that post has remained unedited to this day.
You guessed right, that it was not my intent at all to propagate stereotypes. I apologize to any who reads that post and feels offended by those stereotypes you mentioned. I would certainly retract those portions of the post if I could, but as the saying goes the internet never forgets, which is a lesson for me as this is the first online social medium that I have participated in.
At the time I wrote the previous post (as now too), the thread had a pretty ominous atmosphere, and I was trying for a not so gloomy or tense tone, while still recognizing and commenting on the serious goings-on, and thus the seeming jokes. I realized before I got back home of course that this thread is not meant for political debate, nor is it any part of ASR's mission to be involved in politics (or religion, I am sure), national or international. All I will now say about the political aspects is that I have empathy with regular folk everywhere in the world. We are all born into this world and struggle to live out our lifespans without much control over our circumstances. My empathy is also with the 7.5 million people you mention who were born and brought up under one set of rules that they grew to firmly believe in and in many cases passionately care about, and who now face a set of rules with some major differences that a great many of them find hard to stomach. None of the four jokes I posted previously are just jokes, they all embodied my serious reactions to the disturbing things I read in this thread about the unfolding situation.
Anyway, to counter the inference that the stereotypes mentioned were intended by me to be offensive stereotypes, I would like to say that in the many decades of my life no one has ever heard me make or repeat any jokes with derogatory stereotypes, neither ethnic nor religious nor profession-related such as doctor or lawyer jokes. Other than the one previous post, I stay away from politics too. None of my friends knows which way I cast my vote at the ballot box. During my decades in the U.S., I have had the pleasure of working with and being good friends with people who grew up in the PRC and in Taiwan (and Vietnam and the Philipines, too, and New Zealand, and Western and Eastern Europe too for that matter; forgot India, Mexico, and a handful of countries in the Middle East and Africa), in addition to people who are U.S. born. I enjoy the food/cuisine, music and culture of many nations, have a large collection of foreign movies including a great many made in Asia, and own music albums with songs in likely more than a couple of dozen languages, all of which I hugely enjoy despite not understanding any of the languages other than English and a couple of Indian languages.
I hope this long-winded post does not distract from the serious thread topic. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify the intent of my previous post. I would like to express my sympathy for people suffering everywhere.
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