Friday links! Horrifying laughter of the Chinese edition

Yes, Big Trouble In Little China was on TV last night. It's not like I was gonna go right to bed after The Quick and the Dead.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the partisan anger of contemporary politics that we sometimes forget what we all have in common: fear. Why spend hours debating things like whether and how to be afraid of gay people when we all agree that we’re terrified of the Chinese? Fact: Chinese people live all over Asia. Fact: they are readily identifiable via their dextrous hands and constant smoking. Fact: their atonal yowling makes them utterly dependent on US supplies of pop music. And once I get my shirts back, they will have nothing that we truly need. My point is that we can still reverse current trends, which will lead to Chinese nationals riding us around sand tracks for sport, and return China to a manageable position in which they can only poison our children via lead toys. During this time of national crisis, our xenophobic resentment can bring us together. We just have to take a hard look at the Americans we currently have and make them more like the Americans we once did. First, though, we must identify the problem.

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