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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • For me it’s a little less haphazard, but I’m guessing this person has lived something of a life of privilege and is probably significantly younger than myself.

    I had an ex who was arrested because a gas station employee accused him of not paying for gas after he declined the receipt. Grocery stores and department stores, I want a receipt because there’s too much bullshittery and asshattery going on at those types of places for me to go without. I want to see when Walmart charges me $5.99 instead of $3.00 like it said on the shelf and I want the money back on my card when I inevitably have to do a return. Restaurants, I want my receipt because unfortunately some of the folks who run the card will “accidentally” miskey the tip amount, and strangely it’s always in their favor.













  • In your original comment that I responded to, it sounded like you’re making the case that mixed and non-white people should start asking white people those questions as a matter of policy, and not just those times when a specific white person asked first. That’s why I was curious what you thought the effect would be.

    That being said, even if you meant that people should only return the question if the white person asked first, that’s something which would just be normal and instinctual for most folks, I would think? Like if someone I’m getting to know asked me my favorite color, I’d probably follow up with the same question after I gave them my answer. So it seemed a bit weird to see a call to action to do something that I would have otherwise thought most people would already be doing (at least in my experience, which I certainly am open to the possibility that my experience is atypical of what racial minorities endure).

    And although I am white, and thus I’m certainly coming from a place of privilege, I am a minority (lgbt) and have had my fair share of experience with inappropriate and/or weaponized questions, so I’m not coming from this from a place of complete naivety. I’m certainly aware that sometimes people will ask questions like “are you the boy or the girl in the relationship” from a place of authentic and unintentional ignorance, but that it’s quite often coming from people whose intent is to be derogatory.


  • Out of curiosity, can you explain what effect you believe this might have?

    I am glad to be wrong, but I feel like most white people in the USA wouldn’t be offended or even find that to be a strange question. They’ll just answer it as best they can: Florida, Sacramento, born in Boise but raised in Fairfield. Or if you press about ancestry, most white folks will gladly say French-German, Irish, etc and then maybe even ask you the same thing because they’re genuinely curious and because it’s a natural way for an otherwise polite, as you put it, conversation to steer once the topic has come up. Probably most wouldn’t even recognize if another person were asking that question specifically to make a point about racism/prejudice/etc.

    I really doubt that many white people have had these types of questions weaponized against them so unless they are made aware of how offensive it can be or how it betrays their own biases/prejudices (which we all have by the way), they may not even know. I would think that explaining how those questions impact you negatively in a supportive and understanding way will get you much further with most people than being retaliatory or intentionally inflammatory.


  • Understatement, I know, but I find this so annoying, and it certainly feels malicious.

    I was just commenting the other day how ridiculous it is that google search results literally serve up malware to people via paid ads. My neighbor was running into issues where her computer kept getting “infected” and a full screen scam would take control, blaring out a loud message that her computer was infected with a virus, that it was infecting microsoft’s servers, and she had to call them now to fix it.

    After investigating, I found out that these types of scams are stored as blobs on Microsoft’s cloud service, but the links are spread via ads in google search. When I tried searching for the exact search terms my neighbor was using on my own devices and my own network, I found out that google was serving me the exact same ads, aka sponsored links. They look like legitimate results for things that people search for, like showing what appears to be a link to Amazon when searching for a product, even the links will say “www.amazon.com”.

    Obviously I told my neighbor not to use Chrome and suggested some browser alternatives. I installed uBlock on all the browsers (including chrome) just to be safe. Then I showed her how to tell when things are ads, even when they are deceiving, and to never click on ads or sponsored links under any circumstances.

    But it’s definitely infuriating that they are serving up malware in their ads, don’t respond to reports in a timely manner, are getting people caught in scams that they allow to advertise on their network but then somehow object to people managing those risks by blocking ads from untrustworthy sources, like google.