Twitter rant: Read bottom to top
To begin with, a sock twitter account for Laura Ingalls Wilder (the writer of the Little House On The Prairie books) was giving out the tweets of her family for New Year's.

Here's the one for her Ma:

HalfPintIngalls Laura Ingalls Wilder:

Ma's resolutions: knit more; be less racist.

Well... anyway, a nineteen tweet rant from another user followed. It's sort of epic.

troposphere
troposphr troposphere:

@HalfPintIngalls @sippey 'Be less racist'? That's what I call a cheap, defamatory shot. I read those books 100s of times, and

the only racism one can take away is whatever pre-existed in your own racist, bigoted head,

wherein you ascribe to an individual you've never met character traits based on nothing other than their skin color.

'Ma resolves to be less racist.' HAHAHA, that's teh funny.

If you'd actually read the books you would know that a black doctor treated them when they were all sick; that they

had never seen a black person before. You're incapable of reading any text & not injecting your defamatory illogic

whether or not the text in any way supports it. Bcs you were never college-educated, only college-indoctrinated

and taught to label all whites as racist and evil, and that the Indians/'First Nations'/Native Americans never went

around scalping one another, because you were brainwashed into believing any person of color is morally superior

You know who needs to make a new years resolution to be less racist? YOU do.

You don't understand, and therefore mock, people who actually apprehend God (the REAL God, not your crappy morally

relativistic 1, which you actually created in YOUR own image, whether they lived a century or two ago, a millennia

or 2 or 4 ago, or are one of your own contemporaries. In this regard you are hopelessly ignorant and blind; having

no idea of why you are even here in the first place. Blind, misled, and believing only in your psychobabble B.S.

What else have you been "taught"? To smear & denigrate the WASP pioneers/founders who made this country

the greatest nation in the history of mankind -- actually, they were only instruments of GOD, which you do not &

will never comprehend, because you don't know God and in fact have been taught to be actively hostile towards Him.

People like you, who have no comprehension of the what or why of the most basic principles of what this country is

about are simply tools, useful idiots, in the hands of those who seek to destroy America -- the REAL America, not

the bastardized, self-hating, self-loathing, apologetic, Marxist/Fascist false Obamatopia you seek to compel your

fellow citizens into climbing aboard that space-shuttle-disaster-in-the-making piece of crap Marxist state where

you believe there will be no more HAHA-Racist-HAHA Ma's -- only sub-human fascist slave-drones like yourselves.

(please note, the reason that it's formatted like this is because it was a series of nineteen tweets, which can only be 140 characters in length and each time they had to include the name of the people they were addressing)

And what does our dear Laura Ingalls Wilder have to say?

Laura Ingalls Wilder
HalfPintIngalls Laura Ingalls Wilder:

@troposphr You really ought to have Dr. Tann look at that muskrat bite because you're foaming at the mouth.

And that's that.

I think it's hilarious, in the same way I think watching my cat totally lose it on a paper crane is hilarious, but the topic of racism and racism in the Little House books as potential for discussion is definitely unfunny, so I put it here.

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sorchar
2011-01-03 08:19 am UTC (link)

Hey, you know what, why don't YOU stop trying to lecture me about how to deal with a condition I've suffered with since I was a kid? The last time I checked, I hadn't been elected the NAMI spokesperson.

Do you really think I'm that clueless about the stereotypes of mental illness? Really? Guess what, I'm not. I've been dealing with the stereotypes all my life. I got to come back to school in my junior year of high school after spending six weeks in a mental institution, with everyone knowing where I'd been. In the 80s. When I was already the class freak.

I apologized for offending you and if you don't want to accept that, that's fine. But I won't be condescended to and lectured in an attempt to educate me about something I've lived with all my life.

For future reference, I will also continue to make jokes about obesity, epilepsy, diabetes, and being molested as a child. This is how I deal. You don't get to tell me I can't.

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justira
2011-01-03 05:13 pm UTC (link)

As far as I can tell,

sandglass did not say anything about how you should be dealing with your conditions. There's nothing wrong with dark humour or survivor humour, but it's a really tricky thing and has a lot to do with audience as well as presentation. This is a public space. As such, for one, the audience is not guaranteed to be well-educated in these matters and is likely to take the joke just like most of current culture takes the joke (see

sandglass's comment), or it will just zip right by their radar -- and either one contributes to the normalization of ablism. Or, your audience could include other people with similar conditions or histories, for whom this type of humour would be a source of trauma rather than healing. You have every right to dark humour as a coping mechanism, but your rights end where others' begin.

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	sorchar 2011-01-03 07:48 pm UTC (link)
	Here's the thing - nobody has the right not to be offended. We have the right to say we're offended, but we don't have the right not to be offended in the first place. And once again, lecturing me about the culture of ablism as relates to mental health is pretty condescending when I've been dealing with it for over twenty years. (Replies frozen)(Parent)

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