Holy racist rant, Batman. I cannot fucking believe that Time magazine printed this crap from Joel Stein about how those stinky brown people need to move back to India so his hometown can go back to the way he remembers it:
My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime.
I never knew how a bunch of people half a world away chose a random town in New Jersey to populate. Were they from some Indian state that got made fun of by all the other Indian states and didn’t want to give up that feeling? Are the malls in India that bad? Did we accidentally keep numbering our parkway exits all the way to Mumbai?
This was supposed to be funny? Oh, FFS! Why is Nashville home to one of the world’s largest populations of Kurds? Why are there so many Somalis here, and now people from Burma are arriving? You know why? Because of refugee resettlement programs and support services from all of our churches and Catholic Charities. So Stein wants to know why Indians chose Edison, New Jersey? Hell, I don’t know. Maybe just to piss you off with “the amount of cologne they wear.”
Honestly, is this click-bait or what?
(Both Time and Stein has apologized for the column’s offensiveness, BTW.)
Southern Beale 
Did they give a real apology?
Like, “I’m sorry I’m a racist douchebag?”
So Mr. Stein is upset that a bunch of thieving racists of his boyhood have been replaced by people who work like fucking dogs, pool their resources and strive to give their children lives they could never have had in another country. Wait, wasnt’ that what those businesses he and his friends stole from trying to do when he was a younger asshole?
Stein’s “apology”:
“I truly feel stomach-sick that I hurt so many people. I was trying to explain how, as someone who believes that immigration has enriched American life and my hometown in particular, I was shocked that I could feel a tiny bit uncomfortable with my changing town when I went to visit it. If we could understand that reaction, we’d be better equipped to debate people on the other side of the immigration issue.”
TRANSLATION: Who would’ve thought a Jew from Jersey could be so racist and tone-deaf in his attempt a humor?
well, stomach-sick is a good start, but JEeeeeezzz you’d think he or the editors would have thought this through a little.
I guess maybe they’re subscribing to Ann Coulter’s publicity manual: “Any attention is good attention.”
Just another dying relic of the print media era.
And why with all the country music in Nashville? Why not Memphis? Or Greenville SC? Or Birmingham Alabama?
Why is anything cultural anywhere? It’s not like you can say “the river ran here and the railroads came through here and that’s why this cultural phenomenon occurred.”
It’s Random. Get used to it.
Ah, it reminds me of the time another wit of the Andrew Dice Clay school of humor suggested a “homeland” for “gypsies” be created in an “abandoned mall in jeresy”. And the umbrage he took when someone called him on it. Me being the one who umbrage was taken to.
Liberals today ain’t liberals, they’re libertarians.
Stein was quite the criminal growing up and that is just what he was willing to admit he did.
I noticed that ….
If you’re talking about the namesake town where Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light, then how many polite, considerate, well-spoken natives of New Jersey does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Can’t really think of any.
” how many polite, considerate, well-spoken natives of New Jersey does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
WTF is it to you, you fucking fucker?
Quite a lot of that column struck me as the kind of faux racism good friends, especially teenage friends, might jibe each other with. The problem is that without the trust and friendship, it doesn’t come across that way to readers.
I notice racism has peaked and become more intense since Pres. Obama became president.
It’s nice that the music center is doing what they’re doing with solar.
This:
is something that they’ve done up in Vermont where, believe it or not, they have a lot of sunshine.
People in the nuclear/fossil fuel industry like to trot out the, “Well, sure, you can have loads of sunshine out in the desert but what about where you NEED the power”. They conveniently ignore the fact that most of the power produced by nukes/coal fired plants is “fungible” and enters the grid to be used as/where it’s needed. There is no reason (other than intransigence) for not building solar, wind, hydro and tidal power plants where they can be best built–utilizing good design and being mindful of the environment–and doing exactly the same thing that current electrical production facilities do, putting it into the grid.
It is true that the sun doesn’t shine on any of us for more than a part of the day (a large part if you live in the areas near the equator) but it shines on a pretty good slice of the planet–all fucking day long, every day of the year.
About 10% of provocative commentary is really meant to provoke dialogue and exchange of ideas. The other 90% — you nailed it, SB — is click-bait.