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White People like Co-opting Japanese fashion and pretending they invented it (re: #97 Scarves)

If you are a man wearing a scarf in the United States, you are probably gay.

I cannot stress this enough.

Clander (the jackass who writes "Stuff White People Like"), however, thinks it's somehow trendy for white people to wear scarves. He further postulates that white people will wear scarves not only in defiance of prevailing fashion sense, but also of impending summertime weather. In other words, Clander says white people wear scarves all the time.

This is horridly incorrect--except, of course, you're a redheaded Irish transplant living San Francisco like Christian Lander himself. In that case, scarves are mandatory. So are Priuses and New Balance shoes and all manner of communist dalliances prevalent in that Shining Sinkhole by the Sea.

In the rest of the world of white people, you don't wear a scarf unless you're a woman. I've yet to see a white person wearing a scarf, and I, too, live in California--just not the sinkhole part. Clander could've railed against the white people (specifically, white American) inclination towards wearing giant-lettered university sweatshirts, sports jerseys for teams halfway across the continent, or flags of foreign countries.

But he didn't. Again, Clander wrote his latest blog entry the easy way: He looked at himself in the mirror, noticed he was wearing a scarf, and wrote that down.


God damn it, Clander.

At this point, I'll offer a counter-claim to Clander's latest communist creed:

Japanese people like scarves. They wear them all the time. In all circumstances, in all weather. In Japan, this is not considered gay. It's normal.

In fact, Japanese men do many things that Americans would consider gay. They wear scarves, sip sake from tiny tea cups instead of plunging it into beer, and watch soccer--sometimes in person.

Let's analyze the following photo. You'll note that the two Japanese people are needlessly wearing scarves indoors. The white people in the photo are not wearing scarves.

Japan loves its freaking scarves. It also loves latching onto obscure American popular culture phenomena, like Nightmare Before Christmas. In a pinch, Japanese people will combine the two into an unholy union of sorts, as with these Nightmare Before Christmas scarves.

Fighting global capitalism (re: #96 New Balance Shoes)

Clander is such a jackass.

He writes that white people like New Balance shoes because they're produced in Maine by overpaid union shlobs, not by impoverished Vietnamese children (like Nike shoes). Clander thinks paying Vietnamese kids $2/hr to sew shoes is a bad thing. He also thinks most white people agree.

Clander is dead wrong, at least about the immorality of paying Vietnamese ten times the country's average daily wage to cross-stitch sneakers:

• Vietnam's average monthly household income: $32
• Average monthly income at a Vietnamese Nike factory: $59

By buying Nike shoes, you're almost doubling the buying power of Vietnam's poorest residents. Kind of puts a damper on the anti-globalism fervor of "Stuff White People Like", doesn't it?

Whoops!

In contrast, the average wage in Maine is $16.90, or $33,080/year. In New Balance's factories in Somerset, Maine, workers are paid $15,904/year. That's HALF the going rate in Maine.

That statistic bears repeating: In Vietnam, Nike workers are paid TWICE the nation's average pay, but in Maine, New Balance's worker are paid HALF the state's average pay.

Nike: 200%.
New Balance: 50%.

Nice try, Clander. You fail at economics.

Diagnosing "Yellow Fever" (re: #11 Asian Girls)

Christian Lander over at "Stuff White People Like" makes a lot of assumptions:

• White people are educated.
• Advanced white people are college-educated.
• Highly-advanced white people were college-educated in California (preferably the San Francisco Bay Area, preferably at UC Berkeley), birth place of the sustenance upon which “Stuff White People Like” depends: hipsters, Internets, the Toyota Prius.

And while most white people in California go to college, ALL Asian people go to college in California. A white college student will often go years without meeting another white person, especially if the white person in question is a computer science major. For sexual release, the only option other than becoming celibate or hiring “adult” actresses and filming homemade pornography is to date Asian girls.

Of course, the relationship must be hidden from the Asian girl's parents, lest they become enraged at her dating a White Devil. Her Asian male friends must be similarly ignorant of her new beau—prone to rage at the thought of a white person stealing another one of “their women.”

Christian Lander forgot about San Diego (re: #91 - San Francisco)

"The City of San Francisco has a very multicultural population that ranges from white to gay to Asian."

"No matter how much you have offended someone from San Francisco, you can always make them feel better by asking them how they feel about Southern California. They will instantly talk of how it is filled with crime, pollution, hegemonic culture, and the wrong kind of white people"
-Christian Lander (#91 - San Francisco)

The comments on this post at "Stuff white people like" generally support clander's rants against the southern, more populous, more Latino part of California. Sad. Is "hating on Latinos" something else white people like?

Why do I say that?

• San Francisco is 44% white, one-third Asian, 14% Latino, 7% black
• San Diego is 49% white, 25% Latino, 13% Asian, 7% black
  

Their white populations are proportionate. Switch the Asians and Latinos, and the racial composition of the two cities becomes identical. Evidently Christian Lander doesn't think too highly of Latinos, nor of the white people (the "wrong kind") who choose to live near them. Not surprising from a communist ginger with a book deal.

(San Francisco's median income is $67,000. San Diego's is $56,000. I guess "clander" doesn't like poor people, either?)

Communism (re: #94 Free Healthcare)

There is no such thing as free healthcare. There is communist healthcare, in which money is stolen from productive citizens and given to moochers who can't handle a skateboard, and normal healthcare, in which productive citizens pay for their own broken limbs.

"Stuff white people like" thinks that "free" healthcare is something white people like. Well, sure--everyone likes free stuff. This isn't limited to white people.

A Japanese Case Study

I once stood on a street corner in downtown Tokyo and tried to hand out hip-hop CDs to promote the Defamation League, a San Diego group trying to get huge in Japan. The Japanese were understandably perplexed; rarely are Tokyo denizens offered anything for free other than prepackaged Kleenex. They'd never been handed a free CD before in their lives.

Undeterred, I busted out my dictionary and looked up the Japanese word for "free" and started shouting it occasionally as I threw CDs around Shibuya crossing. Now they understood. The CDs were gobbled up like so many potstickers. From middle-aged businessmen to homeless Japanese living under bridges, everyone developed a sudden interest in "grit hop" when it came without a price tag.

The same goes for healthcare. Just as the hobbling centenarian grabbed the rap music when it became free, the undead zombies who troll our streets at nighttime will also want health care if they don't think they have to pay for it. Thing is, someone has to pay. And that someone is YOU.

You see, you're reading this on the 1Nt3rN3tZ lo!lo!LL. As such, you have a computer, or at least access to one. This means you've got an income. If you've got an income, you'll pay a tax for "free" healthcare. The larger your income, the larger your tax. In fact, if you've got an especially large income--say, upwards of $30,000 a year--you'll pay more in taxes than you'll get in health care. This goes double if you're healthy or young, like me (sorry ladies, I'm taken). Your youthful vitality will do you no good, since you'll get taxed whether you visit the hospital or not. Chances are, if you're not a dumbass on a Razor scooter, you'll never have to visit it. But you'll still pay your tax.

Oh yeah, but Hillary's communist plan goes a step further and actually requires you to go to the doctor once a year. If you don't, you pay another tax. She makes sure you get your money's worth, whether you like it or not, beatch.

#4 - Eurocentrism (re: #95 - Rugby)

Let's be honest - no one plays Rugby. Not even white people. It's a poor man's football--almost literally, since the pads, helmets, and goalposts required to play a proper football game easily amounts to a few thousand dollars.
But despite the fact that no one plays Rugby, there is a small contingent of Europeans who cling to this muddy "sport" out of a sense of nostalgia for the time when the sun never set on the British Empire. (Today, the sun ALWAYS sets on the British Empire, as England is cloaked in a perpetual foggy mist composed of fumes from the decaying corpse of their colonial glory.)

After decades of deriding Europe (colonialists! Imperialists! Oppressors of the Third World!), advanced white people have decided everything Europe (except nuclear power) is cool again. Rugby most definitely falls into that category. Rugby is not to be confused with football, since white people's fetishizing of European English means they will interpret all sports in a European context. Football is not football, and soccer is not a word. For fun, try these on for size:

• Mention you'd like to toss around a "football" with a white person and he'll scold you for touching the soccer ball with your hands.
• Order "chips" and he'll hand you fries.
• Ask for a "fry" and he'll give you his small statuette from Futurama.

Besides being wrong, the post on "Stuff White People Like" is just flat-out racist; The best Rugby team in the world is not white, but rather All Blacks.