Words without meaning.

A friend of mine got all grumpy because of some fool online. I told him if he was going to let things like that get to him, he was guaranteed to be grumpy all day, every day. 

He made the mistake of commenting on a YouTube video. I know, I know, but he meant well. The video is was a clip from The Red Green Show, a favorite of mine, Canada's gift to the lost art of manhood. Here's Red telling us about his idea to look younger with a fake ID.

Funny? My buddy thought so. He commented something to the effect that he thought it was a great idea to use a fake identification to seem good for his age, but with his luck it would be of an Asian woman. Because my friend is a white man.

Some jackass pops right up and says "Whoa, racist much?"

Now, if you watched the video, which Asshat obviously did not, you see that joke right up front -- Red saying that when he was a teenager, his fake ID was not too successful because it "said I was a 27-year old Oriental woman." IT WAS RIGHT THERE IN THE VIDEO, and my pal was just playing off the gag. And for that, a kneejerk weenie in Mom's basement with a diaper on his head says....

He did defend himself, telling the moron that A) it was funny because he does not look like an Asian woman and B) watch the video. 

I said he shouldn't have bothered. Penectomies like this guy wait all day to drop the R bomb on people online; it's what they live for. Facts be damned. They're miserable people and they deserve to be, but don't let them be contagious.

Besides, it's a known fact that the word racist is now officially meaningless, much as Orwell discovered the word fascist to be by 1944. In both cases a serious term for an idea antithetical to human dignity has been used so loosely by hucksters and the enemies of civilization that it means anything, and thus nothing. We all know how the game is played now. If you see people as they look, you're racist. If you see people as human beings and ignore physical incidents like skin color, you're racist. If you strive to understand the experiences of people of different races, you're "othering" them or playing the white savior and -- guess what? Starts with an R... 

In order to use racism as a weapon, the concept has had to be defined up to the point where it can be deployed against those whose antipathy toward those of other races is nonexistent, or so minuscule it could not be detected with an electron microscope. Here's how the scale looks as used with other human blights:

Racism --> everybody is racist
Famine --> everybody is starving
Pestilence --> everybody has plague
Addiction --> everybody is continuously stoned
Murder --> everybody would kill other people if they could get away with it

When famine means I can't find my favorite flavor of Baskin-Robbins, the word means nothing. (Whatever happened to the Blueberry Cheesecake ice cream anyway, Baskin? Robbins?) And as K-Von, the world's funniest half-Persian comedian, has said, "Leftists are using the word racist as a catchall for everything."

Racism still has something vaguely to do with race, but calling someone a racist now ought to have lost all its punch. Like Orwell's finding of fascist, it basically means someone of whom I disapprove. Since it is most often fired off by pinheads with nothing better to do, or cranks, slicksters, or academicians, one cannot take it seriously anymore. It's probably worth considering that if stupid people who hate civilization attack you unfairly, you're probably doing something right.