Tom
I don't know if you are on Twitter but
https://twitter.com/FloridaMan__
nobody is bashing, we are engaging in what we call kidding around, aka humour ... perhaps you can't tell the difference.
If you think FloridaMan has his title only because he lives in Florida you should look at his tweets.
I can tell the difference between humor and prejudice and often there is none.
I study humor and jokes in particular. There is a butt to every joke and there is audience appropriate humor. This is a health forum, not a comedy club. There are little old ladies on this forum from FL.
The reason why FL is the butt of jokes is due to the ancient North vs. South US polarization coupled with recent US and Central/South American politics and socioeconomic environments. We stopped telling jokes about Poles and African Americans, since it is offensive. You all should do the same with Floridians. This is a forum dedicated to heart valve replacement surgery not humor. We should be sensitive to the feelings of others since they come here often under extreme emotional distress.
Being Irish American, I know that people still tell Irish-prejudiced jokes.
Irish Americans are all drunks, Catholic, wife-beating, lazy bums. This used to be said about Italians and African Americans (not the catholic part though
), but has stopped. Irish jokes stem from the subjugation of the Irish by the English, transplanted to America. Not sure why it is still appropriate to tell jokes about the Irish. My mother was denied a teaching job at a private school due to the sign "Irish need not apply" in NYC in the 1950s. My favorite Irish joke is: "
How do you tell the difference between shanty and lace curtain Irish...lace curtain Irish remove the dishes from the sink before peeing in it." I first heard this joke on the TV show Law and Order. Since I am shanty Irish-American with a little bit of lace curtain, it is more appropriate for me to tell this joke than say a Polish American, but it still wouldn't be appropriate on Law and Order in the 21st century although it was OK in the 1990s.
Jokes about Florida have similar historical roots. Here's a joke from Florida by a Floridian. When on business travel I saw two bumper stickers in Palm Bay FL on the same truck. "
Happiness is a Yankee heading North." "Manatee, the other white meat." The first one is more socially appropriate than the second since we all know Yankees don't exist anymore
but Manatees are approaching extinction.
What the recent unrest in the US should have taught us is that prejudice is a cultural institution of humanity...of every human and even "progressive" mature first-world societies. Prejudice is usually denied by most people when pointed out to them, even though they could see it as real if the person can be modern enough to change their perspective.
