From the Desperate Housewives of Orange County, I present to you the distinction between desperate and poor. Your lack of grasp of the difference or willful disregard of it conveys a careless attitude toward a serious debate. No amount logical reasoning will convince the likes of you otherwise. But, I will try.

A glass is 3% full of wine is a valid statement but a strange and deceptive one to make. It is a semantic game. The parent comment and your statement is negative stereotyping of a whole country based purely on anonymous internet users’ opinions. Negative stereotyping a whole group of people is racism because it promotes discrimination or hatred toward that group. Prove the preceding statement wrong. Try. You are suggesting that desperate and poor are always the same. Also, the racist implication is that desperate people will do “bad” things since the original article is about crime. The common Thai nationalist’s racist attack on Cambodia and its people is to call the whole country poor and full of beggars.

For your information, people can be relatively poor and contently hopeful. No, the whole country of Cambodia is not full of poor or desperate people. Also, poor people maybe desperate sometimes but not always. Cambodia has come along way in bringing many of its people out of poverty. Go ahead prove me wrong with logic and reasoning. Or you can just hold on to your racist believes.

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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I did not call him a racist. I said his statement could be understood as racist

This postmodern redefinition of racism really needs to be discarded. It’s done so much damage by giving actual racists cover, since if everyone is racist then racism isn’t a problem.

Negative racial stereotype as a definition of racism is the classical definition of racism. There is nothing postmodern about it.

> Negative racial stereotype as a definition of racism is the classical definition of racism

It wasn’t racial stereotyping. It was stereotyping a country’s population as sad and desperate. Saying X country’s quality of life sucks isn’t racist.

If they’d said or implied Cambodian Americans are also sad and desperate, sure. But they didn’t.

Replying to JumpCrisscross response below:

>> Negative racial stereotype as a definition of racism is the classical definition of racism

>It wasn’t racial stereotyping. It was stereotyping a country’s population as sad and desperate. Saying X country’s quality of life sucks isn’t racist.

>If they’d said or implied Cambodian Americans are also sad and desperate, sure. But they didn’t.

This is a distinction without a difference. A negative stereotype about the people of a country is a stereotype about that country's dominant ethnic group. Their geographic location is irrelevant.

By this logic, saying "All Japanese people are [X]" is not a racial stereotype as long as you're only talking about the ones in Japan. It only magically becomes a racial stereotype when they are "Japanese Americans." This doesn't make sense.

There's a fundamental difference between:

Criticizing a state: "Cambodia's economy is struggling and its government is corrupt." Stereotyping a people: "The people of Cambodia are inherently sad and desperate." The original comment did the latter. That is, by definition, a negative ethnic stereotype.

Could you please stop perpetuating this flamewar? Other commenters are doing it too, of course, but you've done it by far the most. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

I totally get that you have good reasons for feeling so strongly about Cambodia, Vietnam, and so on, and I also get (to some extent) how the root comment was provocative. It did sound like it was putting down an entire population, or at least was easy to take that way.

But going into aggressive abstract argument is not a helpful way to respond. It just degrades the discussion, poisons community further, and causes everyone to dig in.

A more helpful way to correct any misperception in the OP would be to share something of your own background that leads you to perceive things differently, i.e. to express your own personal experience and what it has taught you, that's relevant to the topic.

You don't have to do that, of course—it's just an option. But we do need you to respect the site guidelines when posting here, and you've been breaking them badly in this thread. That's not ok, even if your views are perfectly correct and your feelings entirely justified.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: your account has unfortunately been posting nationalistic flamewar comments in other threads too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45587866

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44649278

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44626745

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44626401

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44626241

We ban accounts that do this, so we really need you to stop.