I mean, personally, this doesn't seem too bad to me; but this is primarily an American site and America is not such a multi-cultural country in the same way as the UK is; so when you've got a lot of Eastern Europeans, Africans and Asians with very strong opinions on non-heterosexual sexuality, my definition of "Bad" is going to be set a lot higher than yours.
But if that's the stick we're gonna use, Gargus should really have received a warning too, as he was by and far the most aggressive one in that comment chain.
Again, it's also probably due to the fact that I interact with a lot of First-Generation and Second Generation immigrants from very conservative and….well, I don't want to say "backward" cultures, but they have a very clear, very distinct view of what sort of people should be doing what sort of things.
When you've seen people get into fights because "How dare this person from this inferior tribe speak to me like he's my superior; just because he is a manager and I'm a entry level employee!?" (African Tribal Politics is nasty shit) and the Indian Caste system in action; that something as simple as someone calling Covid a "Yellow Plague" is just…. so benign.
I don't think that's the right word, but when you've had honour killings committed in your community because someone had the audacity to fall in love with someone not of their own faith or with an "unfavourable" race; words just lose all of their power, because as far as I'm aware, no one's been decapitated by words through the internet yet.
Hell, this is all probably coming off as sounding really racist in and of itself; but that's just life in the town I live in.
There's a Slovak ghetto down by the harbour.
The Turks and Greeks run most of the restaurants.
My English teacher was Zimbabwean.
All of our GPs are Indian.
The Nepalese run all of the local grocery stores and hold an amazing parade every year for Diwali (The Festival of Lights).
We've had a few Saudi Arabian Salafists set up a small meeting hall at the top of the High Street lately, but they seem to have nothing to do with the Moderate Pakistani Muslim community, so they're probably just trying to work out if they like it here.
Among my closest friends are a Tongan stage dancer and a Polish civil servant.
My boss is gay, my eldest cousin is a lesbian and another one is bi-sexual.
The other dominant groups are the Roma (A.K.A Gypsies; DO NOT confuse them with the Travellers, unless you want to get into serious trouble), South Africans, Polish, Romanian, Nigerian, Ghanaian and French.
I deal with all of these different and clashing cultures on a daily basis and after a while, you start learning about what they think about the English (Despite the common misbelief that the English can't speak their language, a lot of us know just enough to know when they're chatting shit and about what) and about what they think about each other.
As you can imagine, a man raised in rural Slovakia is going to have an odd opinion about the Pakistani office manager; whilst the god-fearing Nigerian is not going to be particularly happy about the French homosexual kissing his partner in public.
Trust me, we've tried to get everyone to mingle together and break down the stereotypes everyone holds against the other with public events, talks, awareness campaigns, the whole shebang.
But there are just some things that are so ingrained in people, that you'd have a better chance of convincing them the Sky was Green and that Snow is Hot.
The fact is, is that our liberal, Western European cultural and political views are, sadly, in the minority on the global scale.
I'm sure any of you who have travelled away from the major tourist destinations or have lived outside of the larger cities have experienced similar things yourself; but I think it's been so long now that since any of us have been able to do just that, that've we've all become locked in our own echo chambers and have become hypersensitive to everything.
