Entry tags:

books/authors, omg mock people mock, person: neil gaiman, political wank, twitter, wanking inside the house

Tax deductables! Pencil necks! Thieves! HIGH SPEED CAR CHASES!
Well, all right, maybe not high speed car chases. So, the background: last year, Neil Gaiman, author of such lovely things as Neverwhere and the Sandman series etc., was contacted to speak at a library in Minnesota for a hefty speaking fee, which was paid for by a fund which (a) stated any leftover money would be lost if not used, and (b) was also not available for books, salaries, or other useful things. Neil Gaiman did so, and subsequently donated the speaking fee to charities.

All's well that ends well, right? Well, except that Matt Dean, the House Majority Leader, decided it was time to let his long-simmering grudge be aired to the world: 'Dean said that Gaiman, "who I hate," was a "pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota."'

Neil is... well, he's not well pleased. Nor is his Twitter.

"Sad & funny. Minnesota Republicans have a "hate" list. Like Nixon did. I'm on it. They also don't like capitalism. http://t.co/FObmLGo"

"It's strange watching a grownup high school bully in power. But the bully vocabulary remains the same. http://t.co/FObmLGo"

"And for those curious how and why I made it onto the hate list, what I wrote at the time on my blog. http://bit.ly/lMxsWQ"

"Any nice, sane Minnesota Republicans reading this, please vote for someone who isn't a bully with a hate list next time."

"You can listen to the Stillwater speech that all the Pencil-neck fuss is about at http://bit.ly/k3lA1B (You need to go down to point 2.)"

He also happened to link to Dean's blog, which proceeded to crash. Whoops.

So you'd think that Dean would realize his mistake and apologize, right? Well... sort of. Why?

His mommy made him do it.

The universe collectively facepalms.

(Bonus funny from the comments, courtesy from someone called Lucas: "Do weasel thieves steal just weasels? Or do they also steal ferrets, otters, and wolverines? In the case of the latter, how do they arrange for transportation?")

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	visp 2011-05-06 06:39 am UTC (link)
	Also, I think the genocide of the Native Americans is a lot more publicized than the oppression of Japanese minority groups. twitch In America, probably. Everywhere else... America is not the center of the earth. Our history is not more important than any others. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	sandglass 2011-05-06 06:43 am UTC (link)
	Of course not. However, American Westerns are/were popular even outside the US, and that doesn't change the fact that GNeil was a douche. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	visp 2011-05-06 07:30 am UTC (link)
	And American Westerns don't exactly give outsiders what I'd call an accurate grasp of our history. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	napalmnacey 2011-05-06 08:00 am UTC (link)
	I'm Australian. I've heard all about the genocide of the Native American peoples. Repeatedly. Shit, how many people saw the shitfest Dancing With Wolves? You'd have to be dead not to notice that the Native Americans have been treated like ground shit for few hundred years. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	moljn 2011-05-06 10:16 pm UTC (link)
	Echoing a lot of others here, but really, while I'm all for giving US-centrism the finger, I'd expect every adult European to know that the Americas were occupied long before Columbus got there and that the native peoples got well and truly screwed over. That's just basic European history. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	emily_goddess 2011-05-08 04:25 pm UTC (link)
	And as someone said above, the peoples who lived here were oppressed by the English long before the settlers started calling themselves "American". Seems kind of weird to argue that an English person couldn't be expected to know about it. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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