I never would have imagined that I would be writing a post about a fairly racist remark on Beyond Robson’s Morning Brew for Scout Magazine! After all, I was accused of the very thing in that same column. But what is different here – and I believe this – is that Alana’s attitude comes from a sort of shock-jock, Bruce Allen ‘shut up and fit in’, conservative, knee-jerk reactionary, pedestrian point of view.

“And you know what, I don’t give a shit what your religion is. If you don’t like the way we do things here, get the fuck out. Do you think I’d emigrate to your country? No, before I moved to a country I would ask myself: is this place ideologically compatible with my way of life? We have freedom of speech here… get used to it. But, on a more positive note, Islamic scientists have discovered the cause of earthquakes”.

As I pointed out in the comments, I don’t really understand what the latter has to do with the former, but what is important is how familiar this sentiment is. This is something I don’t think even The Province would publish — Rachel Marsden maybe, or even CKNW — but not Beyond Robson. And yet, just the day before the other Morning Brew writer said this,

This is a disgusting display of religious intolerance. I mean, he hasn’t even scrawled any offensive pictures of Mohammad! Come on, Sikh extremists, at least wait until he does something really bad — like, say, advocating the HST.

Again, I ask what do offensive pictures of Mohammad have to do with Sikh extremism? All that I get from this is a desperate attempt to be cynical for the sake of being cynical (and yes, I’ve been accused of the very thing). But, there is a whiff here of the kind of intellectual laziness promoted by such rhetorical masters as Fox News. By saying the two in the same sentence you have successfully bypassed any contextual differences by way of a semantic flourish. Now, this doesn’t mean that Jon Turner is stating unequivocally that because both religions have extremist elements and dark brown skin they are basically the same, but that is how it reads. And it’s probably just because we are so used to this language coming from neo-conservative media that it has ingrained itself in our own. Nevertheless, these two examples prove to me that we must be ever vigilant, as bloggers, of the same kind of intellectual laziness so often found in those who intentionally manipulate language to promote their own, often extremist, ideologies.