A couple of Washington football nickname columns

Interesting takes.

Rich Lowry, of National Review, and "(People) fabricate outrage over R***":

http://nationalreview.com/article/360614/liberals-fabricate-outrage-over-redskins-rich-lowry

Yes, the name “Redskins” is an anachronism, but it is a harmless one. It isn’t meant as a statement of how people should refer to Native Americans, nor would any rational person take it as such. ... In an ecstatic Pittsburgh, baseball fans have been waving black skull-and-crossbones flags to root on their surprising Pirates. No one stops to object that the Barbary pirates did terrible things centuries ago, as do Somali pirates today, and that therefore everyone in Pittsburgh is making light of murder and mayhem on the high seas. This would obviously be an absurd overinterpretation of an innocent team nickname and the good-natured spiritedness surrounding it.

Jonah Goldberg (syndicated), "No Harm, No Foul, Mr. Costas":

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/15/opinion/la-oe-goldberg-column-redskins-20131015

"Redskin" actually has quite innocuous origins. It was probably adopted from Native Americans themselves. And though it obviously took on nastier connotations over time and in some contexts, it strains credulity to believe that the team name was intentionally pejorative or that the fans or the ownership see it that way today. ... Ultimately, of course, this isn't a fight about words but about cultural politics and the imperative to scrub society of all offensive language(.) That fight will never end, and not just because some people always need to be offended by something.

 

I'll say it one more time: White people don't get to decide who gets offended by this.

 

I think Goldberg's argument about intent is largely a non-starter. A lot of people, probably most, don't have the intent to offend when they coin a pejorative word. Slave owners weren't intentionally offending when they used words like "n***" or "boy." Like R***, those words are de-humanizing, but the assholes who started using them wouldn't have imagined in a thousand years that a n*** might be offended by being called a n****. That's just what he is.

 

Didn't we have a thread on this topic already?

 

Sure would be nice if these folks spent their time covering issues that are having a bigger negative impact on the country.

 

Unfortunately, I see a red X in your post, Dick. Out of date browser and all....

 

It'd also be nice if indignant white people stuck to writing about things on which their opinion matters.

 

It would also be nice if sportswriters only wrote about sports in which they played.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-redskins-and-reason/2013/10/17/cbb11eee-374f-11e3-ae46-e4248e75c8ea_story.html

Might as well the spectrum of views from the VRWC.

 

That's a well-reasoned piece. May be the best argument against the term that I've read yet. But he's white so it's irrelevant.

 

I was talking about the "People Need to Lighten the Fuck Up" Army.

Make an argument for or against it. I don't care. But, don't tell the people the nickname targets how they must feel about it.