Thursday, October 05, 2006

prophetic

steph mineart is a proud gay woman who blogs at indyscribe as well as her own blog, commonplacebook. (she's also an extremist liberal if you believe gary welsh, though these days getting insulted by gary is like a badge of honor.)

a few weeks back, steph posted on indyscribe about a new law-enforcement-themed blog called indy undercover, which is purportedly written by a law enforcement officer. after examining the blog further, she came back to post an update:

UPDATE: After reading a good chunk of both the site posts and the comments from others, I'm dismayed at some of the virulently racist and homophobic attitudes expressed in both. The site goes beyond partisan politics and far into libelous territory.

Most people have the common sense not to blog about their jobs. No matter what the on the job circumstances, blogging about them doesn't help the employee, and it doesn't help the employer; it universally makes the issues worse. In this case, it's certainly not helping the city, the crime rates, or the taxpayers, either. If these were my employees, they wouldn't be for long.

she got a few comments, the first couple agreeing with her, and that seemed to be about it... until this week, when someone from indyu found out about her post, linking to it and flooding it with new comments from indyu loyalists. i'll let you read the comments to decide whether steph was "owned".

but then a funny thing happened. racist and homophobic comments started turning up on indyu, right there underneath the post claiming that indyu was not racist or homophobic... which is pretty much a textbook definition of irony. first some anonymous indyu commenter called steph the D-word, and then a couple screens down, another anonymous person posted a comment mocking sheriff steve anderson (who is black), pretending to be anderson and typing in the most absurd (and offensive) parody of the "black dialect" i've seen in some time. i took screenshots of these comments for posterity, in case "joe friday" wises up and deletes them: here's the D-word comment and here's the racist comment.

how big a homophobe do you have to be to respond to allegations of homophobia with a homophobic slur?

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