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One thing that continually bugs me is the “racists are unicorns” view, which I hear usually but not exclusively from the right. Basically, in this view, almost no one is racist, and no act is racist. Sure, KKK members are racist, but nothing else – not vote suppression, not claming a judge is biased “becuase he’s a mexican,” not the racial wage gap – can be called racism. Because naming racism is considered worse than racism itself.
Artwise, this is one of the cartoons I did with superdistorted figures – huge heads, tiny everything else. It’s always a fun challenge to try and make these anatomically impossible people work out well. I also decided that the mentor character should keep his nose held high, high in the air in all four panels.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
Panel 1
An older white man in a three-piece suit is lecturing to a younger white man wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a tie. We can see that they are indoors; there’s a window with curtains behind them. Throughout this cartoon, the older man has his head lifted veryhigh (i.e., “nose in the air”).
OLDER MAN: Liberals call anything they disagree with “racist.” But we Republicans are more serious.
Panel 2
The older man continues lecturing, holding out one hand in a “stop” or “slow down” gesture.
OLDER MAN: Racism is a serious accusation. Before calling anyone “racist,” we always ask, “is racial animus the only possible motive here?”
Panel 3
A close-up on the older man, who is now looking positively indignant.
OLDER MAN: And we NEVER call our enemies “racist” just to score a cheap political point!
Panel 4
The younger man asks a question; the older man looks pleased with himself as he answers.
YOUNGER MAN: Wow. So is there ANYONE we DO call ra-
OLDER MAN: “Black Lives Matter.”
I was sure “Planned Parenthood” was going to be the punchline, but Amp’s is timely.
I think it’s a different basis: Because neither side trusts the other side to be moderate or reasonable, so the logical thing is to fight tooth and nail against any movement at all.
It’s easiest to make concessions when you think the other side will accept them as reasonable; if you have reason to believe that they are acting in good faith when making the demand; and/or if you expect they will reciprocate. Both sides could probably move towards the middle…. if they thought it would work.
But it’s risky to make any concessions if you have reason to believe they will be viewed as insufficient no matter what you do; if you won’t get reciprocity; or (worst of all) if your concession will merely be used as ammo to demand more concessions. And that is surely the case w/r/t racism, on both sides.
I LOVE the third panel art! The arched eyebrow, the steepled hands, and the shading! It really makes the eyes pop with righteous indignation. You can’t help but hear the guy’s Brahman sneer.
Oh, and the punchline’s perfect. I didn’t see it coming. Moreover, I hear dialogue even when written, and for a punchline to work, it has to have the right cadence. So when the mentor cuts off the mentee’s question with his prompt, absurd answer–you nail it. This is stage-worthy.
Could we turn the panel 3 art into a T-shirt? The image is great, but a T-shirt would need different text. “Obamacare? Bah! When mere mortals attempt to play God, it offends those of us who are…”
It never ceases to amaze me how the right is so terrified of government overreach – until the police start shooting people.
I agree with pillsy wrt the punch line. Black Lives Matter is very timely but Planned Parenthood is, to most, both subtler and likely to be timeless. (I hope that BLM becomes just as timless.)
It works well either way, though.
“But it’s risky to make any concessions if you have reason to believe they will be viewed as insufficient no matter what you do; if you won’t get reciprocity; or (worst of all) if your concession will merely be used as ammo to demand more concessions. And that is surely the case w/r/t racism, on both sides.”
I agree with this, but a big part of this is misunderstanding who you are negotiating for. You aren’t negotiating to get the other side’s extremists on to your side. You are negotiating so that that the people in the middle will think that their extremists are more risky or unjust on balance than our extremists.
Yes altering your position will be used by their extremists to demand more concessions. Yes you are correct that their extremists will never be satisfied. But if you did it right those new concessions will get LESS TRACTION with the middle than they did before because you have dialed down the political salience of the issue to the middle. The target of your ‘concessions’ is not their extremists. Your target is the people who might be influenced by their extremists if YOUR extremists look like they are going too far and have too much power.
Yes, both sides do it! The left is angry because police shoot innocent people in their homes, and boil suspects alive in 180 degree showers. The right is angry because homophobic small business people are sometimes being fined if they refuse to provide the services that they advertise to gay couples. Its just two sides of the same coin.
Yup, if you cherry pick the most extremist complaints and give the absolute least charity you certainly can make people look bad. You could have just as fairly said “the left wants to to be able to shut down a business calling someone by the wrong pronoun” while “the right wants to protect us from terrorists”. Just two sides of the same coin.
But also, even if you are right it isn’t enough. You have to be right AND win enough votes from the middle. Thinking you are merely right is just self righteous. I’d rather have a well functioning country.
Objective reality exists. It is not “self righteous” to assert that the world was not created in 6 days 6000 years ago and humans evolved from apes. People who don’t belive these things would not start voting for Democrats if we could just get hipsters to stop mocking them (which we can’t anyway, so the question is moot). They will always vote for the pro-life, and anti-gay marriage candidate. Letting bakers and photographers discriminate against gay couples is not going to change their minds.* There are no moderates making their voting decisions based on these issues. These are not the people who voted for Obama and then switched to Trump.
The moderates who switched might sort of care about social issues, but they vote primarily on the economy and national defence. They voted for Obama the first time because the economy was in freefall and they always vote for the opposite party when the economy is in trouble. They voted for Obama the second time because Romney reminded them of their asshole boss and made the 48% comment (seriously, I think that comment flipped the election). They vote with their guts. They are not going to be reasoned with. They think people who try to explain policy to them are being condescending. The problem is not that Democrats don’t listen to their concerns. The ACA and medicaid expansion were meant to address their concerns about healthcare. Democrats have plans to create jobs through infrastructure spending, to fund alternative forms of energy, create job retraining and other programs. But these voters don’t want “help”. They want a different reality. They want the return of a world that only existed for a couple of decades after WWII (if it even did then). Republicans tell them that getting that world back is simple. They can have it, if we just cut taxes and regulations enough; stop illegal immigration; and/or raise tarrifs. Democrats are honest. That world is not coming back. We need to find new ways of doing things to create a new prosperity. That is hard. That is complicated. That can be humbling. It is usually (not always) easier to believe the Republicans.
I think the plans that Trump and Ryan plan to implement are going to make things bad enough to jolt these “moderates” into facing reality again, if not in 2018, then in 2020 – especially if the Democrats nominate a white man.
But, that’s not a given. A major factor in past Democratic losses is that they haven’t really figured out a way to counter Republican lies – the mocking of Gore in 2000 for saying that he took the initiative in creating the internet and a bunch of other things which were, in fact, true. Then, there was the swift-boating of John Kerry, a bonafide war hero. Obama was elected twice in spite of lies about his birth certificate. There is no parallel to those gross smear campaigns coming from the Democratic side.
No you could not “just as fairly”. Granted, the two things I chose were cherry-picked. They were also both true. Yours are not. No Democrats are trying to shut down businesses for calling someone by the wrong pronoun. And, the implication that Democrats don’t want to protect us from terrorists is also demonstrably false – Clinton protected New York from attacks throughout the 1990’s (I lived in New York City then, the rest of the country might not have been aware of how much danger we were in, but anyone who watched the local news in New York was very much aware), and Obama protected us damn well for the past eight years – certainly better than George W. Bush. I don’t think that Trump’s plans will protect us from terrorists. I think that they will make us less safe (and so do most defense experts Republican and Democrat). But, I know of no mainstream Democrat who has accused him of wanting the terrorists to win, the way some Republcains did with Obama. That was a lie. We do not tell parallel lies about them.
*However, it might create a precident that would allow such businesses to discriminate against interracial couples on religious grounds. I suspect that is why so many African American churches are o.k. with these decisions.
Objective reality exists. It is not “self righteous” to assert that the world was not created in 6 days 6000 years ago and humans evolved from apes.
Objective reality exists, but humans did not evolve from apes, which are a modern species, just like ours. So, no, it is not self righteous to assert that, it is just wrong.
Apes are both modern and ancient species – this is not an either-or question. Humans split off from chimpanzees after both split off from gorillas, which are also apes.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/cb/91/66/cb9166d9cd0e52f49cb70d2bd6d5dafa.jpg
So, yes, our ancstors were apes. Just not the same types of apes which are alive today.
Apes are definitely not “a modern species”–there are multiple species of apes, some modern, some not. The oldest ape fossil yet discovered is Rukwapithecus, from about 25 million years ago.
You could argue that it would be more correct to say that “humans evolved from other apes”, though–since it’s not wrong to say that humans are apes–but I feel that when people use sorta-colloquial words like “ape” or “animal” you have to rely 0n context to know if they’re including humans.
I have heard people say that humans evolved from chimpanzees, which is the misunderstanding of evolution to which that correction usually applies. But yeah, apes form a clade consisting of the (as yet unknown) first-ever ape species and all species descended from it, from however many millions of years ago that was until the present. Humans have been apes for our entire evolutionary history back to that (somewhat arbitrary) point.
Humans split off from chimpanzees after both split off from gorillas, which are also apes.
This is at least phrased incorrectly… I am not sure whether your understanding is incorrect as well. Humans did not split off from chimpanzees anymore than they split off from gorillas. Humans and chimpanzees both evolved from a common ancestor which in turn had a common ancestor with gorillas. But humans never split off from something which was a chimpanzee or a gorilla, or you may as well say we split off from humans. And for the exact same reasons, we did not split off from apes.
So, yes, our ancstors were apes. Just not the same types of apes which are alive today.
This is true in the same way that it is true to say that our ancestors were mammals or living organisms. We are apes. We did not evolves from apes. Our ancestors, starting from quite a while back were apes, and so was my father, and so am I.
Apes are both modern and ancient species – this is not an either-or question
You are right, it is not. They are a currently existing species (or should we say clade, or branch, or are we talking about ‘ape species’) they are our current clade, and given that we place their likely origin in the Neogene, I think that my use of ‘”modern” was not only accurate, but also better worded than my above use of “current”. Well, unless you use “modern” in the same sense as in “Early Modern Period”, but then I am puzzled by your use of “ancient”.
All this to say that “Humans evolved from apes” is factually incorrect whether you include humans in apes or not. Either you include them, and we never split off, or you use apes to only mean “existing species that do not include humans”, and then that is not what what we evolved from, or you use apes to mean “Hominoidea before hominidae” and frankly, if we are going to redefine terms this way, there is no point in having a conversation.
Actually, if we all agree with the facts, there is no point in having the discussion anyway, is there?
I never said that we all agree with the facts. You clearly do not agree with the facts. That doesn’t mean the facts are in doubt. It just means you don’t understand them. I suggest that you reread the explanations kindly provided by closetpuritain and Sarah.
I never said that we all agree with the facts. You clearly do not agree with the facts. That doesn’t mean the facts are in doubt. It just means you don’t understand them
So, which facts don’t I understand? Can I have your definition of ‘apes’, which makes the statement ‘we evolved from apes’ both true and more meaningful than ‘we evolved from other living organisms which were not humans’, or worse yet ‘we evolved from ourselves’, because ‘apes’ are our branch? I would truly like to increase my understanding of evolution, after all.
By the way, does anyone here think that “The Republic of Poland split from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1918” is a true statement of fact?
“Objective reality exists. ”
“Letting bakers and photographers discriminate against gay couples is not going to change their minds. There are no moderates making their voting decisions based on these issues. These are not the people who voted for Obama and then switched to Trump.”
Your idea of objective reality on this issue may well be wrong. I have some anecdotal evidence in that I know at least three people who voted for Obama (who don’t know each other) who expressed serious reservations about how Democrats have gone in that area. Two of them didn’t vote in this election. Fortunately one of them was in California where it didn’t matter, but one was in Florida where it did. Also one of them is gay (as am I). So it may well be that your idea of “objective reality” is in fact highly colored by a selective sample. (As is mine I’m sure).
I’ve already heard mulling about discrimination lawsuits against businesses based on pronoun references, so I think you’re wrong about that. That wouldn’t seem plausible if we didn’t already have actual cases of photographers being forced to attend gay weddings.
Which is exactly the problem. Our current state of affairs makes our extremists look plausible, while their extremists get to say “Hey, we aren’t crazy, we are just trying to be reasonable”.
All modern apes, including humans, evolved from earlier apes.
Sebastian – I just don’t see people changing their votes, or even deciding to stay home, based on this one issue. Do you really think that the people you know had no other reason for staying home? It was just the issue of wedding photographers/wedding cake bakers? They had no other reasons for opposing Hillary? I mean, you’re the one who knows them. But, I just don’t find that plausible.
So, you think that rightwing extremists today look more reasonable than those on the left? Let’s take a voice of the far right – Breitbart. What voice of the far left, or platform makes the people at Breitbart look reasonable by comparison?
All modern apes, including humans, evolved from earlier apes.
I see. So if I were to say ‘all living organisms, including humans, developed slowly from earlier living organisms’ you think that even a die hard Creationist would disagree with me? I think that this is a very uncontroversial statement. After all, it takes a long time from a human zygote to develop into an adult human, or for a tadpole to develop into a frog. I’m glad we all agree about the facts, then.
Not about the Republic of Poland splitting off from the USSR, that’s just plain ignorance or sloppy phrasing. Exactly as saying that “Humans split from chimpanzees”.
Yep, sloppy phrasing.
Absolutely. Die hard Creationists beleive that God created all living creatures on earth, in the form that they are now over the course of a few days about 6000 years ago. They beleive this because that is what the Bible says, and they believe that the Bible is the word of God and should be read literally.
Wow, I just looked up how many Americans believe in creationism – over 40%
42% God created humans in present form within the last 10,000 years
31% Humans evolved with God guiding
19% Humans evolved, but God had no part in the process
Yup, if you cherry pick the most extremist complaints and give the absolute least charity you certainly can make people look bad.
It’s hardly cherry picking when the right makes Donald Trump President right after the left made Barack Obama President.
Maybe, just maybe, the comparison makes them look bad because they are bad.
Seriously?–
I think you and Kate pretty much have the same understanding of how humans evolved and the issue is semantics. But seriously, Seriously?, if you’re going to fight over semantics, the least arguable question is whether “ape” is a species. Wikipedia puts them at the superfamily level; clades are real, while how many levels in the kingdom-phylym-class-order-family-genus-species is somewhat arbitrary, which is how you get things like “superfamily” in the first place; and many people when they say “apes” think of/mean the great apes, which is at the family level. But apes are clearly not all one species. You ARE correct to call apes a clade, though.
I think that Sarah is correct that you are thinking of how people often mistakenly say that humans evolved from chimps (which I think I’ve seen more than once as a stock answer in FAQs and such). Actually, that’s probably why you keep calling apes “a species”.
I’m not sure if there’s a technical biological definition of “modern” species, but I think whenever I’ve read about evolution, “modern” is used to mean the modern species that exists now/in historical time, not species that went extinct before humans could describe them. So apes that were neither human or chimpanzee, but rather gave rise to both, I would not call “modern” if I were writing for a general audience (which this blog would certainly be). For example, the BBC distinguishes “modern” humans from species such as Neanderthals here.
Again, this is semantics, but assuming the Creationist understood “earlier” here as I believe Kate meant–an earlier type, not earlier in the sense of the relatives you look up on Ancestry.com who are still the same species–yeah, the Creationists would disagree. I think “humans developed” is fairly clear in meaning humans collectively, not the individual development of an embryo to an adult that leaves humans collectively in the same place. If someone wrote that phrase and meant it to describe embryos developing into people, I would also wonder why they used the past tense–do they think babies work differently now?
If someone wrote that phrase and meant it to describe embryos developing into people, I would also wonder why they used the past tense–do they think babies work differently now?
All other apes have their babies delivered by storks. Trufax.
Kate, I don’t think this is sloppy phrasing at all, just casual. “X split off from Y,” when used conjugally with “Y split off from X” (as in, if you consider both to be true simultaneously), is a common way of rephrasing “X and Y mutually diverged from their common evolutionary line,” and is definitely shorter and easier to say. I’ve been in university-level anthropology lectures where the professor used that turn of phrase in casual speech to describe the relationship between the human tribe and the bonobo/chimpanzee tribe.
It’s generally understood when you’re talking about the evolutionary history of species that you’re really talking about approximations of those species that resemble the modern form less and less as you go farther back in time, anyway. So “chimpanzees” is just as accurate an approximation of chimpanzees’ recent ancestors as “humans” is of our recent ancestors. “Humans split off from chimpanzees” is not equivalent to saying “humans evolved from chimpanzees,” which would be wrong. It’s not inaccurate, just imprecise.
Also, I got into an argument on the internet with a Creationist several years ago in which not only the evolution of species but the age of the planet and the principles of stellar nucleosynthesis and radioactive half-life were called into question. This person genuinely would not concede that atoms besides hydrogen were formed by nuclear fusion, so therefore also wouldn’t concede that most of the matter on Earth had formed in the core of our star, so therefore also wouldn’t concede that we could know when any particular scrap of matter had been “placed” on Earth or what its original composition had been, and as a consequence wouldn’t accept that radiometric dating could tell us anything about the age of the Earth (or dinosaur bones, for that matter). It was eye-opening.
I don’t know if every person who answered in the 42% of Kate’s survey was that extreme in their views, but even believing that humans are no more than 10,000 years old shows a startling lack of scientific literacy, considering we have archaeological evidence of entire cities that are older than that.
The thing is, in a lot of cases I don’t think it is lack of scientific literacy. A significant percentage of the U.S. population takes their religion as primary in establishing their understanding of the world. Biblical literalism in the case of creationists. In the case of Catholocism, which I was raised with, they are not creationists or Biblical literalists, but there is a call to submission to Catholic theology and hierarchy. If one takes their various religious tenents as primary and places science as more of a tool which must submit to religious truth, then a lot of things about their world views fall into place. They accept the scientific consensus if and only if it does not contradict their religious world view.
In terms of social problems, when you stop thinking in terms of results in the world of the living and start thinking in terms of results in the hereafter (ie. what will lead the most people to salvation according to various religious views) – again things fall into place and it all makes sense. Birth control may clearly reduce suffering here on earth, but of what use is that if millions are damned for eternity as a result? However, because the U.S. is a secular society, with separation of church and state, they can’t use religious arguments like that effectively. They need to backwards engineer plausbile-sounding secular reasons for their policy positions. That’s why it is so impossible to debate with them.
even believing that humans are no more than 10,000 years old shows a startling lack of scientific literacy, considering we have archaeological evidence of entire cities that are older than that.
Not necessarily.
My wife teaches in what’s probably the most conservative of the top ten liberal art colleges. As third generation atheists we often get into heated discussions with Creationists whose academic achievements far outshine my paltry MEng, if not my wife’s credentials.
They have impressive scientific literacy, an unshakable belief in Biblical inerrancy, and at the same time, a perfectly consistent worldview.
How do they achieve such a tour de force? Simple. God created things this way.
Sure, you can get other elements from fusion, but most atoms were created by God as they are now. Sure, carbon dating works, but God created the artifacts that we are examining so that the results would test the unworthies’ faith. Sure, geological layers tell a story inconsistent with the Bible, but… see above.
The theory that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient Creator who created the Earth 6000 yeas ago, with all evidence to the contrary already built in is absolutely unfalsifiable. You can understand how the natural world works, you can be an outstanding scientist in practically any field, and still believe in all the tenets of your chosen religion. After all, Deity-of-Choice would know of any relevant experiment, and could put a thumb on the scale to produce the result of his choosing.
So ancient cities cannot sway true believers. They are not older than 6000 years. 6000 years ago, they were made from scratch, already buried in the appropriate layers of soil and debris, and if they had been carbon tested at the time, the results would have led anyone ignorant of the Word of God to believe that they have been around for thousands of years. You do not have to believe this, but you cannot argue with it. No one can.
What you can do is mock believers that their Deity-of-Choice has chosen to engage in such trickery. Unfortunately, they have had a long time to compartmentalize their religious and scientific beliefs, and thus provide very little entertainment.
“So, you think that rightwing extremists today look more reasonable than those on the left? Let’s take a voice of the far right – Breitbart. What voice of the far left, or platform makes the people at Breitbart look reasonable by comparison?”
That isn’t how it works. It isn’t left/right domain specific. People have a couple of political issues that are salient to them for various reasons (it directly impacts them, they think it could impact them, they strongly empathize with the people it impacts, or it triggers some other thing that they strongly identify with). Within those issues extremists can look reasonable or unreasonable without much reference to general “voice of” type platforms. You seem to be operating under the idea that most people vote like political junkies. But most people don’t vote like political junkies.
Again you’re confusing the target audience when you make moderations to extreme laws. You aren’t trying to reach people who listen to Breitbart. You’re trying to reach people who think “I work for myself and I can totally see getting sued over pissing off the wrong customer that I would deeply not like to work with, why do they have to have the government punishing people for trivialities like wedding photographs?”.
Yes, you aren’t going to win over the person who wants to put gay people in concentration camps like Fidel Castro. But that person isn’t your target anyway so you shouldn’t care. Yes such a person might think that it means things are moving in their direction. They’re wrong, because it means they are less likely to be able to inspire the middle to work with them.
The reason the “all moderate movements = appeasement” thing gains traction is because we have gotten polarized enough that the only movement comes from one side’s extremists winning and flipping things by cramming it down the other side’s throat. That’s fine if you want to always see half the country as someone to be occupied. It sucks as a way to have a long term multi-cultural society survive.
If we’re being scientifically pedantic here anyway*, it didn’t form in the core of our star, ie the Sun–it formed in the cores of other, massive stars, and to some extent in supernovae.
*and my apologies if this should have just gone in the open thread!
OK, I can see this. Less regulation generally is one of the major reasons why Trump was elected. But, if people are voting based on a desire for less regulation – again, they’re not going change their minds and vote for Democrats because we fiddled around with the laws on public accomodation a bit.
You seem to be operating under the idea that most people vote like political junkies. But most people don’t vote like political junkies.
The weaker someone’s party affiliation and partisanship the less likely they are to have any idea at all about policy details. Trying to appeal to swing voters by making edge-case tweaks to anti-discrimination laws is like trying to advertise your (horribly oppressed, of course) wedding photography business in the Vatican Times.
“Less regulation generally is one of the major reasons why Trump was elected. But, if people are voting based on a desire for less regulation – again, they’re not going change their minds and vote for Democrats because we fiddled around with the laws on public accomodation a bit.”
No. There is a whole range of opinion on regulation. You’re making it binary. One part of the range is “we should have less regulation on stupid trivialities”.
“The weaker someone’s party affiliation and partisanship the less likely they are to have any idea at all about policy details. Trying to appeal to swing voters by making edge-case tweaks to anti-discrimination laws is like trying to advertise your (horribly oppressed, of course) wedding photography business in the Vatican Times.”
No. Making it clear that you are focusing anti-discrimination laws on important issues is exactly how you get the “we shouldn’t be over-regulating trivialities” voter on the regulation spectrum. Pretty much everybody can see the difference between “it would be horrible to be fired for your job based on race” and “it would be mildly annoying to have to find another wedding photographer rather than hire someone who hates me…”
Well, they just voted for “is going to poison your water with mercury tainted mining waste”. Where does that fall on your spectrum?
I agree with gin completely, who is considered “Extremists” is partially in the eye of the beholder. I like using second amendment arguments here… basically all of America, 90% plus or minus, depending on how the question is framed, is in favour of mandatory background checks, closing the gun show loop, and restricting people with mental illness from purchasing firearms. Hell… At one time the NRA was in favour of those regulations. What changed? Gun proponents stopped trusting gun opponents.
And let’s be real: They have every reason to hold that lack of trust. Every time there’s a firearm related death, the same tired people come out with the same tired arguments, the only thing that changes are the graves they’re standing on and the relative absurdity of the situation.
“We need to limit magazine sizes!”, we’re told. “We need to remove ‘semi-automatic assault rifles’ from circulation.” “We aren’t coming for all your guns, just the scary black ones.” “You don’t need an AK-47 for self defense, you’ll always have your handguns.” Well… That’s debatable… And cool heads could have that debate…. But the well is absolutely poisoned by lawmakers who, for instance, said that we need gun control measures to prevent shooters like Dylann Roof.
Roof purchased his firearm legally from a dealer, passed a background check, and had no history of mental illness. The firearm in question was a handgun, a .45 calibre Glock, with a 10 round magazine. What stated gun control legislation would have prevented that? Unless you’re planning on restricting sales to citizens that pass background checks and have no recorded history of mental illness, or handguns with small capacity magazines, gun control would not have worked here.
This is EXACTLY why proponents don’t trust the opponents. They see the opponents as dishonestly pushing for policy that they see as insufficient, but necessary, on a slippery slope to somewhere they don’t actually want to go. And if history is a guide, when you give an inch, they take a mile, so the gun control debate has been mired in a place no one really wants to be.
(Most people don’t vote!)
Barry says:
It’s a definition problem, and one I am absolutely grateful we have. There was a time in history where African Americans had different rights under the law than White Americans, when the KKK would relatively frequently kill American Americans and walk away whistling… At that time in our history, when there was so much overt, violent, hateful racism… It was both necessary and right to completely ignore what we consider to be ‘racist’ today. Today’s racism seems almost cute in comparison.
It seems… wrong… To lump that kind of overtly purposeful, hostile racism in with things like microagressions (TYSRL).
The definition of ‘racist’ is broadening, and sometimes in ways that aren’t helpful. You listed three examples: 1. vote suppression, 2. claming a judge is biased “becuase he’s a mexican,” and 3. the racial wage gap.
I’ll take a swing at these.
The most problematic, for me, is the ‘Mexican Judge’. “Mexican” is not a race. There is no doubt in my mind if the people coming over the Southern American border were white, that much of the rhetoric would be the same. Hell, a good percentage of the people coming up from Mexico ARE white. And when you’re a politician taking a hard stance against a country, it very well could bias a judge from that country against you, especially a judge who’s been relatively consistently in favour of generous immigration reform.
I’m not saying that Trump was right, you don’t get to shop for a judge you like by biasing them during a trial, and Curiel was hearing that case long before Trump ran for president. If Trump was so concerned about his case, and thought his policy would bias his Judge who had Mexican ties, then maybe he should have taken then into account before his “build a wall” rhetoric. That makes it deeply stupid, but not racist.
2. “Voter Suppression” always gets an eye roll from me. It’s the Canadian in me. What other modern democracies see as necessary to safeguard the integrity of their elections, America has found a way to make racially polarised and controversial. Canada has voter ID, Every single EU nation has voter ID (The UK was the last to sign up, couple years ago), hell… MEXICO has voter ID.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that there are Republican lawmakers motivated solely by making it harder for disenfranchised people to vote… But coming to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons does not invalidate the policy. More… Those people are stupid: There is no evidence that it actually works. There were about a half dozen states that had voter ID laws in 2016 that didn’t in 2012. More people in most of those states voted Democrat than they had in 2012.
And even then… Those people… See… I don’t think they’re trying to push voter ID because the people they’re disenfranchising are disproportionately black, I think they’re doing it because the people they’re disenfranchising disproportionately vote Democrat. If African Americans voted Republican, I think Republicans would pay their Uber. When your race shows a 90% conformity as a voting block, calling the reason politicians treat you differently “racism” becomes, I think, a weaker argument.
If you choose to label everything that has a racially disparate impact as “racism”, then sure, this is racism… But that doesn’t really fit either the dictionary definition of Racism, nor common parlance. I see the act of “being racist” as a purposeful act. I think that if we choose to apply “racism” your way, then it loses a measure of gravity. I can never quite decide if progressives tried to push other, less serious, issues under the banner of racism to garner more attention to those issues, or if this is just focus creep, and as things we traditionally saw as racist tended to fade, people who had wrapped their identify and livelihood around racial issues needed a new frontier.
3. “the racial wage gap” This is again a difference in definition. Why do African Americans earn less? Education? Training? Criminal Records? Employer discrimination? Probably a measure of all, and more… But I would only consider the last to be racist. It isn’t racist to pay someone with a degree more than someone who dropped out of high school.
Look, there are a lot of ugly reasons why African Americans tend to punch below their weight class in almost every statistic that goes into earning potential… But most of those things were set in motion long before the people effected were even born. Some have even been addressed… But even once they’re addressed, that doesn’t erase the damage done, and it doesn’t put the affected populations back to parity.
Which is how there could be disparate racial impact without overt racism. If the conversation was: “We need to try to rise people out of poverty, increase school funding to poorer areas, or start some kind of family counselling program to reduce single parenthood rates.” I’d be right there cheering… But this knee-jerk… raw nerve reflex of: “Racial disparity, therefore racism” loses me. It’s jarring in it’s lack of critical thought.
“institutional oppression” is a lazy term. Back in the days of Jim Crow, it was easy to point to the systems that were oppressive, and correct them, because they were overtly racist. Now it’s harder, and not because the racists have gotten more sneaky about their oppression, but because their oppression is more… incidental. Point out to me exactly which institutions are racist, which policies are racist, which people are racist, and maybe we’ll fight them together. Slap together a couple of conspiracy theories welded together with ‘disparate impact’ and bumper stickers and I’m going to remain sceptical.
You’re mistaken about what the history says. Read some of MLK Jr’s writing on racism; of course he was concerned with violence, but he was also concerned with subtler forms of racism.
Judging from your response, when I said “voter suppression,” you took that to mean voter ID and nothing else. (Or you realized that wasn’t all I meant, but for reasons of space decided to just focus on ID, which I’d understand). It’s not crucial, for purposes of this thread, by I think it’s worth pointing out that voter suppression measures refer to more than voter ID laws.
You wrote:
According to this article in Harvard Law and Policy Review (pdf link), this claim is a bit misleading.
First of all, as of 2012:
You said that the UK now has voter ID requirements. But according to this British newspaper, there aren’t yet voter ID requirements in the UK; what’s been proposed is a pilot program in limited areas in 2018 and then seeing how it goes. The pilot program will include both ID and non-ID approaches, to see what works better, so even if they decide the pilot program was successful that won’t necessarily mean voter ID at polls. And that trial program is hardly uncontroversial.
You’re also ignoring the difference in stringency, but that’s essential. Just because a country requires some form of ID at the voting booth doesn’t mean that their ID laws are as stringent as some of the laws the GOP has proposed in this country. Furthermore, not every law existing in other countries is perfect and should be emulated.
Citation, please?
Whoops, gotta go to a show. More later, maybe.
I wrote:
You wrote:
So…. I was right? None of those countries are Canada, Mexico, or an EU member, except the UK, which as I pointed out, admittedly sloppily, has just passed measures a year ago that will (most probably) lead to voter ID. I find this argument pedantic. Even if you wanted to disallow the UK, there are 27 other EU members and literally dozens of other modern democracies around the globe that have some clear variation of voter ID laws.
That’s legit. I think that any measure that didn’t allow citizens to be able to get some acceptable form of voter ID 1) free of charge and 2) relatively quickly is probably unconstitutional, and the GOP isn’t exactly famous for liking the constitution when they find it inconvenient.
I said:
You asked:
Flubbed talking point, mea culpa. Hillary lost some of Obama’s market share in almost every state…. Usually to Stein or Johnson. If you assume Stein voters are likely Democrats, and some percentage of Johnson or McMullin voters might have been discouraged democrats, it’s POSSIBLE that I’m right, but I can’t prove it. Regardless… All four also saw increases in total votes between 2012 and 2016:
Alabama went from 2.074M to 2.123M total votes cast, the difference between ’12 and ’16 for the Democrats was about 65,000 votes, 3rd party candidates took about 70,000, which is about 50,000 more than they got in ’12.
Arkansas went from 1.069M to 1.130M total, difference for Dems was 14K, third party took 60,000, up from 25,000.
New Hampshire went from 710K to 744K total, difference for Dems was 21K, third parties took 41,000, up from 11,000.
Rhode Island went from 446K to 464K total, difference for Dems was 27K, third parties took about 30,000, up from 8,000.
De facto or de jure, this is still the case.
This is worded awfully carefully, as highlighted.
You mean, all of US history?
What happened to Timothy Caughman is not “cute.”
Mookie says:
I actually took a couple minutes out of my day to respond to a couple of these points, and then I had this moment of realisation: You don’t actually care. Your comment was basically a run of got’chas, contextless goldmining, and misrepresentation. Meet me on my arguments, as I present them, or fuck off.
“You’re also ignoring the difference in stringency, but that’s essential. Just because a country requires some form of ID at the voting booth doesn’t mean that their ID laws are as stringent as some of the laws the GOP has proposed in this country. ”
This is what I mean about removing the weapon by moving the state of the law to the center. The state of things right now is that their extremists get to say “They don’t want voter to have to show ID at all”. Which is pretty much correct and to the average person who isn’t a political junkie seems like a self evidently ridiculous position. So we are the ones who look like extremists.
As a result, when their extremists get power they get to do extreme things on the issue.
The dynamic is totally different if you take the weapon away when we are in power by making a just voter ID law. You make sure that it is easy to get, use, and replace if needed. You make it uniform. Now their extremists are forced into exposing themselves to moderate voters who aren’t political junkies. They can’t just lead with “obviously there should be some ID to vote”, they have to come up with something a lot less effective and probably hyper-technical. The average voter will then think: meh, we have voter ID in place which seems like it pretty much works, no need to change it. You’ve changed the dynamic from our side looking like it had the more extreme position (which to average voters seemed crazy) to their side having the extremist position.
You aren’t trying to ‘appease’ their extremists. You know you can’t ever do that. You’re trying to make it so that their extremists can no longer use it as a wedge issue with moderate people who aren’t political junkies. It can still be used for an inflammatory issue for their most extremist base, but you don’t care about winning them because you never were going to win them.
The problem I have with these discussions in the last few months is that too many people are willing to write off way too much of the middle. Yes they are winning the middle some of the time. But part of that is because we are making it easy for people who aren’t political junkies to believe that we are the extremists. I’m not saying that changing will stop their extremists from painting us that way. I’m saying that changing will make it less effective. And when you’re dealing with a closely divided country, that is all we need.
It also contributes to momentum, because if the people who aren’t political junkies see that when you win you act fairly to the losers, they aren’t as likely to be open to being polarized against you if you make a misstep on something that they identify with (like being forced to photograph a gay wedding that they don’t agree with).
Wow, that’s quite a rebuttal. Humble Talent has won the internet. Good job. Your work here is done.
Make another comment like this one and you’ll be asked to leave the blog. Please do better. Thanks.
I have an almost Christ-like (if I do say so myself) patience with people with differing opinions than mine, but only if I think they’re approaching the conversation honestly. Maybe sometimes I break out some snark or sarcasm, but I don’t often drop bombs like that unless I think someone’s being deliberately obtuse.
Unless that was a genuine statement, in which case I’d like to thank the academy for this great honour, my family for all their support, my exceptionally communistic calculus professor for waking me up to politics, and all the Kekistanis online that amuse me on a daily basis.
Humble Talent, Mookie’s comments were abundantly clear to me: You are drawing a distinction between “today’s racism” and racism “at that time” (what time?) that is not nearly as solid as you seem to think it is. You brought up racism in the law; Mookie says that’s still a thing. You brought up “violent racism;” Mookie said that’s still going on, and brought up a specific example.
This seems to be “meeting you on your arguments, as you present them.”
I see my eventual dis-invitation as an inevitability, but in the meantime, I’ll refrain from dropping four letter words.
It’s not about the four letter words, dude. (Fuck damn shit crap dice – see? I’m fine with four letter words).
Please read the policies and try to do better.
(What time?) You want a more specific time? I mentioned Jim Crow, which was late 1800’s, early 1900’s. But even by that time the violence had changed. The history of racism in America is long, disparate, and still ongoing. But there’s a fundamental difference between times where black people were being dragged out of their homes to hang from a tree by a firey cross and today. Even within the context of the law, there’s a fundamental difference between things like the 3/5 compromise and neutrally written laws that have a disparate impact…
Mookie’s comments paint a false equivalency. “this is still the case” No, frankly, it is not. And I’m offended at the inference. That is patently ignoring my argument to score points and shift goalposts, I’m not playing.
Jim Crow laws lasted, and were enforced, until the mid-1960s.
Humble Talent:
And thus the screen name. Sure.
Grace
I was asking you to clarify the argument you think you’re making. I don’t respond substantively to arguments if I don’t yet understand them. There’s no need to score points against something that doesn’t exist. I have not stated any goals.
Can you answer my questions?
If so, I have a few others:
Can you explain what that difference is? What specifics (the cross? the tree?) does that difference hinge on? You mentioned before that lynchers were never held responsible for their actions. Do you continue to assert that or would you like to clarify?
I don’t think it’s an issue of semantics to attempt to determine whether a discussion will be fruitful and if one’s interlocutor is both honest and well-read on the subject at hand. Asking questions is the best way I know of gauging that.
I have an almost Christ-like (if I do say so myself) patience with people with differing opinions than mine, but only if I think they’re approaching the conversation honestly.
Jesus had an easier time of it than you. You have to nail yourself to that cross without any centurions to help you out!
“I have an almost Christ-like (if I do say so myself) patience ”
Come-on people. This is a clear signal of trolling. But an excellent illustration of how we let extremists dominate the conversation.
You are WAY oversimplifying this, and way overestimating how motivating this issue is for moderates.
There are really good, progressive, reasons for making it easier for people to get ID’s. People on the left would love to do this for the economic benefits it could bring people in poor communities, who often rely on shady check-cashing operations that skim a heafty percentage off the top from people who don’t have the ID to go to a bank. If it were easy, it would have been done already for other reasons. But, Democrats attempting to institute a national voter ID – even if its optional, even if you could opt to use your drivers license instead – would cause a full-on freakout on the right. This will be fueled by powerful lobbying interests, incliding the check-cashing shops/payday lenders.
There are very few people who are moderate on social issues and really care about social issues very much. Most moderates are focused on economic issues. They want lower taxes and more government services. They want less regulation, and a cleaner environment, safe drinking water, safe working conditions for themselves and their loved ones..etc. In short, they want the benefits of good government, but they don’t want to pay for it.
Plus, we are decidedly NOT in power (assuming that you are not Republican). So, in that sense, the question is moot at this point in time. Making these sorts of noises now will get us in the weeds explaining why the Republican plan for people to just use their drivers license is not o.k.. That’s exactly what your average voter just thinks – why can’t those people just use their driver’s license like I do. They don’t understand (and won’t be told) how difficult it is to get ID if you don’t have the basic paperwork, if you don’t live anywhere near where you were born and/or grew up, and if you’re poor. Note that these rules vary from state to state, so it may be easy in YOUR state – especially if you live in a liberal state.
Kate, complaints about Republicans misusing voter ID requirements have been around approximately my entire life. Excellent Voter ID models have been around in Europe since before I was born. I’ve been raising the criticism since at least 2007. Democrats have controlled both branches numerous times in my lifetime.
So hopefully I’m laying good groundwork for the next time.
Further, it is an example of a mode of thinking that helps us step away from hyper polarization. We need to be developing strategies to counter hyper polarization–and I’m not satisfied with “embrace it and let half the country choke on it” (especially when it appears that our half will be choking on it at least some of the time).
Kate, complaints about Republicans misusing voter ID requirements have been around approximately my entire life.
Well, yes, since they’ve been using it as a close variation on Jim Crow’s literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and poll taxes, no wonder.
And since the federal court system has gone on to decide that the 15th Amendment is actually just a bit of dadaist humor, any attempts to impose a voter ID system that actually protects the rights of individuals to vote is a complete nonstarter, because John Roberts and his coterie of oath-breakers will just decide it violates the sovereign dignity of the states. Doing it on a state level is useless.
Are you saying that you believe federal voter ID for federal elections is unconstitutional? I don’t think that is well accepted position. (I think there may be that possibility for state elections which is a different issue though again once you have a strong federal ID system in place it is going to be a lot harder to push against it).
Are you saying that you believe federal voter ID for federal elections is unconstitutional? I don’t think that is well accepted position.
After Shelby County v. Holder, I assume that any federal law that is effective at protecting the voting rights of people of color is likely to be struck down by the faithless and corrupt Roberts Court.
I also don’t trust an Executive Branch that’s run by the likes of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Jeff Sessions to fulfill a responsibility to issue voter IDs to people who aren’t white. Certainly, they have run the CBP and ICE in an appallingly lawless fashion.
No compromise is possible with Trump’s Republican Party. It is irredeemably evil and dishonest.
You think denying that voter fraud is a problem loses votes??? Those four words would lead to an absolute bloodbath!!!! They are practically designed to stoke paranoia.
Again, you aren’t thinking structurally. Even if it is true that a strong federal VOTER ID system would cause freakouts, it would cause freakouts among THEIR voters. So instead of our voters getting disenfranchised, their voters end up opting out. And you raise this as a problem….
No, we disagree on the structure. I believe that social moderates who care enough about social issues to change their votes are about as common as unicorns. Swing voters are economy voters. What Bill Clinton said all those years ago is still true – “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Even then I don’t agree. The number of people GAINED by the issue being taken off the table may be near zero. The number gained by not being disenfranchised should be similar to whatever number you worry about now. The number not lost by looking silly saying being portrayed as “doesn’t mind letting anybody vote with identification” is marginal but real. And we are losing on small margins–and it is not the only area where we could improve things with very little real compromise if we adopted that mindset.
For context:
And:
Mookie said:
Well… First off, no. What I said was that there was a time when people could lynch African Americans and walk away whistling. This is true. I did not say that “lynchers were never held responsible for their actions.” It’s that kind of strawmanning that makes a conversation with you, I think, useless. We’re not even disagreeing on interpretation, you’re making up arguements and stuffing them in my mouth.
And then… even ignoring that. It’s… painfully frustrating to see someone sealion that hard. You think the difference in racism between the 1800’s and 2017 is the burning cross? I just… How do you approach that conversation?
“I have an almost Christ-like (if I do say so myself) patience ”
Come on…. It’s funny! There’s hyperbole in there…. And a play on words…
As an aside, if you think I’m an extremist, I have some relatively mainstream publications I’d love to show you. Then again, when you’re standing on the shore in California, it looks like the whole world’s to the East.
Actually, when I lived in CA we had a lot of friends and collegues who were from and/or did busniess in east Asia and Australia. We often referred to CA as the “east coat” – as in east coast of the Pacific rim. Maybe you shouldn’t make such knee-jerk assumptions about perspectives that you don’t know much about.
It’s a turn of phrase Kate. Obviously the world is round… Do I really have to say that? But guess what? YOU CAN’T SEE ASIA FROM CALIFORNIA. Jesus.
Yet again, when Humble Talent is materially shown that its statement is wrong or too vague to be meaningful, it replies via insult. I’m with Sebastian H on his assessment of this commenter.
I have to admit a measure of frustration. I try to take people at face value, that they are exactly what they say they are, at least until they demonstrate otherwise… But I’m struggling here. I can understand a joke falling flat, or taking sarcasm seriously, this is the internet, it’s hard to inject humor into words. But in the last couple of days, I’ve been asked some of the strangest questions.
In a conversation about racism, when I compared a time where racism consisted of lynchings and cross burnings to today to make the point that racism in America is fundamentally different, I was asked: “Can you explain what that difference is? What specifics (the cross? the tree?) does that difference hinge on?”
I have a real hard time believing that someone doesn’t understand the obvious truth in that statement. And so I interpret it to be something like: “I (don’t agree with/don’t like/feel uneasy with) your statement, but instead of meeting it on its merits, because I (don’t know how/don’t want to make the effort/Can’t), I’ll pretend I have no idea what you’re talking about and (pretend you were talking about something else/ask obtuse questions/redirect) under the guise of civility to attempt to (derail the conversation/make you go away). I find the approach dishonest and disrespectful.
Fast forward to this comment… A spin on a common parlance about visual perspective. “When you’re on the edge of something, everything looks one sided”, “when you’re standing on the shore in California, it looks like the whole world’s to the East.” I don’t think this is “wrong” or “vague”, and I cannot believe someone could read this and in good faith respond, “when I lived in CA we had a lot of friends and collegues who were from and/or did busniess in east Asia and Australia. We often referred to CA as the “east coat” – as in east coast of the Pacific rim.”
Again, you aren’t thinking structurally.
I sure am. It’s the untrustworthy federal court system and administrative state that makes me oppose Voter ID; in a world where I had more confidence in them I would be a neutral-to-positive about the idea.
(And yes, this sort of distrust informs my position on a bunch of other issues, from hate speech laws to NHS-style socialized medicine.)
Humble Talent,
If it helps any, I see that here too. I don’t post very much because I just assume that I’ll be banned if I say the “wrong” thing – which is quite easy to do here.
My brother was living with a woman in college for awhile who majored in women’s studies, and he told me this story.
He came home and she was talking on the phone to her mother. She was saying things like “I don’t know why, I didn’t say anything bad to him”. It turns out she was furious because he was calling her the devil earlier that day, and just because she asked harmless questions.
What happened was that she was asking him if she should get a job for the summer because she wasn’t going to take classes. His response was: “The devil makes work for idle hands”. Huh.
I just can’t understand the thinking of many people. I (charitably) assume it’s because they read completely different things and have friends with completely different ways of thinking. I don’t understand why the Kardashians are worshiped. I don’t understand people who think that they should have their life paid for by the government without having to work. I don’t understand people who will try to obfuscate with a perma-smirk. I don’t understand the suffocating self-righteousness. I don’t understand how a person who has an associate’s degree or bachelor’s degree in one of the “grievance studies” can be so absolutely sure of him or herself in the scientific issues of climate change.
I also have to say that once in a while there are posters here who know how to think and who are also polite. There was a poster named Arcje or Argje or something like that a few months ago as an example. He got banned, apparently for thinking different. The people from Feminist Critics also had a different point of view – I assume they have also been banned.
As to “all different points of view” here, yeah, there’s RonF, the token conservative who knows his place. He always backs down. And then there’s some others like … uhhh … did I mention RonF?
You brought this up once before, Ell, when you called Charles a “non-scientist.” As Charles pointed out at the time, his job is creating scientific modeling (by the standard definition, Charles is in fact a scientist), and he reads (and has the background to understand) the primary literature on climate change.
I was struck by your non-response to him at the time. You made a completely false assumption, and upon being told you were mistaken you didn’t do what any ordinarily civil person would do, which is to say “whoops, sorry about that.”
For you to bring it up again now, without acknowledging that the last time you brought this up your assumptions were entirely wrong, seems a little odd. I also note that you didn’t criticize climate change deniers who make very certain-sounding pronouncements without having a degree in the sciences.
Speaking of which[*]: You also made a clearly, unambiguously false claim (“in the 1970s that the forecast was for global *cooling*, and that was even a cover of Time Magazine. The “cooling” thing didn’t really pan out, so it kind of disappeared and then reappeared many years later as global warming”). Charles and I both pointed out, with citations to evidence and even a graph from a peer-reviewed journal, that your claim was wrong.
You didn’t respond, or acknowledge that the “fact” you had shared was wrong.
Are you ever going to respond? Will you either defend your claim with links and evidence, showing that Charles and I were mistaken; or acknowledge that you made an error?
Because I don’t find it frustrating to talk to people who disagree with me (and if you think RonF’s the only right-winger posting comments here, you’re very mistaken). What I do find frustrating is when people refuse to argue, or are apparently unwilling to consider or acknowledge evidence that disagrees with their views – which is the impression you gave by walking away from that thread as soon as Charles and I disputed your claims. I still wish that you’d go back to that thread and respond to Charles and I.
I also want to point out that I never moderated you on that thread; never spoke rudely to you; never indicated that your views on global warming were not allowed on this blog. The reason you didn’t defend your own views on that thread is that you chose not to. Blaming me for your own freely-made choices is unfair.
[*] Although perhaps you do have a scientific degree; I’m not claiming to know either way.
Cool. “Awaiting moderation”.
This comment of mine:
“I don’t understand how a person who has an associate’s degree or bachelor’s degree in one of the “grievance studies” can be so absolutely sure of him or herself in the scientific issues of climate change.”
… had absolutely nothing to do with Charles. Nada Zip. I had forgotten about that. The comment means exactly what it says: I see lots of the types of people described above who are absolutely sure of themselves.
Ya know, just like the comment about the Kardashians wasn’t really aimed at anyone here. I seriously have not seen anyone HERE worship the Kardashians.
As to Charles, I assumed he was a non-scientist because in my opinion he sounded like a non-scientist. If he is a scientist, great. I have no idea what reality is, because self-serving statements on a forum with no other evidence can easily be false. I backed away because if I thought that if I had pushed the issue, and pointed some things out, I would be banned.
As for hearing about global cooling in the 1970s, that is true. I did hear about global cooling in the 1970s. If you demand that I apologize for spreading false information that you and Charles were kind enough to educate me about, I fully, fully super-duper apologize. I beg your forgiveness.
I was only attempting a discussion and a light-hearted one at that; I didn’t mean to step on any toes. Your self-righteous anger above is bizarre.
By the way, who are the other conservatives here besides the token RonF? Whether Humble Talent is one or not, he will be banned in a week or less. Same with me if I post further (or probably even if I don’t). Gin-and-Whiskey is a rational poster, but he claims to be a democrat.
I would say that you had thriving discussions maybe 10 years ago here. The sale of the website to BangBros didn’t help the decline, nor did your constant bannings (1000s?). Today, you have a clique of 10 to 20 people or so who just wallow in victimhood, self-righteousness and virtue-signaling. I still read along for the occasional insightful people who have interesting things to say before they are banned.
That’s because no one actually thinks that. It’s a total straw man.
(We can discuss whether the idea of Universal Basic Income even remotely qualifies for your description, but I am guessing that’s not even what you were talking about. I am guessing that you have the idea that there’s a whole class of grifters out there who have some kind of cushy racket going in which they take advantage of government benefits to live in style.)
Ell,
Fact free insults like “grievance studies” are not appropriate on Alas, according to our moderation policy. Please attempt to remain civil. (Accurate and responsive would also be nice, but Ampersand covered that.)
Also, apparently as a disabled person who can’t hold a full-time job, I should just fuck off and die then.
More data on the election.
It looks like turnout was NOT the key factor (Republican turnout and Democratic turnout fluctuated at about the same amounts). It is looking more and more as if in the Rust Belt states, people who literally voted for Obama (a black man) twice voted for Trump.
So these are people who are not only reachable by Democrats, they have actually voted for Democrats (including a black man) in the very recent past.
These are the kind of people we should be thinking about not going out of our way to alienate if we can avoid it. We can work with the kind of ‘racists’ who are willing to vote for a black man for President of the United States.
Ell, this was the false claim you made that Amp highlighted above:
This is what you are saying you claimed now:
As for hearing about global cooling in the 1970s, that is true. I did hear about global cooling in the 1970s.
I’m sure you can see the difference between those two claims without me having to explain it for you.
Not only is your apology completely disingenuous, your own account of what you said is clearly dishonest.
Yeah, clearly whoever Ell is, they’ve been banned before and are angsting about it. This is an odd behavior pattern but not uncommon among people who are disruptive until they get banned from places. They’re also clearly excited about being banned again so they can virtue signal about their Wounded Sock Puppet cosplay.
I know Charles; he’s a scientist, but I might be in on it.
My husband is a geological scientist who finds Charles a persuasive and informed interlocutor, but he is possibly fictional, and anyway, who can tell if we are all dreams in a dancing butterfly’s afternoon nap?
Hey, I found proof that Charles is fictional!
http://modestmedusa.com/comic/fish-scientist/
By the way, Ell, you are banned – not because of your opinion but because you’re so obviously someone who was banned previously under a different name, and also because you’re being personally insulting.
The good news is, I’m fairly sure this just giving you what you want. Best wishes to you. And please, stop coming back again and again and again under new identities. We’ve got better things to do with our time – yourself included.
Humble Talent (#69):
I apologize for coming to this so late, but I think you’ve inadvertently clarified something important here. It is false that at sometime in the past (pre-1965?) “racism consisted of lynchings and cross burnings,” if by that you mean that anti-racists only complained about such acts in those days. Your statement shows that you know nothing about the history of racism in the US. Yes, lynching and cross-burnings were part of the American landscape, though racist violence and cross-burnings have not totally disappeared. But racism also meant the denial of the vote, differential pay between blacks and whites, exclusion of blacks from schooling at all levels, attempts by whites to block the hiring of blacks from workplaces (notably in defense industries during World War II), demeaning depiction of black characters in entertainment and in high art, exclusion of blacks from the armed forces, redlining in the housing market, attempts (often partiallly successful) to exclude blacks from veterans’ benefits once they got in, hostility to any black person who managed to break the color bar (look at the experience of Jackie Robinson, for just one example), and white liberal reluctance to push very hard against any of this. And much much more, I’ve barely scratched the surface here. I could also have mentioned other targets of racism, such as Jews, whose numbers were limited at least in higher education by quotas; or Latinos or Asians or Native Americans.
But as I said, I think you’ve clarified something here. White racists want to continue or restore many of the abuses I just mentioned, but they don’t want to be called “racist” for doing so. So they concede and focus on slavery, lynching, and cross-burnings as uncontroversially racist in order to distract attention from all the other racist policies they are okay with and want to perpetuate. I don’t know exactly where you fit in, but by trying to make racism ‘consist’ solely of lynching and cross-burning, you’re erasing most of the history of American racism and ignoring the continuity from the past to the present.
That’s a whole lot of reach. No, I have to say that it would absolutely boggle my mind to learn that human rights activists were OK with lynchings. I think that statement to so facially stupid that no one would ever make it, but it sure is easy to knock down, innit? That’s why they call it a strawman. I said those things HAPPENED. The obvious inference being that they either nolonger do, or do in such marginal numbers as to be ignored. And then you go on to make my point for me, my overarching point was that “racism is fundamentally different than it has been historically” and you give a half dozen great examples in favour of that point. So… You agree with me? Great.
Barry, your commenter just inferred that not only was I a white racist, but that the reason I brought up lynchings was to draw attention away from my pet project of rolling back emancipation. I will forever lose respect for you if you continue to tut-tut me when I get condescending, but ignore shit like that. I have absolutely no problem standing up for myself, but I have my doubts that you’d appreciate me doing so.
1.
You clearly didn’t understand what the comment you’re responding to said. In no way did they imply either 1) that activists were okay with lynchings, or 2) that you had said that activists were okay with lynchings. If you think this is what they said, then you need to reread Duncan’s comment more carefully.
2.
As the Alas comment policy says,
What you’re saying is that having your arguments “subject to analysis and criticism” is against the Alas policies, and therefore I should crack down on it. But you’re mistaken about that; the kind of analysis Duncan did is explicitly allowed. He didn’t say “you’re a stupid racist ha ha!” He analyzed your argument and explained why he thinks the argument is racist.
It’s true that Duncan referred to “white racists.” But he also specifically said (immediately after the bit you quoted) “I don’t know exactly where you fit in,” indicating that he wasn’t saying that you necessarily were part of the crowd he’d just described.
Nor did he in any way imply that you want to roll back emancipation, that I can see. (If you think he said that, can you quote his exact words, please?) He could have bent over backwards more to be gentle, but also, you could have less thin skin about someone criticizing your arguments.
There’s a common tactic, among conservatives, to try and shut down discussion of racism – especially the racism of policies they support – by crying “waaaah! They insulted me! UNCIVIL!” whenever the racism of their policies or arguments is brought up. That’s not going to fly here.
I have no doubt you could respond by calling Duncan a jerk, an asshole, or whatever. You’d be mistaken if you thought that was “tit for tat,” however, and I WILL moderate you if you do that. Duncan made a point about your argument. The way you should respond is by making points about his argument.
I have doubt that you are willing to respond by replying to his argument on the merits, however. The fact that you’ve completely misread his argument, and are now trying to get the moderator to shut Duncan down rather than arguing the merits, doesn’t give me much hope that you’re about to respond on the merits. But I’d love for you to prove me wrong about that.
No, I assumed that smearing commentors as being white racists who want to reinstate Jim Crow era policies, specifically without analysis or criticism, MIGHT have been beyond the pale.
No, what he said was ““I don’t know exactly where you fit in,” And with all the semantic arguements on here, I’d have assumed a grammatist might have read ““I don’t know exactly where you fit in,” to mean, “you fit in there, I just don’t quite know where.” Which I think is the most obvious interpretation both as it reads and in context.
I’ll grant you that he didn’t say emancipation, I was being hyperbolic, it might have been covered in “and much more”, but my point remains valid if you said “rollback universal voting rights” or “exclude black children from the education system.” Pick any of the ridiculous policy statements he explicitly wrote and ad-lib it in, it is not material which.
I have no problem being uncivil. I don’t even have that much of a problem with being called a racist, or an Islamophobe, I know I’m not, and I can suffer the slings and arrows of faceless internet busybodies. In fact, I’ve done so quite a few times since being here. What annoyed me here was you specifically… You have a massive blind spot while people are using arguements that sound pleasant to a progressive ear. I don’t understand the thought process that translates some smug condescention into actionable disrespect, but allows someone to smear someone else as a 60’s era white racist with an agenda to enact new Jim Crow-esqe laws. It actually surprises me that after your attention was drawn to it, you still don’t see it.
I… don’t see the merits. What’s the arguement? That modern white racists use lynching as an extreme to justify other forms of racism?
First off: Do you REALLY not see how that could be offensive. I wrote it again and failed the attempt to suppress rolling my eyes.
Second: It’s derailing. I used extreme examples to highlight the differences in historical racism. It’s patently ridiculous to require that every time this arguement is to be made, the maker of it has a duty to dredge up every historical wrong done to African Americans, at the pain of being labelled a white racist attempting to distract from their attempts to enact Jim Crow-esqe legislation.
Third: It’s tin foil hattery. You’re treating Duncan’s comment like he actually made a point. What point? Do you believe, Barry, that white racists are making comments about lynching in order cover their real agenda: To deny black people the vote, create legislated pay inequalities, exclude of blacks from schooling at all levels, block the hiring of blacks from workplaces, demean depiction of black characters in entertainment and in high art, exclude blacks from the armed forces, redline in the housing market, exclude blacks from veterans’ benefits, and “much much more”?
Do you think it’s reasonable? Analytical? Criticism? Criticism of who? For what? It’s insane.
Duncan,
This is a fascinating thread so perhaps you’ll clarify something. You listed these: as “But racism also meant….”
1) denial of the vote,
2) differential pay between blacks and whites,
3) exclusion of blacks from schooling at all levels,
4) attempts by whites to block the hiring of blacks from workplaces (notably in defense industries during World War II),
5) demeaning depiction of black characters in entertainment and in high art,
6) exclusion of blacks from the armed forces,
7) redlining in the housing market,
8) attempts (often partially successful) to exclude blacks from veterans’ benefits once they got in,
9) hostility to any black person who managed to break the color bar
and then you said
So, two questions:
First, what do you mean by the term “white racist”? Are you talking about the KKK/skinhead population (ultra-racist and very small) or are you talking about the rolling-eyes-at-diversity-seminars population (minimally-racist and very large), or something in between….?
Second, which specifically of those 9 things do you think “white racists” (however you define it in the first question) are trying to bring back?
Clarity seems important here.
I don’t understand the thought process that translates some smug condescention into actionable disrespect, but allows someone to smear someone else as a 60’s era white racist with an agenda to enact new Jim Crow-esqe laws. It actually surprises me that after your attention was drawn to it, you still don’t see it.
It’s quite simple: we do not view “racist” as an insult, but as a term that has meaning; a legitimate description of both people and policies.
Conservatives (generally speaking) seem to view the term “racist” as an insult with no actual meaning, which is why they get very offended at any implication that they have ever said, done, or thought anything racist.
Progressives, in my experience, do not get as offended by being told they have said or done something racist, and will often concede that they have.
This often makes conversation between progressives and conservatives difficult, especially when those conversations are about racism.
The problem with accusations of racism in the current context is that the common usage is something like “KKK member” while the academic usage goes all the way to “might take an extra half secon to recognize someone who looks different from oneself”. This is further complicated by the problem of not making clear how much negative sanction you intend to attach to ‘racist’. Thee KKK level implies “outside the political pale” while there are hundreds of potential gradations below that.
I think the academic usage leaking into common usage has been horrible because it allows a lot of people to be accused of ‘racism’ while erasing those distinctions. This makes its easy to dismiss complaints of normalization of those closer to the formerly “beyond the pale” side of the scale because so many people are now in the position of having been grouped together with them already. “Are they really so bad? The people calling me racist (which I interpreted in the KKK mode) were flying off the handle so why should I believe that these people are really that bad”.
That wouldn’t happen if politics weren’t deeply tribal. But when you broadly use terms that used to be used to put people beyond the pale you shouldn’t be shocked if a result is to make such people wonder if the beyond the pale people weren’t unfairly slandered too.
See especially the argument that economic voters in the rust belt who voted for Obama (an actual black man) and then for Trump were exhibiting racism. In some strictly academic sense that mat have a grain of truth. But for common sense explanatory purposes it is silly. There are all sorts of other disfunctions that are clearer explanations than that.
Very salient point. And it’s not unique to “racist”, there are a lot of academic terms that wormed their way into common parlance in ways that were probably counterproductive to their original intent.
“Privilege” is a great example. I think the world would be a much better place if now and again, everyone took a moment to think of all the ways their life was easier than someone else’s, and especially in ways outside of your immediate control. “Privilege”, I think, was designed as an introspective tool to create empathy.
Juxtapose that with the common parlance, and the insidious mutations of “White Privilege” or “Check Your Privilege”. They use what was meant to be a scalpel as a sledgehammer… “Privilege”, in that usage, is nolonger a tool for self inspection, but a tool used to silence other people.
My take on things like this is that it is unuseful to pretend that these are still academic terms. The people talking about them don’t mean them to be, the people hearing them don’t take them to be, and so individual academics on the sidelines insisting that they are are just muddying the waters.
.
The common usage is not “something like KKK member.” That’s nonsense, unless by “common” you mean something like “right-wing forums.” (And even in extreme right-wing forums, people will happily agree if you call BLM or any other lefty group racist, suggesting that even they aren’t using the definition you claim.)
The OED defines “Racist” as
And it defines “racism” as
Of course, dictionaries are descriptive; all this shows is how the researchers at the OED have found the words to be commonly used. There can be other, less common uses, and those might be legitimate too. But to imply that “something like KKK member” is the only common usage is contrary to reality.
The word “racism’ has meant more than that, for generations. When Ruth Fulton Benedict, in her 1940 book Race: Science and Politics, wrote “Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed,” she wasn’t saying that everyone in the world is exposed to KKK atrocities. The anti-racism song “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught,” from South Pacific (1949), is about someone who won’t marry someone else because of their racial background, not about KKK violence. There was the episode of “Happy Days” where Howard called Marion a bigot because she didn’t want to go to a Black friend’s wedding (and the audience was clearly intended to find Howard’s words correct). In 1976, Vatican Radio said “Racism might have different faces but it will always be reprehensible”; they obviously didn’t think that KKK-like activities were the only form of racism.
Etc, etc. None of these were bewildering uses of the word “racism” or “bigot” or “hate,” then or now; few native English speakers, then or now, would hear that and scratch their head wondering what on earth that word meant in that context.
Interestingly, there IS an academic usage of “racism” that isn’t a very common-usage definition, which you didn’t mention: “racism is prejudice plus power.” And I never like it when lefties complain that this relatively uncommon usage of racism is the only correct definition.
You’re doing the same thing.
When people complain that Trump voters are racist they are lumping in all sorts of things less than “would refuse to attend a wedding of another race”. They are willing to include people who voted twice for a black man for President of the United States. There are people here on this blog willing to say that. That is most definitely not in the common definition of racist. They then try to suggest that somehow these people just can’t be dealt with because they are too racist. That is tribal line drawing, not useful describing.
That’s some major-league goalpost-shifting, Sebastian. First you say that when ordinary people hear the word racist they think it means “something like ‘kkk-member'”; I point out at length that this is a ridiculous idea, contradicted by a great deal of evidence, and you respond by, without admitting this is what you’re doing, changing your metric from “something like ‘kkk-member'” to “would refuse to attend a wedding,” which is inaccurate, by the way. (Marion didn’t refuse to attend the wedding; she just didn’t want to go.)
My point remains. The meaning of racism is not, and never has been, “something like ‘kkk-member'” and nothing else. And it’s also not, and also never has been, “people who are so racist that they’d refuse to attend a wedding, but nothing less extreme than that.” Subtler forms of racism have always been part of what many ordinary Americans understood to be racism.
Regarding Obama-then-Trump voters, first of all, I’m not even sure who you’re responding to. If there’s something “people here on this blog” have said that you’re replying to, please quote it, or link it; otherwise it seems like a bit of a strawman.
Secondly, I think you’re being overly simplistic when you say that no one who voted for Obama could be racist. Honestly, that sounds like someone saying “Bob can’t be antisemitic, he hired a Jewish lawyer” or “Sue can’t be racist, she genuinely likes her black coworker.” It’s not that simple. People have layers.
Consider someone like this:
That’s an extreme example – but it demonstrates that someone who voted for Obama twice could nonetheless have racist attitudes.
Extreme cases like Karl aside, people vote based on more than one thing; it’s completely possible for someone with racist tendencies to vote for a black politician, because that’s not the one and only thing they vote on. Just as a racist might still have a black co-worker they respect and think is good at their job.
The fact is, Obama voters who voted for Trump have much higher levels of racial resentment than Obama voters who voted for Clinton. “… the voters who voted for Obama and then converted to Trump did indeed express high levels of racial resentment, high enough to be statistically significant in a model that controlled for party, ideology, education, age, gender, income, views on economic performance, racial resentment and views on trade.” It’s hard to buy that this is just a coincidence.
Apparently about 7% of Trump voters were Obama voters. That’s actually pretty marginal. Even if I agree with you about those 7% of voters, does that mean that it’s not okay to criticize the other 93%?
[Note: Edited to change “kkk member,” which is a misquote, to “something like ‘kkk-member’.” My apologies for the misquote. –Amp]
The questions they use to measure that are:
The dictionary definition of resentment is:
How do any of those questions indicate that anyone who isn’t black feels they’ve been treated unfairly (let alone that they’re feeling a sense of indignation about it)? “Racial resentment” is clearly just another politically loaded “academic” term. Terms that are created to superficially justify applying derogatory labels to opposing ideologies.
Desipis:
I don’t understand your comment at 96. Your list is not a list of questions. Rather, it looks more like a list of possible responses to a question that is missing. So I’m really not sure what to make of your last paragraph.
That’s a strawman, he didn’t even suggest something close to that, what he said was:
Then to follow that through…
Him reinforcing his original position and not meeting you on the bad interpretation you chose to make for him is not “shifting the goalposts”.
I’m not sure if you get to that point by being willfully obtuse, or just very used to a specific interpretation that you struggle to get out of. I understood Sebastian the way he clarified himself to mean: The KKK was hyperbolic symbolism, and the problem is labelling a vast swathe of America with a term that apparently has more negative connotations for them than it does for you.
To people like me “You’re being a racist” is actually a bad thing, you see. It’s not a tool for self inspection, it’s an accusation. It can be a stupid, ignorant, easily ignored accusation, but it’s still see as an offensive tool.
I think:
1) This is most common understanding of racism. I understand that you take a broader, more scholarly view of the term, but I think you’re in a very exclusive club on that front.
2) You’re more than welcome to continue treating the term as if your understanding is the majority understanding, but it will continue to be jarring for the majority, and jarring in such a way and I think you will lose them.
This is the way the conversation goes:
“You’re exhibiting racist behaviours”
(He just called me a racist, I know I’m not a racist, I have black friends, racists don’t have black friends, I voted for Obama, racists don’t vote for black people, this guy is a loon.)
“Fuck you, buddy.”
I’m not saying the reaction of the average person is academically sound, I’m saying the definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing over and over again, while learning nothing from the outcomes. The reaction of the average person is.
Good point on “something like KKK member”; I was careful to (I think) always include the “something like” in my first response to S, but I was lazy in my second comment and didn’t type the full phrase, and that was a mistake.
I’m going to go ahead and edit my comment to be more accurate. Thanks for pointing that out.
Richard: I believe those are statements that respondents were asked to rate their degree of agreement/disagreement with.