Sunday, January 06, 2013

Kos Paranoia: The Spanish Sign Outrage!!!111

Egad.

Basically the worst explanation of this is racism. Bad translation (by the Kossack, or by the folks who made the sign, or by the folks who posted it), some kind of mix-up with the English sign, a change of laws between the posting of the English and the Spanish signs...basically any hypothesis is more likely than racism here.

This is the kind of inanity that gives liberals a bad name.

(via Reddit...I don't slum around on DK...)

[Update: confirmation.]

11 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/h/HanlonsRazor.html

3:59 PM  
Blogger Pete Mack said...

Ummm. You sound like Fox News. Diary posts that don't make the front page are only incidentally part of Kos. They are statistically interesting: what fraction of Kos readers are moonbats? in the same way comments at Fox News are interesting (wingnut fraction)

6:43 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Could be, PM.

I'll happily leave that to others to judge.

From my perspective, it sounds like you're defending the indefensible...but perhaps reasonable folk can disagree. Or perhaps I'm being unreasonable.

I didn't make any claim about how representative this was of DK. The place seems like a kind of loony bin to me...but I'll admit that I basically only go there when I encounter a link from elsewhere.

6:46 PM  
Blogger Dark Avenger said...

Monitor DK for a week, Winston.

That would be more honest than using referrals from other sources, you know, 'selection bias' and all that.

12:24 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

HA! Ahead of you!

Checked it out this morning, and it seemed not notably wacky, but got distracted so I forgot to post about it.

Feel free to harass me if I don't follow through.

4:43 PM  
Blogger Dark Avenger said...

I'll believe it when I see it, Winston. Make it from 01/07/2013 to 01/14/2013, and then you'll have enough evidence to demonstrate whether or not DK is the left-wing version of FR.

7:42 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Well, you DO realize this would only be relevant to my post if I'd made a claim about this being *typical* of D-Kos. Which I didn't.

All I pointed out was that this post was stupid. Not that it was typical.

7:52 AM  
Blogger Dark Avenger said...

That's true, Winston, you just used it to smear liberals in general:

This is the kind of inanity that gives liberals a bad name.

11:05 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

So you say that the following proposition is false?:

That's the kind of inanity that gives liberals a bad name?

2:12 PM  
Blogger Dark Avenger said...

Nope, because, if you checked, they updated their story, thus dodging inanity that gives liberals a bad name:

FINAL UPDATE: The paper of record in Delaware, the Wilmington News Journal, finally has a story up on this sign saga:

For the last year, signs at two Milford School District playgrounds tell English readers that adult supervision is required to use the facility, along with a warning to play at their own risk.

Spanish readers get a much stricter message. They are told they need permission to use the facilities – and that they could be subject to police action if they don’t have permission.

“It’s very intimidating and very threatening,” Lewes resident Margaret Reyes said.

Dan Gaffney, a talk-show host at WXDE radio, noticed the signs Saturday and realized the two messages were very different, even though he doesn’t speak Spanish. [...]

Today, Milford School District Superintendent Dr. Phyllis Kohel learned of the signs. She told her husband to grab his tools so they could immediately remove them. They were in the process of doing so this afternoon.

“I didn’t want to wait,” Kohel said.

Kohel said there are signs at the school district’s middle school and high school that tell visitors in English and Spanish that they need permission to use the facilities or could be subject to police action.

She said she doesn’t know why that message was only put in Spanish at the elementary schools. Kohel said the signs have been up for about a year. Kohel started as superintendent this school year, after the signs were installed.

“I certainly assume there was not an intent to discriminate,” Kohel said. “We have a great working relationship with all of the communities at the school, and there is absolutely an understanding that no ethnic group will be discriminated upon.”

So good on the Superintendent for taking action and taking down the signs. I hope this incident sparks other towns and cities to review their own bilingual signs to make sure they are saying the same thing rather than offering discriminatory messages.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/05/1176645/-Outrage-in-Delaware?detail=hide

3:33 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Uh....I'm not seeing how this does what you say it does...at all.

7:10 PM  

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