Transcription:
I just received your superheated letter in regard to the bill I owe you. You said you thought the bill could have been paid long ago, and you could not understand why it wasn’t. Well, I will enlighten you right now.
In 1907 I bought a saw mill on credit. In 1908 I bought an ox cart, two timber carts and a breach loading shotgun. I also bought a wire tester and a Colt revolver and two fine razorback hogs and all on the same installment plan. In 1909 the mill burned down and didn’t leave a thing. One of the hogs died and I loaned the other to a Son-of-a-bitch who starved him to death. Then I joined a church. In 1910 my father was lynched for horse stealing. A railroader hooked up my daughter and it cost me $75 to keep the little bastard from becoming a relative of mine. In 1911 my boy caught the mumps and they went down him, so I had to have him castrated in order to save his life. That summer I went fishing and the boat overturned and I lost the biggest G-D catfish you ever saw and two of my sons drowned, neither of them being the one that was castrated.
In 1915 my wife ran away with a heavy-hung removed and left me a pair of twins as a souvenir. Then I married the hired girl to keep expenses down but I had trouble getting her to go off. I asked the doctor and he said to excite her about the time I thought she was ready. That night I took the shotgun to bed with me and when I thought she was ready I stuck it out the window and pulled the trigger. The wife shit in bed, I ruptured myself and killed the best cow I ever had.
In 1930 I burned out and took to drinking. I didn’t stop until all I had left was a dollar watch and kidney trouble. For a time all I did was wind my watch and piss.
The next year I decided to start all over again so I bought a manure spreader, a binder, a threshing machine, all on credit. Then along came a cyclone and blew them all into the next county. My wife got a dose of claps from a traveling sales- man, my youngest son wiped his ass on a corncob that was covered with rat poison and some Son-of-a-bitch denutted my best bull.
At the present time if it costs me a nickel to shit, I’d have to puke. Yet you say you can cause me trouble. Listen, trying to get money out of me would be harder than trying to pack butter up a cat’s ass with a red hot poker, but mister you are welcome to try.
Edit: I do not condone the usage of slurs in the original post but left it in for historical accuracy.
The level of intelligence in these Lemmy comments is nauseating, everyone losing their minds over one single word 🙄
The whole transcript is entertainment, y’all just relax & read & soak in some vibes from the past. It’s entertainment, mmkay?
Cool n-bomb you got there, would be a shame if someone downvoted it
It’s representative of the original author. You should not censor history. Don’t shoot the messenger, as they say.
This was written before I was even born. Just sharing it as is, no point in editing what was literally scanned in and converted with OCR software.
So reproducing racism is ok if someone else at a different time wrote the original?
I honestly dont see your point.
But dislike like ratio on my comment seems to indicate I am in a minority here
Will you get mad at Wikipedia for not blurring the images?
If they dont contextualize, yeah
I think the disagreement is about whether presenting a work as-is is reproducing that work. I would say no-- unless you gain partial authorship by modifying it in a substantial manner, you are just presenting it. I think presenting works that contain views that we disagree with today can be (but is not always) okay. This gets pretty close to the line as it is being presented seemingly in line with its original intent as a joke and not as a form of commentary (I see why you might call that “reproducing” it). Overall it does not bother me since I have a fairly high tolerance for historical nastiness being presented rather than removed, but I can see the argument that presenting it as-is is providing more harm than value in this case and a quick censor should have been applied.
In my personal opinion a good way would be to contextualize it, for example in the Body text:
“Here is an old text I found, it contains a nasty slur I dont endorse in any way but I leftbit in for historical accuracy”
Its not uncritically using a slur or editing out, there is a middle ground
That’s probably the most reasonable approach, yeah
OP here, I have since edited my post to add such advised disclaimer. 👍
So if I tell that story to my friends, without contextualizing, it wouldn’t normalize the usage of that word?
Or is the difference for you that he posted a photo, not just the text?
Interesting question. I think it being a screenshot does matter to me, yes-- I view screenshots of other sites as a separate artifact from the text body. This could be because they are clearly separated from the “voice” of the speaker, or because they cannot be edited as easily. The slur in the image was merely mildly surprising, yet I was notably relieved to see it was not reproduced in the text of the post. I guess it’s kind of similar, in my view, to listening to a song that has the n-word in it vs singing a song that has the n-word in it.
Understandable take, although op stated he didn’t remove it in the body text, it was automatically removed by Lemmy
Oh, I don’t feel great about that…
Also, lemmy has content filters?? TIL.
So reproducing racism is ok if someone else at a different time wrote the original?
I’d suggest you don’t read Joseph Conrads eponymous book “Heart of Darkness” or a bunch of other books for that matter.
To censor the racism of the past is to deny that it happened and to revise history. Life can be ugly. If we don’t preserve the ugliness, it creates the illusion that we haven’t grown as a society. It’s important to remember the way we were so we can know how far we’ve come.
True, but it would be nice to add that you dont want back to this ugly time if you choose to post such slurs, as this is sadly not a far Ben anymore in most parts of the world
Might as well censor all the Epstein files too right?
Oh wait…
Thanks for your perspective and understanding 👍
I was not one of the dislikes nor the likes on your comments, you are entitled to express your opinion and thoughts, and that’s okay with me.
I do agree with you, it is a very derogatory and offensive word. But given the context and the timeframe the joke letter refers to, why bother censoring it out altogether? At least Lemmy caught and auto-censored the transcribed text I posted.
Honestly, I scanned and OCR converted this probably like 20 years ago, and kinda blindly posted it from my old files after seeing the recent post about the 97 year old lady thankful for the transistor radio she was given.
My bad that I forgot the original text contains such a derogatory word until after I posted it, otherwise I might have censored the word out in GIMP, but its posted now, and I don’t see any point in bothering to repost a censored version.
Besides, at least to me, it would seem like listening to a bleeped out censored song, when you wanna hear the original lyrics, no matter how offensive.
I do hope you have a good day, and hopefully aside from the bad word, I hope you otherwise got at least something of a laugh.
First of all: I appreciate your calm and unemotional response, I really do, this is not the norm online, and my initial comment was quite snarky, so thank you for that.
To the matter at hand: I think you misunderstand me if you think I am stating cencorship (I would rather call it editing, but that’s irrelevant) as the only viable or even my preferred option.
I just think dropping it without context is not the way, a short comment “I condemn/dont like the usage of slurs in this post but left it in for historical accuracy” in the body text would be my preferred way of dealing with it, this would be possible with an edit, no repost needed.
Its okay to not be of the same opinion, especially because I am not being discriminated with the word, my opinion doesn’t matter as much as the oppinion of people actually discriminated against.
If you choose to drop the n-bomb without distancing yourself from it, I will choose to write snarky comments criticizing it, not more, not less.
No bad blood here, I wish u a wonderful day as well :)
this really didnt take very long at all, and my phone sucks. like its a gigantic piece of shit and this was still not remotely challenging. laziness is a pretty lame excuse to be, at best, a useful idiot by normalizing the use of slurs. fix it or fuck off lol
Yeah homie, this was written before I was born, and I scanned and OCR’d it around 20 years ago. Sorry I forgot it contained a bad word, I posted it blindly after the recent post regarding a 97 year old lady from 1982 that was thankful for the donated transistor radio.
So what? The joke of a letter is set in the timeframe of the 1930s/1940s or so. So fucking what?
Why not censor everything from the Epstein files while you’re at it.
Oh wait…
racial slurs aren’t “a bad word” you absolute semen sock, they are the currency of dehumanizing the survivors of the white supremacy you are actively enabling. you are whining about people’s reactions rather than simply fixing the problem, which, since i gave you the image, would take far less work, so i can only conclude that your objections are in bad faith, and you simply would rather leave it in. you are the problem.
Oh, so we should censor all the Epstein files too right?
Let’s just erase all history while we’re at it, while the child f***** is still in charge.
Fantastic idea, let’s just erase history.
I didn’t write it, it is what it is.
Just because racism existed doesn’t mean it needs to continue to exist. We can pick and choose which things will be part of our culture. You choose racism.
You can’t pick and choose what happened in the past. Censoring the word today doesn’t change that it was said back then. It’s important to preserve the past. To censor the word today is to deny that it was said in the past, to deny the hate that existed then, to deny the struggle that was required to get to where we are today, where that word causes outrage and isn’t accepted.
I don’t like seeing it either, and it makes me uncomfortable when I see it in a Steinbeck novel or a Tarantino film. Does that mean we should destroy any works that make racist remarks? I think it’s good to be aware of our history, it all its ugly forms. Otherwise you’re just pretending that such things never existed, and then how we can hope to improve?
I am not an advocate of trying to erease it from history either.
Doesn’t mean one needs to reproduce it though.
There is a middle ground, which is to contextualize/frame it.
Uncritically using the word in posts (even if its a repost of some old document) isn’t the way imho.
WOULD BE A SHAME if it started off with a year to contextualize it. I dont know like someone who was already having issues in 1907. Man that would put the reader in a frame of mind of who is talking in this piece.
I’m sorry that you choose to place all your focus on one single word that upsets you and not just overlook it and get a chuckle out of all the rest of it. Again, I didn’t write it, just sharing it as is.
You must be real fun at parties…
I chuckled about the most part, I commented about the part I see critical.
Let’s look at an extremer and therefore clearer example: If I post a picture of my bookshelf, with mostly fun novels but also “mein Kampf” in it, without contextualizing or stating that I dont agree with it and have it for example for research purposes, it just normalizes having “mein Kampf” in ones bookshelf. Doesn’t matter if I am a Nazi or not, if I post Nazi stuff, I should get downvoted.
Stating that I am not the original author and the book is from a time where being a Nazi was a good thing doesn’t make it better.
Same goes here, although less dramatic.
And yeah, if someone at a party makes racist jokes, I call him out for it, I would rather be a buzzkill than an enabler.
Also looking at your profile you are a white middle aged american man with a truck, so not the kind of person who is discriminated with that word, so you getting buthurt for being called out for it paints a picture.
Yes I’m white and partly Native American. The truck? That belongs to a black man, I’ve been his roommate and mechanic for the past 8 years.
Both he and his sister laughed their asses off when I read it out to them, despite the N-word.
Yeah, we are in agreement that you can talk in private the way you want, if all are concensing adults.
You know how your friends are, they know how you are and how you mean it.
Possible that they reacted that way, because they know you and know you are not a (purposely) racist person and mean them no harm.
Saying things in public is a different story though. We know nothing about you, for all I know you could be the biggest racists just trying to find excuses to post racist shit.
After reading all your comments this possibility seems quite small to me, but I took effort to come to that conclusion.
A white supramacist could read your post and get the sense, that others are like him and agree with him that using that slur is ok.
So I think many would appreciate it if you at least distance yourself from the word, so its clear you dont endorse it (what you did in the comments after being asked about it).
That’s my 2 cents
Just don’t feed the trolls.
Literally me. Except the racist part.
Yeah, for whatever its worth, my apologies for that part, but clearly I didn’t write this, it comes from the old Xerox days before the internet was even a public thing.
Ok but you did post it knowing the word was in there
That is actually incorrect. This document was transcribed by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software around 20 years ago, and had since sat in one of my old files folders for about 2 decades.
I saw the recent old scanned post from 1982 yesterday regarding the 97 year old lady that was thankful for the gifted transistor radio. I found it funny of course, and it reminded me that I had this old scanned letter, along with the transcription, sitting somewhere in an old files folder.
Sorry I didn’t bother nitpicking and proofreading every last word before I posted it, I just remembered ‘hey, I have an old funny document, where the fuck did I store it?’
It was only after I finally found and posted it that I went back to finally read over it again, and of course by then every other commenter here started losing their shit over one word in the middle of a large word salad that unfortunately happens to be offensive, which was originally typed before I was even born.
TL;DR - No, I was not aware that derogatory word was present in the original image at the time I posted it, I had simply forgot after 20 years. It’s not the end of the world my dude, but at least Lemmy’s filters automatically removed it from the transcribed version.
Yeah I saw the other comment right before I saw this response. Sorry I wasn’t psychic and knew you didn’t bother to read things you post.
It’s a funny post, despite the slur.
Yeah, but considering how often people will grab memes from Tumblr or whatever with swear words censored out, you could have taken the literally 5 seconds to do the same.
We don’t need to let the hate and racism of the past occupy our present any more than it already does. Be the change you want to see in the world, some old racist once said.
Fun fact: The pixels can’t hurt you.
If the scanned image upsets you, well at least Lemmy filtered the bad word out of the OCR transcribed text.
Try to laugh once in a while, it helps relieves stress.
Yeah, see, my life is full of joy. Seeing a racial slur casually used doesn’t add to that joy at all.
If not laughing at a racial slur makes me somehow trouble, then hey, I guess I’m the worst.
lol nobody would think it’s yours, don’t worry. That’s some shit a “greatest generation” parent would tell their teenage boomer kid and then cackle.
