"I woke up with a noose around my neck."

This story, via Cliff Schecter [H/T Blogenfreude] is absolutely jaw-dropping. Just watch it; transcript immediately below.

Male VO: An African-American man is suing a drilling company located off the Louisiana coast after, he says, co-workers hung a noose around his neck and tried to choke him.

Female VO: Robert Minter says he fell asleep during a break and woke up when three of his white co-workers were, as he put it, trying to hang him.

Minter: One of the gentlemen had, uh, he had placed the noose around my neck. It went up, over a pipe, about 14 feet high in the air. My other crewmember was standing up on a I-beam, with the other end in his hand, yanking on it.

Female VO: He says they called it a prank. Minter says when he told the bosses of Nobel Drilling of Houston, they fired him—and they say it was because he was sleeping on the job. The lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial in March.

According to this story, the two white men were fired, too—which makes perfect sense in the era of evolution/creationism-global warning/GW denial-Ann Coulter/Michael Moore both-sides-have-a-point/both-sides-are-just-as-bad bullshit equivalencies that turn everything into a matter of opinion where there's no longer right or wrong or fact or fiction or reality or Cloud Cuckoo, just two sides to every story and gee whiz who can tell what the truth is these days…let's just give it to the guy who screams the loudest.

I hope Minter reams them in court.

And, btw, according to Minter's lawyer, "because the incident occurred offshore, it is outside of the FBI's jurisdiction to pursue a possible hate crime." That's an interesting exception to note when considering federal hate crime statistics.