> An oil executive with no political experience but close ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin at the head of the State Department? When the best-read member of the Cabinet is nicknamed “Mad Dog” you know we are in uncharted waters.
This headline is beyond racist, mocking the language and culture of the people of East Asia.
Implying all the -istan countries are tinpot nepotistic dictatorships.
And worse than that, in the end it says nothing is substance. One should mock the appearance of others when he looks like a clown on his day off. And rail against the personal lives of others when you've been divorced 3 times yourself.
I agree that it smells racist, but if I try to steelman the author: You can't name a single country that happens to end in -stan that isn't a mostly dysfunctional dictatorship. The opening paragraph of this article happens to fit remarkably well with every single -stan. I don't think this has anything to do with race, as you suggest.
The whole -stan trope is pretty funny to me in its double geographical ignorance.
It was/is used by people to refer to any country in the Middle East that is a “Muslim country” (itself a pretty uneducated vague label). But in actuality, -stan is a Persianate suffix that predates Islam and most of the countries are in Central Asia, not the Middle East.
There’s also the fact that we call Armenia that name because of the Romans. In Armenian it’s called Hayastan.
This doesn't sound right...
> February 2017