And now for your Playa Moment…
With apologies to Crossfit and their Workout of the Day (WOD)…
I humbly present to you…(drum roll):
The Word of the Day (WOD)…(rim shot)
That’s right children, here at The Dialectical Playa, I like to imagine myself as a poor man’s, ultra-lite version of Mark Steyn’s “One-man Global Content Provider.” In my case, it’s more like that annoying Dude-in-the-bar-at-2am-who-won’t-shut-the-hell-up Content Provider. Regardless, I press on. While I put the finishing touches on quite possibly the greatest blog-post evah, I have deigned to leave my Olympus and mingle among you unworthy plebes, granting you just a glimpse of the brilliance that will soon overwhelm you with this, my humble WOD. This is kind of like the quest for fire, but I’ve decided to just give it to you out of my Promethean sense of duty and love for you losers so you won’t have to waste a lot of time trying to discover it. That way, you won’t be distracted by unimportant things like trying to figure out what the hell I’m saying and you’ll give me the attention that I deserve. So…
Today’s WOD is:latina, or for you hombres out there, latino. |
Popularized by la latina sabia Sonia Sotomayor, the term latina/latino is actually a misnomer. I work with a guy who likes to imagine us (I’m of Hispanic descent) as latinos though his Spanish is labored and very unfluentish. As for me, the only thing I’m fluent in is profanity. Even if I was down with the whole La Raza thing, I wouldn’t even speak the same lingo as my “brown brother” as my “latino” ass would be speaking Portuguese rather than Spanish since my heritage on my mother’s side is Brazilian.
To add to the overall level of multi-racial confusion at my job, my fellow proletarian and I are actually whitey white. His parents are Puerto Rican, but they are obviously pure-blooded Spaniards. While my mom is Brazilian, she is very Portuguese looking – as am I – though I inherited my Anglo-Saxon dad’s height as I’m 6’1″. When I visited the Portuguese Azores in the early 1990s on your tax dollars, everyone there looked like my mini-me since the older generation of Portuguese are hairy and short like Hobbits. Even the women looked like me, except with thicker mustaches and back hair.
Where the common misperception of the word occurs is in its limitation to only Third World, Spanish speaking people who look like Mexicans. For one thing, most Mexicans are actually Mestizo (descendants of European and Amerindian ancestry though predominately Amerindian in appearance) and Amerindian (who are descendants of Amerindians and are, uh, predominately Amerindian looking). If one is intellectually honest, latina/o actually refers to the Latin culture of Rome, which was spread by their empire throughout the Mediterranean and Balkan areas of modern day Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, and Romania; leaving an indelible legacy on those nations in regards to their respective cultures and languages.
Through Spanish conquest and colonialism, the language and culture of Rome was bestowed upon the subjugated peoples of Central and South America. In fact, one could argue that such an occurrence happened with Anglo-Saxon England due to the Norman conquest of 1066. The Normans were originally Scandinavian Norsemen led by the Viking chieftain Rollo and were bought off from raiding Paris by the French King Charles the Simple through the payment of coastal land at the mouth of the Seine River in 911 A.D.
This territory eventually became known as Normandy, with the Viking “settlers” known as Normans (a corruption of Norsemen). By William the Bastard’s era, any vestiges of Scandinavian culture had been subsumed by the area’s more dominant French culture, with the consequence that the Norse language of William’s ancestors had become replaced by the French of William’s contemporaries. One legacy of his English conquest was that he changed his name from the unflattering William the Bastard to the more suitable and grandiloquent William the Conqueror. The other legacy was the influx of Latin words via French into Old English, with the result that we use such Latin words as “attorney,” “bailiff,” “chancellor,” “baron,” “count,” “duke,” “army,” “artillery,” and “battle,” among many, many others. So all Americans can actually claim with the utmost sincerity that we’re all latinos and latinas now! Open borders with Mexico! Viva la open border! Woohoo!!! Or as they say in Spanish, “Woohoo!!!”
So why wouldn’t Nicholas Sarkozy say that he’s a “wise latino?” Probably because he’d rather be embroiled in a typical, French non-scandal given life by France’s typically scandalous Socialists. Personally, all this self-hyphenating racial identifying can be tedious and disturbing. I mean, no one wants to be white anymore, and much to my chagrin, I’ve discovered that I’m white. Wow, Obama and I have something in common after all.
Why would anyone want to ban this?
























A little FYI for FGM…
By the dialectical playa on July 28, 2010
The Guardian is reporting that Britain is suffering from an epidemic of female genital mutilation (FMG) as they predict that up to 2000 young Muslim girls will be “cut” this summer alone.
Unfortunately, The Guardian – in an especially hackneyed and pathetic way – ascribes this practice to a generally vague notion of social “conformance,” inferring that this extreme form of misogynistic violence could occur in any English home to any English family, much like being randomly selected for rationing by the National Health Service. It’s left up to the racist, intolerant, Islamophobic reader to determine that this “procedure” is in fact performed in “conformance” to Islamic tradition (The Guardian can’t have anything interfere with their precious golden calf of diversity and multiculturalism, don’t you know).
Islam is notorious for both its emphasis on sexuality as per the strenuous exertions in that regard by the Prophet Muhammad himself while schizophrenically suppressing sexuality through a number of bizarre traditions and fatwas. For example, it’s acceptable for a man to commit bestiality in order to prevent “fornication” with a woman, but if the abused animal is later slaughtered for market, its meat can’t be sold locally, though selling it in neighboring villages is permitted.
FGM Factbox
Islamic apologists usually argue that female genital mutilation predates Islam, as if that provides some sort of defense for why almost 130 million predominantly Muslim women have been victimized by FGM, with over 3 million girls, again almost all Muslim, at risk of undergoing the procedure every year. Nor does their defense account for the practice’s prevalence throughout the entire Islamic world. While female genital mutilation does in fact predate Islam – it was mentioned in a Greek manuscript, dated 163 B.C., as occurring in Egypt – so does incest. Yet the fact that the Ptolemaic Pharaohs’ practice of incestuous marriages between brothers and sisters never found itself appended to Islam is seemingly lost on them. Apologists for Islam also will point to the fact that FGM occurs primarily in Africa. This is also true. What is frequently ignored, however, is that the swath of mutilations that latitudinally bisects the African continent from Senegal in the west through Somalia in the east is made up of mostly Islamic countries with Egypt having the highest incidence of FGM followed by Sudan, Ethiopia (which is 32% Muslim), and Mali.
Female genital mutilation, especially when the vagina is partially sewn shut, is a particularly barbaric procedure that is designed to enhance the male’s sexual pleasure while, of course, eliminating any reciprocal feelings of sexual pleasure for the woman. The Guardian, noted for its nuance and tolerance, dismissed any possibility that the noble Religion of Peace ™ – with its burqas, stoning of women for simply being accused of adultery, honor killings of women for “apostasy” (usually for converting to Christianity) or for not remaining a chaste and humble Muslim, etc. – could even be associated with such a brutal practice. In fact, The Guardian achieves such duplicity by utilizing the standard straw-man of relativity among the monotheistic Abrahamic faiths:
And just in case you remain skeptical that FGM isn’t an Islamic tradition, Asha-Kin Duale will set you straight:
Fortunately, these young girls live in Britain and not some stone-age Islamic hamlet, as the British government, under Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone, is not only shouting “You are protected by this law in this land!” But is springing into impassioned, aggressive, and concerted action to stop this horrendous practice!
Wait. Maybe I need to hit a “reset” button or something, but why isn’t she talking about FGM? I thought the British government was going to focus on the real emotional, psychological, and physical trauma a primitive, dark age religion’s “promotion” of “unrealistic body images” is genuinely causing Muslim women, leading many to submissively wear burqas and undergo genital mutilation. Not the hurt feelings of some London teenager who doesn’t think it’s fair that she has a muffin top in tight jeans.
Really? Well, I’ll bet she also didn’t get “cut” those “many moons ago” either. Rather than focusing on reality, the British government is instead focusing on fantasy. While 2000 young girls will be physically disfigured and emotionally traumatized for life, the appropriately named bureaucratic lightweight Lynne Featherstone is instead concerned about whether a girl is trying too hard to look like an airbrushed supermodel’s magazine photograph. Instead of their quixotic tilting at the fashion industry’s airbrushed windmills, the British government could actually be doing something both pro-active and positive in preventing real childhood abuse – with its attendant, life-long trauma – from ever occurring in the first place. A good start would be for the government to place Kitemarks and health warnings against FGM outside all of Britain’s mosques and madrassas.
But what would be even better is for Britain’s multicultural fetish to be discarded on the ash-heap of history where it belongs because if immigrants were conforming to British cultural norms rather than Islamic ones, this would be a non-issue. But don’t fret as Britannia still rules the waves somewhat as Jason Morgan, of the London Metropolitan Police Department’s “Project Azure” FGM Unit says “empowering youth” is the solution. But since most of these crimes occur when the girl is young, it becomes more of a case of “overpowered youth” rather than “unempowered” ones that is the problem. As Britain is proving, when a society loses its self-confidence and relativizes itself to every other culture, no one is “empowered.” Sadly, even more young Muslim girls will be “cut” before Britain, if it ever does, finally snaps out of its long descent into night.
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