Quote Originally Posted by simonj View Post
The whole gypsy (or, to use their preferred term, travellers) thing is pretty big in the UK right now (you can thank us for the "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding format, it's one of the most popular shows on TV here).

Along with the TV show there are regular "outrage" stories in the press, usually where a big deal is made over very little, simply because gypsies were involved. The biggest incident being the Dale Fam debaccle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Farm
Interesting. Yeah, there's a bigger and more established "traveler" culture in the UK. In the US, the population is so low-profile that "gypsy" isn't really a slur here. It evokes more a romantic image of some mythical itinerant, free-roaming lifestyle and people endowed with mysterious, mystical powers. That's at least for the majority of Americans.

And it figures that we the idea from the UK.

I'm just surprised with some of the shit that mainland Europe gets away with in how it treats its Roma population. I mean FUCKING FRANCE engaged in ethnic cleansing in 2010??? (By the by: "ethnic cleansing" means merely to do away with an ethnicity from a particular area, which in this case was accomplished with exile.) What he HELL century IS this?