Leej, I can't agree with our Guest.......Had the other threads not been obvious troll/flames, that exact point was on my mind and I believe you have made the point well. There is a distinction Guest between controversial subjects and flame/trolls.

We grow up not in a cocoon, but in a world populated by all sorts of people who influence even when we simply hear the words. My son Michael came home from school and was using the nigger because he thought it sounded funny although he had no idea what it meant. We tend to go overboard in either direction to compensate or denigrate and both are obvious. Not to mention someone's race in the situation Leej described is silly, yet we don't because we might be thought of as a racist. In our efforts to be less hateful through political correctness, we have thrown away most reasonable common sense.

It's not all about race as Leej pointed out.....it's about bigotry and prejudice. Mrrzy made a comment about living in the southern United States. Do you know what a "Damn Yankee" is? That's a northerner that you might be able to tolerate as a "Yankee," but a Damn Yankee moves south and stays! Worse, Damn Yankees believe they have a far better way and that they need to teach the southerners how things are done. For any Yankee moving to and working in the south, they need about a year and a half to adjust: 6 months to try it and keep their mouths shut, 6 months to see if they can work that way, and 6 months to decide if they like it........because acting like a Damn Yankee ain't gonna' change it! There is bogotry here in both directions, north to south and south to north.

We all have prejudices based on experience and teaching. Some of us work to overcome them and some don't. May sound dumb, but I never hired anyone who smoked a pipe. My experience said that with all the fussing about and screwing around, a pipe smoker wasn't really interested in smoking.....and I found that laid back attitude carried over into their sales performance. Now I know that there are certainly fine salespeople who smoke pipes, I just never met one.........Gimmee a two pack a dayer or a non-smoker anytime.(:<))

What we often lack is honesty in dealing with the subject. That website at least provides some degree of honesty. My interplay with khandu and his home state is based on the fact that we know each other's true attitudes and background and have been honest with each other........so the humor may seem cruel when viewed at face value, but is in fact, a sincere form of trust and friendship.

Spaw