Transcription:

I just received your superheated letter in regard to the bill I owe you. You said you thought the bill could have been paid long ago, and you could not understand why it wasn’t. Well, I will enlighten you right now.

In 1907 I bought a saw mill on credit. In 1908 I bought an ox cart, two timber carts and a breach loading shotgun. I also bought a wire tester and a Colt revolver and two fine razorback hogs and all on the same installment plan. In 1909 the mill burned down and didn’t leave a thing. One of the hogs died and I loaned the other to a Son-of-a-bitch who starved him to death. Then I joined a church. In 1910 my father was lynched for horse stealing. A railroader hooked up my daughter and it cost me $75 to keep the little bastard from becoming a relative of mine. In 1911 my boy caught the mumps and they went down him, so I had to have him castrated in order to save his life. That summer I went fishing and the boat overturned and I lost the biggest G-D catfish you ever saw and two of my sons drowned, neither of them being the one that was castrated.

In 1915 my wife ran away with a heavy-hung removed and left me a pair of twins as a souvenir. Then I married the hired girl to keep expenses down but I had trouble getting her to go off. I asked the doctor and he said to excite her about the time I thought she was ready. That night I took the shotgun to bed with me and when I thought she was ready I stuck it out the window and pulled the trigger. The wife shit in bed, I ruptured myself and killed the best cow I ever had.

In 1930 I burned out and took to drinking. I didn’t stop until all I had left was a dollar watch and kidney trouble. For a time all I did was wind my watch and piss.

The next year I decided to start all over again so I bought a manure spreader, a binder, a threshing machine, all on credit. Then along came a cyclone and blew them all into the next county. My wife got a dose of claps from a traveling sales- man, my youngest son wiped his ass on a corncob that was covered with rat poison and some Son-of-a-bitch denutted my best bull.

At the present time if it costs me a nickel to shit, I’d have to puke. Yet you say you can cause me trouble. Listen, trying to get money out of me would be harder than trying to pack butter up a cat’s ass with a red hot poker, but mister you are welcome to try.

Edit: I do not condone the usage of slurs in the original post but left it in for historical accuracy.

  • SomeLemmyUser@discuss.tchncs.de
    727·
    4 days ago

    So reproducing racism is ok if someone else at a different time wrote the original?

    I honestly dont see your point.

    But dislike like ratio on my comment seems to indicate I am in a minority here

    • we is doomed!@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      So reproducing racism is ok if someone else at a different time wrote the original?

      I’d suggest you don’t read Joseph Conrads eponymous book “Heart of Darkness” or a bunch of other books for that matter.

    • gastroglizzy@piefed.socialEnglish
      202·
      4 days ago

      To censor the racism of the past is to deny that it happened and to revise history. Life can be ugly. If we don’t preserve the ugliness, it creates the illusion that we haven’t grown as a society. It’s important to remember the way we were so we can know how far we’ve come.

      • over_clox@lemmy.worldOP
        9·
        4 days ago

        Might as well censor all the Epstein files too right?

        Oh wait…

        Thanks for your perspective and understanding 👍

      • SomeLemmyUser@discuss.tchncs.de
        11·
        3 days ago

        True, but it would be nice to add that you dont want back to this ugly time if you choose to post such slurs, as this is sadly not a far Ben anymore in most parts of the world

    • over_clox@lemmy.worldOP
      93·
      4 days ago

      I was not one of the dislikes nor the likes on your comments, you are entitled to express your opinion and thoughts, and that’s okay with me.

      I do agree with you, it is a very derogatory and offensive word. But given the context and the timeframe the joke letter refers to, why bother censoring it out altogether? At least Lemmy caught and auto-censored the transcribed text I posted.

      Honestly, I scanned and OCR converted this probably like 20 years ago, and kinda blindly posted it from my old files after seeing the recent post about the 97 year old lady thankful for the transistor radio she was given.

      My bad that I forgot the original text contains such a derogatory word until after I posted it, otherwise I might have censored the word out in GIMP, but its posted now, and I don’t see any point in bothering to repost a censored version.

      Besides, at least to me, it would seem like listening to a bleeped out censored song, when you wanna hear the original lyrics, no matter how offensive.

      I do hope you have a good day, and hopefully aside from the bad word, I hope you otherwise got at least something of a laugh.

      • SomeLemmyUser@discuss.tchncs.de
        21·
        3 days ago

        First of all: I appreciate your calm and unemotional response, I really do, this is not the norm online, and my initial comment was quite snarky, so thank you for that.

        To the matter at hand: I think you misunderstand me if you think I am stating cencorship (I would rather call it editing, but that’s irrelevant) as the only viable or even my preferred option.

        I just think dropping it without context is not the way, a short comment “I condemn/dont like the usage of slurs in this post but left it in for historical accuracy” in the body text would be my preferred way of dealing with it, this would be possible with an edit, no repost needed.

        Its okay to not be of the same opinion, especially because I am not being discriminated with the word, my opinion doesn’t matter as much as the oppinion of people actually discriminated against.

        If you choose to drop the n-bomb without distancing yourself from it, I will choose to write snarky comments criticizing it, not more, not less.

        No bad blood here, I wish u a wonderful day as well :)

      • overkrill@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        317·
        4 days ago

        this really didnt take very long at all, and my phone sucks. like its a gigantic piece of shit and this was still not remotely challenging. laziness is a pretty lame excuse to be, at best, a useful idiot by normalizing the use of slurs. fix it or fuck off lol

        • over_clox@lemmy.worldOP
          81·
          4 days ago

          Yeah homie, this was written before I was born, and I scanned and OCR’d it around 20 years ago. Sorry I forgot it contained a bad word, I posted it blindly after the recent post regarding a 97 year old lady from 1982 that was thankful for the donated transistor radio.

          So what? The joke of a letter is set in the timeframe of the 1930s/1940s or so. So fucking what?

          Why not censor everything from the Epstein files while you’re at it.

          Oh wait…

          • overkrill@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            28·
            3 days ago

            racial slurs aren’t “a bad word” you absolute semen sock, they are the currency of dehumanizing the survivors of the white supremacy you are actively enabling. you are whining about people’s reactions rather than simply fixing the problem, which, since i gave you the image, would take far less work, so i can only conclude that your objections are in bad faith, and you simply would rather leave it in. you are the problem.

            • over_clox@lemmy.worldOP
              71·
              3 days ago

              Oh, so we should censor all the Epstein files too right?

              Let’s just erase all history while we’re at it, while the child f***** is still in charge.

              Fantastic idea, let’s just erase history.

              I didn’t write it, it is what it is.

              • overkrill@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                35·
                3 days ago

                what in the fuck are you talking about?

                first of all, nobody has censored you, you’re just throwing a tantrum because people don’t like this racial slur you are lovingly defending.

                second, it would be fine if someone, like say a mod, did censor you, because hatespeech should not be protected.

                third, none of this has anything to do with the epstein files. im sure all those guys would love to hear your racist joke.

                • over_clox@lemmy.worldOP
                  51·
                  3 days ago

                  Oh go suck a rotten egg.

                  This is a SHITPOST community for sharters.

                  Mods, if you folks are upset, well I apologize.

    • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      I think the disagreement is about whether presenting a work as-is is reproducing that work. I would say no-- unless you gain partial authorship by modifying it in a substantial manner, you are just presenting it. I think presenting works that contain views that we disagree with today can be (but is not always) okay. This gets pretty close to the line as it is being presented seemingly in line with its original intent as a joke and not as a form of commentary (I see why you might call that “reproducing” it). Overall it does not bother me since I have a fairly high tolerance for historical nastiness being presented rather than removed, but I can see the argument that presenting it as-is is providing more harm than value in this case and a quick censor should have been applied.

      • SomeLemmyUser@discuss.tchncs.de
        51·
        3 days ago

        In my personal opinion a good way would be to contextualize it, for example in the Body text:

        “Here is an old text I found, it contains a nasty slur I dont endorse in any way but I leftbit in for historical accuracy”

        Its not uncritically using a slur or editing out, there is a middle ground

      • SomeLemmyUser@discuss.tchncs.de
        31·
        3 days ago

        So if I tell that story to my friends, without contextualizing, it wouldn’t normalize the usage of that word?

        Or is the difference for you that he posted a photo, not just the text?

        • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          Interesting question. I think it being a screenshot does matter to me, yes-- I view screenshots of other sites as a separate artifact from the text body. This could be because they are clearly separated from the “voice” of the speaker, or because they cannot be edited as easily. The slur in the image was merely mildly surprising, yet I was notably relieved to see it was not reproduced in the text of the post. I guess it’s kind of similar, in my view, to listening to a song that has the n-word in it vs singing a song that has the n-word in it.

              • SomeLemmyUser@discuss.tchncs.de
                3·
                3 days ago

                Didn’t know either bit to quote op:

                I do agree with you, it is a very derogatory and offensive word. But given the context and the timeframe the joke letter refers to, why bother censoring it out altogether? At least Lemmy caught and auto-censored the transcribed text I posted.

          • over_clox@lemmy.worldOP
            1·
            3 days ago

            I do think I’ll make this my final comment on this posted document, to add to whatever historical context anyone wants or cares to take from it.

            This is not a screenshot, it came from a yellow pamphlet slap full of physical paper ‘memes’ that my late father gave me from the 70s/80s before the word meme was even a thing. This was legit half moldy old paper funnies from long ago, during the Xerox office copier era.

            I scanned some of them in on my potato 300dpi scanner like 20 years ago, including this one. Ultimately I ended up losing most of the contents of that old hard drive to drive failure, but this one document interested me.

            Why? Not even the funny factor, but the fact that I couldn’t get official OCR software of the time to even read the damn text. So, I wrote my own G-D experimental OCR software in QuickBasic 4.5, meant to read as best as possible potato quality scans.

            And this became my test document for my own adaptive OCR software, loosely 20 years ago. That’s the only reason this document even survives to this day, because it got copied from the old old folder into an experimental old OCR project folder, as the main working test sample, because potato…

            TL;DR - This is not a screenshot, I scanned it myself roughly 2 decades ago, nor do I still have the copy of a copy of a copy of however many copies it made on the Xerox machines of the day. It is what it is, and I’m not gonna edit a single pixel. Leave it be, for sake of history…