Male Grooming

[Perryville]

I say again, what culture? New age, feel good, disposable pablum. Spiritual and cultural ennui.

[vashti]

I LOVE the West Coast. I can't imagine living anywhere else.

[all alone]

We need to start an EAST vs WEST coast thread..

and Canada's equivilent of NJ would probably be Montreal's east end haha. Loads of people who are of italian decent.

[Lulu]

What about the MIDWEST????!

[girl68]

Hehe SIR I like your location

[SirWagginston]

I say again, what culture? New age, feel good, disposable pablum. Spiritual and cultural ennui.

I think of: progressive, open-minded, laid-back, tolerant, tech-savvy, educated. As an agnostic and libertarian type of person, I have a strong dislike for the States' rising social conservatism. Nothing was more disappointing back home then the times I would start talking to and getting along with a girl, only to have her say something like, "Hey, wanna come to church with me, sometime?" No, dammit, I don't. I remember being made fun of by other kids for admitting that I don't really believe in God, or that I think evolution is accurate. I can't picture that having been a problem if I had gone to school in Vancouver to start with.

[Perryville]

It seems to me that this is rapidly becoming the social stereotype thread. As a man , who travels a lot, and has lived or stayed in many regions and countries, I find that stereotyping for any reason is ignorance. I've many friends on both coasts, and each region has it's interesting aspects. But NO region or country is inherently superior to any other................except , of course.........Jamaica!!!

[SirWagginston]

I don't buy the whole "stereotyping is ignorance" thing. Sure, it's ignorant to assume that everyone in a region is the same, but you can speak factually about the statistical tendencies of a place. Overall, the West Coast is a more tolerant and progressive place. I like that, because I'm a weirdo, and tend to go against the grain of traditional customs in most places. If one is a traditional kind of person, though, I can totally understand why he or she would feel differently.

[Perryville]

Wag, Assuming that I am a "traditional" person, because I come from Texas, really just proves my point. Assumptions based on stereotypes, is ignorance, pure and simple. If you believe that Texans act in a certain manner, simply because of their place of origin, then it's but a small step to implying that Jews or Blacks act similarly, simply because they are Jews or Blacks. You are being a bigot.

[vashti]

I think there are plenty of dumb f*ckers here on the west coast, as there are everywhere else, but the weather here is better than anywhere else. I can't stand humidity.

Also, I live in a West Coast bible belt. The cities on the West Coast tend to be more progressive, but there are vast amounts of areas that are just as red-necky as anywhere else.

[SirWagginston]

Wag, Assuming that I am a "traditional" person, because I come from Texas, really just proves my point.

What? I made no such assumption. I did say "if." Here, maybe this edit will help. Sometimes the colloquial "you" can be confusing.

You need to relax, though. Trust me: I'm not a bigot. I have a really close friend from Texas... and one from Turkey, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Mongolia... this is unnecessary.

[Perryville]

Wag, you made a comment about Texas, based on stereotypical assumptions. Which is bigotry. Why is it so hard for you to admit it?

[Perryville]

Dude, I'm not trying to bust your chops, really I'm not. Everybody makes stereotypical/bigotted statements even Blacks or mixed race people like me. Just don't attempt to justify them. BTW, the very first thing people do after making a bigotted statement is to talk about how many "minority ", friends they have. As a person, who is only half white, I've a pretty good nose for stereotyping. BC and Texas both have large populations of people from somewhere else, in our case it's predominately Hispanics, Asians and " Snowbirds" (Canadians and people from the Northern States) so we have that in common.

[Lipp]

Wag 1 - Perry 0

[SirWagginston]

There's a difference between saying something about a place and making assumptions about specific people. The latter is bigoted, the former is not. If I say, "Texans are traditional," I'm citing a fact. Anybody who studies cultures and politics has to make statements like this all the time. The percentage of people who align themselves with traditional values is higher than the American average, as evidenced by the politicians elected from that state, and the number of citizens per capita that regularly attend religious service. It would be silly to get upset about something like this; people who do so usually either have some sort of victim complex or are simply unreasonable. I think it's unfortunate that some people are still sensitive enough to the idea that different groups of people have different tendencies, because it's really counter-productive. I had an anthropology class where we discussed the idea of race, and we read about the fact that there are heart medications now that work almost exclusively on African Americans, at around 60% improvement to around 10% for everybody else, varying again by race. A couple people have refused to take the drug, because they disagree with the notion that their hearts can be physically different in how they operate from the those of other races. They will try other medicines for a while, and typically only relent if those don't work very well.

If, however, upon meeting a person from Texas, I assume he or she is traditional before getting to know the person, that's stereotyping. If I insist upon my belief even after meeting the person, that's bigoted. I made no assumptions about you or any other specific person. All I have done is compare two places, which are actually pretty similar. Texas and Alberta are both large states that have traditionally been agrarian and of below-average GDP per capita, until the discovery of oil brought an inflow of cash and development. Although prosperous, their cultures have not yet lost their traditional roots. States where development occurred earlier have more progressive politicians, less people that attend religious services and more openness to scientific ideas.

I'm well aware that there are bigots of every race; my high school was plurality Hispanics, followed by African Americans, followed in third by whites, just barely. I've been a called a honky, a cracker, a gringo, and my all-time-favorite: white boy. Mostly in good humor, though, because people were not very racially sensitive, so slurs were used casually in my environment. People never implied or interpreted these terms in a racist way.

It would actually have been very difficult for me not to have made a majority of friends from "minority" backgrounds; I would have to have been very exclusive and withdrawn. I'm sure a lot of people in this scenario mention that first, because it's the easiest way to get an oversensitive person off of your back.