Indian-American wins pageant internet reacts like idiots.

This is actually a very good point, sadly. It's quite possibly no coincidence that she was up against a blond white woman from Kansas with a religious tattoo. So much of "reality TV" is completely scripted crap.

This is just a vocal minority, as with almost all internet outrage. News stations are just seizing on it for clicks. In reality, most people are completely indifferent or happy. I am indifferent because, logic.

Yeah, shit like this makes me ashamed to call myself American a lot of the time. I swear, there should be a 100 question logic test for people that want to use the internet. If you fail, you can't use it ever.

That aside, beauty pageants remind me of that one episode from Parks and Recreation, but I'm sure at least a few of them want to use their position to do some good in the world.

@believer258: Leviticus 19:28 (NIV): "Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD."

This whole thing was absolutely infuriating though. Love how the people who thought Miss Kansas should have won for being a "real American," seemed to have conveniently forgotten there were several other women who placed between her and New York.

She's a REAL AMERICAN!

Punctuation: use it.

What? Lack of empathy enables violence. Knowledge leads to empathy, and thus does just the opposite.

What an odd line to take from his post out of context and take issue with.

Third book of the Old Testament, which is considered by most Christians to be outdated after the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Of course, Jewish people do not believe in the New Testament, so some of them do still have issues with tattoos that Christians do not.

Here's a quick link I found: http://judaism.about.com/od/conversi2/f/tatoos_burial.htm

Which is just what you did by not reading the rest of the discussion.

I'm going to take a wild guess and assume that the reason that law exists is that the Philistines enjoyed tattoos, so the Jews outlawed it. Almost all Jewish/Christian laws that deal with that kind of shit exists only because the Jews hated the Philistines 3000 years ago. The Philistines loved pork, they liked cutting their hair into mohawks, they made images of their god Baal... so no pork, no cutting the sides of your hair, and no graven images.

It's amazing that Bronze Age tribal politics survived into the information age.

@brodehouse:

The pork one might have actually had some practical reasons, which leads me to believe something similar might be going on with your other examples.

@video_game_king: Yeah I read that on Cracked a few years ago. While it makes some fair degree of sense, it would require that aversion to pork or the process of slaughtering pork would be shared by all cultures; followers of Abrahamic religions didn't develop different biology that makes the sound of dying pigs uniquely terrible to them, but not to Philistines or the Germanic tribes thousands of miles away.

These Philistines were also heavy eaters of seafood from their Greek origin (delicious kalimari!), and this so appalled the Jews who based their diet around animal husbandry that you won't be shocked to hear that crustaceans and those that crawl on the seafloor are also 'unclean'.

@brodehouse:

Or maybe it requires that they live in an area where raising pigs is impractical and takes away more resources for them than they get out of it.

Who the fuck cares? You're giving them the limelight with this kind of exposure. Let it go and realize how stupid they are being.

@video_game_king: I mean, they lived in virtually the same area that the Philistines did. If pork production was costly and inefficient compared to sheep, the regular Jewish farmer wouldn't bother with it. In the same way Europe never really bothered with rice even after they began trade with China. The difference is the _outlawing_ of pork, of seafood, of mohawk hair styles and images of Baal and giant penis statues (the Philistines were into fertility idols!). The bans were not in place so as to increase the production of the Jews, they were there to culturally separate the Jews from the Philistines, to prevent Philistine culture from infesting and overriding what they considered as Jewish culture. They looked negatively upon cultural trade and Philistine memes infiltrating their society.

It is in no way different than how Soviet culture demonized and banned Western culture from getting into Russia, and demanded Soviet-focused culture as ethically superior. Extravagant Art Deco architecture was replaced by Soviet socialist realism. German expressionism was decadent bourgeois nonsense. Things had a 'proper' form, and failure to follow that form was counter-revolutionary, against Soviet values. You can see something similar in American society at the same time.

Not to compare the ancient tribal Jews to Soviets, I'm just incredibly amazed that social prescriptions that were relevant a thousand years before the common era continue to bear some weight today. Although perhaps I shouldn't considering how the Roman Republican example inspired the entire foundation for the United States Constitution. But this would be like assuming that 3000 years from now, gay marriage will remain a pertinent issue for a large amount of society in the same way dietary restrictions from the Bronze Age remain an issue for a lot of people today. It's a mind-boggling thing to think about.

You should be used to this by now. I agree its terrible and every time something like this happen, I lost faith in humanity a little bit but these are probably the same people saying Japan's earth quake was god's will to punish the Japanese and rampant rape in india = nations of rapist. They are terrible people and should be forgotten, not given attention.

People on Twitter apparently have made claims that she's a terrorist or something, which is total bullshit. And it's a good thing she's not out to blow stuff up. Judging by that picture from the swimsuit competition, she wouldn't even need to wear a bomb vest when her body's already THAT bangin'.

I'm sorry, I just needed to get that lame joke out of my system.

@bbalpert: I think you mean dat body is the BOMB.

Fair enough, but even in the context of the rest of the discussion, my point still stands. Knowledge doesn't enable violence. I'd argue it has the opposite effect. Anyway, didn't mean to be a dick with that post. It's just that as I was scrolling down the page, that comment really stuck out to me.

Yea, it does. Knowledge makes violence very possible. Would Hiroshima/Nagasaki have happened without knowledge on how to build a nuclear bomb? I'm fairly certain people are confusing knowledge with empathy.