I.
Back during the primary, Ted Cruz said he was against “New York values”.
A chump might figure that, being a Texan whose base is in the South and Midwest, he was making the usual condemnation of coastal elites and arugula-eating liberals that every other Republican has made before him, maybe with a special nod to the fact that his two most relevant opponents, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, were both from New York.
But sophisticated people immediately detected this as an “anti-Semitic dog whistle”, eg Cruz’s secret way of saying he hated Jews. Because, you see, there are many Jews in New York. By the clever strategem of using words that had nothing to do with Jews or hatred, he was able to effectively communicate his Jew-hatred to other anti-Semites without anyone else picking up on it.
Except of course the entire media, which seized upon it as a single mass. New York values is coded anti-Semitism. New York values is a classic anti-Semitic slur. New York values is an anti-Semitic comment. New York values is an anti-Semitic code word. New York values gets called out as anti-Semitism. My favorite is this article whose headline claims that Ted Cruz “confirmed” that he meant his New York values comment to refer to Jews; the “confirmation” turned out to be that he referred to Donald Trump as having “chutzpah”. It takes a lot of word-I-am-apparently-not-allowed-to-say to frame that as a “confirmation”.
Meanwhile, back in Realityville (population: 6), Ted Cruz was attending synagogue services at his campaign tour, talking about his deep love and respect for Judaism, and getting described as “a hero” in many parts of the Orthodox Jewish community” for his stance that “if you will not stand with Israel and the Jews, then I will not stand with you.”
But he once said “New York values”, so clearly all of this was just really really deep cover for his anti-Semitism.
II.
Unlike Ted Cruz, former London mayor Ken Livingstone said something definitely Jew-related and definitely worrying.
A month or two ago a British MP named Naz Shah got in trouble for sharing a Facebook post saying Israel should be relocated to the United States. Fellow British politician Ken Livingstone defended her, and one thing led to another, and somewhere in the process he might have kind of said that Hitler supported Zionism.
This isn’t totally out of left field. During the Nazi period in Germany, some Nazis who wanted to get rid of the Jews and some Jews who wanted to get away from the Nazis created the Haavara Agreement, which facilitated German Jewish emigration to Palestine. Hitler was ambivalent on the idea but seems to have at least supported some parts of it at some points. But it seems fair to say that calling Hitler a supporter of Zionism was at the very least a creative interpretation of the historical record.
The media went further, again as a giant mass. Ken Livingstone is anti-Semitic. Ken Livingstone is anti-Semitic. Ken Livingstone is anti-Semitic. Ken Livingstone is anti-Semitic. Ken Livingstone is anti-Semitic. I understand he is now having to defend himself in front of a parliamentary hearing on anti-Semitism.
So. First things first. Ken Livingstone is tasteless, thoughtless, embarrassing, has his foot in his mouth, is inept, clownish and offensive, and clearly made a blunder of cosmic proportions.
But is he anti-Semitic?
When I think “anti-Semitic”, I think of people who don’t like, maybe even hate, Jews. I think of the medieval burghers who accused Jews of baking matzah with the blood of Christian children. I think of the Russians who would hold pogroms and kill Jews and burn their property. I think of the Nazis. I think of people who killed various distant family members of mine without a second thought.
Obviously Livingstone isn’t that anti-Semitic. But my question is, is he anti-Semitic at all? Is there any sense in which his comments reveal that, in his heart of hearts, he really doesn’t like Jews? That he thinks of them as less – even slightly less – than Gentiles? That if he were to end up as Prime Minister of Britain, this would be bad in a non-symbolic, non-stupid-statement-related way for Britain’s Jewish community? Does he just say dumb things, or do the dumb things reflect some underlying attitude of his that colors his relationship with Jews in general?
(speaking of “his relationship with Jews”, he brings up in his own defense that two of his ex-girlfriends are Jewish)
I haven’t seen anyone present any evidence that Livingstone has any different attitudes or policies towards Jews than anyone else in his general vicinity. I don’t think even his worst enemies suggest that during a hypothetical Livingstone administration he would try (or even want) to kick the Jews out of Britain, or make them wear gold stars, or hire fewer Jews for top posts (maybe he’d hire more, if he makes his hiring decisions the same way he makes his dating decisions). It sounds like he might be less sympathetic to Israel than some other British people, but I think he describes his preferred oppositional policies toward Israel pretty explicitly. I don’t think knowing that he made a very ill-advised comment about the Haavara agreement should make us believe he is lying about his Israel policies and would actually implement ones that are even more oppositional than he’s letting on.
Where am I going with this? It’s stupid to care that Ken Livingstone describes 1930s Germany in a weird way qua describing 1930s Germany in a weird way; he’s a politician and not a history textbook writer. It seems important only insofar as his weird description reveals something about him, insofar as it’s a sort of Freudian slip revealing deep-seated attitudes that he had otherwise managed to keep hidden. The British press framed Livingstone’s comments as an explosive revelation, an “aha! now we see what Labour is really like!” They’re really like…people who describe the 1930s in a really awkward and ill-advised way? That’s not a story. It’s a story only if the weird awkward description reveals more important attitudes of Livingstone’s and Labour’s that might actually affect the country in an important way.
But not only is nobody making this argument, but nobody even seems to think it’s an argument that has to be made. It’s just “this is an offensive thing involving Jews, that means it’s anti-Semitic, that means the guy who said it is anti-Semitic”. Maybe he is. I’m just not sure this incident proves much one way or the other.
III.
Nobody reads things online anymore unless they involve senseless violence, Harambe the gorilla, or Donald Trump. I can’t think of a relevant angle for the first two, so Trump it is.
Donald Trump is openly sexist. We know this because every article about him prominently declares that he is “openly sexist” or “openly misogynist” in precisely those words. Trump is openly misogynist. Trump is openly misogynist. Trump is openly misogynist. Trump shows blatant misogyny. Trump is openly sexist. Trump is openly sexist and gross.
But if you try to look for him being openly anything, the first quote anyone mentions is the one where he says Megyn Kelly has blood coming out of her “wherever”. As somebody who personally ends any list of more than three items with “… and whatever”, I may be more inclined than most to believe his claim that no anatomical reference was intended. But even if he was in fact talking about her anatomy – well, we’re back to Livingstone again. The comment is crude, stupid, puerile, offensive, gross, inappropriate, and whatever. But sexist?
When I think of “sexist” or “misogynist”, I think of somebody who thinks women are inferior to men, or hates women, or who thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to have good jobs or full human rights, or who wants to disadvantage women relative to men in some way.
This does not seem to apply very well to Trump. It’s been remarked several times that his policies are more “pro-women” in the political sense than almost any other Republican candidate in recent history – he defends Planned Parenthood, defends government support for child care, he’s flip-flopped to claiming he’s pro-life but is much less convincing about it than the average Republican. And back before his campaign, he seems to have been genuinely proud of his record as a pro-women employer. From his Art of the Deal, written in the late 1980s (ie long before he was campaigning):
The person I hired to be my personal representative overseeing the construction, Barbara Res, was the first woman ever put in charge of a skyscraper in New York…I’d watched her in construction meetings, and what I liked was that she took no guff from anyone. She was half the size of most of these bruising guys, but she wasn’t afraid to tell them off when she had to, and she knew how to get things done.
It’s funny. My own mother was a housewife all her life. And yet it’s turned out that I’ve hired a lot of women for top jobs, and they’ve been among my best people. Often, in fact, they are far more effective than the men around them. Louise Sunshine, who was an executive vice president in my company for ten years, was as relentless a fighter as you’ll ever meet. Blanche Sprague, the executive vice president who handles all sales and oversses the interior design of my buildings, is one of the best salespeople and managers I’ve ever met. Norma Foerderer, my executive assistant, is sweet and charming and very classy, but she’s steel underneath, and people who think she can be pushed around find out very quickly that they’re mistaken.
There have since been a bunch of news reports on how Trump was (according to the Washington Post) “ahead of his time in providing career advancement for women” and how “while some say he could be boorish, his companies nurtured and promoted women in an otherwise male-dominated industry”. According to internal (ie hard-to-confirm) numbers, his organization is among the few that have more female than male executives.
Meanwhile, when I check out sites like Women Hold Up Signs With Donald Trump’s Most Sexist Quotes, the women are holding up signs with quotes like “A person who is flat-chested is very hard to be a 10” (yes, he actually said that). This is undeniably boorish. But are we losing something when we act as if “boorish” and “sexist” are the same thing? Saying “Donald Trump is openly boorish” doesn’t have the same kind of ring to it.
This bothers me in the same way the accusations that Ken Livingstone is anti-Semitic bother me. If Trump thinks women aren’t attractive without big breasts, then His Kink Is Not My Kink But His Kink Is Okay. If Trump is dumb enough to say out loud that he thinks women aren’t attractive without big breasts, that says certain things about his public relations ability and his dignity-or-lack-thereof, but it sounds like it requires a lot more steps to suggest he is a bad person, or would have an anti-woman administration, or anything that we should actually care about.
(if you’re going to bring up “objectification”, then at least you have some sort of theory for how this tenuously connects, but it doesn’t really apply to the Megyn Kelly thing, and anyway, this)
And what bothers me most about this is that word “openly”. Donald Trump says a thousand times how much he wants to fight for women and thinks he will be a pro-women president, then makes some comments that some people interpret as revealing a deeper anti-women attitude, and all of a sudden he’s openly sexist? Maybe that word doesn’t mean what you think it means.
IV.
I don’t want to claim dog whistles don’t exist. The classic example is G. W. Bush giving a speech that includes a Bible verse. His secular listeners think “what a wise saying”, and his Christian listeners think “ah, I recognize that as a Bible verse, he must be very Christian”.
The thing is, we know G. W. Bush was pretty Christian. His desire to appeal to Christian conservatives isn’t really a secret. He might be able to modulate his message a little bit to his audience, but it wouldn’t be revealing a totally new side to his personality. Nor could somebody who understood his “dog whistles” predict his policy more accurately than somebody who just went off his stated platform.
I guess some of the examples above might have gotten kind of far from what people would usually call a “dog whistle”, but I feel like there’s an important dog-whistle-related common thread in all of these cases.
In particular, I worry there’s a certain narrative, which is catnip for the media: Many public figures are secretly virulently racist and sexist. If their secret is not discovered, they will gain power and use their racism and sexism to harm women and minorities. Many of their otherwise boring statements are actually part of a code revealing this secret, and so very interesting. Also, gaffes are royal roads to the unconscious which must be analyzed obsessively. By being very diligent and sophisticated, journalists can heroically ferret out which politicians have this secret racism, and reveal it to a grateful world.
There’s an old joke about a man who walks into a bar. The bar patrons are holding a weird ritual. One of them will say a number, like “twenty-seven”, and the others of them will break into laughter. He asks the bartender what’s going on. The bartender explains that they all come here so often that they’ve memorized all of each other’s jokes, and instead of telling them explicitly, they just give each a number, say the number, and laugh appropriately. The man is intrigued, so he shouts “Two thousand!”. The other patrons laugh uproariously. “Why did they laugh more at mine than any of the others?” he asks the bartender. The bartender answers “They’d never heard that one before!”
In the same way, although dog whistles do exist, the dog whistle narrative has gone so far that it’s become detached from any meaningful referent. It went from people saying racist things, to people saying things that implied they were racist, to people saying the kind of things that sound like things that could imply they are racist even though nobody believes that they are actually implying that. Saying things that sound like dog whistles has itself become the crime worthy of condemnation, with little interest in whether they imply anything about the speaker or not.
Against this narrative, I propose a different one – politicians’ beliefs and plans are best predicted by what they say their beliefs and plans are, or possibly what beliefs and plans they’ve supported in the past, or by anything other than treating their words as a secret code and trying to use them to infer that their real beliefs and plans are diametrically opposite the beliefs and plans they keep insisting that they hold and have practiced for their entire lives.
Let me give a snarky and totally unfair example. This is from the New York Times in 1922 (source):
I won’t say we should always believe that politicians are honest about their beliefs and preferred policies. But I am skeptical when the media claims to have special insight into what they really think.
I propose an explanation for why the dog whistle narrative might be detached from any meaningful referents here: https://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2016/07/14/iterations-of-hurt/
The classic example is G. W. Bush giving a speech that includes a Bible verse.
Reminds me – in a related but non-mainstream vein – of GWB’s “New World Order” speech.
Sure, most of us only took it as commentary on how, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus the collapse of International Communism, world geopolitics was rearranging, with the end of the Cold War, to a new … order, as in organization.
But plainly it was a dog-whistle announcement of a giant Illuminati conspiracy to rule the world and probably kill off almost everyone because reasons.
(I wouldn’t bring this up, except for more than once coming across people who actually believed that at about 90+% confidence.)
It was George H. W. Bush, not George W. Bush (I assume that is just a typo).
Referring to a woman’s anatomy (as part of an attack or judgement) is definitely sexist and not merely “boorish”. He’s not just being crude and childish. Your defense for that quote is very weak (he finishes sentences with whatever so we should ignore the context? Come on). You could say that this doesn’t really reflect anything regarding his policies and that it’s irrelevant to the election, and you might be right, but it’s definitely very sexist.
What is the definition of ‘sexist’?
When Hillary refers to Trump’s “small hands” is she making a sexist attack against him?
I absolutely think all the small hands talk is trying to emasculate him in the eyes of his supporters, who are thought (by those invoking small hands) to be especially likely to find small hands/effeminate qualities on men de-legitimizing.
It’s very unfortunate, the whole thing.
This is a definitional point. And it has been written about in context of racism. See Lawrence Blum’s I’m Not A Racist But…
The point is something like this: there may be good reasons to distinguish between different kinds of activity that is, taking the Trump example, harmful to women. It’s true that prohibiting women from working in the upper echelons of a company because they are women might need to be distinguished from saying a woman without big breasts can’t be a 10. Fine. Similarly, it’s easy to agree that chattel slavery also might need to be distinguished from, for instance, refusing to hire someone who is black, because they are black. (and, in case it isn’t obvious, chattel slavery is worse than not hiring women to work in the upper echelons). The questions worth pondering are (1) why should we distinguish these things and (2) how do we do the distinguishing.
As for (1), Blum points out that there are pragmatic reasons to distinguish racism (belief in a hierarchy of races) from, for instance, racial hostility or racial insensitivity. We might make more progress on race in this country if we call some things “racially insensitive” than if we go up to everyone and call them a racist. But, moving on to (2), whether or not x is racist is in the end of definitional question. How do you define racism? If racial insensitivity is subsumed under our definition of racism, then (by definition) racial insensitivity is racism. And perhaps someone being racially insensitive is a racist (again, what’s the definition of a racist?).
Trumps comments are sexist depending on how one wants to define sexism (and being a sexist). I think it quite reasonable to say that boorish comments are sexually insensitive and sexist. But, it might be better to not call them out as sexist in some cases, for pragmatic and other reasons. But in the political sphere, where the vast majority of people are looking at headlines and nothing more, there are other pragmatic reasons why some speakers choose to call him a sexist instead of getting into the nuance between sexism and boorishness.
It’s not just a question of how you define it, but using it as motte and bailey. People are using strict definitions so they can say that racism is evil, and then using loose definitions to call others racist in order to paint them as evil.
As others have commented, I don’t see this as a motte and bailey.
If I have a broad definition of racism that includes actions motivated by both (1) belief in some sort of Darwinian racial hierarchy and (2) a (perhaps unconscious) desire to increase my in-group status via the subordination of blacks, I might very well think both are evil. And it certainly doesn’t seem some sleight of hand is going on when I include both under a definition of racism.
As for boorishness being sexist — same thing. When someone says boorishness is sexist, they aren’t relying on some strict definition at all. And when challenged, I’m sure they are happy to explain their very broad understanding of what counts as sexist.
The motte and bailey fallacy isn’t happening here, or at least not necessarily.
I think Trump is a pretty bad example to use to make this point. Trump isn’t a bit of a clutz, and his boorishness isn’t some minor problem that people are just too judgemental to overlook. It’s one thing to charitably interpret one or two gaffe’s as not-reflecting-any-underlying-problem, but when it’s constant and neverending like with him, that’s something different. In my view his rhetoric signals an utter disregard for what is and isn’t true, and an absolute incompetence public relations wise. To have that man represent America would be a catastrophe.
Also, when it comes to policy, the fact that he flip-flops constantly combined with the fact that he’s willing to lie shamelessly, makes it next impossible to know where he actually stands (or where he would stand as a president) on a lot of issues. I actually think his flip-flop ambiguitiy is working in his favor unfortunately, the Trump supporters I’ve talked to appear to use him as some sort of Rorschach test, believeing he stands for whatever they want him to stand for.
Oh, its a horrible Rorschach test. What I find amazing is how the Dilbert blog guy who previously on his blog thought that climate change would
kill us all* if we did nothing, somehow finds support for Trumps constant statements on it being a scam. Hes wont even mention Trumps support for Autism being caused by vaccines, simply seems to conveniently forget about those statements.Is he starting to really believe his schtick about the guy now? r/the_donald loves linking him
*ok, not quite that, but this was his previous viewpoint after researching it for a good deal of time
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/05/global_warming__3.html
Semi on topic. I find it…interesting that one of the first acts of the new London mayor Sadiq Khan banned “unrealistic” marketing images of women. Does this just ban the gay-fashion-designer super-slim and boyish type of models, or the really busty porn-star big tits and ass style of unrealistic women?
Was Richard Dawkins right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecJUqhm2g08
I’m a fat and average guy at best, I demand no more pictures of youthful peak- Fabio.
He banned them on public transportation. And honestly it’s a disgrace that public transportation has advertising on it at all.
If its a shame that public transportation has ads at all, ban it all. Hell, the same product can be sold, just as long as the lady selling it(not the 8-pack dude btw) is no better then an 8 out of 10. Or isn’t deemed to thin at the waist or something. C cups maximum?
Are there going to be new beer advertisment restrictions in an effort for public safety?
I’m not saying he’s got the right idea exactly, it’s just that with all the ways Britain is a censorious shithole with no interest in privacy or free expression or protecting its people from the depredations of savages, it’s hard to get worked up about them asking the merchants of mind control to cover up their tits on public transit.
It does play right into the “Islamization/Muslims imposing Sharia law” narrative.
Yah know, I remember when it was the fuddy-duddy conservative types who wanted to censor sexy pictures of people.
(Having said that, the Overton Window for “selling stuff with sex” in Europe is set at a way different place than it is in the USA. Emotionally, the ban feels right, but I think it’s still Not A Good Idea.)
Oh. Muslims *are* fuddy-duddy conservative christian types, with a few changes. It is an abrahamic religion.
This is a major reason I respect Bill Maher, despite disagreeing with him on a lot: he takes seriously the idea that his liberal values are objectively better.
Edit to add: if there is any silver line to Wahhabism (never thought I’d say that), could it be that it forces Western “cultural” conservatives to face what it looks like when someone takes “cultural conservatism” seriously? And could it force Western “liberals” to face up to the fact that there’s nothing “liberal” about defending illiberal cultures just because they’re different/poor/non-white?
Islam/Wahhabism is not the only serious attempt at cultural conservatism.
True enough. And I am not against all forms/aspects of cultural conservatism. Still, the similarities between conservative Muslims and conservative Christians, I might hope would give the latter some pause. Which is not to say all cultural conservatism should be abandoned, but rather that seeing how extreme versions of some aspects of it look when practiced by the outgroup might help.
(I actually think this has already happened to some extent: it feels like there is much less of the “ban violent video games” and “censor TV and movies” type stuff coming from the American right nowadays; I thought this was just because they gave up, but maybe it’s because the left has surprisingly become rather anti-free expression lately, perhaps causing the right to embrace a more classical liberal stance on this point).
Yes, that’s true. But at the same time, you’re not going to confuse, say, an Amish and a Wahhabi if you get more than a glance at their behaviour and beliefs. Both are serious cultural conservatisms, but the effects are highly divergent.
If it hasn’t happened in the last fifteen years, I’m not sure when it’s going to happen.
If a guy slaughtering 50 gays while live tweeting his allegiance to Islam won’t do it, what possibly could?
“If a guy slaughtering 50 gays while live tweeting his allegiance to Islam won’t do it, what possibly could?”
It’s too early to know the long-term cultural fallout of this case.
I thought he swore allegiance to ISIS, not Islam, and there’s some evidence that swearing allegiance to ISIS is more like a fashion statement for terrorists.
It isn’t about cultural conservatism, or not much about it. Arguable, ISIS is a thing which sort of looks like cultural conservatism, but it’s an effort to radically overwrite existing cultures.
He swore allegiance to ISIS, praised a guy who had gone to Syria and become a suicide bomber for the Al-Nusra front, and some 3 years before had bragged to his coworkers about being a member of Hezbollah. The fact that these 3 groups are all at war with each other didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. So yes, at this point the evidence seems to point to him pledging allegiance to ISIS more for the boost in notoriety rather than a deep understanding of their ideology.
“swearing allegiance to ISIS is more like a fashion statement for terrorists.”
I was thinking of bringing this up in the next OT: namely the issue that 1: it was the son of the religious radical from Afghanistan who grew up in America who committed the attack, not the religious radical himself, and 2: I don’t think he was suffering any serious material deprivation.
This, along with related facts (such as Osama bin Laden’s wealth, and the 9/11 hijackers reasonably comfortable background) seems to throw a big wrench in many of the most popular explanatory narratives and assumptions.
One assumption is that when Muslim immigrants get to the West or, ideally, grow up in the West, they’ll absorb Western liberal values. The other is that terrorism is a desperate reaction to extreme poverty and lack of opportunity, presumably caused by colonialism or something.
But the terrorists seem to come from a stratum of relatively well-off Muslims who are relatively familiar with the West. People who are actually worrying about where their next meal is coming from probably don’t have time to stew in bitter resentment about how the shameless imperial powers are occupying their homeland (I am pretty convinced of the research showing suicide terrorism as a reaction to foreign occupation or perception of foreign occupation more than anything else).
So, personally, I do tend to think most of our interventions and general involvement in the area tend to make it worse, but I am much more skeptical that the problem is economic, or that if Muslims are simply allowed to emigrate to rich, Western, liberal countries, they will themselves, in time, become liberal and tolerant.
We’ll see how the Canadian approach of being extremely welcoming to immigrants works out.
@onyomi:
I would submit its more effective to break down terrorism into multiple different profiles before trying to analyze it.
1 – The IRA and the PLO might be in one bucket.
2 – Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and Al Qaeda might go in another. Maybe AQ crosses over into bucket 1, but I’m not sure that makes sense.
3 – Robert Dear, the Orlando shooter, Columbine, the guy who ran his plane into an IRS building.
I think it’s a mistake to analyze terrorist events without acknowledging that, although there is a continuum, 1 and 3 look really different from each other.
Note: I don’t really want get bound in what exact bucket people belong in. That’s note my point.
>If a guy slaughtering 50 gays while live tweeting his allegiance to Islam won’t do it, what possibly could?
The Quran very explicitly calls for the death of those who engage in homosexual acts.
The Old Testament also has passages supporting the execution of gays (“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.” ), and I wonder far in the history books it takes one to find a christian/jewish theocracy where the acts were frequently punished by death.
ISIL/ISIS is just following the book literally, turned up a notch with a more explicit reward in paradise for martyrs.
People should be very very glad a good deal of christians value the new testament much more over the old.
>And could it force Western “liberals” to face up to the fact that there’s nothing “liberal” about defending illiberal cultures just because they’re different/poor/non-white?
Its not just that. Part of it is talking down a bunch of rednecks more then willing to fight every muslim looking guy they see and chase them out of town and who support getting into yet another middle eastern war.
@HBC
It is a good point. What is kind of interesting and scary is that in this case it feels rather like a cross-pollination of types 2 and 3, which perhaps is unsurprising when you have the unstable American son of a Middle Eastern radical. The psychological profile and the method feel a lot more like Columbine and Elliot Rodger, whereas the ideology and stated sympathies are more like 1 or 2.
And this raises the question: to what extent do the sorts of Middle Easterners who blow up a bus as a supposed political statement share a psychological profile with the Americans who shoot up their school for reasons we have difficulty fathoming, but which seem more apolitical?
I associate these sorts of “rampage” killings for reasons of personal instability/unhappiness with Western countries (US, Norway…), though that could only be my ignorance of Middle Eastern local news. Or could it be that there is just a certain percentage of people prone to go on a rampage, and if they can’t latch on to an obvious political outrage they’ll just invent one (Unabomber) or do it for more inscrutable reasons?
Which is not to say every terrorist is mentally unstable, but it seems more likely to be the case with suicide terrorism (though, as noted, perception of foreign occupation seems also to be strongly associated with willingness to do that).
No it doesn’t. The Quran has a version of the Soddom and Gomorrah story where God kills a whole bunch of people for (according to traditional interpretations) being gay, but at no point does it order human beings to kill gay people.
There are, however, Hadiths that call for the execution of gays, though they have been inconsistently followed at best throughout Islamic history, as demonstrated by the enormous amount of gay erotic poetry from the Islamic Golden Age, the second Caliph of Cordoba, etc.
Just over 150 years in England.
—-
@onyomi: You’re assuming that terrorists don’t have “Western liberal values.” But I can think of some significant counterexamples. The 9/11 hijackers visited strip clubs. Salah Abdeslam, a coordinator of the Paris and Brussels attacks, co-owned a bar and was a regular at a gay bar in Brussels. Dzokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon Bombers, was described by his friends as pretty much a perfectly normal pothead New England hipster.
And, of course, there is Omar Mateen, who idolized the NYPD, sent dick pics to other guys on Grindr, and visited a gay bar twice a month for 3 years where he would get drunk and complain about how strict his father is.
There is also the high number of converts among Western Islamic terrorists. Something like 2/3 of American Muslim terrorists have been converts compared to just 20% of the general American Muslim population, and about 1/3 of British Muslim terrorists compared to 2-3% of the general British Muslim population. These people presumably had the same Western, liberal, and tolerant upbringing as the rest of us, yet they still ended up as terrorists.
Of course, you have to be careful with anecdotal evidence, but the literature seems to back up this impression, as multiple studies have failed to find a positive correlation between support for terrorism and either religiosity or support for conversative/Islamist political parties and policies. One study compared political Islamists with Jihadists and found that “what distinguished the violent from the nonviolent radicals was their longing for adventure, excitement, and a cool existence.”
The more I look into this subject, the more I think that:
1) Islamism, especially its more violent strains, is more a product of modernity than a product of traditionalism, much like Communism was.
2) Ideologically motivated acts of terrorism and supposedly non-ideologically motivated mass killings like Columbine and Sandy Hook frequently have more in common with each other than many people think. If Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had been born 15 years later, I think it is quite possible that they might have dedicated their massacre to ISIS.
3) Fight Club may be the single most prescient film made in the last 20 years.
Of course, like HBC says, it’s clear that there is a spectrum. Some mass killers clearly have more personal issues than others, while others seem to be more ideologically motivated and have few personal problems. But isn’t it striking how easily Eric Harris was able to recruit his friend into a suicide + mass murder pact without any coherent political or religious ideology?
>but at no point does it order human beings to kill gay people
At the very least, it suggests its a heinous crime worthy of the punishment of death. And plenty of majority Islam countries interpret it in the most obvious way and institute the death penalty for homosexuality, with the orlando shooter also giving a “rain of stones”, though these stones were a bit more pointed.
>Islamism, especially its more violent strains, is more a product of modernity than a product of traditionalism
I don’t believe the societies are *less* brutal than those in the 1600’s. Its the same philosophy, now with easy access guns and bombs, and barring certain types of discouragement, nukes. Drones built with the aid of renewable energy are probably going to be the new nukes.
I suppose then its how you define traditionalism. Type of weaponry? Philosophy?
“If Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had been born 15 years later, I think it is quite possible that they might have dedicated their massacre to ISIS.”
Yes, that is sort of what I’m getting at. And pointing out the libertine habits of the supposedly fundamentalist terrorists (so far as I know the Boston bombers claimed a political, non-religious motivation?) also seems a good point in support of this.
Put another way, it seems like nearly all the stereotypes about Islamic terrorists are wrong: the stereotype, I think, is a poor, desperate, true believer hoping to get into Heaven by dying for his faith. The reality seems to be rich, disaffected weirdo looking to attach a bigger purpose to his angst.
But I think I’ll post something about this in the new OT.
My one nitpick is that a lot of volunteer terrorists (there are poor terrorists from ISIS territory) are middle class rather than rich. Terrorists look a lot like normal people– jobs, marriages, not especially religious, not especially depressed. Don’t trust normal people, it’s too easy to talk them into things.
“so far as I know the Boston bombers claimed a political, non-religious motivation”
Not really. They claimed inspiration from Anwar al-Awlaki’s pro-al-Qaeda preaching. They were also Chechen refugees believed to have been radicalized during visits to Dagestan; that part of the world has been a hotbed of Salafist insurgency for decades now.
That said, the violence may have preceded the Islamism or they might have reinforced each other; before the Boston bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was the chief suspect in an unsolved triple murder that didn’t appear to be related to Islam (the victims were all Jewish, but it’s not clear what the motive was, and since Tsarnaev is dead now it’s unlikely we’ll ever know).
@Tsom Eroc:
Meh. The Old Testament calls for brutal execution of people for so many things. Disobeying your parents, for example, is to be punished by being stoned to death by all the men of the town.
Their are lots of homophobic cultures in the world. It’s not exclusively Islamic, in any way. Essentially all of the religions have really barbaric things written down somewhere in their holy texts, which probably reflects human nature more than it does any particular religion.
There are plent pay of Christians, Jews, Hindhus, and even Buddhists who use their religion as justification and even motivation for doing horrible things. Hard for me to blame in individual religion for what looks a fairly common mode for all religions.
>The reality seems to be rich, disaffected weirdo looking to attach a bigger purpose to his angst.
You don’t get ISIS to be the size of ISIS with terrorist attacks around the world with people pledging to ISIS if its as simple as some dudes looking to attach a bigger purpose to angst.
Or heck, a religion of a billion and a half people where century after century people died for the cause.
Religion has caused people to undergo amazing hardships that otherwise would not have been done. Just look at the ritual in some latin american countries of men nailing themselves to crosses. Or for a more positive example a man refusing a life a pleasure and sex and entering a monestary to serve plague victims.
Yes, plenty of the same violent testosterone circuits in men who commit shooting in america light up as those who pledge themselves to ISIL. Offending god(the greatest member of the family/tribe,and even a part of oneself) hits the same centers as those who feel vengence for personal insults.
But I am pretty sure there is a good deal ISIS propaganda, that’s actually true, of some wealthy man in the middle east with a good steady job, hot subservient(is any other descriptor allowed?)wife or two(or like 5 like Osama) bravely risking himself for the Islamic state.
Osama was a rich man with several wives who could have easily led a different life that was “easy” and even partaked in constant forbidden activities, but risked his life and ultimately died “for” his religion. If a guy like that was on “your” side and risked that much, it would inspire people. But what inspired *him*?
There’s poor people, middle class people, people all around the spectrum of wealth pledging their lives this way. People who simply read the book of their god and took it for what it said.
The analysis is very very different.
And if Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists were carrying out all these flashy massacres in the name of their religion, that would mean something.
Those things happen, but they’re very rare compared to the incidence of these in Islam.
The first article I read on this (from an obvious red-tribe source) was insistent that it was nothing more than appeasement to radical Muslims. They claimed (have not verified personally) that in many Muslim majority neighborhoods, it was common practice for any images of scantily-clad women to be painted over.
Oh yeah. But there is this really strange silence coming from corners that used to be associated with sexual liberty and the abdurdity of banning scantily clad images of sexy people, unrealistic or not. Certain brands of leftism and Old testament-style religious conservatism make really strange bedfellows.
The Left’s attitude toward smut has been complicated since at least the rise of second-wave feminism. As popular as it is in some corners to blame all censorship on old white right-wing men that hate fun, it’s in many cases ended up coming out of bootleggers-and-Baptists type coalitions.
Consider for example the Nineties push against video-game violence, which attracted support from people as ideologically divided as Joe Lieberman and Pat Buchanan.
Yes, Joe Lieberman was the relevant example there.
Yeah, I guess it always has been a bit weird. 1970’s protests of shaving and glossing vs a women shaping her body how she pleases to gain social power.
For the games, to be fair, it wasen’t a scientific fact like it is today that violent video games like COD mostly turn young men into lazy dudes that don’t even leave their rooms, let alone commit crime
I think this post is badly confused. It assumes, first, that only people can be properly described as racist or sexist, and second, that an individual is racist or sexist only if they consider another group inferior, believe that group to be undeserving of political and social equality, or bear some kind of animus towards the group. Neither of these assumptions is true.
“Racist” and “sexist”, like “evil” or “stupid,” are predicates that can apply to different categories of things. First, a sentence might be racist or sexist solely in virtue of its content, regardless of the intentions of the person who says it. For concreteness, suppose that “broggos” is a racial slur for people with Maltese ancestry. Then a child who says “you filthy broggos” says something racist, whether or not the child understands the meaning of the words involved. Even if “you filthy broggos” were carved into a cliff formation by erosion, we would still have no trouble saying that nature had inscribed a racist message into the rocks. A sentence, moreover, might be racist or sexist in any of three ways: it might contain terms which are liable to give offense, as in the examples above, it might invoke pernicious stereotypes about a group, as, for instance, with “the Maltese are all thieves,” or it might assert that a group is inferior in some desirable aspect, as with “people hailing from Malta have subnormal IQs.”
Second, utterances or other types of expression can also be racist or sexist, culpably or non-culpably. An utterance is culpably racist or sexist if (a) its linguistic content contains offensive terms, invokes pernicious stereotypes, or asserts the inferiority of the specified group and (b) the speaker knows or ought to know that it does. An utterance will be non-culpably racist if (a) holds but (b) does not. Crucially, an adult who calls a Maltese person a broggo is acting in a way that is culpably racist, even if she does not bear any hostile attitudes towards Maltese people and merely intends to annoy or offend, or is indifferent to the negative consequences her speech will have on its audience. Similarly for an adult who insults a Maltese acquaintance by reminding him of his countrymen’s thieving ways or alleged deficits in intelligence.
A person can also be racist or sexist, of course, in either a thin sense or a thick sense. In the thin sense, a person is racist or sexist if they are disposed to act or speak in ways that are racist or sexist. Someone who frequently makes culpably racist comments, as defined above, is a racist no matter their underlying attitudes towards race. I could have the most egalitarian convictions in the world, but if I go around using racial slurs or invoking racial stereotypes to demean people, I qualify as a racist in the thin sense. Deep-seated racial animus need not exist for a charge of racism against a person to stick: the combination of a pattern of offensiveness with negligence or indifference is sufficient. Racism in the thick sense is the classic form of racism, that is, believing another group to be inferior in some respect, wanting to restrict their rights, or hating or fearing them. Note that neither thick racism/sexism nor thin racism/sexism implies the other– I could hold negative attitudes towards a group but never let those attitudes show, or I could be a vicious misanthrope who enjoys cruelty and uses whatever tools are readiest to hand to offend people, without actually harboring any hostile views towards other races.
All this I take to be relatively uncontroversial, a straightforward description of how the terms “racist” and “sexist” are understood in natural language.
With this taxonomy in place, we can now classify some of the examples mentioned above. Let’s assume that Trump, in his comments about McArdle, was referring to menstruation (I agree that it is not totally clear that this is true). This seems to be a prime example of a culpably sexist utterance, deliberately invoking the negative stereotype that women are hormone-driven and irrational around that time of the month to demean the judgment of a political adversary. How about Trump’s remarks concerning the judge overseeing the lawsuit against Trump University? Here Trump deliberately attributed a negative feature to a political opponent, a lack of impartiality, in virtue of his ethnic heritage – again, a textbook example of a culpably racist remark. Several commenters above mentioned the Confederate flag. The Confederate flag is grossly offensive to black folk and every adult in the country is in a position to know that it is. So flying the Confederate flag is culpably racist, even if the offense is not intended, because some lesser degree of mens rea like recklessness or negligence will be present.
If the word “broggos” is a racist slur and nothing else, you may have a point. But words often have more than one use. Suppose the word isn’t “broggos”, but instead it’s “the”, If the word “the” is a racist slur, but 99.44% of the time someone uses the word they just want to use it because it is necessary for English grammar, you don’t get to say that everyone who says “the” is saying something racist. You especially don’t get to say that if you’re doing a motte and bailey where the motte is “just saying a word is racist and you can be racist innocently and unintentionally” and the bailey is “racism is evil”.
Polysemy does complicate matters, particular when the inoffensive alternative meanings are deeply ingrained in ordinary speech. Certain terms which double as as slurs for disabled people, like “vegetable” and “retarded,” are obvious examples. Whether a polysemous term qualifies as offensive in a given use is going to depend on a host of contextual factors, like the topic of conversation, the meaning of the surrounding words in the sentence, the speaker’s intent, and the availability of alternate phrasings.
It is true both that (1) you can say something racist innocently and unintentionally, and that (2) racism is evil. I suspect what you really object to here is the inference from “Bob said something innocently racist” to “Bob is a racist person.” This inference also strikes me as faulty– this is why I said above that a person can only be judged racist (in the thin sense) after a pattern of culpably racist utterances.
An interesting example of this is the word “boy”. I come from an area that was settled primarily by the Irish and has some little linguistic bits and pieces left over from them, and have gotten into quite a lot of trouble for saying “how’s it going, me boy?” to a man from an island where boy was apparently a slur. The thing is, I’m not sure that it’s reasonable to claim that the sentence in question is racist, since in my dialect it has no slurs and was said with no ill intent.
Consider also the case of a child who used the word broggo in a made-up language to refer to a pair of boots, a decade before it became a slur. Was the sentence racist before the slur existed? Does it become racist once the slur exists? Or when it’s heard by someone who knows the slur? Or does it become racist only when it’s heard by someone who it would offend? I don’t think this is at all clear.
Under the grandparent’s interpretation it seems impossible to avoid being racist even when you’re highly literate and deliberately avoiding all slurs. Furthermore, by that definition, if a holocaust museum has a photograph of a concentration camp and a swastika is shown in that photograph, the holocaust museum magically becomes racist by association. This seems ridiculously, ludicrously broad, and that is bad for two reasons: first, the story of the boy who cried wolf comes to mind, and second, a definition of racism that applies to nearly everyone allows the malicious to selectively enforce taboos against people they don’t like.
Note the important distinction between saying things that are racist and being racist. It is certainly possible to inadvertently say things that are racist even if you’re an able and careful speaker of the language, simply because some slurs, like “hunky” or “dink,” are seldom-heard or archaic.
Why think that? The swastika itself is racist, of course, but I don’t see why that should make the photo or the museum racist, as if by contagion.
Accusations of racism are contagious – it’s weaponised. If the sentence “have you seen the Australian TV show spicks and specks?” is racist, or if reading Mark Twain out loud is racist, then the person whose mouth those words come from is tainted by association. Racism implies intent, from my observation.
I’m more interested in your opinion of the first two paragraphs, though. Should I change my dialect, or should the man who took offence develop a thicker skin? When does the child say something racist?
Evidently not, else we could make no sense of claims like “that three-year-old says a lot of racist garbage” or “this scrabble AI plays racist words constantly.” The latter sentence is one I have in fact had occasion to use.
I don’t know your circumstances in detail, but where I come from calling a black man a boy is a notorious slur, and should be avoided if at all possible. The first few times you do it by accident it will be non-culpably racist, if you persist by choice after someone kindly asks you not to and explains why… that’s pretty bad, yeah.
Presumably, terms come to be racist in concert with their coming to be seen as racist by the linguistic community and the targeted group. If you like, we can define the racism quotient of a putative slur as its mean perceived offensiveness, attaching special weights to the opinions of members of the group to which it applies, and classify it as categorically racist if the racism quotient falls above some arbitrary threshold. I’m not sure how informative this would be, though.
There is a lot in this that should be contentious.
A sentence, moreover, might be racist or sexist in any of three ways: it might contain terms which are liable to give offense, as in the examples above, it might invoke pernicious stereotypes about a group, as, for instance, with “the Maltese are all thieves,” or it might assert that a group is inferior in some desirable aspect, as with “people hailing from Malta have subnormal IQs.”
Does the sports team name “Fighting Irish” contain a pernicious stereotype about a group? Per my comment above, is saying that women are slower than men ‘asserting a group is inferior in some desirable aspect’?
There is also a lot in there that is incredibly subjective. How do I determine what is “grossly offensive”? How do I know if a term is “liable to give offense” or if a stereotype is “pernicious”? Per your later comment, when you say whether or not something is racist or sexist “depend[s] on a host of contextual factors, like the topic of conversation, the meaning of the surrounding words in the sentence, the speaker’s intent, and the availability of alternate phrasings”, who is qualified to judge?
There’s a lot of potential double standards in play. We don’t blindly accuse African American politicians of racism when they allege that white prosecutors or cops are potentially biased when dealing with African American suspects. Most people that throw around terms like ‘toxic masculinity’ or ‘mansplaining’ don’t consider them to be pernicious stereotypes or liable to give offense.
The point is not to formulate an algorithm that will certify for any sentence of English whether it is racist or not in a way that will command the assent of all competent speakers of the language. No such algorithm exists. The point is to show that (1) sentences can be sexist or racist, independently of the speaker’s intentions, (2) speech acts can be sexist or racist, and culpably so, and (3) people can be racists or sexists by engaging in patterns of culpably racist or sexist speech and behavior. We all know damn well that (1), (2), or (3) are true, too, so Scott’s absurdly stringent restrictions on the use of words like “racist” and “sexist” come across as careless or disingenuous.
If you can’t come up with a way to determine whether or not a sentence or word is racist or sexist, then the words racist and sexist are meaningless.
It’s also completely possible to miss that it’s very easy to use the completely subjective nature of what constitutes racism and sexism to just bash your opponents.
As an example, the sentence “The swastika itself is racist, of course” is racist, and you ought to know why.
Edited: as originally posted, this was kind of harsher than I had intended.
You used the words “determine,” “possible,” and “subjective” in your comment. Can you give me an algorithm which specifies for each sentence of English containing any of these terms whether it is true or false? No, right? Doesn’t that make your comment meaningless, by your own standards?
All we ever have to go on when it comes to word meanings is intuitive judgments of particular cases and dictionary definitions which partially systematize those judgments. I don’t see why we should hold the terms “racist” and “sexist” to a different standard than any other word in English.
Words used to call people and actions evil require higher standards than words which do not.
That may be. But English is rich with pejoratives, insults, and imprecations, and I have never seen any of them held to such unrealistic standards, either.
It sounds to me like you are tacitly admitting that “racist” and “sexist” are nothing more than generic insults / pejoratives in the same vein as “Jerk” or “Asshole” and have nothing to do with actual prejudice or bigotry.
If so, why should we take accusations of racism or sexism any more seriously than accusations of being “a Doo-Doo Head”?
That means you should probably see an audiologist, because I said nothing of the sort.
@ Earthly Knight
You said…
and this is obviously false.’
Which begs the question, when you hear someone being described as being as a shit head do you take time to determine weather or not the individual’s cranial cavity is actually comprised of fecal matter, or do you dismiss it as a generic pejorative.
“racist” and “sexist” are words that have specific meanings if you dismiss those meanings the words become meaningless.
@ Earthly Knight –
Since we have made racist and sexist speech and behavior subject to legal sanction, in a manner which we have declined to do for speech which is boorish, rude, or unpleasant to hear, then I fully support specific, objective, and defendable standards for tagging “racist and sexist” words and actions.
I completely agree that insults depend on context. But context – along with charity and rationality – are generally not a part of the discussion concerning these labels.
You used the words “determine,” “possible,” and “subjective” in your comment. Can you give me an algorithm which specifies for each sentence of English containing any of these terms whether it is true or false? No, right? Doesn’t that make your comment meaningless, by your own standards?
I can provide a rule at least for possible and subjective, which, like racist and sexist, are adjectives.
For something to be possible, I can either do it or prove it has been done. “It is possible to run the 100m in less than 10s” or “It is possible for me to provide a way to prove that something is possible.”
For something to be subjective, I merely need to prove that it is not objective. To prove whether something is objective, all I need to do is come up with a rule, like the one for possible, that is valid regardless of the person making the observation.
For both of these arguments, the answer isn’t a binary yes or no, there are things we can’t prove to be possible or impossible and there are observations we can’t prove to be objective or subjective.
Your initial arguments, and the argument I quoted above, are all dependent on a binary yes or no value. I admit that there are things we can’t prove to be racist or not racist, or, for that matter, to be able to prove what words are grossly offensive or what stereotypes are pernicious. in fact that’s the crux of my argument. None of us in this thread besides you claim that power, yet you can’t recognize when your own sentences are racist, so ‘you ought to know why’ we challenge your ability to know what’s racist.
@ keranih
I don’t know what backwards country you live in, but in the United States sexist and racist speech is protected by the first amendment. If your situation is different, the problem is with the laws of your country, not our definitions of sexism and racism.
@ Civilis
It’s a nice try, but you’re not even close. We license many claims to possible truth which are no wise in your power to make true, e.g.:
1. It is possible that an Ethiopian will win the next Boston Marathon.
2. It is possible that Los Angeles will be leveled by an earthquake in the next century.
3. It was possible for Napoleon to win at Leipzig.
I don’t know if you realize quite how far over your head you’re in.
I certainly did not claim that I could prove for any given sentence whether or not it is racist or sexist. In fact, this subthread started with a comment in which I said exactly the opposite. You seem to be pretty confused about the dialectical situation here.
@hlykacg
I have no idea why you would say that.
I don’t know if you realize quite how far over your head you’re in.
On the contrary, I at least read your arguments. “There are things we can’t prove to be possible or impossible” was one of my arguments, and that applies very well to all three of your statements.
I certainly did not claim that I could prove for any given sentence whether or not it is racist or sexist.
You’ve identified multiple sentences as racist in this thread, yet you can identify no logic by which you made that identification that is subject to anything more than your own opinion. You just know certain sentences are racist, certain words are grossly offensive, and certain stereotypes are pernicious. In fact, this latest claim just makes me more confused. If you can’t tell whether any sentence is racist or sexist, how are you able to make a definitive claim in the cases above?
All I want is a logic to test the claims you’ve made, either for whether a given sentence is racist or sexist, or (now) whether we can determine whether a given sentence is racist or sexist. I’ve provided multiple examples, a sentence (“The swastika itself is racist, of course”) and two stereotypes (“Fighting Irish” and “women are slower than men”) that I want to test. If the rule is merely ‘it’s racist if Earthly Knight thinks it’s racist’, then that’s fine, but you wouldn’t accept ‘it’s racist if Civilis thinks it’s racist’ or ‘it’s racist if hlynkacg thinks it’s racist’ as valid rules.
Is it true that it’s possible an Ethiopian will win the next Boston Marathon?
Because I do not believe you when you say…
In order for that to be true, you would have to be a deaf illiterate mute. And I do not believe that you are a deaf illiterate mute.
Most words in the English language are actually held to mush stricter standards of truth/meaning than those that you are currently calling unrealistic. To illustrate, if you want to label someone a “thief”, and have that label taken seriously by others, you need to support it. IE. What did they steal? Likewise if you say that someone is “married” you are saying that they have a spouse.
Civilis is not suggesting that we should hold the terms “racist” and “sexist” to a different standard than any other word in English. Civilis is saying that we should hold them to the exact same standard we hold words like “thief”, “spouse”, “child” etc…
Is it true that it’s possible an Ethiopian will win the next Boston Marathon?
When I check the results for the Boston Marathon, I see that an Ethiopian won the last time the race was run, so obviously it’s possible for an Ethiopian to win the Boston Marathon. I see nothing in the rules has changed which would prohibit Ethiopians from running. I generally don’t follow sports to know the current state of the running world, so there may be issues I am unaware of. I would state that given my limited imperfect information, now that I have researched the issue it is possible for an Ethiopian to win the next Boston Marathon.
You state that the swastika is racist. Explain how you know.
@hlynkacg
Uh, the standard I was calling unrealistic was that to make an assertion containing a word one must produce an algorithm which will certify for every sentence in English containing that word whether it is true or false in a way that commands the assent of all competent speakers of the language. I have never seen any word held to that standard, I can assure you.
@ Civilis
But you have not even pretended to answer my question! I asked you whether it was true that it is possible that an Ethiopian runner will win the next Boston Marathon, not whether given your limited background knowledge it is true! You are answering a different question altogether here.
Here’s the problem: you are agitating for a norm of assertion whereby it is acceptable to assert a sentence, F, only if one is in a position to prove that F is true. I am not sure what you mean by prove (hopefully you are not thinking of a mathematical proof!), but under almost any disambiguation the overwhelming majority of ordinary speech will violate this stricture. Pretty much anyone will be happy to affirm that an Ethiopian could win the next Boston Marathon, for instance, even in the absence of anything resembling a proof that this is so.
You really have two choices here. You could take the extremely revisionary view that almost all of ordinary speech is defective (or meaningless!), that your norm is a genuine norm but people flout it at every turn, or you could accept that sentences can be warrantedly asserted in the absence of proof.
In truth, all that is really needed to judge that a sentence is racist or sexist is linguistic competence with the words “sexism” and “racism,” the same linguistic competence which allows us to make attributions of possibility and necessity unproblematically.
Earthly Knight: There are some words for which uses should be held to stricter standards than others. “Racism” and “sexism” are two such words.
I answered your question. I can’t give an unqualified answer because it involves information beyond my knowledge. Had you asked, “is it true that it is possible that an Ethiopian could win the next Boston Marathon”, which is how most people parse similar questions, an unproblematic answer would have been possible.
Above, you say:
“Whether a polysemous term qualifies as offensive in a given use is going to depend on a host of contextual factors, like the topic of conversation, the meaning of the surrounding words in the sentence, the speaker’s intent, and the availability of alternate phrasings. ”
yet, you are willing to define words produced by a Scrabble AI, which are by necessity absent conversational context, surrounding words (except, perhaps, in a strictly literal sense), intent, or the availability of alternate phrasings, as racist. (Falling back on your use of polysemous isn’t going to work as a dodge, as in this case any word with an emotional context is going to have different meanings to different people, which, by default, would include any word that someone could interpret as racist or sexist.)
In truth, all that is really needed to judge that a sentence is racist or sexist is linguistic competence with the words “sexism” and “racism,” the same sort of linguistic competence which allows us to make unproblematic judgments of possibility and necessity.
You keep falling back on naked assertions, and when called on it, you repeat the process with a different unsupportable assertion. Can you offer a method by which I can tell who has linguistic competence with the words sexist and racist? I’m not even asking for objective proof, just an independent heuristic besides ‘Earthly Knight says so’, which seems to be the only heuristic you have. I don’t want to have to go to you to check whether every sentence is racist.
Despite all your claims of linguistic competency, you won’t answer my questions, and despite the claims that judgements of whether a sentence is racist are unproblematic, it looks like you recognize that answering the questions I posed would open you up to being accused of racism.
Judgements of racism are particularly problematic because the ‘linguistic competence with the words sexist and racist’ you claim is a dodge used to hide the fact that any honest attempt to define racism will, by necessity, either indicate bias on the part of the definer or be so broad or narrow as to include almost everyone or no one.
Yes you have. The algorithm for “married” is if (number of spouses > 0) married = true. Else married = false. The algorithm for “murder” is killer + unlawful I would expect a competent speaker of the language understand this.
In order for a label to have meaning or value you must define it, and it must be defined in a manner that allows other speakers to distinguish “X” from “Not X”. That’s what distinguishes “real words” from nonsense sylables.
If you don’t have a reliable method of telling distinguishing between sexist and not sexist, or racist and not racist, how can you expect anyone else to? Much less demand that they modifiy their behavior to be less so?
@ Civilis
In fact “it is possible an Ethiopian will win the next Boston marathon” and “it is possible an Ethiopian could win the next Boston marathon” mean the same thing; the “possible” makes the “could” redundant.
But it doesn’t matter, normal speakers of English, including you, routinely affirm sentences like those above without having anything that could be called proof in hand. The requirements you place on assertions are not reasonable, and there’s no chance that you abide by them yourself.
If you like, I would be happy to inquire with several associates whether they judge it to be true that it’s possible an Ethiopian will win the next Boston marathon. I can pretty much guarantee that all will, and that they will have nothing in the way of proof to offer other than vague recollections of Ethiopians being good distance runners. You are free to perform the same test yourself.
@hlynkadcg
If all that is required is a substitution of synonym for synonym, “has a spouse” for “married” and so on, you are free to look the words “racist” and “sexist” up in a thesaurus. But note that simple exchanges of synonyms will not guarantee that you end up assigning every sentence in English containing the term a determinate truth value, because any vagueness in the synonym will infect the analysis as well. Consider, e.g. whether aliens who pair-bond in elaborate rituals qualify as spouses, or whether a couple whose marriage licensed was issued by the CSA remained spouses after the Union was restored.
So, my take away from all this is that there is no way to demonstrate linguistic competence in determining what is racist or sexist and therefore all claims of racism and sexism are equally valid.
I therefore claim all Earthly Knights sentences are racist, and having noticed this pattern of culpably racist speech, Earthy Knight is, therefore, a racist.
It’s not. The second example does not swap “synonym for synonym”, it combines two separate concepts to form a third.
At this point you’ve basically admitted that you have know way of knowing whether something is racist so civilis’ proposal strikes me as being at least as reasonable as yours.
@ Civilis
Unfortunately, we are interested only in your sincere intuitions about word usage, and your assertions here are clearly insincere. Sorry!
@hlynkacg
Your first example, that “married” =df “has one or more spouse,” just substitutes one synonym for another. I agree that the analysis of murder as unlawful killing is somewhat more informative, although it has the drawback of being false– it makes killing an endangered caterpillar an act of murder, for instance. More importantly, it is still less than perfectly determinate, as it inherits all of the vagueness of both “killing” and “unlawful.”
By that standard, objectively truthful statements could be considered “racist” or “sexist”. It’s a true fact that, on average, African-Americans have an IQ about one standard deviation lower than white Americans (note I did not say anything about the possible cause of this difference, which is a subject for legitimate debate). It’s a true fact that women, on average, have less upper-body strength than men.
If people are to be considered “racist” and “sexist” for mentioning and attempting to discuss facts like these, then those terms are mind-killers and should be actively avoided.
Re: the encouragement of rage in politics
http://www.vox.com/2016/6/17/11962618/right-wing-violence-politicians
“Alex Massie, a columnist for the Spectator (a conservative British magazine), wrote a beautiful column in the wake of Cox’s murder. Massie explains, better than any commentator I’ve read, the relationship between apocalyptic rhetoric and panic-induced violence:
“When you encourage rage you cannot then feign surprise when people become enraged. You cannot turn around and say, ‘Mate, you weren’t supposed to take it so seriously. It’s just a game, just a ploy, a strategy for winning votes.’
“When you shout BREAKING POINT over and over again, you don’t get to be surprised when someone breaks. When you present politics as a matter of life and death, as a question of national survival, don’t be surprised if someone takes you at your word. You didn’t make them do it, no, but you didn’t do much to stop it either.
“Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realise any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.
“We can’t control the weather but, in politics, we can control the climate in which the weather happens.”
A month ago I would have treated this seriously. After the riots and assaults on Trump supporters in California, I really don’t give a damn anymore because it’s too much hypocrisy for me to swallow.
The argument could just as easily be made that the liberal media calling Trump Hitler 2.0 over and over again and insisting solemnly that his campaign was basically the Fourth Reich coming to life and that his presidency would result in death camps for the Mexicans and global genocide for the Muslims and yada yada yada was irresponsible rhetoric that was bound to lead to inflamed passions and political violence. But not only did this argument not work for the progressive left, many of them enthusiastically embraced the violence and said “There’s no revolution without violence! No gay rights without Stonewall!”.
So I just can’t find it in me to care that inflammatory rhetoric from the right may have led to a political assassination.
If your side does it: it’s inflammatory and will lead to disaster, if my side does it: it’s because of our GENUINE CONCERN.
I remember after the 2015 Canadian election conservatives were bummed out and shit talking new prime minister Justin Truedeau in Internet comments.
Well someone comes along and says “suck it up losers you lost, have some respect for the new PM”,
to which a conservative replied “when Harper (conservative pm) was elected we never heard the end of the whining from the left: Harper’s a secret evangelical, Harper’s going to sell Canada out to the US, Harper’s a dictator. It’s a bit rich to hear calls of respect from the left.”
To which the left winger replied, “That was different! People were genuinely concerned for their country!”
I’m principled, you’re a partisan, he’s a fanatic.
You could pretty much replace Truedeau with Obama and Harper with George W. Bush. You could pretty much replace Obama with Clinton and George W. Bush with George H. W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. You could pretty much replace Clinton with Carter or LBJ and Reagan with Ford or Barry Goldwater.
As conservatives like to joke, “Dissent is only patriotic when there’s a Republican in the White House.”
There has been a change, though, as time has progressed. The internet has made it easier for anyone, including the 5% that are sure the whole thing is a space lizard conspiracy, to have their say. I think that’s made the fringe more visible for the more recent presidents.
Sounds like you’ve read Jesse Benn’s “Sorry Liberals, A Violent Response To Trump Is As Logical As Any“.
And, relatedly, what do you call people who openly argue that “violence is ALWAYS justified against” their opponents, who must be stopped “by any means necessary”, that preventing the spread of their opponents’ ideas “justifies the use of violence, and in most cases killing”, and that their enemies are “nothing more then[sic] scum of the Earth that have no business even living in the first place”?
That and a bunch of other stuff. There was a pinned thread on a prominent SocJus subreddit that will remain unnamed but is fairly infamous in such circles where some progressives were discussing the attacks in California and the majority opinion seemed to be that they were clearly justified; quite a few of them brought up the now classic argument that “Without violence against our oppressors, America would still be a British colony”.
Also all the stuff from HuffPo and Vox about “riot shaming” post-Ferguson because some people didn’t like the idea that black people can ransack stores, burn buildings, assault random people and generally cost property damage running into the tens of millions, all in the memory of a crook who was shot dead after trying to steal a cop’s gun, and still credibly pass off such actions as a human rights movement. I don’t know who it was, it may have been Steve Sailer or it may have been Moldbug, but someone from that end of the spectrum contrasted that with white people marching non-violently in anti-government Tea Party rallies and getting called “dangerous extremists” for it.
Increasingly the moral standard of the progressive left seems to be “Civility for thee, but not for me”.
Just like Canada and Australia!
Non-zero possibility that Canada and Australia were allowed to leave peaceably only because England had already been taught, the hard way, that occupying a hostile populace was an untenable position.
@ Sandy
The cynic in me is tempted to take this idea and run with it.
@ Kevin
Off Topic but, do you know what the smallest minority is?
The same reasoning applies to comparing Trump to Hitler, or otherwise raging at Trump.
Edit: Ninjaed by Sandy.
Sorry, but I can’t hear you over all the people standing next to you calling every Republican politician Hitler.
What if right wingers are right to be angry since nothing else has worked?
A rather prominent Democrat once suggested that the key to effecting positive change was to get mad, get in peoples’ faces, and punch back twice as hard.
I wonder if he has since reconsidered that advice. 😛
Wasn’t Trump implying that Megyn Kelly was irrationally/overly aggressively attacking him because there was blood coming out of her “wherever”? It still doesn’t make him “openly sexist” to say that but implying that a newscaster/journalist would lose her professionalism because she’s “on the rag” is definitely sexist.
Someone asked me about the records for truth vs. lies of these Right and Left leaning folks. Here are some stats from politifact, about statements they checked, that these people said. Jon Stewart had more mostly false or worse statements than I expected. The others were near to what I expected. Apparently John Olivier is the most factually accurate of all these people.
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/ann-coulter/
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/sean-hannity/
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/bill-oreilly/
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/rush-limbaugh/
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/jon-stewart/
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/john-oliver/
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/741422156999987204
It looks like those are completely different statements (total unemployment vs. black youth unemployment) and so could possibly have different truth values. Does somebody explain somewhere what makes them contradictory?
The thing is I think both Trump and Sanders arrived at their numbers the same way – by looking at labor force participation rather than the traditional unemployment rate. Yes, Sanders limits himself to black populations, but either labor force participation is a valid measure or it isn’t.
Seems to me the burden is on Politifact to prove why one gets “half true” and the other gets “pants on fire” when they seem to be making the same point with similar evidence.
You think wrong. Read the actual articles.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/30/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-unemployment-rate-may-be-42-perc/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/13/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-says-real-unemployment-rate-african/
The official figure for black youth unemployment at the time of Sanders’s comments was 32%. The figure Sanders quotes does indeed come from the broader U-6 measure of labor force participation.
The official figure for unemployment at the time of Trump’s remarks was around 5%, the broader U-6 measure was at 10%. Trump apparently got 42% from an off-the-wall metric which counts homemakers, students, retirees, and disabled people as unemployed.
The question is, how many people become homemakers, students, retirees, or officially disabled because of trouble finding work? The number isn’t zero.
In any case, looking at the actual article, what Trump actually said was the highest number he’d heard for unemployment was 42%, he wasn’t claiming it was actually that high. Given that politifact tracked down the source of the 42% claim, it seems pretty plausible that 42% is a number Trump did in fact hear, so he should really be rated as “True”.
@suntzuanime
I would of given it a mostly false. For the reasons you state it wasn’t totally pulled out of Trump’s rear end. But it was at least very misleading as presented and not a good representation of the level of unemployment. The U6 unemployment numbers attempt (imperfectly) to determine how many people have dropped out of the labor force due to market factors. And Trump’s number is well above the U6. And by repeating the number Trump was giving it some credence.
You can dispute the actual number Trump gives. He says “the unemployment rate is probably 20 percent”, fine, provide data and arguments that it’s lower than 20 percent. But that’s not what politifact is doing. They’re trying to say he was claiming it was 42 percent. That’s not what he said, he gave the number as an illustrative example of how much disagreement there was with the official figures floating around. He never endorsed that number, he only claimed that he saw it. And given that the number was available to see, politifact seems beyond disingenuous here calling him “pants on fire”.
It is possible to grossly deceive or mislead your audience without saying anything that is literally false, you know. Repeating ridiculous falsehoods while attributing them to someone else is a pretty standard way of doing this. So I don’t think that’s much of an excuse.
Are we really going to treat people as endorsing every claim they quote while explicitly stating they disagree with it? Give me a fucking break.
I don’t know why politifact is getting on Trump’s case for saying the unemployment rate is 42% when they themselves say the unemployment rate is 42%.
Did Trump explicitly say that he didn’t think that the real unemployment rate was 42% at the time? It looks to me like he said it was probably 20% (also false) and then went on to insinuate that it might be as high as 42%.
Where are you getting this from?
Right there on the page, they say “If you run the numbers, ‘the real unemployment rate was 42.9 percent,’ Stockman wrote.” It is possible to grossly deceive or mislead your audience without saying anything that is literally false, you know. Repeating ridiculous falsehoods while attributing them to someone else is a pretty standard way of doing this.
Politifact quoted Stockman’s claim, then proceeded to show why it was false and no reasonable person should believe it. Did Trump do the same?
Again, the point is that Trump explicitly disagreed with the claim. No he didn’t extensively debunk it, because he’s not a factchecking website, he is a politician, and he was making a rhetorical point. But it’s very clear that he was not endorsing the claim, if you understand what the word “but” means.
I don’t see where you’re getting this from. Here is how Politifact quotes Trump:
“The number isn’t reflective,” he said. “I’ve seen numbers of 24 percent — I actually saw a number of 42 percent unemployment. Forty-two percent.” He continued, “5.3 percent unemployment — that is the biggest joke there is in this country. … The unemployment rate is probably 20 percent, but I will tell you, you have some great economists that will tell you it’s a 30, 32. And the highest I’ve heard so far is 42 percent.”
This looks to all the world like he is asserting (falsely) that the unemployment rate is probably 20%, while insinuating (falsely) that it may be as high as 30%, 32%, or 42%.
Pants on fire!
@Earthly Knight
You say…
…and the politifact article says…
So if you’re being honest, you ought to agree with suntzuanime that the “pants on fire” rating is unwarranted.
@suntzuanime
I have nothing to add to a technical discussion, but I also want to add that at least insofar as Donald Trump is concerned, he very often does exactly this thing whereby he says something unbelievably outrageous (Scalia was murdered), claims that he doesn’t know the truth value of it (people on the Internet are saying this but I don’t know) etc etc., but the point of it is so clearly to make exactly that assertion to his audience while leaving wriggle room for deniability; to the point where I consider it to be exactly as dishonest as if he had just come out and and said that thing in the first place. Perhaps more so, in fact. Is it possible that it is for this reason that WaPo are reacting more strongly to his artfulness as compared to Sanders’ equivalent claim?
Note that Sanders’s claim was in no way equivalent, for the reasons given above.
@ hlynkacg
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, but I suspect it depends on the false premise that Trump never contradicts himself (or, more charitably, changes his mind over time).
erenold,
Regarding Trump’s “I’ve heard people say…” or “I’m just asking the questions!” routine…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elRxbGJuCw8
Ah – I apologize, Earthly Knight. I was not following the technical aspects of the discussion as closely as I should have. My apologies.
Matt:
Yep – that’s exactly my interpretation of it. The moment that most struck me was the Scalia “was he murdered? I dunno all I know is what’s on the Internet” line, but there were several other instances that stuck in my mind. I’ll see if I can find them.
I’d be a lot more sympathetic to claims that he was trying to advance his position behind a stalking horse of what he’d heard other people say if he didn’t, in the same damn breath, state his actual damn position.
@Earthly Knight
I’m saying that if you really think that Trump “is asserting (falsely) that the unemployment rate is probably 20%” you ought to concede that, as per Politifact, the claim may be false but it is not a “pants on fire” lie.
Edit:
@ suntzuanime, I know right?
Sure, and I respect that, but the salient question is whether WaPo genuinely believe it – that Trump does that artful thing in Matt’s South Park video above. If so, is it possible that that would be a non-bad-faith explanation why Trump seems to incur more aggressive ratings from their Truthometer, rather than a specific animus towards him? Of course, I appreciate that an animus towards him would predispose them to believe that Trump does that in the first place.
His actual position was that real employment is probably at 20% but maybe much higher like these other guys say. Endorsing a ludicrous claim as possibly true in the guise of innocently relaying the opinions of others is still dishonest.
Worse than those:
Politifact on Trump on NJ celebration of 9/11: Pants on Fire
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/22/donald-trump/fact-checking-trumps-claim-thousands-new-jersey-ch/
Breitbart found the TV reports about the celebrations:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/12/02/trump-100-vindicated-cbs-reports-swarms-on-roofs-celebrating-911/
Whether this is perfect vindication (as Breitbart claims) or not, it should at least pull Trump’s statement to “half-true”.
Politifact doubled-down:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/dec/02/new-information-doesnt-fix-donald-trumps-911-claim/
(I’ve also heard about celebrations in Paterson, NJ, from someone who saw them)
This sort of thing is essentially irrelevant from a measurement standpoint as PolitiFact gets to choose what statements it does and does not evaluate. Not to mention that their ratings are usually, themselves, highly subjective.
Yeah, I can’t claim to be a diligent reader of PolitiFact, but in my experience they can’t be treated statistically as seems to be the current fad. By only rating “contoversia” statements they are already getting a non representative sample. And while their long-form analyses are usually decent, their bottom line rating seems pretty subjective and inconsistent.
Right. I don’t suggest that Politifact is entirely useless – it can be a nice resource when attempting to evaluate the evidence behind a specific factual claim that is getting some play in the news cycle.
But it IS useless for what a lot of people (including Jill right now) try to use it for – definitive and scientific proof that Republicans lie more often than Democrats. Or that Trump lies more than Hillary. Or whatever.
There’s some truth in the saying that, if you hear the dog whistle, you’re the dog. My own theory is that “dog whistles” are actually a way liberals police their own membership.
You take some phrases that conservatives will typically use in their perfectly normal sense, and assign them outrageous implications that have nothing to do with what the conservatives mean by them. Then, when a liberal inadvertently starts listening to something a conservative is saying, just as they might start to understand it, and risk agreeing, along will come a ‘dog whistle’, like some sort of linguistic mine, and blow up the conversation.
The liberal will stomp off, outraged, and renewed in their conviction that conservatives are monsters, and actual communication will have been prevented.
A very interesting thought. As with many kinds of propaganda, it does seem to inoculate the intended listener against the opposition. The interesting thing is, as with many things, I don’t think anyone explicitly planned it that way, but that seems to be how it works out.
The most proximate cause of the proliferation of “dog whistles,” I believe, is the fact that thinking of new ways to be offended by Red Tribe is a high-status, high-reward activity within Blue Tribe. But part of the reason why it is high-reward, I imagine, is precisely because people know subconsciously that it is inoculating them against the possibility of having the wrong opinions or being pressured, by cognitive dissonance, to change one’s mind.
If one’s worldview is that Red Tribe is awful, then you will crave a steady diet of proofs of that proposition to inoculate you against any reasonable-seeming Red Tribe arguments or nice Red Tribe members. A new concept, like “intersectionality” or “dog whistle” is especially welcome, because it promises to generate new grist for that mill.
And I think this is the problem a lot of people seem to have with Jill: it feels often like she is unreflectively reciting a Blue Tribe catechism. I believe her when she says she’s interested in genuine discussion and exchange of ideas, but the anti-GOP antibodies her Blue inoculations so rapidly generate seem to block much of that (Red Tribes, of course, have their catechisms, but we don’t have anyone here, so far as I can tell, who invokes them in so rapid-fire and unfiltered a fashion).
I was actually thinking something different when I started reading your comment – dog whistles are ways people follow who is sufficiently in touch / fashionable with the political currents. If you can randomly designate a few phrases as forbidden, then somebody using those phrases marks them as an outgroup member who doesn’t stay up to date with your side’s trends.
Now I want an accompanying piece called “Against Cat Bell-ism.”
(Related, some very Blue FB friends recently posted about a horrifying supposed online trend among anti-Semites of putting (((Jewish names))) in a series of parentheses and calling it “belling the cat.” Don’t know whether this is a real trend or mostly paranoia).
I haven’t heard it called “belling the cat” but it’s definitely a thing some people in the alt-right do. The origin of the trend was a browser extension that would automatically put the parentheses around Jewish names, it billed itself as a “coincidence detector” and the idea was that if you left it on while reading the news you would see how coincidentally disproportionately Jewish various elite elements of society are. I think it also might have been intended to detect coincidences in the authors of thinkpieces about white privilege? Anyway when the coincidences found out about it they wrote outraged thinkpieces and the broader alt-right took notice. They said “hey, this really freaks out the squares”, started quoting Goebbels, and ran with it. AFAICT, like most stuff the alt-right does, they mostly do it to watch the left’s horrified reaction.
I’ve heard (but haven’t bothered to confirm) that the parenthesis thing is now banned on Twitter as recognized anti-semitism…
I know that on Twitter a lot of Jews were putting the parentheses around their own names as a form of reclamation, so that would seem a little misdirected. (Even the SPLC was doing it, which came as new information to me.)
From what I’ve read about it, the browser extension didn’t automatically recognize Jewish names, it added parentheses to names anti-Semites fed it.
Yes, the natural way to make a browser extension automatically put parentheses around Jewish names is to give it a list of Jewish names to compare to. We should be glad that people at the forefront of AI research are not using their talents on deep neural net statistical Jew detectors, I guess.
It probably wouldn’t be all that hard. Get massive list of names, some of them Jewish, flag them as Jewish or not, feed it into a neural net, train it until it can do something like 90% accurate coincidence detection on names it wasn’t already given.
But you’d have to do it in yarvin’s incomprehensible urbit ecosystem for ideological purity reasons. Or maybe Terry Davis’ TempleOS, that might be an even better fit.
Either way you are talking a lot more effort.
You realize Yarvin is a Jew, right?
I guess at that point you’re figuring it would be looking at features like “-stein” on the end? I’m no Jewish names expert but it seems likely to me that there are a fair number of names that you just have to learn by rote, rather than being able to generalize from their characteristics. I mean, what’s Jewish about the name “Cohen”? Just the “-en”? Sounds like you’d get a lot of false positives.
Seriously people, I know it’s not cool or sexy, but sometimes a big fuckoff list that you compare to is just The Right Thing. Not everything needs to be machine learning.
I’m guessing, but I don’t think white supremicists want to live in a world of approximations.
I didn’t realize Yarvin was Jewish, no. That must drive the Sailerite wing of the alt-right even more nuts.
Sailer is ethnically half Jewish and was adopted by a Catholic family. I think Spielberg should have him consult on the upcoming Edgardo Mortara movie.
Yes, if “alt-right” was being used here (except maybe by STA, if Alt-Right means anything, it’s probably those specific guys he’s talking about) as anything but a catchall term for people who are not leftists, browse the web and post memes, that would be quite problematic for them.
It’s not, so it’s not.
FWIW, I think that the nomination of Sarah Palin was that philosophy manifest into meat-space. A poor choice for the position, and fun to watch.
@suntzuanime: “Cohen” derives from the Hebrew word for “Priest”, along with variants (eg Cohn). Many characteristically Jewish names are German in origin, though.
Really now. Trump doesn’t use a dog whistle, he uses a bull horn. Perhaps that’s why your hearing is impaired. You cannot create a hostile workplace environment with degrading and sexist language and then somehow claim to be pro-women for the women you do hire (often times based on their appearance).
“with degrading and sexist language”
-Trump insults everyone. That’s the opposite of sexist.
The way I read Trump’s opinion of women is that he believes them to be different from men, and therefore inferior in some respects and superior in others.
As for Livingstone, I think his position on Israel sounds similar to the position on Jews of an average citizen of the Reich, who would never support mass murder but would prefer that Jews were no longer around, and does not much care how that is to be accomplished.
It just dawned on me. Due to tribalism and living in bubbles, people can not see the cruelties done by their own tribe to the other. One tribe could be burning people at the stake, and members of that tribe would still be complaining about every minor slight done to them by the other tribe.
Since the complainer is usually not being burned at the stake, nor burning others at the stake, the complainer doesn’t take that situation seriously. They don’t actually approve of burning people at the stake.
But they are like moderate Muslims in the U.S.– they consider themselves members of “the religion of peace” or the political tribe of peace, in their own eyes. They are certainly not going to leave or disapprove of their tribe, just because some members of it are murdering the other tribe. They are horrified that Trump is proposing to ban their tribe from the U.S.– keeping Muslims from entering the non-Muslim bubble, in order to try to decrease terrorism and murder.
Or a tribe may be horrified that someone is being called racist who is not, while Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity and O’Reilly seethe with so much rage that federal wildlife officials were in danger of being killed by that Bundy guy, and other people are in danger of being killed by raging tea partiers, from time to time.
I know the reply “Prove to me the connection between Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity and O’Reilly raging and insulting and bashing liberals and Red Tribe members acting violently. You’re being illogical and irrational. Look at Scott’s rules about that. ”
You continue “People can be filled up with adrenalin and rage and fear every day by the radio and TV and it never incites anyone to violence at all– not even the ones with the least self control. If 13% of Republicans think Obama is the Anti-Christ (Oh, no it’s actually only 12.9%, so that invalidates your whole argument right there. Pay attention to numbers, will you?), and they are also being filled with fear and rage daily by the TV, that’s no big deal.”
It took 20 years after Gingrich got politics to be intensely focused on bashing of the other tribe (See article below) for the Blue tribe to react much. Yes, I know the reply I should expect to this too– “This was not the first time in history that politics was ever acrimonious in any way, so Gingrich is absolved of any responsibility for starting this wave of intense acrimony, and should be chosen as Trump’s VP, as his reward for his helping the GOP so much since 1994.”
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/6/11598838/donald-trump-predictions-norm-ornstein
So it was 20 years before the Left finally reacted in the extreme and began to go crazy with rage too. Toward the beginning of this time period, a Blue tribe president was impeached over a blow job, and the Red tribe president who came next, got away scot free after getting us into a long bloody expensive war, based on lies about weapons of mass destruction. But still the Blue tribe kept being long suffering. And the Red tribe didn’t think their tribe was guilty of anything bad.
So after about 20 years, the Blue tribe finally began to react angrily toward the Red tribe — and even then, the reaction was mostly only by, or about, the subgroup of the Left that consisted of a minority group that was getting unarmed people murdered by police on a frequent basis.
I know the reply I expect to hear to what I just said: “Prove to me how frequently this happens. Our tribe hardly ever murders people. This isn’t a big deal at all. Nor is it a big deal at all that our tribe’s TV and radio leaders are training our tribe to be more and more filled with fear and seething with anger, and that we also own tons of guns and keep buying more. It’s Blue Tribe’s comedians, and some Blue tribe people incorrectly labeling people racist that are the real problem.”
Anyway, the thing is: People can’t see the cruelties, or even murders, done by their own tribe. Or if they do, they easily excuse them, because, after all, this is not typical of this wonderful political tribe of peace.
I’ll bet Diesach blew a gasket after a zillion replies of the kinds I often get, and then actually insulted someone back, then I am sure that insult was more easily noticed than other people’s insults. Because Diesach was of the OTHER tribe, not of the tribe this board mostly consists of. Did Diesach get death by 1000 cuts and then finally strike back big time?
Both of us may be a bit insane to come to a board of the other tribe. This is a very painful experience. Perhaps Deisach will be happier now? Will it be like hitting your head against the wall? I have heard that it feels very good when you stop.
Well, at least I have learned about the culture I am a part of. Everybody is a wonderful person, a member of a wonderful tribe, no matter what pill they’ve taken, no matter which bubble they’re living in. Even if your tribe murders people, no biggie. It’s the people who took the OTHER pill who are causing all the serious problems.
You don’t have “skin in the game” of being harmed or feeling hurt by your own tribe. You have “skin in the game” of feeling hurt or scared by the OTHER tribe. So when you have no skin in the game, then it just seems like nothing is happening at all. “What’s the problem, really? I don’t see anything.”
Maybe I can even use rationality as a tool to nitpick someone to death with, as my revenge for their even hinting that there may be the slightest problem originating in anyone from my own tribe.
I don’t think D. is very Blue tribe, her blown gasket over that particular issue notwithstanding.
She Irish. The red and blue tribes refer to two, mostly white, American cultures. The totalizing over the terms is just dumb.
Put another way, she doesn’t strike me as particularly left-wing for an Irish person. Rather more the opposite. Though defining her is rather… well difficult, which is I think part of what made her posts interesting.
Still not getting it.
It is well established and well known here that each tribe ignores the problems of their own members. Congrats on reaching square 1.
Square 2 is to realize that applies to yourself and your own tribe as well. You seem entirely oblivious to this.
Step 3 is to start to use various objective tools to try to seek truth. Not only are you not there, but you mock the very idea.
As is the usual case for a brain being killed by tribalism, you blame your own failings on this board being filled with enemies. While there may certainly have been done drift, i beloved Scott’s most recent survey on the matter showed leftist ideologies as the most numerous.
This is not a board of the other tribe. This is a board that doesn’t glorify the usual tribal nonsense. Which is the mode you are still stuck in.
It certainly as all hell is a board of an other tribe.
I learned the same lesson on a smaller scale during the recent unpleasantness about Hugos. People wildly underestimate the effect of the insults emitted by their own side. Insults from your side are based in truth and really, really funny. Insults from the other side are proof of deep malice and fundamentally irrational beliefs which can only as an excuse for malice.
As for Deisach, I think there was something going wrong at her end– to my mind her posts were getting more repetitious and less interesting. Then we had a bunch of people complaing about the poor having any comforts or pleasures at all. Deisach is poor and has mental problems, and it isn’t surprising that she blew up at the idea that she should have a much worse life.
Yeah, I had that thought too. It felt more like an emotional outburst coming from a place of personal difficulty than malice. Hope she gets better.
I would have given a 1 wk ban if I were Scott. Enough to deliver the point that the rules will be enforced, but there wasn’t a reason to get rid of a productive poster over one outburst about a sensitive topic.
He was impeached over a blow job because the Blues created unworkable sexual harassment rules and it never occurred to them that the (absurd) sexual harassment rules could be applied to one of their own. Surprise!
The kerfluffle over Clinton’s blow job happened because the blues called up a monster that they couldn’t put down, not mainly because of red influence.
(Not to mention that even now, people in this very thread are talking about Trump’s sexism. Surely actually being given a blow job by an intern has to be at least as sexist as making some comments.)
He got impeached over a blow job because he was diddling a female employee in the workplace, and then *lied* about it.
It might not have been the most world-shattering justification for legal proceedings in the history of the world, but it was over something Clinton actually did.
Hey, it was against the law. And the reason they were able to get the evidence was a law that Clinton himself signed.
@kerinah:
He was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice, not merely lying. Although, I think a fair reading of the facts is that he did neither, as the trial judge, IIRC, considered those charges and ruled against them. She did cite him for contempt of court for lying, though.
Perhaps that’s pedantic. I just think the impeachment of Clinton was a gross breach of the norms required for effective governance.
It’s certainly fair to say that Clinton’s behavior with Lewinsky could constitute sexual harassment, as Clinton almost certainly exploited an unequal power dynamic, but I think for that charge to truly hold weight legally you need Lewinsky to be a complainant.
As to Trump compared to Clinton, Clinton does not seem to bring any sexual attitudes towards women into the political/public sphere. Trump does.
What tribe was Deisach even in? As I recall she was a conservative Catholic. Her politics seemed to be heavily based on solidarity with the working class. She had a strong aversion to technocratic solutions. In general her views seemed complicated.
Deisach did not strike me as fitting into any of the red/blue/grey tribes.
Well part of it is that she isn’t American so you shouldn’t expect her to map into the US usual tribal dynamics.
In the broad sense though, she was socially conservative while being somewhat (but not very) economically liberal which in the US probably would have been a “blue dog democrat” but the blue dogs these days are a shrinking group that has been largely eclipsed / absorbed by evangelicals and neo-conservatives.
The last three books I’ve read were by Orwell, Dawkins, and Marx. Those may not be blue tribe authors in the current century, but I suspect a member of the guns-and-bibles red tribe would chew off their arm rather than read anything political by a socialist, a commie, or a capital A Atheist.
The reason I say this is that I don’t find the comments section here to be at all hostile. However, Multi and Jill have both mentioned that everyone here seems very red. What is it that marks it as red tribe?
Orwell was a bit of a heretic socialist, e.g. the left wanted to bury The Road to Wigan Pier because of all the nasty things it said about them and Animal Farm was about how fucked up the Soviet Union was back before people were forced to admit it. There’s a certain type of guns-and-bibles red triber that takes 1984 pretty seriously and finds lots of parallels between it and Obama’s America. I’ll give you the other two, though.
Basically Multi is an actual IRL communist, and Jill is (presenting as) a member of John Oliver’s Army. Everything looks very red when you’re wearing blue tinted glasses. Or, like, the exact opposite of that, but you probably take my meaning.
Ha! The blue tribe is basically a giant revolt against Darwin.
“On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” – now does that sound like something progressives would be happy to support or does it sound like something that might be a bit “problematic” in pansy tumblr speak?
Darwin is the one who tells you that the terms “racist” and “sexist” are synonyms for “person who correctly perceives reality”.
“Race” hadn’t fully acquired its modern connotations when Darwin was writing; at the time it was a loose synonym for “subspecies” or even “breed”. It would have been perfectly normal then, for example, to talk about races of cats or dogs or finches (and Darwin did).
(That’s not to say that early Darwinian biologists didn’t talk about human races; they totally did. Some stuff they got right, some they got wrong. I remember reading one book, for example, that said humans were an unusually genetically diverse species, when the reverse is true thanks to the Toba bottleneck.)
I think the claim is not that the site’s readership is predominantly red tribe, but that it is predominantly from the libertarian wing of the gray tribe, which means politically it’s somewhat allied with the conservative red tribe in the Republican political umbrella, especially on economic issues and in opposition to Social Justice Progressivism on many cultural issues.
I don’t think so. Sargon of Akkad and the Amazing Atheist (both Berniebros, one from the U.K., the other from Louisiana) are definitely in the gray tribe, though.
There is also a libertarian affect that some people find more offensive than others: an almost sociopathic lack of empathy, extreme pedantry, belief that everyone who disagrees with you is stupid followed by a short essay on what they learned in Microeconomics 101.
The punchline to this joke is “utilitarianism”, do ho ho.And as we all know, anything libertarian is practically fascist, in exactly the same way that everything President Obama does is Pure Islamic Socialism, made with 100% Juice.
My inner use-mention pedant thanks you for renaming this from “Against Dog Whistles”.
The blog post is somewhat incoherent; it tries to put too many things inside the dog-whistle framework, and doesn’t really succeed. I however agree with roughly where it ends up, though it’s incomplete. One should not fetishize “racism” and “sexism” by themselves; we should look at the person’s statements, past and present, and the plans they pushed. I would also add, for politicians and public figures, to look at the political forces behind them and the ones they are allied with. And by the same token, one must look at the forces behind the people pushing the dog-whistle anti-Semitism or sexism charge to see whether the charge makes sense.
Let’s look a bit closer at the Trump vs Livingstone comparison. Let’s leave Naz Shah to the side and focus on Livingstone’s own comments. Notice that Livingstone never said anything about Jews per se; he was talking about Zionism and Israel. Even if Livingstone said “Hitler supported Zionism”, it would be anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic (since Hitler = evil by definition).
In contrast, Trump is talking directly about women in places where Trump is being quoted, not say, feminism, or a profession like nursing where there are lots of women. So whatever your opinion about Trump being a misogynist or sexist, that has little to do with Livingstone’s case.
Zooming out, it is obvious that much of the hysteria about Livingstone is simply partisan: notice that the hysteria over Labour anti-Semitism decreased by a factor of 10 after the elections – though this might just be the short news-cycle. And there is the matter of the divisions in the Labour party over Corbyn (who Livingstone is close to) and divisions over Israel.
Similarly, much of the hysteria against Trump is for partisan purposes. Though I think the case for Trump being a sexist is much stronger. I’ll just note that looking simply at the statement by employees in Trump’s organization, as the Washington Post article did, or the statement in Trump’s Art of the Deal, would have a survivor bias: women who had a bad experience would perhaps leave and thus won’t be considered.
Isn’t the term “dog whistle” somewhat dehumanizing?
That’s a feature, not a bug.
Sorry if others have already mentioned it, but it seems like a counter argument might be that history shows that almost all wrongdoings of the racist and sexist categories give none of the obvious warning signals that you suggest we should look for, and therefore an attempt to somewhat obsessively look for non-obvious ones might be the only available option? For example, most all male boards probably don’t explicitly bring up the woman’s sex in their appointments. There’s just a series of comments and jokes about the person that help establish a general attitude or agreement that’s understood but plausibly deniable. Or, for a more in-your-face example, the leaders of most genocides don’t stand for election with a policy platform of genocide, but the participants often seem to get the idea that is the intention at some point just from the rhetoric involved. Comparison of rhetoric to historical outcomes does seem relevant in some way. In my experience sexism doesn’t need all that much to be said explicitly to go to work….
That said, it does trouble me how ridiculously racism and sexism is used as a label to fight unrelated arguments these days. Your examples do seem reasonable, in that the evidence seems to make little impact on the arguments of dog whistling, and that the most frequent users of “dog whistle-ism” seem to be at least a little evidence adverse. I just don’t know if there’s a clear-cut approach to solve this one though.
Agreed. I’ve met a number of people who are pretty clearly racist/sexist/-ist but I’ve never had (except for a few internet trolls) someone admit to being -ist. Looking for dog whistles come out of this. -ists exist but are in denial about their beliefs, so, there are cases where you do have to read between the lines.
I’m not sure I agree that those who have committed genocide haven’t usually warned us ahead of time in non-subtle ways.
In Hitler’s 1939 “Jewish Question” speech, for example, he doesn’t explicitly say “I think we should round them all up and gas them,” but he does say that Jews are destroying European civilization and that there was no room for them in Germany.
The problem is that obsessive search will both turn up a lot of false positives and absorb a lot of time and energy. Unless you can reasonably say that the true positives are high enough to justify both, you should probably just assume innocence without strong evidence.
So no one else in some 751 comments thought to bring up that dog whistle is just a special case of Mott and Bailey, where the Mott is what your words literally mean, and Bailey is the message you would like to transmit, and anytime someone brings up the Bailey connotations of your comments you retreat to the Mott of calling them paranoids who over interpret simple messages?
Well, there seems to be variance in interpretation. Some have said that the point of the dog whistle is plausible deniability–black people may know you mean them when you say “urban,” but the word is neutral enough you can always deny intending any racial connotation. This is basically a motte and bailey, as you say.
But a literal dog whistle, I believe, is supposed to be a whistle which only dogs hear. So, as some others have pointed out, the point of the “dog whistle” should be to sound unremarkable to the non-target audience, but to indicate something one can’t say in polite conversation to the target audience.
In motte and bailey, the point is that you get to argue from the weak position and then retreat to the strong position when challenged; here, the idea seems to be more of a secret “code”: a way of winking and nodding to one group of supporters without alienating another: say, to secretly tell the racists and anti-semites that you’re on their side without losing all the support of non-racist, non-anti-semites.
But on this definition, it becomes hard for me to think of any clear-cut, unambiguous examples. Maybe this is because I am not the target for any dog whistles and/or don’t see the ones aimed at me because their meaning seems clear. Or maybe it is actually mostly a myth. It seems largely like a bogeyman of liberal journalism+confirmation bias.
When you know about them, I think they’re called shibboleths. For example: I don’t know if you spilled some sugar in your house or what, but you sure do seem to have a problem with reproductively viable worker ants.
This would be a better argument if “dog whistle” was not thrown about with casual abandon by political opponents.
What sort of “dog whistle” is heard only by non-dogs? Who have motivated reasoning to believe it?
Of course, the best reason to avoid looking for hidden coded messages in things your political opponents say is that sort of behavior is normally called “clinical paranoia” for good reason.
I don’t want to claim dog whistles don’t exist. The classic example is G. W. Bush giving a speech that includes a Bible verse. His secular listeners think “what a wise saying”, and his Christian listeners think “ah, I recognize that as a Bible verse, he must be very Christian”.
Why is Bush’s use of a quote from the Bible a dog whistle at all? What reason is there to think that it’s not because he thinks is a wise saying that expresses what he wants to say?
Did Martin Luther King Jr. also quote the Bible as a dog whistle? How about Gore (most famously, the time he got it wrong)? Are all Bible quotations dog whistles, and if not, how do you tell the dog whistles from the legitimate ones?
A dog whistle has to be heard by its target and (importantly) not heard by someone else. I’m not sure about Bush’s Bible quote; if it was a well-known Bible quote or if he mentioned it was a Bible quote (as he did in a some cases; if you say “In the words of the prophet Isaiah”, most people are going to assume you’re quoting some religious figure even if they don’t know the book of Isaiah), it certainly wasn’t a dog whistle. Most likely even if it was obscure it wasn’t a dog whistle, because to whom would it be important it NOT be recognized?
Take, on the other hand, “urban”, often code for “black”. Suppose you’ve got some white politician campaigning for office in a large county near large and crime-filled city. The county includes blacks and whites, and the whites include some KKK types. This politician makes it a campaign point to talk about how they’ll keep “urban” crime out of the county. This signals to the KKK types that the politician is one of them and will assist in their racist ways. On the other hand, the non-KKK types including the black people (if it works) see this as a standard law-and-order pledge about keeping crime from the city from spilling over.
And how do you know that it is not, in fact, a standard law-and-order pledge about keeping crime from the city from spilling over?
Only by breaking into his campaign headquarters and stealing his notes. Done well, you can’t know for sure.
Which, of course, means that there’s no way to defend yourself from the charge.
I think they’re getting to “being offensive is racist/sexist” through a different route than the one you describe:
1. Making offensive remarks about minorities or women tends to make the minorities or women who hear them uncomfortable.
2. If minorities or women are uncomfortable enough to avoid contact with the people who are offending them, this will close off the opportunities that may be around those people.
3. Therefore, we owe it to minorities and women to avoid making comments which we should know they will find especially offensive.
4. Therefore, if you do not avoid making offensive comments about minorities or women, you are not meeting society’s minimum standards for treating minorities and women as they ought to be treated.
5. Therefore, saying that Hitler was a Zionist is anti-Semitic even if done out of ignorance, and alluding to Megyn Kelly’s menstrual cycle on national television is sexist even if you’re just as crass about everything else, because you are being ignorant or crass in an area where you ought to know to tread lightly.
This is not so different from the logic behind the concept of a hostile work environment, except it’s socially rather than legally enforced, and thus rather more slippery and vague.
And that argument fails at #2. If you’re avoiding contact because someone merely says things which offend you, your opportunities are closed off as a result of your decision, not theirs. Your race and gender do not place an obligation on other people to walk on eggshells around you.
People really tired of being silenced by variants of this argument are a Trump constitutency.
To me the central example of a “dog whistle” is the way some political figures refer to Dred Scott as the kind of decision the Supreme Court should overturn. Now obviously all decent people agree that Dred Scott was wrong in its holding that people of African descent could never be citizens, but it was quite explicitly overturned by the 13th and 14th Amendments and hasn’t been a political issue since then, so why keep mentioning it?
Well, there’s a meme in the pro-life community that Roe v. Wade is our generation’s equivalent to Dred Scott – a radical imposition on freedom unsupported by the text of the Constitution. So whenever a pro-life pol mentions Dred Scott, the pro-lifers in the audience think of Roe and nod, while the rest of the audience is just confused.
Now that’s a dog whistle, or was until pro-choice people started to catch on. (Full disclosure: I’m pro-choice.) To me the misuse of the term to ascribe sinister implications to anything your enemy says is a travesty, since the term is useful and describes something real.
People are already discussing it, but what is really fair and good to do and say in terms of gender, race, and religion? Just assuming that some people might desire to be considerate, rather than being at each other’s throats all the time.
Maybe it’s just like the Dalai Lama says. “My religion is simple. My religion is kindness.” But kindness is unrealistic to ask of everyone. Well, back to fairness then.
Scott says the essence of dogwhistle-detection is:
But this misses the point entirely. It doesn’t matter a bit what politicians secretly harbor in their heart. They are public figures making public statements, and if they are any good at all they are perfectly aware of the implicatures of what they say. And the point of dogwhistle-detection is not to find out what secrets are in the innermost soul of some politician, it’s to uncover the politcal values and alliances they are trying to exploit.
In any case, Trump is a ludicrously bad example. There’s nothing remotely muted about his sexism, it’s out there for all the world to see and has been exhaustively cataloged.
So, here’s an actual somewhat famous dogwhistle: Reagan’s 1980 speech in Philadelphia Mississippi. The location (where civil rights workers were murdered in 1964) and his use of the phrase “state’s rights”, were either a very loud signal of racial politics, or not, depending on your preexisting sensitivities to such things.
In any case, Trump is a ludicrously bad example. There’s nothing remotely muted about his sexism, it’s out there for all the world to see and has been exhaustively cataloged.
Agreed. I think Scott was way to soft on Trump. Trump didn’t just make one comment like the Megan Kelly one — he has a solid history of crude attacks on women. So many that it becomes hard to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
And yet, the only state in 1980 in which Carter won the majority of the vote was his home state -which was in the Deep South.
The whole overdoing of accusations of dog whistling is yet another symptom of the increased political tribalism in the U.S. and some other parts of the world.
Some personal growth workshop leaders claim that you get what you focus on. I hope they are wrong, because we seem to focus a lot on Middle Eastern tribal warfare and terrorism, and on hating terrorists back for what they’ve done to us. The different U.S. political tribes are not quite terrorists yet. But no one could accuse us of not hating each other– or of being nonviolent when you look at what has gone on in both directions at some Trump rallies.
We’ve been going down this road for a very long time in the U.S. Norm Ornstein at the conservative American Enterprise Institute dates it back to Newt Gingrich in the 1990s.
The political scientist who saw Trump’s rise coming
Norm Ornstein on why the Republican Party was ripe for a takeover, what the media missed, and whether Trump could win the presidency
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/6/11598838/donald-trump-predictions-norm-ornstein
Gingrich “delegitimized the Congress and the Democratic leadership, convincing people that they were arrogant and corrupt and that the process was so bad that anything would be better than this. He tribalized the political process. He went out and recruited the candidates, and gave them the language to use about how disgusting and despicable and horrible and immoral and unpatriotic the Democrats were. That swept in the Republican majority in 1994.”
“The problem is that all the people he recruited to come in really believed that shit. They all came in believing that Washington was a cesspool. So what followed has been a very deliberate attempt to blow up and delegitimize government, not just the president but the actions of government itself in Washington.”
So Gingrich and many Right Wing “news sources” have been doing this since the 1990’s. And, as noted above, this negative campaigning worked like a charm from the beginning, in 1994.
And since it worked, eventually Democrats started doing it back to Republicans.
Well, what could Democrats say to to fire back at Republicans who were saying Dems were corrupt, evil, disgusting and despicable? Why they could call Republicans racist, sexist, and prejudiced against various minority groups, of course.
So now we have all this tribalism and people of various tribes insulting each other– slicing and dicing and misinterpreting each other’s words, to try to prove that the other tribe is corrupt. evil, disgusting and despicable.
Here is the procedure.
—Some politician of a different tribe says/does something
–Think hard: How can you bend, distort, or misinterpret what they said or did, to use it as proof that they are weak, incompetent, immoral, corrupt, evil, disgusting, or despicable? How can you use it to prove that they are the Anti-Christ and hate America?
This is no exaggeration. A lot of Fox News viewer types literally believe that Obama is the Anti-Christ.
Scott has noticed the sort of dismemberment of college debating societies, brought forth by very aggressive minority group members. Since being an aggressive a**hole worked so well for more powerful people, minority groups started doing it too. And lo and behold, at least in colleges, it worked for minority group members too.
I hope there is some way to stop this. But the problem is that it works for politicians, to win elections. And when politicians say it, their supporters say it too.
This is kind of like how we are stuck with the kind of media that works to make money for media companies, instead of media that reports accurately. There’s apparently no money in accurate reporting. Kind of like that, we are stuck with the kind of societal behaviors that make money for the most powerful people in our society and who rule it.
So Special Interest Big Money in politics pays politicians and political advertisers to bash the other tribe 24/7/365. And the politicians gratefully take the money, do the bashing, and carry out the wishes of the .01% once they are elected.
And so the 99.99% are stuck with a steady diet of the kind of political advertising and “news” that works for those purposes. This turns out to be a steady diet of being pitted Republicans and Democrats angrily railing against each other’s supposed immorality, corruption, incompetence, weakness etc.
Along come Twitter etc. and now everyone is angrily railing against everyone else.
Another aspect of this is that this is a Divide and Conquer program that is wildly successful. How can the 99.99% not be able to cooperate to achieve things that are in our common interests, even though we are the vast majority of the people? Because we’re at each other’s throats, that’s why.
No wonder The Hunger Games is so popular. It’s the story of our current society.
So. Gingrich invented disparaging the opposition, and we’ve been animals ever since?
Or maybe instead tribalism is a basic part of the human package, and we’ve been doing it forever?
We’ve been like this. Before monied interests or Illuminati or whatever other bugaboos you conjure up to explain why we’re not all working together in Utopia already.
Turns out, getting people to work together is a hard problem. Particularly if there is a big divide in what values to serve.
Side note on the silly theory about Gingrich causing widespread racism accusations against Reps as a counter-strategy. Civil Rights Act of which year? Goldwater running for President in which year? Nixon southern strategy of which year?
Of course it has happened before. And it’s been worse before. And it’s been better before too. Yes, it was better in the years just before the latest wave of acrimony that began with Newt Gingrich. If you read the article, Gingrich specifically and intentionally aimed to increase acrimony for the purpose of winning elections. And he did it. And it worked to win elections.
Just because waves of this have happened before, is no reason not to point out the most recent wave of it. Because that’s what we are dealing with now.
I’m honestly flabbergasted you think this was novel, or marked a departure from business as usual. I want to make sure that this is your actual claim before I point you to actual facts.
That’s what the article I cited said, the one about the interview of the political scientist from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Did you read it?
Yes, if the political scientist interviewed there has his facts wrong, then cite me an article or 2 or your own.
I am not saying that this never happened before. I am saying that this marked the beginning of the most recent wave of this.
“Think hard: How can you bend, distort, or misinterpret what they said or did, to use it as proof that they are weak, incompetent, immoral, corrupt, evil, disgusting, or despicable? How can you use it to prove that they are the Anti-Christ and hate America?
This is no exaggeration. A lot of Fox News viewer types literally believe that Obama is the Anti-Christ.”
Really? You’re not just saying that in order to distort or misinterpret what Fox News viewer “types” say or do? And, perhaps, in order to strive to drive the hive into apoplexy by composing those paragraphs consecutively and salting the second with “no exaggeration” and “literally”?
(And if you would like to tell me that your “a lot of” construction is correct because it is true of, e.g., thousands of people, then please riddle me this: is there anything wrong with the claim “a lot of the votes for Democrats are fraudulent”?)
One in four Americans think Obama may be the antichrist, survey says
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/02/americans-obama-anti-christ-conspiracy-theories
But William, please feel free to ignore all my comments, if that helps you to stay in your bubble. This bubble inhabiting is very normal for Americans in the current time. Not unusual at all.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
You regurgitate propaganda, and you don’t know the basics of reasonable thinking that Scott has already covered here.
That is still a ton of people who either think Obama is the Anti-Christ or else are not sure whether he is or not. If you think that is unreasonable of me to cite that article, feel free to not read any more of my comments. I expect you will continue to think my other comments are unreasonable also.
3 minutes was not enough for you to read Scott’s article on why you are entirely wrong.
You spew noise and are unrepentant about it. That’s why you are meeting resistance. Not because “OMG so many libertarians and right wingers.”
Indeed. I wonder if it has occurred to her that a recently banned person probably shares her politics to about a 90% extent (and may be even more left on the other 10%) and was met with loud cries for the ban to be reversed because they were considered to be a pillar of the community.
This community has shown it can be VERY tolerant of people with VERY opposed views. The fact that it isn’t tolerant of you should be something of a wake up call.
Interesting. So you folks are VERY tolerant of some people with VERY opposed views, but not of others. And if this is supposed to be a wake up call, what am I to think about it?
Am I supposed to be a clairvoyant who knows exactly what someone is referring to when they tell me my views are “progressive talking points” which would not make them wrong, even if they were. And when they present no evidence that these views are false, am I to go on a time-consuming hunting expedition looking for evidence that they are, just to please some people here?
There are some very good people here, and some very intolerant ones. I like some people very much. Those of you who are bugged by me may get your wish though. I don’t know how long I will last here.
Anyone who thinks what I am doing is easy, and that I am terribly rude or irrational, should try going to some Far Left Internet board and commenting there, to see how you fare– if there is one. When I look at the comment sections of Left Wing Internet sites, they often have more Right Wing commenters than Left Wing ones.
We have a very Right Wing country, as anyone can see by the fact that the GOP dominates both Houses of Congress and that America’s “most trusted news source” is Fox.
@Jill
The vast majority of sites are full of propaganda, with people who care nothing about actual facts and reason, but just want to signal their tribal affiliation and the superiority of their tribe. Many of us try to keep a much higher standard. The fact that you think we don’t know how horrible they are out there is yet another sign of how out of sync you are. We’re completely aware.
So, yes, the onus is on you to make sure you’re not just parroting nonsense. And if you just repeat some version of what you’ve read elsewhere, chances are very high that’s all you’re doing. Many of us don’t want that polluting our comments.
Regarding
Here’s Pew’s typology of America as of 2014:
http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/26/the-political-typology-beyond-red-vs-blue/
2 groups solidly right (22% of the population)
1 group moderately right (14%)
1 group moderately left (13%)
2 groups significantly left (27%)
1 group solidly left (15%)
and a disaffected group making up the remainder.
If you think that’s true, you should have spent more time lurking.
@ several
Usenet had a great feature – “Killfile poster” — that would save long long threads insulting Jill.
She makes some quite wise points, eg that a President Trump would probably have a Cheney doing the actual work, so in a prediction thread that is who we should be trying to spot.
Nah. D’s politics don’t fit cleanly into an American context; she’s highly religious and very skeptical of technological and social innovations (all Red-marked traits), but also broadly feminist, skeptical of American nationalism, and strongly supportive of social safety nets. And she seems sympathetic to populism, which isn’t too partisan but is definitely anti-establishment on both sides. I reckon she’d probably vote Democratic if she lived here, but she’d be far from the modal one. At least now.
Jill on the other hand reads to me as a typical young American leftist.
(No offense intended to either of you guys, if I accidentally stepped on something.)
Yes, but of the _wrong generation_.
[Jill] makes some quite wise points, eg that a President Trump would probably have a Cheney doing the actual work, so in a prediction thread that is who we should be trying to spot.
Two thoughts on this –
Firstly, that I think a great deal of left-wing rhetoric was spent on trying to find some demonic figure to blame for [everything that went wrong] and that latching onto Cheney provided the opportunity to attack someone for this, instead of actually grappling with the multiple threads of events and influences that led to [everything that went wrong.] This isn’t limited to any partisan side – there are more than a few red-siders who do the same to Eric Holder on the part of Obama – but I think that it’s a) not helpful and b) the other side of the “Great Man Theory” of history which is so soundly rejected by left-siders, and I find it annoying.
Secondly – when picking a leader, one wants someone who can lead – ie, someone who can influence other people. The term gravitas gets thrown around, probably to the point where it is diluted, but this is getting at something, I think.
The American president is extremely important and influential, but the scope of the executive branch is such that even one twentieth of the whole thing eclipses the manpower and potential effect of independent nations. It should not be either surprising or alarming that powerful people are in those positions.
(If the argument is that the elected officer (the president) was not providing sufficient oversight to his staff, well, that is a different thing. But to me, a lot of the concern was that a) there were powerful people in those positions and b) that Things Were Being Done which the particular observer did not fancy.)
It seemed like there were people who believed both that Bush went into Iraq because of his father issues and that Bush was Cheney’s puppet.
It’s possible that I was just seeing them as unquestioned beliefs on the left, but that there was no individual who believed both claims.
@ keranih
In haste. Maybe I should have said “Cheney et al”.
@ houseboatonstyx
Postscript to my own comment above.
Usenet had a great feature – “Killfile poster” — that would save long long threads insulting Jill.
In Usenet, each individual reader could set zis own client to ignore posts from any certain individual, ie to ‘killfile’ them. That is what I meant here.
An administrator could also ‘killfile’ an individual, but that’s not what I meant.
I’ll see you that and raise you over half of Democrats believing Bush knew about 9/11 in advance.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2011/04/more-than-half-of-democrats-believed-bush-knew-035224
The takeaway is that people say all kinds of dumb things to signal their political beliefs and neither “side” has a monopoly, or even a majority claim, on virtue.
“This bubble inhabiting is very normal for Americans in the current time.”
Funny you should say that…
FWIW, I guess it is better that you are repeating someone else’s claim tolerably accurately rather than jumping to the conclusion yourself, or exaggerating someone else’s claim beyond recognition. (It is fair to characterize twelve percent of the US population as “a lot”; yay.) However, as others have suggested, what you are repeating seems to be nonsense, and uncritically accepting nonsense politicized soundbites is a pretty effective way to stay in a bubble.
On the one hand, we have the evidence of a poll sloppily reported by journalists. The journalists don’t quote the poll questions. The journalists don’t report anything else to limit the possibility of sleazy partisan push-the-outcome poll design or nonpartisan above-and-beyond mind-blowing poll sloppiness. The journalists don’t report the sample size. And the journalists merrily report the outcomes to two figures with no error bars. As Kimball Kinnison might have said, I could eat a shape-shifting alien reptilian zombie brain and *puke* better evidence than that.
On the other hand, we have the evidence of our lying eyes.
Do even 40% of Americans believe in the Bible in general and Revelations in particular sufficiently literally that they “literally believe” that the Anti-Christ will ever walk the Earth? I’m pretty sure not. I live near Dallas where that kind of stuff is supposed to be overrepresented, and everything I see either in the national public debate or in the local public debate suggests the fraction is subsstantially smaller than that. E.g., how often does a local politician ever win a majority anywhere, even in Smallestsmallville, on a platform appealing to Revelations as a literally true guide to the future? How often do people talk about Mutually Assured Destruction as though Revelations was a literally true part of their worldview?
Do even half of those general believers also specifically believe the Anti-Christ is an identifiable public figure on Earth today? I’m pretty sure not: I’ve read probably several books worth of stuff about prophecy and mysticism touching on things like that, and seen nothing like a general confidence that it’s *right* *now* as opposed to maybe now, maybe later, and even people who queasily think it’s so imminent that the Anti-Christ has probably been born aren’t confident that he’s already a prominent public figure today.
Do even half of *those* people believe that of the various public figures who might be the Anti-Christ, Obama is definitely The One? Possibly, but I doubt it. (Not the Pope? Not some figure in the mideast, and not some leader of a non-US major power? Not some sinister string-puller in political half-shadow?)
So I get less than 10% with pretty high confidence. And as others have pointed out, our fearless blogger (may his mighty output ever enlighten us) has already led us to reflect on the confusion that can arise naturally when attempting to poll for such small fractions. As some disrespectful wag or other may have observed, three minutes might not be long enough to study the lizardman post (tremble before its mighty heft, even as we do); it is true. But even a single minute of study of your Guardian troll poll can also remind us of some of those difficulties. Indeed I expect it would remind *you* if you read it thoughtfully. (Go ask the Spartan ephors…) Or do you find it easy to believe that your poll not only establishes the truth of your gentle anti-Fox-News-“type” spin on the delicious Obama-as-Anti-Christ soundbite, but also establishes the curious fact that 4% of USAians literally believe that “shape-shifting alien reptilian people control our world by taking on human form”?)
A lot of the stuff that Jill is saying does exist. Quite a bit. However, she should be careful not to absolve people on the left of the same behaviour.
I admit: This is the first Jill post I’ve ever taken notice of, and only because of the long thread following.
But if people really don’t like Jill’s thoughts, can’t they just… IDK, ignore them? I admit, I may be missing something–maybe a lot of somethings. But people seem to be coming down pretty harsh on someone who was probably well-intentioned.
Jill has been “probably well-intentioned” long enough. The sort of lengthy uninsightful tedium Jill typifies is more harmful to a community than most of the open trolls our host bans, since the open trolls are recognizable as such and don’t tempt people to make good faith replies to someone who was probably well-intentioned and drain the oxygen out of every discussion.
I wouldn’t mind so much if Jill only posted top-level comments, those are easy enough to click “hide” and move on. But sometimes there will be an interesting comment thread, and then Jill will have something to say, and then the comment thread becomes about responding to Jill’s probable good intentions. I guess if everyone ignored Jill, Jill would be no worse than a penis drug spammer, but coordination is hard without a Czar to go on a Reign of Terror.
To be fair, Jill is getting better. When she first showed up she spammed us with several easily-disproven talking points (eg, a claim that the Koch Brothers were spending [ridiculous sum of money] to control the next election). In response, I pointed her at Politifact’s debunkings of those same talking points, whereupon she stopped posting those links and now seems to be using Politifact as a supplementary information source. And sure, Politifact has a strong left-wing bias too, but (a) it’s better than wherever else she was previously getting informed, (b) it proves she’s listening!
Now if somebody could just convince her not to post the same Vox link multiple times in the same comment section…
I disagree. I think that in a weird community like this one, it’s incredibly helpful to have somebody bringing up the normal point of view to make sure we don’t get completely unhinged.
I agree
The normal point of view is the point of view of a US left-wing partisan? How WEIRD.
It’s a normal point of view, and I strongly oppose banning anyone arguing politely in good faith who is willing to change their view based on evidence.
As Evan states, it’s most certainly a normal point of view. The use of “the” is either a subtle signal of Scott’s tribal affiliations or just a poor choice of words, depending on your opinion on caliphal infallibility.
@Evan Thorn: Wait, who the fuck said anything about banning? Are you just trying to stretch the Overton Window or something?
@WHTA: You don’t get to have an opinion on Caliphal infallibility—the One True Caliph is infallible by definition! Are you some kind of Eliezerite heretic?
The point of a dog whistle is the dogs can hear it and the people can’t. Pretty much no one except a few reporters could hear a dog whistle of “Jews” for “New York City values”, and they aren’t dogs. On the other hand everyone could hear the condemnation of “arugula-eating liberals”, so that wasn’t dog-whistle either, just an open signal.
This finding of dog whistles in everything is a failure of ethics in journalism. And an intentional one; the idea is to make it so that if you step off the plantation of liberal values, everything you say is a code word for something racist, something sexist, something evil. Oppose Obamacare or higher taxes or Libyan intervention or whatever and you’re obviously not _actually_ concerned about those issues, you’re just a racist and a sexist who doesn’t need to be listened to.
Further, the idea that Trump uses dog whistles is kind of ludicrous. Trump would never use a dog whistle when a megaphone was available. That’s kind of his whole thing.
Right.
The Establishment is enraged at Trump because he says what he means, and they are terrified that other Americans will follow his example.
Says things that his followers want to hear and want to believe that he means, which isn’t necessarily the same thing. But the Establishment has little reason to (openly) care about that distinction.
“He says what he means”
I really don’t understand this. Not in smug sarcastic way some people say that way, I’m genuinely puzzled.
Like, you’ve seen Trump flat-out deny things he said the day before, right? And make unquestionably false claims like having seen New York Muslims celebrating in the streets after 9/11? His constant lying is a huge part of his persona; how is it compatible with being “straight-talking”?
He lies like a boisterous uncle, not like a politician. He talks like he’s not calculating every little thing he says for maximum political gain and adherence to the talking point message. While that might lead to more contradictions and factual inaccuracies, it feels less manipulative, which is what people are talking about when they say he “says what he means”. Contrast it with Marco Rubio’s famous gaffe, where he may well legitimately believe that Obama knows exactly what he’s doing, but the way he kept repeating the same line the same way made it very clear it was a practiced talking point, not him saying what was on his mind.
I have heard (anecdotally) that Mathematics departments have policies of not accepting people who look like they are particularly hard working because if they are stressing out over their masters degree they are obviously not world class intellects.
I am reminded of this when Trump campaigns against Clinton who has a staff of hundreds and has literally spent the past
8162468 years planning her run.(I would love to hear if that math department story is true or not BTW)
“boisterous uncle” is a great analogy, I’m probably going to steal that phrase
He approaches political issues the same way the average person does – by having a general framework of beliefs, and then formulating answers to specific challenges in his head, on the fly, when people ask him to. This does not ensure 100% consistency.
John Jay,
I just recently was doing a lot of case interviews for some elite-level consulting firms. Some of the best advice I received was “It’s not about how quick or how accurate your answers are, it’s about looking like you got there really easily and without much effort.” I even had some people go as far as to suggest liberally sprinkling in words like “clearly” and “obviously” to suggest that things are going well – even if you don’t feel like they are.
If they hire you, they can pretty much force you to put in an effort – but they can’t force your IQ up…
Someone already gave the reference to show this isn’t false.
Didn’t I cover this above? His claim was he saw Muslims celebrating in Jersey City. There were contemperaneous news reports of Muslims celebrating in Jersey City.
It wasn’t thousands, which may be Trump lying, exaggerating, or mistaking reports of East Jerusalem with Jersey City.
I’d never heard this variant of the joke. The versions I know all have a different punch-line. The newcomer takes the time to study the catalog of jokes and joins a session.
“17!” says one fellow, to rousing laughs.
That’s the one about the nun and the octopus, the newcomer thinks, and I’ve got the perfect follow-up. “103!” he calls out. Dead silence. “47!” No reaction.
He slumps away, discouraged. One of the joke-swappers comes over and explains the response his efforts got: “It’s not just the joke: it’s the delivery.”
The variant I initially heard was, the newcomer says some number, not knowing the underlying joke but expecting laughs, and is shocked to see everyone glaring at him and a few tut-tutting under their breaths. He looks around in confusion, until someone pulls him aside and berates him: “Dude, that is NOT a joke you tell when in front of a lady!”
I think both the all-new variant and the delivery variants might be better, though.
I’d like to actually explore this a little more. What to we think Cruz actually meant by “New York Values”?
I agree that a NYC values = Jewish formulation is foolish, especially because ignores the fact that separate for Judaism, Jews and Israel are all very entrenched in the evangelical circles which comprise the base of support Cruz draws most heavily from. His primary strategy was to try and coalesce evangelicals and “establishment” Republicans once his establishment rivals had conceded.
But saying New York Values clearly was intended to have some meaning, to call to mind something in the primary voters to which he was appealing. What was it? I mean “coastal elite” isn’t a set of values. Nor is “arugula eating” a value.
What actual values does the phrase “New York Values” constitute? And if some of them are objectionable, why does Cruz not merely point that particular value as a deficiency of Trump?
I would say some combination of:
-Overly materialistic (in both senses of the word)
-selfish
-conceited
-inhospitable
Mostly I’m keying off of Wall Street caricatures. I suppose there might be different negatives if I first thought of Broadway or Bronx. (After I got over reminiscing about Gargoyles)
Materialistic, I’ll give you.
The others seem more like characterization a than values. If we are going with characterizations, how about “urban”? NYC is the largest metro area in the country.
“Urban” is a dog-whistle for “black”.
Is it? Literally everyone knows urban means black. Major corporations use “urban” in their marketing pitches to black people.
I have heard it used sort of euphemistically, though one does wonder if it can be a “dog whistle” when black people themselves all know what it means and don’t object to it.
I recall Paul Ryan making some comment about the plight of “urban youth.” The advantage of “urban” is it’s ambiguous enough that you can still claim to just be talking about “inner city youth” (which also sounds a little like a code for “black”…) if pressed, as he did.
Part of the problem, though, is that there is almost nothing Paul Ryan could say about problems faced by black people without getting crap for it, so one almost has to talk in euphemisms and “dog whistles,” even if one has no particular desire to obfuscate.
@onyomi
Because the point of a dog whistle is plausible deniability, not unintelligibility. While urban strongly points in the direction of race, the word still has other meanings.
I think “urban” probably was a dog-whistle at some point, but as you say, everyone knows it know. Except maybe the hipsters.
Well, this was sort of my point about how dog-whistles really work.
We all know urban, inner city, “street” and some others are code used to refer to various elements of the real and imagined black community and culture.
But then you get people (like Cruz) inveighing against “New York City values” and it’s a couple of steps removed from “urban” and even farther from “blacks and minorities”.
To the extent dog-whistle has meaning it’s this, using ever more abstract terms to invoke the object of the voters animus.
And like every use of euphemism, it’s going to be on a treadmill.
I have no concrete answers for you, as I Am Not Now And Have Never Been A Member Of The Republican Party, but allow me to substitute some plausible speculation in its place as someone who has lived for a number of years in upstate NY.
“New York Values” is an example of soundbite politics – it’s a dog whistle in the sense that it’ll mean different things to different people, and also in the sense that it’s intended to mean Cruz is “against something negative” to his supporters. It’s short enough to fit in a newspaper headline or clickbait title, can be ascribed both to his most-likely-at-the-time primary opponent and most-likely-at-the-time general election opponent (useful to avoid later accusations of flip-flopping), and does in fact unpack into a not-exclusively-positive set of associations, the main negative ones being, I think, “corruption”, “rules-for-the-sake-of-rules”, and “rudeness”. Some of this, particularly the “corruption” bit, may be the result of a blurring of associations between NYC and Albany.
This particular dog whistle turned out to double as a cat whistle, though, and the cats hated that. /facetious
The positive associations of “New York Values” I’d also say point to NYC: “opportunity”, “egalitarianism”, “straight talking”. Likely a good deal of this is a matter of perspective – two sides of the same coin, as it were.
“Some of this, particularly the “corruption” bit, may be the result of a blurring of associations between NYC and Albany.”
Not necessarily. NYC was the home of Tammany Hall, after all.
Despite the weasel word “may” usage, I do in fact appreciate the explicit addition of contrary evidence. Thanks.
Still is for a few more months – they’re in the process of demolishing the building to put in condos.
If he had said NJ values, I’d give your corruption, but I don’t think people really see NYC that way. And I doubt people outside the Northeast are going to be particularly familiar with how bureaucratic NYC can be.
I agree whole-heartedly with the idea that it is sound-bite politics.
Rudeness, sure. Not sure if it’s a “value” though. Perhaps the absence of “politeness” as a value is being pointed at.
Maybe it’s a point at “tax and spend”? I think people generally think of NYC taxes as high. That’s a statement about what you value in government.
Fair enough; on the other hand, how much of a distinction is the average red-state voter going to make between New York and New Jersey?
On the “rudeness” point, it makes more sense I think if you interpret “values” to mean “culture”.
Overall, I think Squirrel of Doom has it about right.
I assume he meant the general leftist politics. High taxes, over regulation, corruption, racial quotas, high crime, promiscuous life style, etc.
These kind of things work a bit like the monster that’s never shown on screen.Each viewer can imagine what would be the scariest thing for them, which is worse, on average, than any concrete monster they could have designed.
“Make America Great again” is another example. People have many different ideas about*what* has gone wrong in America, and can fill in their own favorite remedy. They will, on average, like that much better than any specific policy Trump could formulate.
A lot of people dislike various things about New York, and if you take a stand against “New York” values, they’ll fill in their own pet peeve.
But then, if some of those things are Jews, wouldn’t it be fair and accurate to accuse you of playing to people’s antisemitism? It doesn’t seem like much of an excuse to say “oh, I was just playing to whatever hatred my listeners happened to have, without any particular intent that that hatred should be expressed towards groups that are societally taboo to hate”.
Seems too broad to be fair and accurate. In a British election, if someone said, for instance, that their opponent was a stooge for American foreign policy, would that be considered anti-Semitic or explicitly anti-Israel because defending Israel is basically a cornerstone of American foreign policy? Or could it be the case that there are many other reasons someone might dislike American foreign policy or specific elements of it that have nothing to do with Israel?
Sure, it’s possible Ted Cruz might have been playing to some listeners’ hatred of Jews. It’s also possible he might have been playing to some listeners’ hatred of loud, self-satisfied elitists, which is a New Yorker stereotype that has some element of truth behind it.
Yeah, I can’t think Cruz meant anything anti-Semitic by it. It’s too much against his self interest and strategy in the primaries. The evangelical vote is explicitly pro-Jewish right now, and that is the base he was counting on.
“These kind of things work a bit like the monster that’s never shown on screen”
I like this. But then it really does make it a kind of Pavlovian dog whistle. Blow it and the voter starts to raise their hackles and growl, for various and random reasons having nothing to do with the actual content of the phrase “New York Values”.
Yeah, there are some actual dog whistles, in addition to false accusations.
NYC is a Blue city in a Blue state. And many Reds like to hate on Blues or put them down condescendingly. And vice versa too. E.g. Blues think that Reds are clinging to their God and their guns.
I thought it was a pretty cut and dry case of suggesting that Clinton and Trump (who are both New Yorkers) are kind of lacking in the “Values” department
But why would Republican primary voters associate that with being from New York?
From New York City.
Which is a place of high crime, rent control, high taxes, urbanism, single people, the fast life, bums, hookers, and drugs on every corner, Wall Street, corruption, and so on, and so on. And they’re rude, *and* they brag on themselves.
You can’t fool us. We seen NYPD. We know how it goes.
The way you emphasized City reminded me of those old salsa commercials. Perhaps Cruz was trying to appeal to 90s nostalgia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooPBXfnIpYI
Well, I agree that “city” is doing a lot of the lifting.
I’m not sure it wasn’t much more than a way to say “those people” (hippies, hipsters, gays, immigrants and minorities, criminals, loose women, etc.)
Because they’re both from New York, and the stereotypical (metropolitan) New Yorker is an arrogant, abrasive, know-it-all who’s somewhat shady.
Also overwhelmingly votes Democrat.
Keep in mind that Cruz’s strategy at that point was to paint Trump as “not a real conservative” and imply that he was a closet liberal double agent trying to secretly help his buddy Hillary.
“What actual values does the phrase “New York Values” constitute?”
Donald Trump’s values.
Trump was attempting to cast aggressive questioning as irrational anger tied to a woman’s menstrual cycle. How does this not implicate him in sexism?
Relevant to the Ted Cruz “New York values” part at the beginning: Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, has used this kind of tactic before when he was in charge of the campaign of a Missouri congressman and ran an ad accusing his opponent of “San Francisco values”. In that case as well, I don’t think there was supposed to be any connection to Judaism, but rather “west coast liberals” and general liberal cultural values.
Of course there wasn’t any connection to Judaism. San Francisco is gay, not Jewish.
Multi-frequency dog whistles!
Anyway, now I’m starting to think about the problem more along the lines of Trickle Down Economics. You see, Trickle Down Economics is not a thing. It has never been a thing. There was never any economist who proposed Trickle Down Economics. There are no journal articles discussing the principles of Trickle Down Economics. There are no textbooks entitled Trickle Down Economics.
Instead, there was a partisan attack on Supply Side Economics. You see, Supply Side Economics is a thing. Economists proposed it and wrote about it. It made concrete, testable claims like, “Removing barriers to or otherwise increasing investment increases real output.” Rather than argue against these claims, political opponents saw that if you squint hard enough, you can carry out most methods of increasing investment to a point where you can draw a circle around rich people. You can do this even for methods that don’t immediately seem all that focused on rich people. Consider IRAs. They have rather modest contribution limits; it’s not like rich people can drop millions into tax-advantaged accounts. Nevertheless, it is true that it is easier for a rich person to use the entire allowance compared to a poor person.
Then, they were able to single out the disfavored group. “See!? They just want to give money to rich people! What do they think, it’s going to ‘trickle down’ to the rest of us?!” The more sophisticated could go so far as to adopt this attack so deeply to claim, “Supply Side Economics is just a dog whistle for giving money to rich people.”
I think I’ve seen a lot of political attacks that work like this. Start from an intentional or accidental misunderstanding of your opponent’s position; draw a faintly-plausible line out to a favored/disfavored group; claim that their position is really just about that group.
I think you’re being misled by the fact ‘economics’ is being used to mean that this is (primarily) an attack on an abstract economic theory that might be written about in textbooks. Pretty sure it’s squarely at the political level and saying ‘if your policies to make the nation richer just make the top 1% richer, you can’t rely on this ‘trickling down’ to everyone else’.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a clear cut example of someone not reading past the first paragraph.
I mean……the gay rights movement in San Francisco was spearheaded by prominent Jews like Harvey Milk and Dianne Feinstein, so it’s not like you couldn’t conflate gay San Franciscan values with Judaism if you really wanted to.
Is there any significant movement in the US in the last 70 years that didn’t have some Jews prominent in it? if you use that logic you can conflate anything with Judaism (and plenty of people do).
The Tea Party, probably? Just on the basis that most Jews aren’t Republican. I take your point, I’m not actually saying you should conflate gay rights with Judaism or that it would be a good idea to do so; simply that a lot of the further-right associates progressive agenda items (gay/trans rights, mass immigration, etc) with the work of Jews because there is the belief that Jews work to weaken the traditional structures of European/Western society to a) destroy social trust in these societies and lessen the chance of a second Holocaust or b) destroy the homogeneity of European societies as revenge for the Holocaust or c) dominate the gentiles through divide-and-conquer strategies or d) pick whatever other theory you would prefer to believe.
It does not help that a lot of these agenda items do in fact feature powerful, well-connected Jews in prominent positions.
A bunch of the Volokh Conspiracy lads were involved in the con-law side of the tea party movement, weren’t they?
I suppose it doesn’t really count when they’re officially part of a public jewish blogging conspiracy.
Like Nancy Pelosi, who has 5 children.
Most of these links are just reporting on what two individuals, Geraldo Rivera and Jeffrey Toobin, said. All your quotes are just synonymous ways of describing these two responses. Even most of the criticism of the Cruz comment linked in these articles doesn’t focus on the possible anti-Semitic dogwhistle aspect. I really don’t think you’ve made the case that there was any sort of consensus among the media that the comments were anti-Semitic dogwhistles.
Can I plug here the more general objection to “Argument From My Opponent Is An *-ist”. Diagnosing people with -isms is really easy. The problem is when we let those glib judgements guide out thoughts about their abilities to lead, or the correctness of their views on other subjects.
If someone’s argument is unreliable because they have a history of making bad arguments for similar things then say so. Don’t do the lazy thing of claiming they are wrong/bad/should not be elected etc because you’ve detected signs of their prejudice.
The ad hominem fallacy only applies to arguments. It makes no sense to apply it to who should be elected or who is a bad person.
Trump: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, Socrates is a mortal.
Clinton: Trump molests little children, therefore Socrates is not mortal.
Here Clinton is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Trump: Vote for me!
Clinton: Trump molests little children, don’t vote for him.
Here Clinton’s premise may be incorrect, but there’s nothing wrong with the conclusion given the premise.
Isn’t there? I don’t see how being a child molestor makes you a bad president. Clinton wasn’t perfect, but his time in office is generally looked back on fondly and it would be hard to argue he wasn’t at least better than average.
For many decades the President in office has made me look back fondly at his predecessor. It doesn’t matter whether the incumbent is Republican or Democrat. In 2016, I despise the incumbent with a white hot despite, but I fully expect to look back on him with fondness in a year or two, regardless of who is elected.
This means I feel physically ill when I think about 2020, but there you go.
Doesn’t this say a lot more about you than it does about the various presidents?
Yes, I think I know what your answer will be, that we really are going to hell in a handbasket. Let just say, I don’t think that is the most likely possibility.
Believe me, that has occurred to me. I do hope you are right. I don’t think you are.
I think a lot of this is just buying into the negative ads that candidates run against each other leading up to an election.
Both sides say “if you vote for this guy, he will destroy the country!” No matter who wins, it’s a person for whom “this guy will destroy the country” is a meme that’s entered your consciousness, even if you don’t think you really believe it.
But then 4/8 years pass and they didn’t destroy the country and you’re on to a new obsession over two new people, both of whom are going to destroy the country.
The expectations for Presidents are so low that pretty much anything short of becoming a dictator or starting a nuclear was allows them to exceed the expectations that were set for them by their opponents.
Yeah, this is close. On even-numbered days I don’t actually believe we’re in the hand basket, but rather that I can’t seem to hold a grudge no matter how justified. When the current bastard has let go of the reins for a couple of years, and (as you say) he has not outright destroyed anything crucial, I can cut him some slack, especially when there is a new clear and present danger with his hand at the controls.
Either way, my point is that there’s not much comfort to be had in observing that a bad President doesn’t look quite so bad in retrospect.
Isn’t there?
Shouldn’t it be comforting that predictions of doom and gloom about past presidents proved to be false?
One of the reasons I’m rooting for Trump to win is to see people reconcile how boring and uneventful his presidency will inevitably be with their predictions of unprecedented disaster.
Being a child molester is a very good indicator of poor moral judgment generally. Seems relevant in evaluating polticians. But less relevant than actual questions about their abilities, policies, and platform.
Ah, I think I’ve found a place where there should have been a dog-whistle (but I didn’t hear it). Obama running for election did not endorse gay marriage, marriage equality, or anything of the sort.
But when conservatives were denounced for, say, supporting proposition 8 in CA, they pointed out the President Obama held (or recently had held) the same position. The response in some cases was something to the effect of, well, we know how he really feels. And indeed, he does now support making m-w and m-m/w-w marriage legally equivalent.
At some point there most likely would have been a dog whistle type statement Obama made to signal his real position.
The Case of the Dog That Didn’t Whistle
Well, yes, I am “assuming” (mostly for the sake of argument) that there is one there, though not without evidence, despite not hearing it myself.
But, as I am neither in the intended audience, nor have a journalism degree, there’s no way I could have caught it.
I think the evidence in that case was that Obama had previously supported gay marriage and had only started opposing it once he was running for national office.
This actually reminds me of what I felt in 2004 when Kerry was running and explicitly said that he believed marriage was between a man and a woman. Being a progressive college student in Massachusetts, I was certain that Kerry was pro-gay marriage and was just refusing to publicly express an opinion that would make him un-electable. I was also certain that conservatives were smart enough to figure that out, and that Kerry wasn’t fooling ANYONE by “lying” that he was against gay marriage.
Thinking back, I don’t think that was a case of dog whistling – at the very least, I can’t recognize what the dog whistle would be, which doesn’t make sense since I was the exact target audience for such a whistle. I think it was more a case of me projecting my own beliefs to the candidate who represented my tribe.
During 2008 I had several militant-atheist types as friends who wouldn’t hesitate to mock anyone for being stupid enough to believe in God. They were also all fanatical Obama supporters. When I challenged them on how they could vote for a Christian candidate, they were all 100% insistent that Obama was actually an atheist, he just had to say he was Christian because America was full of ignorant rubes who were stupidly biased against atheists.
They were apparently 100% serious about this too. When I tried to suggest to them that when people on the red side accused Obama of lying about his religion it was considered racist, they didn’t seem to understand the comparison I was trying to make.
I think there’s a problem here where you haven’t separated “it’s wrong to judge politicians by extrapolating their unexpressed natures from clues in what they say” from “it’s wrong to trust the perfidious media with its strong biases and lack of intellectual honesty to make delicate judgment calls accurately when it comes to whether a politician they disagree with is evil”. Your examples seem to be arguing against the latter more than the former.
Agreed.
To offer a counter, Bush Jr. did claim to be against nation-building, and Bush Sr. promised no new taxes. I don’t know how anyone could have predicted the latter (it seems more like “things didn’t go as planned” rather than “Bush Sr. was intentionally deceptive about his plans,”) but I can see someone listening to Bush Jr. thinking “that sounds like bull; he is totally the kind of guy who would try to topple dictators and try to install democracies, but how can I prove it?”
As always, a lot of things boil down to “sides” (or tribes.) If feminists and immigrants are both Blue Tribe, and Trump (red tribe,) is anti-immigrant (or anti-certain immigrants,) then by implication Trump is anti Blue Tribe, which includes feminists. And feminists assume that they hold a monopoly on being pro-woman.
Or to use a more recent example, it is pretty clear that Islam is not pro-gay people, and the average American gay person would be much worse off if they suddenly lived in a Muslim neighborhood. But Gays and Muslims are both Blue Tribe, so LGBT people don’t want to vote for Trump because of his “hate-filled anti-Muslim rhetoric,” which makes them concerned that he is anti- other groups, like gays. They are sticking with their Tribe, Blues, even though it is pretty clear that in reality, Trump is much less of a threat to gay people than Muslims. But one couldn’t possibly anti-Muslims and pro-gays.
(I suspect Trump is not pro-gay so much basically neutral, but he certainly doesn’t want to see them gunned down en mass.)
Getting back to Cruz, I bet a lot of heartland Cruz-supporters don’t even realize that there are a bunch of Jews in NYC; for a dog-whistle to work, your audience has to understand it. Further, Evangelicals love Jews. Sometimes they’re annoying about it–Evangelicals are legendary for being annoying–and they often love Jews for reasons that Jews don’t like, such as wanting to convert them all to Christianity. But their love of Jews is still very strong, which is why they are staunch Israel-defenders and spend their spare time learning bits of Hebrew. It’s the most unrequited relationship in American politics, as Jews (who are based mainly in very blue NY and LA,) identify Evangelicals as Red Tribe enemies who say insensitive things and won’t shut up about Jesus and abortion and other things Jews don’t care much about.
To sum long paragraph: Cruz’s voter base is staunchly pro-Jewish and doesn’t particularly identify Jews with NYC. The idea that a Red Triber would be anti-semetic is probably just due to Blue-Tribe loyalties or NYC-ers’ lack of experience with Red Staters.
As for Labour, I get the impression that the Labour party is actually anti-Israel to some degree (though perhaps I am wrong because I am not a Brit and I don’t follow British politics.) Being anti-Israel or anti-Zionist could lead to some weird, garbled statements on the subject.
That depends on where they currently live. If they live in an Evangelical Protestant, Mormon, or Jehovah’s Witness neighborhood, then moving to a Muslim neighborhood would be a significant improvement.
(I’m assuming, of course, that you mean a Muslim neighborhood in America instead of, say, a Muslim neighborhood in Pakistan.)
I haven’t heard of any mass shootings of gay people in Utah lately.
I haven’t heard of any in Muslim neighbourhoods, either.
It’d be more accurate to say they’re part of the Left coalition, or part of the Blue ingroup. Blue Tribe itself is a culture, and insofar as we can identify separate gay or Muslim cultures, they aren’t Blue Tribe more or less by definition. Though there’s a certain amount of cultural overlap and code-switching going on.
Not even part of the Left coalition. Just the not-Red coalition, whenever that coalition is tactically relevant.
Just as Trump has run on creating a not-Blue coalition, and his success has been as a result of people realizing that it’s a tactically relevant one, whereas most of the other Republican candidates were trying to shore up/recruit to the Reds.
I agree with everything else you said, and would like to register that agreement before nitpicking.
This sounds extremely unlikely, on par with people not having heard that there are Jews in Hollywood. People call it “Jew York City” for a reason.
People who are specifically interested in tracking large concentrations of Jews call it “Jew York City” for a reason. Possibly people who care deeply about New York City would as well. But as someone from flyover country I gotta say that this did not describe the culture as I was growing up. To me, New York City was a big city, full of millionaires and financiers, that got made fun of in a salsa commercial. Maybe the second point was supposed to make me sit up and say “aha! Jews!” but that wasn’t really a dog whistle I could hear.
From the UK, my stereotype of New York is equal parts Jewish and Italian.
I’ve seen media-representation complaints of how NYC is depicted with Italian and Russian and sometimes Polish/Black/Asian factions, but not one Jewish character. This is often accompanied with the charge that Jewishness has been erased into the whitewashed morass.
I guess it’s not a contradiction, per se, in that NYC Jews are thus invisible until it’s convenient to use a stereotype of them as dog-whistle fodder?
@arbitrary_greay: Really? That’s surprising to me. So many major pieces of pop culture set in NYC feature Jews as a distinct and identifiable part of New York’s cultural tapestry. The Law and Order franchise, for instance, or Seinfeld.
From over here on the West Coast, my conception of New York is mostly as the default setting for superhero comics and romantic comedies. Big, capitalist, unique accent, pizza and spaghetti, had a rep as gritty and dangerous when I was growing up but that’s faded somewhat. “New York Jew” is a stereotype I recognize, mostly from Woody Allen movies, but New-York-as-Jewish isn’t.
Same thing here from Europe. “New York Jew” is a stereotype I’m aware of and recognize, but other than the prevalence of Bagel shop I wouldn’t expect to run into many typically Jewish things in NYC as I would in Israel.
First I’ve heard it called that. For that matter, first or near-first assertion I’ve heard that there are a disproportionately high number of Jews in NYC. And I live in NY (albeit not the city), so similar or higher levels of ignorance of “heartland Cruz-supporters” strike me as quite plausible.
(Of course, usual caveats on the difference between truth and plausibility)
How old are you? This stereotype is decades out of date.
In the 1950s New York had 2.5 million Jews. Now, there’s less than half of that number. NY now has far more blacks and hispanics than Jews.
http://jewishgeography.typepad.com/.a/6a01053639b2f5970c010536fa1536970c-pi
I don’t know about the 5 boroughs, but it looks like a lot of Jews do live in what the rest of the country considers NYC (including Long Island and New Jersey.)
ETA: from the same site (The Jewish Geography Blog): “New York City has the largest US population of Jews,numbering about 1.6 million, a full 25% of the entire US poulation. New York is second only to Tel Aviv, Israel as the city with the largest Jewish population in the world. Per capita however, Miami slightly outranks New York in the concentration of Jews.”
Thanks.
I am often surprised by things people don’t know, even intelligent folks–it’s really hard to know everything.
Some of the folks I knew growing up in flyover country certainly did know about Jewish settlement patterns. Others didn’t even know that “Cohen” and “Goldberg” are common Jewish last names; I’d wager they don’t know much more about NYC than “full of liberals” and “West Side Story.”
(Seinfeld may have changed that, though.)
didn’t even know that “Cohen” and “Goldberg” are common Jewish last names
I realized that Cohen was a Jewish surname –
– and not just ‘a’ surname, but the surname, one of the lines associated with high-mucky-muck rabbis –
about six years ago. Before then, boo. Not a clue. Goldberg I knew, because of some pre-WWII propaganda (get it? “Gold-bug”! filthy rich Jews have so much money, it’s in their names! *eyeroll*) and “stein” I knew, but that to me had been more of a ‘the sort of people who came from Germany’ name, like ‘-ski’ meant ‘from Poland’.
In defense of other fly over folks, there are a large number of people who are Jewish in ethnicity but not faith, and outside of the big city that means that their kids get married to non-Jews and some of *their* kids grow up Mormon, Catholic, Baptist, etc.
But yeah. Jewish people don’t make up that big of a portion of the USA, and with a huge fraction of them in NYC – and another, smaller-but-still-huge chunk in LA, that doesn’t leave a lot for the rest of the country to bump into.
Priests, not rabbis. The Cohanim is the line of the priests.
But Jews don’t have priests, you say?
Yeah. It’s a complicated religion.
It’s interesting that ‘priest’ ended up being the translation in English for Cohen. The etymology of priest (from πρεσβύτερος presbýteros meaning elder) as well as the actual selection and role of Catholic priests is much more like a Rabbi than a biblical Cohen.
English could easily have had a word derived from the Latin sacerdos or the Greek ἱερός hiereus but somehow didn’t.
@ The Nybbler –
Thank you, I stand corrected.
(I did know that that there were priests – and that priest, prophet and rabbi all had different niches, and then there were judges…)
>The idea that a Red Triber would be anti-semetic is probably just due to Blue-Tribe loyalties or NYC-ers’ lack of experience with Red Staters.
The idea that all conservatives believe the thing is no less stupid than the idea that all liberals believe the same thing.
This is, in fact, the point of a dog-whistle – to allow a politician to signal support for a segment of a political coalition while maintaining plausible deniability with segments of his political coalition who hate that group.
See, for example, the internal liberal feud between pro-gay people and pro-muslim people following the Pulse shooting.
Just a quick point but the “the left has an anti-semitism problem” narrative is being driven more by a civil war in the Labour party between the recently ousted Blairites and the Corbynistas than anything of substance.
See also Craig Murray’s analysis of the Nuneaton Council Elections.
Eh, I can see that it might be exaggerated, but it seems likely that Naz “the Jews are rallying” Shah and Malia “Zionist led media” Bouattia are indicative of some larger problem.
Regarding Trump, there’s a difference between him being a sexist and him enacting sexist policies. It’s certainly possible that he thinks that men and women should be treated significantly differently while being pro-choice and so on. If so, his non-sexism in policy is less reliable, because an issue could arise where he’d intuitively decide to take a politically sexist line, and also raises the question of how he’d conduct himself as president.
“It’s certainly possible that he thinks that men and women should be treated significantly differently while being pro-choice and so on.”
Do you treat men and women differently on a daily basis?
Everyone does one way or another, particularly if a person is an attractive member of your preferred gender. So just saying “treated differently” probably implicates virtually everyone as some kind of sexist, when it really should not be the case.
I assume that readers would understand what I mean by treating men and women differently in the objectionable sense.
“When done by someone I don’t like”?
You can do better than that.
From an Australian perspective, probably the top example that comes to mind regarding dog-whistling is our government’s policy on refugees. The stated aim of our policy (which forbids migrants who arrive by boat from being settled in Australia, and mandates that they be detained and processed offshore) is ostensibly humanitarian: to break the business model of people smugglers, who profit from human misery, and to prevent the deaths of migrants at sea. But our policy necessarily involves a hefty number of our own human rights abuses, which makes the argument that the policy is humanitarian quite shaky (and imo untenable). I am naive enough that I can probably believe that the otherwise-seemingly-reasonable politicians try their very hardest to believe sincerely in the humanitarian aim of the program. But there is another compelling reason for them to support it: they can dog-whistle for the support of the constituency revealed in the 90s by former MP Pauline Hanson, our local far-right, anti-immigrant nutjob. This constituency, which has usually proven to be shockingly large, doesn’t care about human rights, but it does care that foreigners shouldn’t be able to take over our culture, by “jumping the queue” and failing to integrate. And if migrants aren’t allowed to settle here, then they get their way.
So here I would say that the deepest, darkest machinations of our politicians’ minds are not what is at issue. Like I said, I can plausibly believe that they do try to believe sincerely in the stated reasons for the policy, assuaging their consciences by focusing on the deaths at sea they are preventing, and the exploitation they are cutting off. But the dog-whistle is still blown, and blown merely for cynical political expedience. And that, I think, is much more of a problem than the examples Scott gives.
But don’t the anti-immigration politicians say explicitly that they’re anti-immigration? Or are there Australian politicians claiming that they will allow immigration, but other people can figure out from their dog whistles that they actually won’t?
There are two areas of dark matter, from the voter perspective, where this matters. One is candidates’inside info: if many candidates sincerely believe offshore processing is humane, this raises my credence that it is. The other is future decisions: a candidate with sincere pro-immigrant values who favors offshore processing will likely adopt pro-immigrant policies on issues that aren’t in the radar yet.
Hanson is still around, and she does readily admit to not wanting immigrants coming in. But the politicians from the major parties generally take great pains to emphasize the humanitarian angle, even as they are accused of egregious human rights violations. Both our main left and right parties support offshore processing, and yes, the left party (which is currently in opposition) does try to talk up its pro-immigrant, pro-human rights values in contrast with the government, but still insists that we should continue with the current policy (there seems to be a bit of a civil war going on inside the party over offshore processing, but for now they are in favour). The government uses that to claim that the opposition would actually weaken the borders, contrary to their claims (so, sort of the opposite of “politicians claiming that they will allow immigration, but other people can figure out from their dog whistles that they actually won’t”).
Point is, we have some very plainly anti-immigrant policies in place, but I don’t think we have lots of politicians motivated by xenophobia.
In other words, the conventional wisdom is so crushingly pervasive that politicians can only do the sensible thing — keep Australia from being overrun by Afghans and the like — by not mentioning that their goal is to keep Australia from being overrun by Afghans and the like.
The funny thing is that Australia doesn’t really have many prominent anti-immigration politicians, but it does have a great many anti-refugee politicians. The centre right party that led the anti-refugee rhetoric also increased the skilled migrant intake, while the centre left party which was ostensibly on the side of the refugees put in place most of the offshore processing.
Of course, they both keep that reasonably quiet, presumably for fear of pissing off their voters. Still, it’s important to draw the distinction between “ewww swarthy foreign Mohammedans who will shoot ak-47s and eat hummus with our wives” and “ewww unskilled and traumatised subsistence farmers who will pay less tax than a Filipino accountant or a Keralan chemical engineer”.
It is quite correct and pertinent to make the distinction between “anti-immigrant” and “anti-refugee.” I should’ve done that.
There’s an angle for the antisemitism claims that seems obvious to me but I haven’t seen mentioned yet, so here’s my go at it.
Livingstone pseudo-defended Hitler by attaching to him an identifier (“Zionist”) that is generally used with a positive connotation, at least among people who support the existence of Israel. Maybe Livingstone is out there fighting the good fight by making sure that Hitler is slandered only as much as he deserves to be, and not more, by reminding everyone about Hitler’s good deeds at a frequency proportional to how many of his deeds were good. Or maybe Livingstone just thinks that Hitler is criticized too much (independent of whether or not he’s criticized more than he should be, due to his crimes). Or maybe Livingstone doesn’t like Jews all that much, and a win for Hitler is a loss for the Jews. Or maybe…
i.e., there’s basically one scenario in which Livingstone’s state of mind that leads him to call Hitler a Zionist comes from some weird academic obligation he feels towards maintaining moral parity for Hitler criticisms, and all the others feel like maybe he just doesn’t like Jews. Compare “Hitler had some good ideas.” It doesn’t help that Zionism is the correct denotation but wrong connotation (given Hitler’s more Hitlery actions), so it feels like in addition to staking out a weird position he’s also trying to fool us with some verbal slight of hand. All of this combined does not a good picture make.
The analysis I’m doing does have some disadvantages as a societal norm — it’s very difficult to genuinely discuss positive aspects of Hitler et al. without repeated disclaimers that you understand they’re terrible people. But having been on the internet once or twice, I don’t think that loss is big enough to match what’s gained.
I think this generalizes to similar, but less strong, arguments about sexism.
Rests on the assumption it’s an out of the blue, bizarre position that he came up with all by himself. Which may not be true.
“Hitler temporarily fooled some people into thinking he was OK to cooperate with despite his open anti-Semitism by supporting Zionism, before settling on extermination” is a reasonable simplification of the situation. If you grew up with that, “Hitler supported Zionism” is an obvious “even shorter” version.
Not talking about Livingstone here since I’m unfamiliar with that context but in general: such an “even shorter” wording could even be meant as a callout to the denotation/connotation issue you mentioned, as in “Hitler supported Zionism (and we know what his reasons turned out to be).”
Uh, there’s a very big connotation difference between those two that you seem to have noticed 😛 . And you could forgive the unenlightened for hearing (2) and not assuming (1).
Not really.
I have no clue what the fuck I’m supposed to be imagining other people reading into “Hitler supported Zionism” other than the historical facts, since I’M AWARE OF THE FACTS and so is Scott and so, I assume, are most people.
If you know the facts, why WOULDN’T you assume it’s a reference to the facts? What the hell else are you going to assume?
I’d better re-read your previous comment.
…yeah don’t assume people who don’t have any opinion on Zionism (let alone people who oppose it) give it a particularly positive connotation. For me it’s neutral since I have no opinion on it. So when someone says “Hitler supported Zionism” I hear “Hitler supported [Neutral Thing X]” and what this makes me think of is the historical facts. Apparently when someone says “Hitler supported Zionism” YOU hear “Hitler supported [Wonderful Thing X]” and what this makes you think of is “Hitler apologia.”
Why assume Zionism has such a distractingly positive connotation to everyone?
BTW: A willingness to provide extra explanations targeted to your personal idiosyncrasies as part of a good-faith effort at communication, is not a concession that your personal idiosyncrasies are shared by the majority. Acting as if it were is a good way to look like you’re not arguing in good faith. It’s also a good way to discourage people from ever doing that again.
Hitler supporters have a type of doublethink where they say that Hitler didn’t do the bad things he’s accused of, but these things are really great anyway. That’s why people who think the Holocaust was a good thing nevertheless engage in Holocaust denial.
This is just another case of that where the bad thing that Hitler is being accused of is opposing Zionism.
Also, consider the noncentral fallacy here. Hitler is a non-central example of support of Zionism and is being invoked specifically because of that.
…did you mean supporting Zionism?
And what is the “this” here? My expensive blue tribe private school’s attitude? My attitude? Livingstone’s attitude?
You appear to be accusing me and my school of being “Hitler supporters.” For using a phrase that to us connotes no such thing. Then since I guessed the phrase may sound neutral to us because we’re neutral about Zionism, you appear to have transmuted “neutral about Zionism” into “against Zionism.” Huh? When I said neutral, I meant it.
But maybe that’s not at all what you were trying to say. What were you trying to say?
By Livingstone? Sure, maybe. I already said I’m not familiar with him.
What I care about is that Scott, who I respect, and who has had his own trouble with superweapons, is here irresponsibly brandishing his.
His brandishing is structured as “Here is the obvious disclaimer that I have to say.” He may be thinking that he needn’t take my concern seriously because “obviously” what he wrote was “just boilerplate.” But that’s exactly the problem: He thoughtlessly throws around such inflammatory language, as just boilerplate.
No. “Hitler supported Zionism” is NOT “obviously” even weird, let alone offensive. It’s a completely normal summary of the historical facts. A casual aside that “Well obviously it was a really weird and offensive thing to say”…is irresponsibly brandishing your superweapon.
Please, Scott, please change it. Acknowledge that there are plenty of people out there who aren’t even anti-Zionist (they’re just not pro-Zionist) to whom the phrase actually does sound perfectly normal. All you’d have to do is add a note that, whoops, the idea that it WASN’T normal was actually current only inside your bubble. The bubble whose existence you’ve already vividly described.
It isn’t a completely normal summary of the historical facts and I don’t really believe the “expensive blue tribe private school” part. My guess is you misunderstood, misremember, or it wasn’t a blue tribe place to begin with.
Anonymous, it’s a blue tribe school in a very blue area, and if I misunderstood or misremember, the same is true of others who attended that school.
You seem very determined to believe that blue tribe couldn’t possibly speak that way. Why? Is your logic “that phrase is anti-Semitic, and blue tribe isn’t”? Because if so, you might consider believing me when I say that no, that phrase is perfectly normal.
Livingstone was not defending Hitler, he was using him to attack Zionism.
Ah. Well, I’m sure arguments of the form “Zionism is stupid because it’s what HITLER liked” only ever come from well-meaning, intellectually honest individuals.
Livingstone was mayor of a city, London, that is becoming increasingly Muslim due to Britain’s immigration policies. It’s only sensible for a 21st century London mayor to side with Muslim views than Jewish views on the current conflict in the Holy Land. We just saw this in the latest mayoral election in which Sadiq Khan defeated Zac Goldsmith.
If Jews don’t want this trend to continue, they should look toward making immigration policies more restrictive.
WHAT?!?
OK, I’m furious with you right now. Sir, my expensive, blue tribe, secular private elementary school attended mostly by Jews and WASPs, taught that “everyone knows” that “Hitler supported Zionism.” Calling this position “not totally out of left field” is the epitome of damning with faint praise.
Just because YOU PERSONALLY have never heard of this position DOES NOT give you the right to go around implicitly accusing holders of a perfectly ordinary position of anti-Semitism. Completely unintentionally in the process of attempting to say the opposite, I know, but sir, YOU HAVE A SUPERWEAPON. Kindly be careful where you point that thing.
WHAT THE FUCK !@#$%^& yeah I’m literally shaking with rage right now.
…the other person in the room with me right now just asked me if I was OK. Because I was shaking. Literally.
That is a COMPLETELY ORDINARY POSITION if you have a problem with it the least you could do is give an actual reason for your objection.
…little more on topic: so yeah we have a diverse society made up of many different groups with many different ideas of what is “an ordinary position” and what is “obviously offensive” and at this point yeah that is probably a more frequent cause of these incidents than actual hidden prejudice.
Really, in elementary school? And presented as “Everyone knows Hitler supported Zionism” rather than “Nazi Germany considered deporting the Jews to Mandate Palestine before settling on extermination as a Final Solution to the Jewish Question”?
I think maybe your parents should ask for a refund.
More like “Everyone knows Hitler supported Zionism before settling on extermination as a Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
Yes, really. See my last paragraph.
Your elementary school teacher was Lenni “Karl Marx was only being matter-of-fact when he remarked that ‘the Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races'” Brenner? (He was the guy Ken Livingstone got the idea from). I agree that the idea isn’t by itself anti-Semitic — a few months before Ken put his foot in it, it was mentioned by Benjamin Netanyahu. However, there are issues with bringing it up in the context of defending someone accused (accurately) of anti-Semitism for saying “the Jews are rallying”.
Whatever you were going for, I don’t think it worked…
>It’s stupid to care that Ken Livingstone describes 1930s Germany in a weird way qua describing 1930s Germany in a weird way; he’s a politician and not a history textbook writer.
Except that it was a pretty clear Gowin of Israel in general and his opponents in particular. And, I guess, one might consider a politician’s knowledge of political history important.
But my question is, is he anti-Semitic at all? Is there any sense in which his comments reveal that, in his heart of hearts, he really doesn’t like Jews?.
Those two questions are not the same. The reason people suspect Ken Livingstone of anti-semitism is that he has a history of speaking up for anti-Israel terrorists, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, likening Jewish reporters to concentration camp guards, arguing that it is not anti-Semitism if you only hate Jews in Israel and so on.
The thing that I find most frustrating about this is that there really are informative, worrying comments by politicians, and this endless, dishonest hype train conditions people to ignore them.
When Richard Nixon pushed “state’s rights” as part of the Southern Strategy, it genuinely was a (lightly) coded racial message – it was a promise to stay out of the south’s way on racial issues. Lee Atwater was explicit about this, to the point where it is one of the Wikipedia page quotes for ‘Dog Whistle Politics’.
When George Allen described a dark-skinned videographer at a campaign event with a racial slur (twice!) and “welcomed him to America”, it was not a subtle moment. Even this may not have been “open racism”, because that requires being openly racist, which he denied. But it was certainly an ugly moment which was genuinely grounds to reconsider how the candidate viewed minorities.
These things do happen, and they are typically not very subtle. But by preaching a story where they happen all the time, to every candidate, and are often incredibly subtle (and easy to mistake for awkward wording, or a bad knowledge of history), the media discredits its own narrative. This is a shame when it distracts from real issues and taints the reputation of well-meaning people, but it is a tragedy when it stops us from recognizing real horrors as they happen.
I think maybe there’s an important distinction between questioning a politician’s motives versus questioning their policies.
I think it’s much more likely that a racist politician says “We should pass law X because of states’ rights” whereas actually it is because racism, rather than a racist politician saying “We should oppose law X, and also states rights”, but the states rights quote means he supports racism and will actually pass law X.
The reason this is important is that it makes ferreting out politicians’ hidden motives irrelevant; if you like Law X for whatever reason, vote for him; if you don’t, don’t.
The thing is, politicians will face situations which they haven’t campaigned about, and that’s why voters are reasonable to care about what the politicians really want.
The Flint water crisis would be an example of what politicians care about mattering.
The point isn’t to “ferret out politicians’ hidden motives.” The dog-whistle claim is about strategy, not the inner psychology of politicians. And understanding politics has value other than merely deciding on who to vote for. For example, it’s important to know whether the popularity of a politician who says “We should pass law X because of states’ rights” is due to racism or genuine belief in states rights if you would like to convince the people who vote for that politician to adopt a different position.
Trump says that he’s in favour of women’s rights, but when asked about specific things people usually signal using “women’s rights”, like income equality, fighting rape culture, and abortion, he either deflects or flat-out states he opposes it. He also says boorish things which people allege are dogwhistles for the fact that his reason for this is sexism and/or fishing for the support of sexists.
Similarly, the people who are accusing British politicians of anti-semitism are arguing that it explains specific policies of theirs – their position on Israel.
I hadn’t heard about the Ted Cruz thing, and looking at your links, they all seem to be about a CNN reporter who thought Cruz saying “money and media” probably referred to Jews, and most of them aren’t sympathetic to his claim.
This seems to me like a plausible honest mistake, and concluding that his motives must surely be impure based on this one thing he said seems unfair.
>When Richard Nixon pushed “state’s rights” as part of the Southern Strategy, it genuinely was a (lightly) coded racial message – it was a promise to stay out of the south’s way on racial issues. Lee Atwater was explicit about this, to the point where it is one of the Wikipedia page quotes for ‘Dog Whistle Politics’.
No, they weren’t. You should read the whole interview, not just the bit that gets endlessly quoted, because Atwater doesn’t way what you think. It’s quite clear that what atwater is saying is that shouting n**ger used to work, then it stopped worked so you had to find issues BESIDES race to motivate them. He goes on, explicitly, that Reagan had never done racebaiting, that Reagan had been campaigning on the same issues for decades, and that it was southerners who came around to him, not him dog whistling southerners. When he talks about a “southern strategy” he’s talking about the racial strategy that democrats used to use to win elections, but which doesn’t work any more.
To quote him “But Reagan did not have to do a southern strategy for two reasons. Number one, race was was not a dominant issue. And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been, quote, southern issues since way back in the sixties. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the issues of economics and of national defense. The whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference. And I’ll tell you another thing you all need to think about, that even surprised me, is the lack of interest, really, the lack of knowledge right now in the South among white voters about the Voting Rights Act.”
That Nixon or Reagan had some sort of southern strategy is almost entirely a myth.
“More abstract” does not mean “something different and unrelated”.
Atwater may have thought that moving to the abstract would eventually move the positions, step by step, away from being racist. But even he didn’t think that forced busing was unrelated to racism.
And saying Nixon didn’t have a Southern strategy is just flat wrong. He had it. He executed it. He won the south.
Reagan knew where he started his campaign. It wasn’t an accident. And it wasn’t designed to troll liberals.
>Atwater may have thought that moving to the abstract would eventually move the positions, step by step, away from being racist. But even he didn’t think that forced busing was unrelated to racism.
He says, explicitly, that he does.
>And saying Nixon didn’t have a Southern strategy is just flat wrong. He had it. He executed it. He won the south.
No, he didn’t. He lost it badly in 68, to segregationists, precisely because he wouldn’t peddle their line. He did better in 72, but he won 49 states in 72, so unless you think the entire country liked his whistling, you need a better explanation.
>Reagan knew where he started his campaign. It wasn’t an accident. And it wasn’t designed to troll liberals.
I’m going to go ahead and say 99% of voters have no idea what town Reagan started his campaign.
“When Richard Nixon pushed “state’s rights” as part of the Southern Strategy, it genuinely was a (lightly) coded racial message – it was a promise to stay out of the south’s way on racial issues.”
Nixon immediately forced school integration on the South in 1969-1970 after a decade and a half of delay against Brown v. Board of Education.
In general, much of today’s conventional wisdom about recent history doesn’t align much with what I remember actually happening.
And yet, Nixon’s best state (even better than McGovern’s performance in DC) in 1972 was Mississippi. But, considering McGovern won only one state, that tells us a lot more about McGovern than Nixon.
1. Why can’t it be both? I don’t like Cruz but he is a canny politician and he knows how to speak to an audience. His main audience is very socially conservative evangelical Christians who are no longer the mainstream but still a decent sized minority in U.S. politics. Lots of Jews are suspicious of Evangelical support for Israel because it can often be combined with their own unique ideas on the Book of Revelations. With friends like that, the Jews/Israelis don’t need Hamas. Cruz’s father is rather anti-Semitic. Also most American Jews are not Orthodox but Reform and Conservative and still overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic.
2. I don’t agree with anti-Zionism but there is nothing inherently anti-Semitic about it. The problem with anti-Zionists is that they often fall so easily into old anti-Semitic stereotypes and accusations and it is hard to determine how much of this is unintentional or not. There was a demonstration at CUNY in the fall with accusations about how Zionist administrators were causing high tuition at CUNY. This is problematic because CUNY’s student body is largely poor and minority and I imagine many of the professors and admins are Jewish. But what does Zionism have to do with increases in tuition? They are basically using Zionist and Jewish interchangeably and going into old tropes about Jews controlling finances. This is not just a problem at CUNY. Stanford had some serious issues with anti-Semitism in the past few months and years.
3. Trump rallies aren’t even dog-whistles. They are pure expressions of rage and hatred and sexism, racism in rather vulgar and crude terms.
https://twitter.com/i/moments/742975954860052481
“Tailgating in parking lots. Vendors selling Hillary Sucks But Not Like Monica shirts. General awfulness.”
Speaking of dog-whistles and expressions of hatred…
It is not all evangelicals but there is a strong contingent and it should not be surprising that people don’t want to be pawns in someone else’s cosmic struggle.
I am not hear to be part of someone’s weird interpretation of the Book of Revelation and neither is Israel.
So, people who have weird beliefs about your role in the end of the world are just as bad as people who explicitly want to kill you. WTF?
Wow, those tweets. 75% of them were basically “oooh, look at members of the outgroup showing off their membership in the outgroup, isn’t that awful?”
I find it really hard to defend Trump per se, but I find it even harder to get upset that these (my) people finally have a candidate who doesn’t loathe them.
I don’t think this is really a valid shutdown though the ingroup outgroup thing seems big in many circles.
Sometimes out groups are out groups because they are horrible. There is a big difference between being in an outgroup because you a geeky kid who likes Dungeons and Dragons vs. being in an out group because you are willing to wear openly vulgar shirts in public that say purposefully offensive and horrible things.
I don’t think someone should be judged because they can only afford non-designer jeans and shirts but actions have consequences and if you are going to wear a sexist, racist, homophobic shirt, be prepared for people to judge you on it.
Also why shouldn’t I be shocked or angered by disproportionate responses. The dad did not have to get his kid an ice cream but using violence as a form of no when your kid asks for ice cream is completely unacceptable.
Dad from a tribe that views spanking as a valid form of discipline does so. Outgroup member paints it in worst possible light, knowing their tribe views the other tribe as barbaric.
I was spanked as a kid but it was never for asking for something like an ice cream.
I don’t want to get into the whole debate about spanking v. non-spanking debate but physical violence for asking for an ice cream strikes me more about psychological and anger management issues.
Also the author grew up in a dying working class industrial town.
“Jared Yates Sexton was born and raised in Southern Indiana and received his MFA from Southern Illinois in 2008. He’s the author of three collections, a crime-novel, and works as a political correspondent and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University.”
Blue Tribe.
You’re very certain what happened at the event. Those damn barbarian other-tribers have anger and psychological issues, don’t they? How else do we explain their stupid opinions?
Oy vay the antisemitism!
The idea that evangelicals secretly hate Jewish people is one of those things that make sense if you don’t know a single thing about evangelicals. No one loves Jewish people more than them. Is their unceasing support of Israel no matter what just a really elaborate ruse? Because if it is, they are incredibly convincing. The probability of your statement being true is about the same as progressives actually hating homosexuals. That’s how wrong it is.
This may just be my bubble speaking, but pretty much the only anti-Semitism I see is from the edgelord alt-right or the pro-Palestine left. I don’t think the enormous swathe of people in the middle give much thought to Jews in any capacity.
“60% of Evangelical respondents would want the United States to vote against a possible U.N. Resolution in favor a Palestinian state, while only 38% of non-Evangelical Republicans and 26% of all respondents would want the same.”
http://forward.com/news/327697/new-poll-reveals-evangelical-christians-fuel-republican-support-for-israel/
“Ladies and Gentleman, evangelical Christians support Israel because we believe that the words of Moses and the ancient prophets of Israel were inspired by God. We believe that the emergence of a Jewish state in the land promised by God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was ordained by God”
http://www.patrobertson.com/Speeches/IsraelLauder.asp
Evangelicals are why Republicans are as pro-Israel as they are.
What do they think about Jews living in the United States? Do they think we all need to move to Israel before Jesus can come back? What about Jews living in the United States that aren’t Likudniks?
They may not have any antisemitic bones in their body, but providing pro-Zionist quotes doesn’t prove that.
I fail to see how whether an American Jew follows an Israeli political party has any significance (unless you’re using “Likudnik” to mean “Jew I don’t like”).
Some Evangelicals explicitly support Israel because they believe that the state of Israel is essential for bringing about the Biblical apocalypse. Some of these people also believe that during this apocalypse, 2/3 of all Jews will be killed and the remaining 1/3 will convert to Christianity.
I don’t know if that fits the precise dictionary definition of antisemitism, but it certainly isn’t very nice.
Believing something has zero impact on “niceness” quotient.
What actions have these evangelical Christians taken that have harmed Jews?
To my knowledge, they aren’t currently dangerous.
I’m not sure whether I’m reaching for an argument, but I do wonder whether they’re so irrational that if someone came up with a different biblical interpretation, they could very easily turn against Jews.
Any chance we could tackle the cultural groups who are currently vocally and physically promoting the harming of Jews, instead of wondering if under the right circumstances some people who are currently vocally in favor of Jews might be convinced to change their mind?
I mean, just in order of priorities?
keranih, if it’s any consolation, I don’t put a lot of work into that one. And I have no idea what to do about the obviously dangerous anti-Semites.
“Any chance we could tackle the cultural groups who are currently vocally and physically promoting the harming of Jews, instead of wondering if under the right circumstances some people who are currently vocally in favor of Jews might be convinced to change their mind?”
LOL
They also believe that the people responsible for killing 2/3 of the Jews will go to Hell, so it’s not like they’re going to try and get it started themselves.
A meta-comment: have we considered the possibility that words like “racism” and “sexism,” like the word “poverty,” are continually redefined to allow their continued use?*
Like “poverty” used to mean “may starve this winter.” Now, because we don’t get a lot of that in the US, it means, “can’t make my credit card payments.”
Racism and sexism used to mean “believes people of other races/genders are inherently inferior”; now, because we don’t get a lot of that in the US, it means “says something gauche about women/black people.”
*I’m not even necessarily saying this is bad; one could make a case that words like “poor” are meant to be somewhat relative in practical use.
I would say it is bad in as much as “that society has a lot of poor” is a value judgement, as is “He is a x-ist”.
In other words, the words can be repurposed if we can drop the old connotations, but I don’t think that is possible on time-frames that avoid discord.
Or maybe it is? See euphemism treadmill.
A term that is sufficiently vague AND emotionally loaded has all sorts of practical implications. Poverty and sexism are both good examples. Both cause strong emotional reactions (these are bad things and we must eliminate them) and both are vague enough to be manipulated to include whatever particular thing it is you want to have done/not done.
Edit: “sexual assault” is another popular one these days, everyone hates it and wants to eliminate it, but there is a HUGE range of opinion as to what it actually is.
Sexual assault is a good example. I often see statistics like “90% of sexual assaults are unreported!” Which, if sexual assault means “forcibly raped in an alley” is horrifying. But if sexual assault means “got my ass pinched by a jackass in the bar”, well… Do you really want all of those to turn into court cases?
Deliberate conflation of a mildly not good thing with a horrible thing to elicit the emotional reaction to the horrible thing; that seems dishonest and definitely an issue with our current treatment of racism and sexism.
Agreed.
You can have “not good thing” being worthy of incandescent wrath that lays waste and ruins lives or you can have it be something broadly defined and as such somewhat innocuous.
You don’t get to have both unless the whole “laying waste and ruining lives” thing is your explicit goal.
Sometimes normal use of language covers a pretty wide range– both the holocaust and not letting Jews into a country club would be described as anti-Semitic, and this was true before Social Justice was in play.
1. I think for Trump to say what he said about his preference for women qualifies as sexist, because by saying it publicly and out loud, he is implying that his preferences matter. And since he has been in a position of power (which some may say is due to the patriarchy), some people will respond by conforming to his preferences as much as they can.
2. I’m sure more than a few people have dismissed Livingstone noting his Jewish ex-girlfriends as the “some of my best friends are….” defense, which is an item on the dog-whistle bingo card. I wonder how many could explain why and it what context this is offensive.
“Wow, all this time I was down on breasts, but if Trump likes them, I guess they’re okay” said no man ever.
That may be a strawman of your first point, but I think you point isn’t much more defensible.
Perhaps a more precise term for what Trump is doing with that statement is a kind of flaunting of privilege.
Trump saying that suggests that people should give a damn about his taste in women. And, because he is in a position of privilege, people do care about his taste in women. And a non-null number of women will measure themselves against Trump’s taste in women.
The context of many of these quotes was that they were on pop culture-style talk shows back in the 90s before he had obvious political ambitions. Many of them came from Howard Stern, a shock jock radio show notable for being vulgar, sexually charged and politically incorrect.
If you’re on Howard Stern and he’s asking you about women you know, then well, the direct implication is that people DO care about your taste in women. Most notably Stern himself, but indirectly his listeners as well.
I recall reading an article that had all the same quotes that you see in the commercials, but immediately including (in the same font/size/style) where and when the quote was from, and finding the whole thing FAR less offensive or outrageous. Non-political celebrity says crass things about women on Howard Stern: Film at 11.
“Gold diggers who hope to bump into Trump at some point” is a non-null set, sure. I remain unconvinced anyone else listening was affected, as men’s affinity towards noticeable breasts is news to no one.
Just so we’re clear, because I really do want to nail this down, are you saying that it is sexist to prefer larger breasts, or that it is sexist to say so out loud?
I realize this sounds like snark or a trap question, but I’m having a really hard time trying to phrase this in a non-absurd way. Looking for a steelman.
Saying so out loud is correlated with being sexist regardless of whether the action of saying so is itself sexist.
Why don’t we cut out the middleman? What we really want to say is that being a conservative is correlated with being sexist, regardless of whether the action of being conservative is itself sexist. Dat Bayesian evidence, dough.
The really weird thing to me is that this, like a lot of Trump quotes, seems incredibly weak material for attacking him compared to other things he’s said.
I tracked down the source for that quote, and it’s from a talk show in 2005 where the host asked him to rate the cast of Desperate Housewives. Now, you can argue that rating the cast of Desperate Housewives on air is objectification or contributing to women’s sense of only being judged on their looks or what have you, but it’s certainly not unusually bad – I’m sure you could find similar quotes from random male and female celebrities on talk shows.
But while rating them, he also said this:
“Would you go out with Marsha Cross, or would you turn gay, Howard? … four to five.”
Now isn’t that way worse then saying it’s “hard” and you have to be “absolutely stunning” to be a 10 with small breasts?
The whole conversation does seem to imply that Trump’s 10 is everyone’s 10, which isn’t something I’m a huge fan of – I think that’s the most common reason people are upset? – but why go with the weaker quote? And they don’t even include enough context for you to conclude that he’s implying it!
I would say that saying so out loud is a way of being openly sexist, by saying “I don’t mind being considered sexist.” What the person really believes deep down is unknowable.
This is an interesting point.
For a public figure to publicly say something widely considered to be sexist or racist (even if it in fact isn’t) is signaling that he doesn’t care about being called a racist or sexist. So, someone who, regularly went out of his way to throw the word “niggardly” around wouldn’t be guilty or racism, but is knowingly attracting charges of racism.
Which is likely to increase his appeal to actual racists and sexists.
Which, may not be racist and sexist itself, but is capitalizing on the racism and sexism of others.
Which was the heart of the post — the “dog whistle.” It’s kind of a circular reasoning. Once something is considered offensive, it can be come in fact offensive based only on that basis.
Which seems wrong, but I’m not certain it’s untrue.
I think it’s the saying it out loud. Or more precisely, saying it out loud and expecting anyone to listen. What I heart it saying is:
* Women should want to be “10s.”
* My opinion on what it means to be a “10” is definitive, or at least carries considerable weight.
Now, what if he had said, “What makes a woman a 10 is a tender heart and a sharp intellect,” the above would still be the same, and most (including) me wouldn’t have a problem with it. So, yes, I have to admit that the inclusion of physical features, and in particular something like large breasts, pushes it into offensive for me.
In the context of a radio shock jock asking him to rate the characters on a show that is highly sexually charged, that would be quite a bizarre thing to say (and a nice way to guarantee you’ll never be invited back to the show hosted by a very popular guy in your city)
Why is intellect an acceptable attraction, but large breasts not? Both have both heritable and environmental components.
Because the people who decide what’s acceptable have bigger brains than tits.
I’m having a hard time formulating a version of this that does not boil down to “It is unacceptable for men to be openly heterosexual.”
I really, really, really don’t want to see any Straight Pride parades….
Is it really so strange to have a norm against discussing publicly what types of woman you’d like to fuck?
That’s been a bread and butter middle class norm in the US since we’ve been founded. At least among the Puritans, Quakers, and Cavaliers. Not sure about the Border Reavers.
We has humans have a variety of urges. There are appropriate times and places to act on them or express them.
We might be tired, hungry, horny, etc. As children, we respond to these by crying so that our caregivers can help us.
As adults, we should learn that these our balanced with other needs.
The proper response to Trump saying his idea of a 10 should be, “Who gives a F?” That we don’t, and he knows we don’t is the fundamental problem, which he is flaunting.
Gentiles telling Jews what is and isn’t antisemitism. What else is new?
Ok, shouldn’t feed the troll, but…
How are we defining these terms? Can someone who is not an antisemite accurately identify the thought processes of a person who is bigoted against jews?
Is a woman who accuses another person of sexism actually understanding what that person meant to say, or is that woman only reporting how the words/action made her feel?
I think it’s a given that we don’t have accurate mindreaders, so we are not able to know what evil lurks in the hearts of men. But some judgement must be made.
What is our metric for determining what is harmful/oppressive/badthought, vs what is not?
(Please, let’s assume that It Is Known that for some people, it’s a version of “If a man/white/straight says it, and I object to it, then it’s wrong”, but we reject that reasoning, and go on from there, instead of wading through a bunch of tribal flag waving before we come to the heart of the issue.)
Men shouldn’t even be allowed to debate abortion!
Since when is Scott a gentile?
It cannot be the case that people are always making unwarranted inferences from dog whistles to openly professed beliefs. Such inferences are warranted by the fact that people are always making them. I may think that “a person who is flat-chested is very hard to be a 10”, but I would never say that unless I intended to convey open sexism.
“Jews stink” is not a statement of one’s olfactory experience with Jews but an expression of anti-Semitism. It is so just because everyone treats it as such. This is a really inefficient way to use language: there are so many redundant ways to express anti-Semitsm but zero ways to convey experience of bad-smelling Jews. That’s just the way it is.
So, does thinking that make you a sexist? Or is it OK to think at as long as you don’t say it? I don’t see how it’s sexist at all. Boorish, in most contexts. But merely having or expressing opinions on women’s beauty doesn’t make one a sexist.
I’ve read every single post by Scott Alexander, and this is the first one that I completely disagree with
The entire point on Ken Livingstone is absurd. It completely ignores the entire situation of what was happening in the Labour party at the time (http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/202104/anti-semitism-labour-party-corbyn). Additionally, it also ignores so much of what we know about anti-Semitism. People who question the Shoah aren’t just interested in history. People who call Israel Nazis aren’t just making a comparison. People’s delusional thoughts about Jews rarely ever are limited to one subject.
Secondly, the article displays a complete misunderstanding for the entire idea of things being objectionable and racist. People rarely want to (or are going to be open about it) go on a pogrom about the oppositional group, or refuse to hire any of them, or things like that – but that doesn’t mean a person’s thoughts, actions or statements aren’t offensive to the point of being racist, sexist, or anything else. Your standard for what meets someone being racist/sexist etc. is so obviously completely different from what the common definition in society is. If you want to raise the threshold for racism and claim that racism/sexism only exists when one actively discriminates against a group, then do that – but that is a completely different conversation.
If someone calls you a Kike, or says that Jews have no loyalty to the United States, are unclean etc; they might be still really nice to you, want to be your friend, hire you, maybe even date you, but they are still anti-Semitic.
Politicians are often called liars, and this is true, but there’s a ceiling for that. You can’t run on an open platform of ultratraditionalist ultracapitalism, and then in your inauguration speech come out with “Joke. I’m a communist!” and start imposing Marxist legislation, because all your supporters would leave you instantly, your own party would block you, and the communists aren’t going to suddenly join you. You can’t bait and switch like this.
Politicians can pretend to hold a more moderate version of their actual beliefs, with it going unsaid that this is the case, because it’s assumed that everyone who is on the moderate left/right is actually farther to the left/right than they’d admit from a position of vulnerability. You can run on a position of moderately socially conservative moderately unleashed capitalism, and then come out as being actually for ultratraditionalist ultracapitalism once in power, because the first allows you to get the moderates and the extremists as a base, and the second doesn’t alienate the extremists when you need them to be your shock troops and whips to keep the alienated moderates in line. You can soften your values, without any political spectrum bait and switch going on. This is a very risky strategy, but with a high reward for marginalized extremists, and accusing someone of using a “dog whistle” is a way of trying to scupper that.
In order to correctly use the dog whistle accusation, you need to make sure you don’t use it too lightly or too much, because otherwise you’ll end up readjusting people to be more tolerant towards the thing you are trying to get them to oppose as your smears just become background radiation. So pick something with a very strong history as a dog whistle tactic (“urban youths” as a race euphemism for example), and also make absolutely sure that you pick the strategy from the second paragraph of this post, and not the first. Accusing a right wing party candidate of being a secret ultracommunist is out of order.
The first two examples Scott gave fall into the category of bait and switch. Ted Cruz using “New York values” as a euphemism for Jewish is implausible because his party (this may change) is often enthusiastic about the shared values of Jews and Christians; you could call the Republican Party philosemitic even, and they would just block a secret nazi Ted Cruz in congress. Ken Livingstone over in the UK Labour Party is left wing, and while there’s a hatred for Zionism/pro-Israel positions, there’s nothing ethnonationalist about Labour or left wing parties in general, so the accusation is absurd for the same reasons.
The accusation that Donald Trump is a misogynist is also absurd taken absolutely literally, but since he is a right wing candidate in a right wing party, and has hordes of traditionalist and nationalist extremists backing him up no matter what, it’s a lot more plausible that he’s downplaying the kinds of policies he’d be interested in getting passed. If he suddenly once President acquiesced to the social conservatives in his actual party, then he’d have no more trouble getting that legislation passed than an open social conservative. Accusing him of engaging in dog whistle tactics can be effective because it signals to moderate Trump supporters that they won’t be getting what they’re expecting. This helps prevent him getting into power in the first place. The media just happens to be doing this in a really really really inept way.
Eventually people start disbelieving in the wolf.
Sometime later, they may start rooting for the wolf.
Beautiful. I tried to say something like this up-page, and took orders of magnitude more words with inferior effect.
>Politicians are often called liars, and this is true, but there’s a ceiling for that. You can’t run on an open platform of ultratraditionalist ultracapitalism, and then in your inauguration speech come out with “Joke. I’m a communist!” and start imposing Marxist legislation, because all your supporters would leave you instantly, your own party would block you, and the communists aren’t going to suddenly join you. You can’t bait and switch like this.
Trump appears to have developed a cunning solution to this problem, which to simply claim you were a communist all along and never said otherwise. It seems to work for him.
I don’t get it man. You understand perfectly well that when media elites and regular people are discussing person X (or statements made by person X), they use the terms “dog-whistle” in a way that essentially means “person X hasn’t actually made any explicit racistsexistantisemiticetcetera statements, but the logic/rhetoric X uses implies that they hold racistsexistantisemiticetcetera views.” Either that, or that they genuinely believe that the belief that “Hitler was supporting Zionism” is included in the category “antisemitic”.
Why is this? Obviously it’s because these words are mapped to so many meanings that they’ve become useless. Perhaps members of the same in-group have a mutual understanding of the denotations and connotations of a particular -ism word (though based on personal observation, I haven’t found this to be true), but it doesn’t matter since members of different groups come together on the interwebs to argue about whether or not X is [something]-ist every day.
I’m sure you know this to be obvious, that the word and the thing are not the same. And yet, this thread is full of very smart people asking very useless questions like “so is ABC antisemitic or not?”, and very smart people answering those questions with “well, maybe ABC is antisemitic if DEF, but not if FGH”. It’s an utter waste of time, and helps nobody.
The only way to resolve this is to ensure that parties to a debate have an exact mutual understanding of the terms that they are using. Force people to unpack their words, or to just taboo them outright. If someone asks “is X antisemitic?”, say “define antisemitic”. Otherwise, progress on this very important topic will not be made.
Yeah, it seems like everybody needs a refresher on 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong. I really thought we were well past these ungrounded arguments over definitions.
This doesn’t work for politicians. X can say “Y is sexist, as I define it thusly–thinking unequal treatment is ever justified.”
Y replies, “Well then by that definition I am sexist, because I don’t want to draft women or give maternity leave to men. ”
Headline or ad the next day: “Y is a self-described sexist! Hates women!”
>This doesn’t work for politicians.
I was talking about charitable debates between smart people. Trying to get polarized journalists to interpret their outgroup’s statements charitably is an exercise in futility.
this is the “rectification of names”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names
not going to happen
I also want to suggest, again, that maybe some of this has to do with a simple paucity of descriptive vocabulary, though I’m sure much of it is designed to take advantage of the sensational nature of words like “racist” and “sexist.”
For example, we had a debate not too long ago about whether the birther thing was “racist” or merely “xenophobic.” Part of my point was that the average person doesn’t know the word “xenophobic.” For them, what we call “racism” encompasses xenophobia.
Similarly, we who are careful about terms may describe “sexism” as “the belief that women are inherently inferior to men.” But I think the general population defines sexism as “women+[is there an LW terms for the opposite of “applause lights”?]”
Boo light.
It’s funny that by technically correct definitions, one can be a “misogynist” without being a sexist, provided you also are miso to men as well.
(I use the prefix because I’m not sure if misogynist is means behavior, feelings, or both. Another point towards the paucity of language, perhaps)
1) One tenet of Social Justice is that how people feel matters. Trump clearly doesn’t care how his comments make women feel. Similar goes for Livingstone, but if his gaffe was in the heat of the moment it’s less bad. I wouldn’t call it “open sexism” but it’s not great.
2) You can use *ism as a weapon against your enemies without believing it yourself, and the effect is still rather unjust. Using period innuendo against a critic falls under this.
“politicians’ beliefs and plans are best predicted by what they say their beliefs and plans are, or possibly what beliefs and plans they’ve supported in the past”
I agree, and just want to point out, if it hasn’t already been said or isn’t already obvious, that it cuts both ways: due to tribal priors, people are strongly primed to believe bad things about politicians representing the other side, and so will latch onto any excuse to confirm that.
But the opposite is also true: if tribal affiliations and/or personal charisma predispose you to liking a politicians, you will tend to read into his/her statements whatever you want to hear. Which is why vagueness+charisma is such a good strategy. Worked for Obama and is now working pretty well for Trump.
Heck, I even kind of hope Trump may be in favor of smaller government.
I think it’s odd to insist that one needs to be on the Eliot Rogers spectrum to qualify as “sexist.” In the common vernacular, most men who are referred to as sexist aren’t irrational woman-haters. Typically, they are boorish men who are viewed as not respecting women.
You correctly point out the flaws of the dog whistle discourse as applied to sexism and antisemitism, but the problem there isn’t the discourse of dog whistles, but its application to those issues. Dogwhistles are a symptom of a prematurely ended fight, an underground revanchism that results when the public discourse excludes a viewpoint that a lot of people actually still hold. It applies to race, because we went from a society with de jure Jim Crow to one where racism was publicly taboo within the space of a generation. Racists need dogwhistles to communicate with one another, and they do so because there’s still plenty of them out there–there’s a genuine and substantial community, a constituency, with a need for communication and an inability to do so openly. But there’s not plenty of antisemites, and there’s not that many Eliot Rogers. Everyone has women in their lives, so outright woman-hatred just isn’t that common, and antisemitism never had enough of an imprint in America (and really, the West in general) to have survived the backlash of the Holocaust.
Which is part of the problem he’s highlighting.
Not respecting women is bad, being boorish is bad. But conflating those things with rape, murder and oppression weakens your ability to condemn the latter in the process.
We’ve seen how this can actually make women less safe: such as when feminists marched in Cologne in support of gang rapists, because the people opposing the attacks made the faux pas of talking about “our women” in the process. Or how any number of practical self-defense measures have been forbidden to be taught out of a misguided belief that they constitute victim blaming.
If our priority is helping women, then using the terms developed to talk about systematic abuse and violation to scold people for impoliteness is a huge misstep.
My point is that irrational woman-hating is exceedingly rare and not a significant contributor to harm-to-women when compared with the more mundane but infinitely more common forms of disrespect, which can easily morph into actual violence under particular circumstances (for example, a man like Donald Trump who is in the habit of disrespecting women, might, in the context of a deteriorating relationship and a botched medical procedure and the associated stress and chaos, violently force himself on his wife). Go browse a askreddit thread on “when did you finally decide to leave your SO” some time; you’ll read story after story of men who would never gang-rape a stranger, would never go postal on a sorority house, but who were nonetheless hell on the women in their lives through a fairly straightforward and “rational” (from an amoral perspective) egotistical lack of respect.
And while it’s certainly tenable to deny the link between that, to say “disrespect is disrespect, and whatever association with rapeyiness is may have doesn’t change the fact that those are distinct and different actions”–but then you’re going to need to stop saying things like that a random march in Cologne that I’ve never heard of and probably can’t be fairly steelmanned as supporting gang rapists “actually makes women less safe,” because that shit is pretty tenuous.
The problem is, the numbers paint the opposite story.
Most attacks on women, outside of wartime or ethnic struggle anyway, are purported by a small percentage of hardcore serial rapists and abusers. Opportunistic attacks by first-offenders are extremely rare.
If we are willing to believe that casual sexism is the driver, then we would see the exact opposite pattern.
Well then what about the self defense bit I mentioned?
There’s a pretty good literature that most would-be rapists deliberately go after ‘soft targets,’ like most other criminals. Women who fight back and yell when attacked, and especially those who carry firearms, can protect themselves effectively. For that matter, simply not drinking to excess or going somewhere alone with a newly acquainted man sharply cuts down on the opportunities for sexual violence against them.
Of course, mentioning this is victim blaming and propagating rape culture.
I don’t agree with your take on the numbers. Most attacks on women come from intimate partners. Thank god, those are still coming from what is a relatively small minority of men, but we’re still talking about a large number of men who are acting on something less than an explicit ideology of woman-hatred or anything akin to it.
I also disagree with your take on the self-defense aspect, although I don’t blame you for that one. Feminism has a point when it makes those arguments, and I by and large agree with it, but it’s a subtle and nuanced point to make and we’ve done a piss-poor job articulating it. Suffice it to say that I don’t think any feminists actually object to risk-mitigation/self-defense strategies, and where the rubber meets the road are often quite willing to teach them, but object to it having a large piece of the discussion or of being a broad solution.
Intimate partners is kind of a slippery term though.
In general, crime statistics show that most crimes are committed by “acquaintances” which includes date rape. But the issue is that these aren’t by and large people you’re well acquainted with or close friends, so much as they aren’t perfect strangers. Obviously this pattern breaks for domestic abuse.
As for men who commit these attacks not actually being motivated by hatred for women as such, that’s true but I’m not sure what to do with it. The dominant framing at least since the victory of second wave feminism has been that attacks on women by men are inherently misogynistic. Rejecting that framing takes a lot of our current opposition to sex crimes and abuse with it, which might be unwise.
Mostly true, and I am very strongly in favor of not deciphering politicians like a secret code. But!
1) Anti-semitic or not, insulting broad groups is not and should not be okay. There are only 4 million Jewish people in America (including myself), but there are 8.4 million people in NYC (also including myself.) Dismissing the latter group as entirely having a corrupt value system is not ethically defensible.
2) I find Trump’s repeated eagerness to define women’s attractiveness bad. It’s not merely boorish as in rude to everyone, it specifically treats women differently. “Openly sexist” might be too far to call it, but there should be a better term than boorish.
3) I understand you’re taking aim at media that hyper-focus on claims of sexism and racism, but honestly, obsession with finding the “secret beliefs” of public figures goes well beyond those categories.
Also, anti-semitism is a complex term. In some sense it’s specific to Judaism… but it can refer to other cultural things. Nations, especially the rural parts, often develop a paranoia about city dwellers – that they are over-educated, nebbish, creepy, disease-ridden, corrupt, manipulating money, and want to have their way with your pure women. This is a primal myth you see repeated in many places, that only sometimes targets jews specifically (I think Scott had a post about how mockery of neckbeards looks an awful lot like anti-semitism). It definitely reads as if Cruz was playing into that myth, one which is very often intertangled with anti-semitism so much as to be indistinguishable, even if he otherwise a friend of some Mideast state that wants to blow up other Mideast states.
No, it’s not specific to Judaism at all, where are you getting this from?
> It definitely reads as if Cruz was playing into that myth
That “definitely” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, you realize.
Also, it’s a bit rich to complain about anti-Semitism in one breath, and then breezily throw out “some Mideast state that wants to blow up other Mideast states” (wink wink!) in the next.
Agreed, I’m pretty sure at this point that the New York = Jew York thing is a distinctly blue tribe dog whistle.
Media Talking Head: Obviously disliking New York City is the same as hating Jews because everyone knows that NYC is run by Jews!
Random Mid-Westerner: Err whut?
“Nations, especially the rural parts, often develop a paranoia about city dwellers – that they are over-educated, nebbish, creepy, disease-ridden, corrupt, manipulating money, and want to have their way with your pure women.”
As Ben Stein pointed out decades ago in “The View from Sunset Boulevard” about the prejudices of screenwriter, a common theme of episodes of 1960s and 1970s detective TV shows was the hero leaves Los Angeles for a case in a small town that turns out to be a nightmare of smalltown crime and conspiracy against the innocent city-slicker.
Regarding 2, the guy judged beauty contests. Now, maybe you think those are bad, but let’s be up-front about the context and implications.
He has through the primaries continued to describe women who support him as beautiful (somewhat normal behavior) and women who oppose him as ugly (pretty terrible).
So he is nice to his supporters and mean to his opponents, regardless of their gender.
That may be mean, but it’s not sexist.
Does he talk about how beautiful the men who support him are?
Is using different terms to praise and criticize men and women inherently sexist?
(I’m pretty sure some think it is, but if you call a woman a “bitch” for behavior which, if a man did it, you’d call him an “asshole,” then that doesn’t seem sexist to me simply by virtue of the terms being gendered. Calling a woman a “bitch” and a man “assertive” for the same behavior, however, would be sexist.
I do understand that the difference between “asshole” and “bitch” is arguably smaller than that between praising someone for their intelligence vs looks, but culturally, it’s conventional for men to compliment women on their looks more than other men; if you want to just generally express a positive feeling about a man, you might say he’s “terrific,” when you might call a woman “lovely,” for doing the same thing; this doesn’t strike me as inherently sexist).
“I find Trump’s repeated eagerness to define women’s attractiveness bad. It’s not merely boorish as in rude to everyone, it specifically treats women differently. ”
For this to be true, you would have to compare it to how eagerly Trump defines men’s attractiveness. We certainly have plenty of evidence that he has done that entirely eagerly and willingly on the campaign trail (in that he mocked the appearance of his male GOP rivals constantly)
You can say “it’s bad to judge people based on their appearance” if you want, but if he does it to women AND men approximately the same amount, it’s not sexism and it’s not “treating women differently” but rather, treating them the same.
This is naive and/or ignores how tied up judgments of physical attractiveness are in gender relations. Women have, for a very long time, found their fortunes particularly and uniquely tied to their physical attractiveness in a way that men have not.
“Trump, in his majestic equality, insults men as well as women as fat disgusting pigs.”
But this gets back to the original point of this post:
It is not Trump’s responsibility to ensure that society puts the exact same level of weight of importance on the physical appearance of men and women.
The question is – is he being sexist or not. If he treats men and women equally, then he is not. The fact that some other people might think that remarks on appearance towards women are more meaningful than remarks on appearance towards men is completely independent of Trump and not at all his problem.
I think you, and to the extent that Scott agrees with what you’re saying here, he, are using overly formal and abstract definitions of “sexism” that are out of touch with the common vernacular understanding, which includes a failure to take into account of the historical and social context which makes it very different to call a woman vs. a man a fat pig.
That may very well be the case.
My point would be that if the term “sexism” is not specific enough as to distinguish between so many various different definitions, it’s not a very good term and we should pick a different one.
But perhaps the vagueness is a feature, not a bug, among those who choose to use it. Perhaps it’s considered a very large benefit to SJW types who can call Trump a sexist, knowing that many people will see that to mean “he hates women and treats them worse than he treats men” when all they can sufficiently prove is “he doesn’t go out of his way to work around societal constructs which exist independently of him for the sake of making women feel good about themselves”
If a term cannot distinguish between behavior that virtually everyone finds incredibly repulsive, and behavior that is highly politicized such that half the country thinks it’s reasonably acceptable, then that term is a very poor descriptor and we should all work to avoid using it.
It’s not a nefarious SJW motte and bailey, it’s a genuinely complex issue that is properly resisting your attempt to define it down into something that barely exists.
@herbert herberson
I think it’s very easy to be led astray trying to make sense of sexism as a single coherent concept, as doing so seems to lead to one of two absurd extremes.
If you take seriously the idea that there shouldn’t be any average differences between the experiences of men and the experiences of women, you need to take a sledgehammer to the preferences of almost every man and woman alive.
On the other hand, there really are problems that people face that they perhaps ought not to face, that sometimes have something to do with gender. Upon realising that ‘remove gender differences’ taken as a universal axiom would entail transforming humans into an asexual species against everyone’s will, and that this is maybe a bad idea, it’s easy to come to the opposite conclusion, equally silly: that everyone should act entirely according to what would make them most attractive to the opposite sex, that there are no gender-related problems in the world at all.
@hh
No, I think it’s closer to being used as a “nefarious” motte and bailey.
If you look at the “openly sexist” articles linked in the main post, you don’t see them delving into the nitty-gritty of varying definitions of sexism and how we ought to be careful to elaborate that Trump isn’t the “hates women in general” type but rather the “doesn’t go far enough in ensuring the negates structural disadvantages toward women” type. Instead, they freely equivocate between the two, if indeed they even hold the distinction, and delight in asserting how *hateful* toward women Trump *definitely* is.
So if the complaint is that “sexism” is being misused, either by being applied at all or by being applied as a “concept that barely exists” while excused with the “genuinely complex” interpretation… it seems pretty reasonable to me.
Okay, but if there is a difference in how he describes men and women, will you concede his behavior is sexist then?
I honestly don’t recall him mocking the appearance of men, though because it’s Trump I’m going to assume you’re right and he’s said stupid things about that too. It’s probably more about specific traits, than ever fully summing up someone’s value and ranking it.
For the record, I do not think Trump is, in his innermost soul, sexist or hates any particular group more than others. I think he is a cruel bully who attacks people’s weaknesses. Many women feel insecure about their appearance, and so that is how he attacks them (or praises them). In doing so he is part of a sexist structural system, and shows how women have it different than men in our society.
This is negative behavior and should be harshly discouraged.
And I think Scott’s point here is that we can continue to harshly discourage negative behavior AND be accurate in describing it.
The point is not “Trump is a nice and virtuous man” but rather “what Trump is doing does not meet the criteria of sexism, so let’s stop calling it that okay?”
No, but it is sexism. It’s not the sexism of Trump’s soul showing itself for real – it’s the structural sexism of Trump’s defector-style behavior targeting women differently and worse than men. We should care about that, and we should want it to stop.
Obviously there are some articles that insult Trump stupidly and bring bad analysis. But that does not free us from the responsibility to read Trump’s statements for the structural oppression they are.
And all of this can be done without decoding secret messages or pondering what Trump truly feels deep inside.
About 1)…
Ethically defensible or not, America’s coastal cities (like coastal cities throughout the world) are the centers of most of our national and international media, and thus have a very disproportionate influence on national conversations, especially when it comes to questions of values.
When I was growing up as Mormon in a suburb in the heavily Baptist South in the mid-90’s, we as teens were all still watching and mimicking Saturday Night Live, random Hollywood movies, and a bunch of heroin addicts out of Seattle singing odes to their addictions. That culture / value flow was expressly one way; no one in those markets was on the receiving end of any culture from my local Southern Baptist mega-church (except, potentially, from their own childhoods before they fled to the coastal cities).
I’m not saying that to suggest that insulting New York values is okay, but there is absolutely a kind of massive power imbalance there that reasonable people outside of coastal cities have deep problems with, a kind of colonization / coastal-man’s-burden that is pretty obvious to people on the other end of it.
I agree that is a power imbalance, and that sort of red-state-resentment fuels a lot of political anger in this country. The ethical choice is to address the power imbalance. The short-sighted choice is to demonize the city-dwellers and try to unite your tribe around expunging them from the party.
I am not someone who thinks an accusation of antisemitism should destroy your career (and in Ted Cruz’s case, it definitely did not.) But if we are not looking for secret messages, we should read the statement for what it plainly is: a view that big cities and their values are evil.
The ethical choice is to address the power imbalance. The short-sighted choice is to demonize the city-dwellers and try to unite your tribe around expunging them from the party.
It is a pity, then, that the way to address a power imbalance is for the despised to ally with each other against the powerful. Which in this case would mean uniting your tribe against the city-dwellers.
Nobody is dismissing every single New Yorker as having a corrupt value system. But I think it is perfectly alright to say that something is wrong with values that are prevalent in a certain region or among certain people. In fact, to call this “not ethically defensible” strikes me as bizarre. I mean, what else are you going to do? Agree that everything everybody does is fine? Say that only isolated individuals in the whole world do things that are not fine?
They sure are happy to spend our tax dollars tho.
Okay, but then this is just isomorphic to anti-semitism. You went from “most Jews are bad or have bad values” to “most New Yorkers are bad or have bad values”. Why would this be a good thing?
“What else are you going to do?” Well, condemn specific actions, condemn systems of oppression, critique various statements of values, but resist from imagining that those evils come from “bad people” or vaguely defined groups of bad people.
But there was not talk about “bad people”. Someone said they don’t “agree with New york values”. That was a convenient shorthand for a vague set of values prevalent among powerful people in New York. (Values generally come in vague sets, so it’s really difficult to disagree with concrete statements of them.) I just don’t think it’s reasonable to parse this as “New Yorkers are bad people” (let alone the really offensive “New Yorkers are bad people qua New Yorkers”). They were also not saying that New Yorkers should be disenfranchised and have no say in anything. In the context of a presidential campaign, saying that you don’t agree with New York values just means that you think the country, as a whole, shouldn’t be run on those values.
Maybe I’m wrong about the particular case of Cruz. Maybe he wants all New Yorkers to be sent to ghettos or whatever. I’m just arguing that “I don’t agree with New York values” is not, per se and automatically, an offensive statement.
I don’t buy the isomorphism to common instantiations of anti-semitism, although I must admit that anti-semitism, to me, is a very strange and incomprehensible thing that I don’t understand very well. I doesn’t seem to be well-summarised by “I don’t agree with Jewish values”, though. For one think, I have something of an intuitive grasp of New York values while I have no clue what Jewish values are supposed to be, except perhaps, stereotypically, literacy and its extensions, and why on earth would anyone object to that?
Let’s also keep in mind that at the time, Cruz wasn’t running a presidential race, he was running a race for the GOP nomination.
Early on, Trump was mostly winning blue states (that he can’t be expected to win in the general) and Cruz was mostly winning red states. I think there’s a somewhat relevant argument to be made that the decision of who gets the GOP nomination should largely be made by people who are actually going to vote for the GOP come November.
I think most of what Cruz was trying to say with “New York values” was “Trump is winning the blue states, who you’re supposed to hate, remember? I’m winning the good ol heartland where true patriotic Americans live!”
My general policy is to assume that politicians are lying when they say things I like, and telling the truth when they say things I don’t. It seems to have pretty good predictive power so far.
Scott, the way you point out how his opponents insist on painting him as sexist and racist instead of just as a boorish, childish simpleton reminds me of something that I’ve observed recently: There is a fundamental irrationality to our society’s attitudes of the kind of people we find acceptable. We live in a time where you can be the most genuinely offensive, rude and disgusting person in the world, and people will still tolerate you, but if you cross certain taboo lines then you instantly become socially toxic. For example, if I angrily started yelling at the black clerk at the customer service desk and calling her an idiotic, incompetent asshole who has the brain of a turtle, questionable parentage, and a masterful ineptitude of her worthless job, and I started threatening to get her fired, then people will just look at me like a jerk and I will suffer no serious consequences. But if instead of doing all that, I simply roll my eyes in frustration at her and quietly mutter, “Every time I deal with you people, something like this happens,” then I will be labeled a racist and be faced with much more serious repercussions. In other words, being a total and unmitigated jackass who treats people like shit is more more acceptable to our society than is being someone who is generally decent, yet politically incorrect.
It’s the same thing with how they view Trump. He can be a jerk, a buffoon, and incontrovertibly intellectually lacking for the job of president. But all that doesn’t make him as unacceptable as being (perceived as) a racist or sexist.
I think you need to justify the claim this is fundamentally irrational. Off the top of my head, it’s much easier/cleaner to have a code of conduct which bars things than one which is based on complex and subjective assessments of just how unreasonable/offensive someone is being. Some level of calling someone incompetent can be the right thing to do, so we can’t just rule it out of order.
In your situation, you’d definitely face more repercussions if you hit them, even if it was just say a slap to the face. Plenty of people will be a lot more upset/hurt by being shouted out and insulted in public than a slap, but again, the line’s easier to draw.
Similarly with Trump, the question of having skills for President is complex whereas plenty of people would look at a single comment and say ‘OK, someone who says things like that is not someone I want to vote for’.
On a factual point, I’m not convinced that you’d face serious repercussions if you said something racist like that. People might challenge you on it, but I think it would be very unlikely to go further (and I think both being challenged and a chance of going further would go with the generally being abusive alternative you mention).
>But if instead of doing all that, I simply roll my eyes in frustration at her and quietly mutter, “Every time I deal with you people, something like this happens,” then I will be labeled a racist and be faced with much more serious repercussions.
Unless you’re saying this in front of someone who uploads it to Youtube and goes viral, almost certainly not.
>his opponents insist on painting him as sexist and racist
Except Trump is sexist and racist; people have posted unequivocally sexist and racist quotes from Trump here. That the media insists on instead paying attention to relatively innocuous statements and insisting they betray Secret Racism(tm) is annoying, but doesn’t actually betray a failure for liberals to correctly model Trump.
“That the media insists on instead paying attention to relatively innocuous statements and insisting they betray Secret Racism(tm) is annoying, but doesn’t actually betray a failure for liberals to correctly model Trump.”
I’m genuinely curious as to why you think this happens.
Most of the media that are driving attention to the innocuous statements are clearly anti-Trump, so why are they doing that? Are they all just that incompetent, or what?
And as a a follow-up, for people who are neutral (or Trump supporters), is it reasonable for them to think something like “I can tell this media outlet is out to get Trump, yet it leads with fairly innocuous material, which leads me to believe this must be the WORST they have on Trump, so he must not be that bad.”?
Depends what you mean by “reasonable”. I certainly thought that, then I researched it, and having updated I now must conclude that my reasoning was flawed and untrustworthy.
Scott has written about this phenomenon before in his “The Toxoplasma of Rage” post, but I never really bought it until Trump.
Even now, I find it hard to believe media people would do it deliberately, yet also hard to believe they’re so incompetent as to do it accidentally. Perhaps it’s an evolved property of the liberal memeplex, to give people habits of thought that lead to them picking terrible examples all the time?
They’ve bought into a narrative that murky controversy drives clicks, and clicks mean money. So they’ve adapted to only display the most toxoplasmic of stories, to create the narratives of most controversy, to generate the easiest clicks in the world.
At least one small press journalist wrote an op ed a little while ago about how his boss would tell him “Write an article on something, and post it in the next 30 minutes.” That was never enough time to do any research that mattered, so he’d just pick something to be pissed about and go on a tear.
It’s just habit. The media constantly interpret everything somebody of the outgroup says in a negative light, combined with their echo chamber they might even think that it works. In addition to his innocous statements, they also led with his actually racist statements, so it’s obvious they cannot get out of the habit (“People, this time the guy is REALLY racist”). This kind of reminds of a phenomenon in behaviourism. If you reward chickens on a particular behaviour for some time and then stop rewarding it, they actually intensify the behaviour in question. This is similar to what is happening now: They try smearing him, and rather than realizing that it’s not working and questioning their strategy, they smear him some more.
I feel like I’ve seen something similar, where the kind of things people say about other races/genders in private don’t pan out in how they treat people of that race/gender when those people are in front of them.
I have a friend who’s basically a stereotypical SJW. Big into feminism, decoding racist things, etc, etc. And I used to really respect him for it. I disagreed, but I appreciated that he stood for something and had the courage to advance it. Then one day we went out to Starbucks, and the lady behind the counter messed his order up, and he just went ballistic. Lots of anger and demands that it be fixed at once; the poor lady was practically in tears by the time he was done.
On the other hand, I have family members who are racist. For instance, my mom often makes comments about how all black people/Hispanics/etc are all dirty, criminal types. But when I brought a black roommate home from college for a weekend, she was perfectly nice and polite to him- I didn’t detect anything that could be construed as racist, and that friend has visited several times and told me how much he likes my family (we are sufficiently close that I believe he would tell me if he felt we were being racist against me- I’m going to be in his wedding in a few months).
And it occurs to me that both my mother and my friend have the same problem, but I hazard that my friend’s problem is more serious. All of my friend’s good will is directed towards people far away from him, towards people he will never meet. All of my mother’s racism is directed at generic black people, not the ones she actually knows. My mother’s beliefs would be labeled “racism”, but from a consequentialist perspective, I find it difficult to maintain that mother’s fear of the outgroup is worse than my friend’s being a jerk to people he meets without regard to race.
Anyone have the quote from the Screwtape Letters handy? I’m thinking of the one about a devil recommending that people should be encouraged to push their benevolant impulses further and further from the people they actually deal with.
“Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.”
“I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand!”
The concept of somebody being fervent about social issues regarding arbitrary distant others while being mean to those close to them is the subject of the song “Easy to be Hard” from the musical Hair:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz-ofKAC31s
t. For instance, my mom often makes comments about how all black people/Hispanics/etc are all dirty, criminal types. But when I brought a black roommate home from college for a weekend, she was perfectly nice and polite to him-
This sort of thing possibly has the consequence that people who belong to an obvious minority model the world as being less prejudiced than it is, than people who belong to a non-obvious one, because they never get to hear the between-ourselves *ism, whereas the person how is jewish or gay, for instance, gets to hear the material intended for consumption by presumptive straight white gentiles.
This comment reminded me of Dan Piraro on obscenity:
I tend to agree; I think there is a tendency in American culture to have taboos on symptoms rather than the disease: on specific symbols rather than the things they represent, and similarly on specific acts or attacking specific groups of people rather than disrespect or violence in general. (I mean, violence is even sometimes seen as virtuous; ever heard of a superhero comic franchise that didn’t originate in the United States?) I think many people realise this on some level; what follows from this — and from the equally American tendency to not understand what the word “subtlety” means — is that in order to discredit someone, people tend to reach for the strongest taboos — which are about symbols/groups of people — never mind whether it makes sense in the context. The result is something similar to this:
This is a caricature, of course, and few people are going to directly admit to thinking like this, but this is how it effectively works.
I grew up in an area that had only one Jewish family in the area, so I effectively have zero opinion whatsoever about Jewish people. It is about the same as my opinion of Mongolians. I’ve read about Genghis Kahn, but I have no useful concept of what a modern Mongolian is like as a human being. There’s just an empty space in that slot.
As an outsider who wants to avoid accusations of racism on things he has zero opinion about, where would I go to learn how to avoid anti-Semitism dog whistles?
Many of the things mentioned here might be considered slipups but aren’t really dog whistles.
But that aside, I don’t think you’ll have a problem. Dog whistles about Jews are inherently going to be about subjects related to Jews. If you have no reason to talk about Jews, you probably won’t be talking about those subjects very much, so you are unlikely to say anything that can be accidentally mistaken for a dog whistle.
And if you do want to talk about subjects related to Jews, your lack of knowledge about Jews will probably make you incompetent to talk about those subjects anyway.
So, therefore, TheAltar, never ever speak about New York. Also don’t mention Hollywood movies, don’t have an opinion on the Federal Reserve, and don’t talk about “Seinfeld.” But also, don’t know why you aren’t talking about New York, Hollywood, etc.
Jiro advises:
“Dog whistles about Jews are inherently going to be about subjects related to Jews. If you have no reason to talk about Jews, you probably won’t be talking about those subjects very much, so you are unlikely to say anything that can be accidentally mistaken for a dog whistle.”
So, TheAltar, you should simply avoid talking about subjects that Jews are talking about. To be safe, don’t talk about anything that the media are discussing.
That’s the route to relevance!
Beekeeping is probably a safe subject to discuss. Golf course architecture would seem like a safe subject, too (although, now that I think about it, the one Jewish golf course critic got really angry at me for an apparently politically incorrect remark I made about how golf appeals more to straight men and lesbians than to gay men and straight women).
On the other hand, if you *do* want to dog whistle antisemitism just mention Steve Sailer. As a failed journalist very few people in your audience will have ever heard of him, but those that have will know that you mean the guy utterly obsessed with da joos (and also transwomen).
I mostly think of Sailer as “that other HBD guy” (as opposed to “that HBD guy”, JayMan), but I guess I didn’t learn about him through the usual means.
I would advise against gravatar, for starters.
well, *I* thought it was funny.
Seriously, can’t gravatar at least detect clockwise designs and flip them?
Stay off of Tumblr. I’ve browsed some that attributed an incredible wide variety of seemingly innocuous descriptions of people to anti-Semitic roots, and obviously therefore maintain their anti-Semitic connotations in all applications today. Just like the term Gypsy and its derivatives!
For example, using wordplays on the word rat to insult someone with a last name of Rothenberg.
Or having a black woman deliver a pro-eugenics speech in a TV show.
I think antisemitism just isn’t a thing in the U.S. to the same extent that it is in other countries. I remember when I was a kid learning that there were still people who hated Jewish people. It was such a shock. To this day, I still don’t understand it. Did a Jewish kid take your lunch money? Did you read Mein Keimpf and feel it was captivating? Do you just really hate Adam Sandler? Where does the hatred come from?
I would amend your statement with anymore. I’ve heard some pretty bad stories from my parents and grandparents.
Out of curiosity, do you find islamophobia or racism less shocking than antisemitism? Because obviously I agree antisemitism is ridiculous, but your post made it sound as if it was especially suprising compared to other forms of prejudice, which I don’t believe it is.
It might be that for most of us the Jewish people we know are almost indistinguishable from the normal American ethnic mutt. If the only visible differences are a Menorah instead of a Christmas tree in the window in December and a Bar Mitzvah instead of a Confirmation, then it’s easy to forget the history of ethnic hatred and think of Jewish heritage as no different than Irish or Polish heritage. For what it’s worth, we’ve forgotten the historical bias against other immigrant groups in America in the past.
> As an outsider who wants to avoid accusations of racism on things he has zero opinion about, where would I go to learn how to avoid anti-Semitism dog whistles?
I say don’t worry about it. In my experience anti-Semites are rarely shy about their opinions and are very easy to identify for that reason.
This doesn’t mean there’s no chance of getting accused of whatever, but if someone is going to interpret a perfectly innocuous statement (or even an ignorant one) as a dog whistle, they were probably gunning for you anyway, and there’s nothing you could have done to avoid it other than never meet the person in the first place.
Asian sheep ranchers. Good wrestlers.
Fellow British politician Ken Livingstone defended him,
small correction – Naz Shah is a ‘her’ not a ‘him’.
Re: New York values
There was an almost identical subplot on the West Wing in the 90s where a comment like that was aimed at a character that was supposed to be Jewish.
At what point is the distinction between saying something you know will be perceived as antisemitic and actually saying something antisemitic meaningless? It isn’t like Cruz came up with the comment on the spot. It was a calculated comment that was undoubtedly workshopped with his team.
I think you overestimate the degree to which most people make that association. Is this antisemetic?
No I don’t think that’s antisemetic.
But here’s the West Wing clip, which I guarantee you Cruz and all of his top staff have seen. You can’t have been a political geek between the ages of 15 and 45 in the
90soughts and not have watched the west wing. Yes, even if you were conservative.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbgoAchOhEk
I’m a political geek who was between the ages of 15 and 45 during the aughties. In fact, I used to live in DC and lived within easy walking distance of the White House for multiple years. I’ve never seen an episode of the West Wing, and have never seen that scene before.
Edit: also, as a political junkie, I know that Cruz’s base overwhelmingly considers itself philosemetic (even if they don’t actually know jews) while the tiny number of Americans who would be open to an antisemitic appeal were overwhelmingly supporting Cruz’s opponent at the time that he made that statement. Clearly, it was a mistake, because some people did make that association, but I’m fairly confident that Cruz’s people weren’t anticipating it and instead intended it in the purely Pace-picante sense (or, possibly, as a homophobic dog whistle–I guarantee you that the rural cultural conservative’s image of the flaws of New York has far more gay pride parades than it does synagogues)
For what it’s worth, I’ve already talked about not leaning D *and* liking The West Wing.
That doesn’t mean that every thing they did was fair, or memorable, or accurate. Some of the things that most resonated with me didnt work at all for some of my friends.
Even when we were working with a more limited Western Canon, reactions to evocation of symbolism varied.
***
I grew up in the South. I did not know many New Yorkers – or even many Northerners – socially. But there were a fair number of snowbirds who stood out for their accents and dress, who were clearly strangers from a strange place. Their values and priorities were not as My Kinda Folks.
It took me quite a while to realize what I was identifying as “typical New York values” were actually the habits and patterns of a smaller group of New York City Jews – that this was the habit of a people who strongly resisted taking on the habits of outsiders, and rejected the temptation to blend in with the local community.
And it was quite a while longer than that, and well into my adulthood, before I recognized that at least a little of their rudeness and hostility was because they were in my part of the world, a place where they were uncomfortable, away from their own sorts of people (and food, and weather, and bugs) and amongst strangers. Which didn’t make them any less rude and short tempered, but had I known that, I would have exercised more patience with them.
I have a beef with this type of reasoning. It feeds into attempts to root out hidden racism/sexism/whateverism, but it’s also prevalent in other political discourse (MarcoBot can tell you that President Obama knows exactly what he’s doing).
There are two fairly obvious objections. The first is Herbert’s. Sometimes, people just didn’t have the same experience.
The second is one that keranih gets at. I don’t lean D, and I loved The West Wing. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have in a million years made a connection from “New York Values” to that clip.
I couldn’t imagine being a politician. You get called all kinds of names because something you said sounds vaguely similar to something shown to be offensive in one tiny piece of a pop culture reference from 10-15 years ago. What a friggin’ minefield.
“This dog whistle plan is totally going to work, just as long as all skinheads watch The West Wing but no liberal journalists do.”
The point isn’t that the people need to have seen the west wing to get it, the west wing did that bit for a reason. The dog whistle / euphemism / whatever you want to call it already existed at that point. Aaron Sorkin didn’t just pull it out of thin air.
The reason I said that TC and his staff had seen the show was that even if they had somehow missed out on the overtones they would have had a chance to make the connection if they had seen that scene.
For example, I didn’t know gyp was a racial slur until I got to college. But if it had somehow been a plot point in Jurassic Park than it would have been more reasonable to expect I would have known it before then.
But you are assuming that they made the connection in the first place!
I had heard Cruz’s remark but didn’t know it was considered anti-semitic until this post.
I still don’t get what you’re accusing Cruz / his staff of. If this was the sort of thing that was featured as a dog whistle on the West Wing, do you think that makes it more likely to be a dog whistle in reality? Or just that they had atrocious judgment for using something other people would think was a dog whistle?
I think “New Yorker” has in the past been actually used as a dog whistle / euphemism for “Jewish” in reality. It wasn’t a contrived scenario for the show. Ted Cruz knew or should have known that.
Therefore either he intended that meaning to be latent or he had atrocious judgment in using something he knew other people would think was a dog whistle. (The third possibility is the “should have known”). And to circle back to the original point, the first two possibilities are not particularly distinct.
Why “should” he have known that? I’ve never heard of “New Yorker” being a euphemism for “Jew.” Some people may, at some point, have used it that way, but it’s definitely not common knowledge.
New York is a place with a lot of Jews, but it’s also a place with a lot of other people, and I wouldn’t even think of the modal New Yorker as being Jewish.
In terms of stereotypes about New York (City) the first thing that comes to my mind is more like this.
My stereotype about the rest of the state is just too much snow.
“Therefore either he intended that meaning to be latent or he had atrocious judgment in using something he knew other people would think was a dog whistle.”
Can I just say that I feel like we see this reasoning a lot in society and I think it’s really unfair.
Any time we want to accuse someone of something, but we can’t quite prove it, we just accuse them anyway, then point to the fact that some people believe the accusation, then suggest that the accused must at least have “bad judgment” for putting themselves in a situation where someone might accuse them (i.e. any situation ever).
It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that someone who does not, in fact, regularly associate with either KKK-level racists or hysterical media pundits constantly looking for a new way to bash Republicans, would not necessarily think that “New York values” = Jewish.
So, what you are saying is that it’s anti-Semitic to not like New York because everybody knows that Jews control the New York national media, Wall Street, and Madison Avenue?
I, as someone that comes close to Ted Cruz politically, thought the statement as a mistake at the time because it would be interpreted as an attack against Blue tribe trendy upscale urban culture. New York, to me, has an association with that particular set of traits, which to my perspective overlaps a lot with the perception of both secular Jews (very Blue, very upscale, very urban) and the media. I suspect it also has, to the Red tribe way of looking at things, an association with Donald Trump, in the manner of socially liberal, crass and representative of conspicuous consumption.
Certain cities seem to have associations in popular culture. If Cruz had talked about San Fransisco values or Chicago values or Detroit, Boston, Seattle, Denver, Las Vegas or Salt Lake City values there would have been a similar interpretation of his words as being against the stereotypical associations with that city, even if those represent a small part of the city itself.
I understand San Francisco (gay), Detroit (poor and black), Las Vegas (crass and commercial, immoral), and Salt Lake City (Mormon). But what would Boston, Chicago, Seattle, or Denver be standing in for? The only thing I associate Chicago with is corruption; Seattle maybe Greens, but the others?
I also suspect that Cruz made a tactical mistake for another reason: most of us in Red America, I believe, are proud of New York even if we consider it weird and don’t want our own towns to be like it.
But what would Boston, Chicago, Seattle, or Denver be standing in for? The only thing I associate Chicago with is corruption; Seattle maybe Greens, but the others?
Again, just my opinion.
There’s a difference between urban as code for black and urban as code for ‘doesn’t understand flyover country’, I’m thinking New York is code for the second.
Detroit is also a code for Union.
If someone talks about Chicago values, I assume they’re talking about political machines or corruption.
Boston is either Irish or WASP; if someone is talking about Old Money, I assume it’s somewhere around Boston.
Seattle is Green/Progressive; on further thought Portland would probably be a better choice in that matter.
Denver, at least from the Red tribe perspective, seems to be the go-to example of people fleeing Blue tribe areas because of the over-regulation or cultural collapse and then voting to institute the same policies that caused the over-regulation or cultural collapse.
Nobody’s posted View of The World From 9th Avenue yet?
That Steinberg sure was crafty in his hidden antisemitism!
Which seems more likely…
That his comment was a simply a cheap dig in at his two chief competitors who were both New Yorkers? Or that it was some sort of elaborate West Wing “easter egg”, intended to signal is hatred of international jewery to the cognoscenti?
But if Cruz’s dig at Trump being a New Yorker was anti-Semitic, how can Trump be an anti-Semite too like I keep reading?
I’m confused …
BRRRRRRRAAAAAWWWWRWRRRMRMRMMRMRMMMMM!!!
Here I will point up that, having grown up in the South, with two parents who were die-hard Republicans, and having spent pretty much all of my life around conservatives of one stripe or another until I was in my mid-20s, I had never heard of “New Yorker” or “New York values” as a reference to Jews until the Cruz flap. While I would no longer describe myself as a conservative by any stretch of the imagination, by and large this seems to be the reaction of most of the conservatives I still know.
If this is a dog whistle, I’m pretty sure it’s only a dog whistle for liberals, not conservatives.
(Also, despite having been fairly politically interested since the late 90s, I haven’t ever watched The West Wing all the way through, though it’s probably my wife’s favorite TV series of all time. Aaron Sorkin’s obnoxious political self-righteousness just grates on me too much to like his shows.)
Ditto.
Everybody knows that if you don’t like Aaron Sorkin’s grating obnoxious political self-righteousness, then you are an anti-Semite.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of Sorkin’s movies:
http://takimag.com/article/beyond_the_hubbub_of_aaron_sorkins_the_social_network/print#axzz4Bmxj0PDf
Let’s compare two scenarios here.
1) Cruz and his team carefully crafted and workshopped a reference to The West Wing, in hopes that American right-wing anti-semites (who are not notably fans of that show, but are known for accusing people of “dual loyalty” to Israel) would notice this “dog whistle” and switch their support to someone whose record and rhetoric has always included staunch support for Israel.
2) Cruz and his team carefully crafted and workshopped a reference to this appearance on Meet the Press by Donald Trump. Cruz and his team expected the New York-based national media would pick up on his slighting reference to New York, they would tell the media Cruz was referring to this Trump appearance on Meet the Press (which, in fact, they did), and the media would broadcast the video when covering the story, letting Republican primary voters see and hear Donald Trump speaking of his support for gay marriage and partial-birth abortion without the Cruz campaign having to go to the expense of buying a single second of ad time.
Really, which seems more plausible?
>There was an almost identical subplot on the West Wing
Given Sorkin’s argument style of “go on crack-filled rant full of lies while your opponent sits in scripted, speechless shock, followed by massive applause”… I’d say that supports Scott’s position.
This is very poor analysis for two reasons.
1) Political dog-whistles are not supposed to be undetectable. They are substitutes. “Everyone” knows what they mean, but no one is allowed to say the thing it means. Because they are substitutes, this leads to eventual confusion, and so it looks like people might be trying to secretly signal, but that isn’t what is going on.
“Death Eater” is a good example of how dog-whistles work. Except if, instead of tabooing the word, you tabooed the belief. “I’m against forced busing” meant that you were against white kids and black kids being in the same school together because you thought segregation was right, and, at the beginning, no one was unclear what this meant.
2) The headline “Em drive will allow faster than light travel” does not mean that the Em drive will actually allow faster than light travel. Breathless headlines and breathless reporting are as old as reporting. Saying something doesn’t exist because you can find examples of a journalist hyperbolizing when reporting is extremely contra-indicated.
No, you’re thinking of euphemisms. See wiki:
Yes, it’s analogous to a real dog-whistle. But the anology is not exact.
But do you really think that in Atwater’s time, in 1968 or 1976, say, most people weren’t clear about what being opposed to forced busing actually meant?
You can’t say “I don’t want my kids going to school with any n*ggers”, but you can say “No forced busing on my watch!” No one is unclear about what you are objecting to, it’s just a more palatable way of expressing it.
Think about it, how are you going to transmit a secret code to only the true believers anyway? It’s nonsense.
Dog whistles are “coded” language. The code IS a euphemism.
Except what you’re describing isn’t what Atwater described in his quote. What Atwater is saying that by talking about bussing you are letting voters off the hook for supporting racist policies. That’s not secret code for “hey, I’m a racist too!” It’s telling voters, “Don’t worry. You’re not a racist. You just want the best for your kids.” And that is not how secret codes work at all.
@j r:
I don’t think that is really correct. It may turn into something like that (which would make it a dog-whistle that even the target didn’t consciously hear).
But when the original politician say “no forced busing”, it’s because, as Atwater says, it hurts you to say “N*****, N*****, N*****”, but that doesn’t mean that the core objection to segregated schools has been made secret. Everyone is clear that what is being objected to is forcing your white kids to go to school with black kids.
Sure, 30 years on people want a return to neighborhood schools because they want Johny to be able to walk to school and they don’t remember why busing came in. But that isn’t where it starts.
You should read the whole interview, not just the bit that gets endlessly quoted, because Atwater doesn’t way what you think. It’s quite clear that what atwater is saying is that shouting n**ger used to work, then it stopped worked so you had to find issues BESIDES race to motivate them. He goes on, explicitly, that Reagan had never done racebaiting, that reagan had been campaigning on the same issues for decades, and that it was southerners who came around to him, not him dog whistling southerners. When he talks about a “southern strategy” he’s talking about the racial strategy that democrats used to use to win elections, but which doesn’t work any more.
To quote him “But Reagan did not have to do a southern strategy for two reasons. Number one, race was was not a dominant issue. And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been, quote, southern issues since way back in the sixties. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the issues of economics and of national defense. The whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference. And I’ll tell you another thing you all need to think about, that even surprised me, is the lack of interest, really, the lack of knowledge right now in the South among white voters about the Voting Rights Act.”
Reagan and Nixon both won massive chunks of the country, it seems silly to discuss them obsessively pouring over the south when they won just about everything.
Between 68 and 88, republicans won an average of more than 40 states per election. That’s not a southern strategy but a whole country strategy. And over that Same period, the.Southern congressional delegation remained solid blue.
This completely misunderstands what happened. At the local and state level, the South remained Democratic. At the national level, the south stopped voting with rest of the Democratic coalition for President.
The Solid South voted overwhelmingly Democratic for president from the end of reconstruction to 1964. From 1968 through today Democrats essentially have not won the south overall with the exception of Carter in 1976, and mostly haven’t won even individual states in the South. It’s a vast departure from the previous almost 90 years or so.
But individual incumbent house members, senators or local legislative representatives mostly did not change their allegiance to the Republicans. The South only slowly shifted local representation from (D) to (R). U.S. Senate is a little bit of a more mixed bag, with some senators like Strom Thurmond changing parties, and people Jesse Helms changing parties to subsequently run for and win a Senate seat.
Yes, that is what happens when a bloc of states that used to be unassailably owned by the Democrats flip en masse to the Republicans. The Democrats flounder, which is exactly what LBJ was worried about.
> At the national level, the south stopped voting with rest of the Democratic coalition for President.
No, the pretty much the whole country stopped voting for democratic presidents.
> From 1968 through today Democrats essentially have not won the south overall with the exception of Carter in 1976
that’s because, with the exception of carter, they lost the whole country. democrats won 13 states in 68, one in 72, 23 in 76, 6 in 80, 1 again in 84, and 10 in 88 And, with the exception of 72, republicans did worse in most of the south than they did nationally.
@cassander:
What would this 1960 map look like if you gave Nixon: TX, LA, AR, MS, AL, GA, SC, and NC?
Nixon wins and Kennedy takes only 16 states.
In 1964, Goldwater, as a Republican, wins LA, MS, AL, GA, SC, and NC (and his home state of AZ). Eisenhower, who absolutely blew the doors off both his elections only managed to take one of those states once.
The south (roughly) flipped from Democrat to Republican for presidential elections in 1964. Yeah, 1976 against a very wounded Ford looks a lot like the 1960 Electoral map with Carter, as a Southern Governor running on an anti-government and outsider platform, but that’s the last hurrah for that map.
It’s not a light switch and it isn’t the only factor. But, really, don’t throw away 90 years of precedent and knowledge of why the Democratic party ruled the South from the end of Reconstruction forward in favor of some theory that wants to ignore the effect of the CRA on Southern voting patterns.
>Nixon wins and Kennedy takes only 16 states.
Which is a lot more than any democrat won between 68 and 88.
>In 1964, Goldwater, as a Republican, wins LA, MS, AL, GA, SC, and NC (and his home state of AZ). Eisenhower, who absolutely blew the doors off both his elections only managed to take one of those states once.
>The south (roughly) flipped from Democrat to Republican for presidential elections in 1964. Yeah, 1976 against a very wounded Ford looks a lot like the 1960 Electoral map with Carter, as a Southern Governor running on an anti-government and outsider platform, but that’s the last hurrah for that map.
Because, again, when you win 40+ states, everywhere looks red.
>It’s not a light switch and it isn’t the only factor. But, really, don’t throw away 90 years of precedent and knowledge of why the Democratic party ruled the South from the end of Reconstruction forward in favor of some theory that wants to ignore the effect of the CRA on Southern voting patterns.
I’m not ignoring that evidence. Up until 1948, the south is solidly democratic. the Dixicrats break in 48, but come back into the fold, despite Ike doing better than any republican in history and managing to chip away at the edges. LBJ had to steal In 60, the dixiecrats split again. In 64, they vote republican. In 68 they go back to the dixiecrats because the republicans won’t push their issues. in 72, everyone votes republican. 76 the south again goes to the democrats. in 80,84,88, almost everyone votes republican again. 92 and 96 the south splits. It’s not until 2000 that a republican wins the south without an overwhelming victory everywhere else.
As we can see, the history is long and complicated, and cannot be explained by some sort of southern strategy. the south gets acclimatized to the idea of voting republican by a number of overwhelming republican victories, but don’t start to really distinguish themselves from the rest of the country until, at the earliest, the 90s. And if you look at any voting besides presidential, the evidence is even more against a southern strategy theory. Even Taking your strongest evidence, it doesn’t make the case for the conventional wisdom, as much as people like to believe it.
They vote Republican or American Independent Party (George Wallace) in ’68. They don’t vote in the coalition. Wallace runs on segregation as his main issue, first in ’64 (“Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever!”) and then he runs 3rd party and he wins the South. This about as clear a marker as you can find about what is motivating the Southern voters in civil rights era. The weren’t hosing blacks marching on Birmingham in ’63 for no reason.
I certainly never said history wasn’t long and complicated. You appear to be attempting to wipe away one of those “complications” as if it does not exist.
Asked and already answered. Presidential voting is a leading indicator. The same people, in the same one party that rules the South (the Democrats) continue to be elected. Very little party switching happens. The Southern Democrats are in the process of fracturing from the broad Democratic coalition. They don’t immediately stop being Democrats.
Yes. And this is why they South stops being one party Dem and flips largely to one party Republican, on a state by state basis, over the next 50 years. This trails the Presidential vote change and reflects the fact that national Democratic coalition is no longer a very comfortable home for the kind of Southern Democrats who happened to not want the CRA to pass.
There are other factors at work at the same time. I’m not denying that. But to argue that passage of the CRA didn’t have a fundamental effect on Southern presidential voting patterns is mystifying.
Dog-whistles could be steel-manned as “signalling.”
That said, I’ve never seen an article purporting to decode a “dog-whistle” that wasn’t ridiculous.
So, objections to forced busing weren’t primarily appeals to people who didn’t want there kids going to school with black kids? And, yes, primarily is doing work there. I understand.
The forced busing was at least partially about ethnic white cultures being attacked and having their communities broken up by other ethnic whites. The black kids were the pawns. Forced busing was a way to avoid actually giving black kids equal access to resources. It was thought the threat of busing would open up pocketbooks and lead to segregated but equalized spending. This did not happen and things got very combative on all sides of this issue.
@TPC:
Are we talking about the same time frame?
I’m talking about forced busing in response to post Brown v. Board and post CRA requirements that schools be actually integrated, implemented by court order.
Well, there isn’t one timeline. The forced busing and forced integration were to some extent due to a failure of the pocketbooks to fly open for segregated schools and were also due to the chances to score points and break ethnic whites due to anti-Catholic biases. There were competing factions for segregation but equalized spending and integration among both whites and blacks involved with the relevant civil rights movements and legislation.
It’s hard to reduce it down to one thing, many different moving parts were going on during that twenty year or so period from Brown through the 1970s. It wasn’t, well, black and white back then, though it’s certainly portrayed very narrowly and simply now.
In Los Angeles, where I grew up, forced busing in 1978 was largely a Jewish versus black issue, with most of the resistance to integrating San Fernando Valley public schools by busing over the mountains from South-Centra led by Jewish politicians like Democratic Rep. Alan Robbins and schoolboard member Bobbie Fiedler.
The Jewish politicians lost, and Jews largely took their kids out of Los Angele public schools. This was one of the largest battles over school busing, and the LAUSD, the second largest school district, has never recovered from busing, but it has kind of disappeared down the memory hole for reasons of Narrative Awkwardness.
Putting the Northern white vs Southern white conflict primarily in terms of Southern white attitudes towards Southern blacks completely misses the whole point of you ain’t the boss of me and you got no right to come down here and tell me what to do.
This is a fundamental error, I think, in understanding (and repairing) the inter-regional rift.
Forced busing is way before my time. Everything I see these days which uses the phrase “dog-whistle” is along the lines of the Cruz thing.
The sickness goes deep!
Did pro-integration people respond in the form “I don’t understand: How can we achieve integration without forced busing?”? If so, then that was a genuine dog whistle, with segregationists knowing what is being said but integrationists hearing only the surface meaning.
But I don’t think that was the response. I think both sides knew what was being said.
The question in my mind is why it was felt necessary to pretty it up. I can think of a couple of possibilities. One is a ham-handed attempt at politeness: I don’t want my kids going to school with black kids, but the disadvantages to my kids in doing so are not the fault of the black kids per se, so why go out of my way to be insulting? Another is coalition-building: There may be integrationists who nevertheless feel that busing is a big hammer compared to more gradual approaches, like zoning reform and consciousness-raising, and this lets segregationists make common cause with them.
(I feel that it says something about the Overton window that my browser flags “integrationist” as a spelling error but not “segregationist”. But I confess I’m not sure what. For that matter it also flags “Overton”, which really surprises me because it usually leaves proper nouns alone.)
@Doctor Mist:
Because saying “No n*ggers or coons are going to school with my kids or yours” calls to my mind even worse possibilities like turning fire hoses on peaceable marchers or bombing little black girls in church?
There are a broad range of people at the time who don’t want their kids going to school with black kids. Probably most of them just feel vaguely disquieted by it, the way a nervous pedestrian might be have felt uncomfortable by the sight of a black man in the 80s when “inner city crime” was the dog-whistle.
They don’t want to say they are in favor of segregation, but they also don’t want their kids going to school with “those” black kids. You might even think of it as a kind of Nimby-ism. “Someone should integrate the schools, but not my school.”
One possibility is that the true motivation was “we don’t want our kids going to those crap schools the blacks have been saddled with”, but they knew it would be misheard as “we don’t want our kids in the same school with black kids no matter how good the school is.”
Signalling is not supposed to be esoteric.
>1) Political dog-whistles are not supposed to be undetectable. They are substitutes. “
This theory makes even less sense. It requires that there are millions of people out there who want racist/sexist/whatever politicians but don’t want those politicians to say that they are racist/sexist/whatever in plain language.
That’s pretty much exactly the assumptions behind the theory. Progressive culture has cowed the racists, but they lurk on the fringes, waiting for a candidate who can clue them in to his inner darkness without alerting the ever vigilant media.
I realize that’s the theory, the problem is it’s nonsense. If there were that many racists they wouldn’t need to be secret and they wouldn’t be cowed.
They might. Could be a “belling the cat” type effect where any racist who speaks out is quickly crushed by the anti-racist minority. Even though the racists as a group could easily crush the anti-racists, they’re unable to coordinate thanks to the ever vigilant media.
There’s also the issue of, of course a minority can oppress a majority, it’s happened many times in history. If the anti-racists control the money and the guns and the propaganda organs, the racists won’t do well to directly challenge their dominance, even if they have more warm bodies.
>Even though the racists as a group could easily crush the anti-racists, they’re unable to coordinate thanks to the ever vigilant media.
the media doesn’t get to vote. If being racist won elections, politicians would be racist, media or no.
>the media doesn’t get to vote.
The media gets to shape reality. Simply voting as a way of influencing nations is passe.
I guess I was unclear. The role of the media in this scenario is to identify the racists who are trying to coordinate so that they can be crushed, leaving the racists uncoordinated and unable to use their power. Consider an analogous situation in labor relations. Management knows that it would have to make major concessions if its workforce unionized, so it goes to a lot of trouble to spot workers who talk of organizing and fire them on a pretext, because while the workforce as a whole may be able to fight management, management can crush the troublemakers before the workforce as a whole can coordinate against them.
@suntzuanime
the trouble with that is that the racists get coordination for free. If the media labels someone racist, they can all just show up and vote for him on election day, explicit racial appeals or not.
Oh I assumed everybody realized that was a core assumption of the “dog whistle” theory.
It’s pretty much assumed by most college educated liberals that anyone with less than a college degree is a racist and that the only thing stopping the fourth Reich is a constitution (written by the best educated people in the 18th century, and amended by Lincoln and the 60s generation) and the hard work of university educated liberal arts and social science students.
Did everyone else not notice all the left wing books (Handmaid’s Tale being the best example) about a dystopian future where right wingers are in charge!!! (and for some reason behave exactly like racist-nazi-death-eater theocrats instead of, you know, anything republicans actually want to do)
But in short: yes. The vast majority of the left does seem to believe the right is nothing but racist-sexists who support social Darwinism, want to kill all the brown people and want to turn women into livestock while covering it up in code words.
If you saw the Southpark episode where Cartman dresses up like a nazi and gets a bunch of people together to kill the jews while say “I think we all know what needs to be done” and screeching unintelligible German, with the other people mistaking it for a prayer group.
Well that seems to be what most left wing people think the Republican party is: evil people screeching in code and stupid people following along.
I used to be left wing and that was what I thought of Republicans at the time: truly evil people who knew they were evil on top, stupid people at the bottom. The left also tends to believe financial success is a function of being a psychopath. So they hear “business” as Hannibal lector.
I went from a fairly average liberal who though republicans were the source of modern evil to a a right winger who recognising that most liberals think republicans are the source of evil.
On the left right divide it is only the left where we have college educated people assuming that the only way someone could disagree with them is by being stupid or evil. Educated conservatives don’t make that mistake because they are such a minority on campus that they aren’t able to create a bubble where the only people they respect are people who agree with them.
Compare how the large cross section of the modern educated left thinks of big business: cartoonishly evil greedy bastards who will exploit, expand and destroy if heroic activists won’t stop them.
With how the educated right thinks environentalists: good intentioned people who let their concern for nature cloud their judgement of necessary tradeoffs.
Consistently I see the left wing atributing bad faith and evil intention to people whose arguments they do not understand and I do not see an equivalent hostility from the political right.
The right thinks people, even educated people, can be mistaken or disagree whereas the left thinks any disagreement from their ideology must be the result of either ignorance (thus demanding they get proper education) or evil (if the person has been educated but does not see the OBVIOUS truth) or both.
And you may think I have selection bias I read smart right wingers, and dumb left wingers clog up my Facebook feed: but that’s just the thing right wingers don’t link to “ingroup member crushes stupid out group members 5 arguments like dixicups!!!”.
Speaking as someone who went the other direction (partway), the stereotypes and cartoonish villainy are hardly exclusive to the left wing. I was more or less raised in communities of people for whom “Democrat” and “Satanist” were pretty closely related terms. There was a generally agreed understanding that white coastal liberals had a patron/client relationship with blacks and Hispanics aimed at disenfranchising and destroying the lives of regular middle-class Americans out of lust for wealth and power on the part of the former and racial hatred on the part of the latter. “Black” was a synonym for “probably a criminal”.
The interesting thing about your comparison is that you talk about stereotypes among educated members of each faction. This is where the comparison does indeed break down, because while the uneducated members of both factions have laughably cartoonish stereotypes about each other, it’s pretty much impossible to get an education as a non-liberal (unless you go to the very rare exception school like Bob Jones or Liberty) without coming into close, constant contact with liberal ideas. As a result, college-educated conservatives do indeed have a much more clear appreciation for what college-educated liberals actually believe and how they think than vice-versa. (And Jonathan Haidt’s work has provided empirical evidence of this.)
In some cases (such as mine), this contact is enough to make a person question their strongly-held tribal affiliation and break with the tribe. (Though it never caused me to fully go over to the Blue Tribe; I understand their thinking far better but still disagree with many of the premises and absolutely loathe the self-righteousness and gleeful oppression and even violence of the modern social justice movement. But I no longer think the Red Tribe has all the answers or is particularly virtuous either.) In other cases it simply causes a bunker mentality where the person clings even more desperately to their tribal affiliation as their core identity in a hostile environment.
Incidentally, as someone who still has a significant number of non-college-educated right-wingers on their Facebook feed as a result of upbringing, I can tell you for certain that there are plenty of similarly cartoonish memes that get spread about how dumb/evil the Blue Tribe is and how obviously they’re trying to “destroy America” and ruin all white people.
Of course, somehow I’m also more willing to forgive less-educated people spreading these ridiculous ideas than people with graduate degrees who are supposedly educated, traveled and cosmopolitan. I’m still not entirely sure if that’s latent tribal bias or a legitimate distinction.
Ya I feel that distinction pretty strongly myself. I used to be alot more of a moderate and bounce around between center left, right and libertarian, I still follow some very left wing philosophy professors, but the big thing that really pushed me over the line was social justice, the purge of wrong think at the academy and just the smug style.
Its like all the things that i liked about the left growing up: its anti-authoritarian streak, defense of free speech, broad-mindedness, contempt for bureaucrats, tolerance of other ideas and cultures, looking out for the little guy.
These all became libertarian things.
And even the good ideas the left has and ought be pushing have gotten drowned out in the hypocrisy and group think.
The labour movement has become a conspiracy of rich old labour against poor young labour.
The anti-racism movement has become a means of class warfare by wealthy college educated kids against uneducated old timers.
Freedom of speech is now the enemy
The Bureaucrats have been unleashed and are now writing their own laws
Diversity now means tolerance of people who agree with me/ tolerating anyone but the outgroup
And the little guy is fucked because the dems/labour/the liberal party, only look out for connected special interests now.
Liberalism is where conservatism was in the 60s, ideologically bankrupt and in desperate need of some hard losses combined with new ideas. The thing is conservatism adopted the classical liberalism of Milton Freidman, Left Liberalism can’t adopt Libertarianism or the [death eaters] and those are the only ideological movements generating new ideas as opposed to new rhetorical tricks with which to attack people.
Euros joke that the US has two right wing parties. Many ideas a standard on the European left are unheard of , or outside the current Overton windon, in the US. That means there is plenty of scope for the US left to reinvent itself in more european terms. For instance a left, based on labour rights, rather than minority rights, on universal provision rather than compensation and special pleading.
“The problem is assholes like you”
This is almost never useful around here. You actually have a decent critique in that post somewhere, but it’s smothered by invective.
I see it as more of a baptists and bootleggers issue. A lot of policies have both racist and non-racist justifications. Non-racists have more votes, but racists have enough votes to be worth courting. However, explicitly using racism to court voters pisses off too many non-racists. But you can court the racist voters by bringing up policy issues that racists care about but which have some non-racist justifications.
As a non-American, the notion that being against forced bussing meant being in favour of racial segregation strikes me as bizarre. For example, in NZ there has never been racial segregation of public schools but there are a lot of small (one-room) rural primary schools. Whenever the Ministry of Education proposes closing one of them due to a falling roll the locals object both because they don’t want young kids taking long bus trips each day and because the school is an important part of the local community.
The policy of “forced busing” in the US was (and may still be) specifically a policy of taking students from the school closest to them (where their racial group was in the majority) and putting them in another school, further away, where a different racial group was in the majority. Basically deliberately mixing black students and white students to combat the effects of geographical segregation. To say that it was wildly unpopular among the affected white families would be a serious understatement.
Yes, in NZ the law currently mandates that local kids have first priority at their local state school.
I first got interested in the forced busing thing when I was living for a few months in Boston. I once came across a Marxist analysis that the Boston forced busing was a deliberate plan by upper class whites to drive a wedge between working-class whites and blacks, which is perhaps the most plausible Marxist analysis I’ve come across. I struggle to imagine forced busing ever being a democratically-accepted policy in any country.
I struggle to imagine forced busing ever being a democratically-accepted policy in any country.
Which is why, in the USA, it had to be imposed by the threat of military force.
This is one of the larger questions of the American experiment, I think – when is a failure of basic rights cause for the use of violence to correct the situation, and when should correction be limited to social pressure, shouting matches, and boycotts?
More generally, I believe that the left wing policy of favoring all blacks over poor whites and then blaming poor whites for being racists for not liking it is at least an example of people doing a superiority dance, though I’m inclined to think it’s a matter of poor whites being nearer competitors than poor blacks.
It’s interesting that this is a question that is genuinely an American one. In NZ or the UK parliament is basically sovereign so I strongly suspect that any government trying to enforce something like the American forced busing policy would back down in short order.
I understand that in America the elected institutions (eg Congress, the Senate, the Presidency) rapidly moved to an anti-forced busing stance.
It seems like the cleanest explanation for this is projection. Feminists are hideously sexist, anti-racists abhorrently racist, and so on–and so when they come across someone without those defects, they don’t know how to act except by saying “well, if I behaved that way, it would be because I buried my sexism / racism super deep and it was just poking through.”
There is another clean explanation, that most of the causes the left had endorsed have been so successful they’ve largely run out of problems to keep them going (and the donations coming in). The Progressive / Social Justice left are a combination of the Baptists in a Baptists and Bootleggers coalition and the March of Dimes against Polio. They’ve almost achieved their original objective, but unlike the March of Dimes, there’s no obvious next goal, so rather than admit success, they’ve doubled down on cracking down on Bootleggers and anyone that looks like they may be a Bootlegger.
I think there is definitely an element of projection from some elements of the Black Lives Matter coalition and from the extreme La Raza Hispanic movement, but I think it’s too simplistic to see it all as just a case of projection.
While it’s almost become a cliche in Internet arguments at this point, this quote is evergreen:
Identity politics and grievance-mongering usually start out with legitimate grievances, but the successful movements generate power, privilege and money for their leaders. The leaders then have considerable incentives to make sure the problem is never actually solved — by stirring outrage over ever-more-trivial things if necessary.
Scott’s “Toxoplasma of Outrage” post is strongly correlated to this as well.
“Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being — the stone wishes to be a stone, the tiger a tiger, forever.”
I think this misunderstands how insults like ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ etc work. We associate words like racism with very bad things such as slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK etc or, as Scott says:
These words therefore have very bad connotations. The idea then is to associate them with progressively less bad actions but maintain the connotations. So when Trump says something boorish about flat-chested women, it may or may not be sexist according to the definition, but that isn’t the point. The point is to associate Trump with a word associated with people who hate women and deny their human rights and get people to treat Trump as if he had said such things himself.
Usually you need some kind of argument to claim that some innocuous statement is actually sexist/racist etc (but sometimes pure assertion will do the trick). Accusations of dog whistling skip this requirement by simply asserting that even if the statement does not seem sexist/racist, it secretly is.
The genius bit is that it is almost impossible to defend against. With standard accusations of racism or whatever it’s possible to defend with things like the ‘my best friend is black!’ defense (though many have now bingo-carded this into a confirmation of the target’s racism). With a dog whistle you can’t do that, because of course they would deny it. The need for plausible deniability is why they were dog whistling in the first place!
I agree that the media are often far too hungry and eager to “catch out” politicians and as such often read too much into their statements, but that doesn’t mean some politicians don’t also harbour deeply unsavoury views that they try to keep hidden from the general public. Ken Livingstone for example, I would hesitate to condemn as necessarily anti-Semitic just on the basis of the quote you have mentioned. However, as someone else mentioned above, quotes like this can be Bayseian evidence of anti-Semitism, particularly in the case of the kind of weird historical revisionist comments Livingstone made, because those weird historical views are especially common among genuine anti-Semites and pretty rare among the rest of the population. As someone who knew Livingstone’s history of making other not-very-nice-about-Jews comments I already had pretty high priors of him being moderately anti-Semitic and so this further evidence seems to make me pretty confident that he in fact is. Not to say he’s anti-Semitic in the “kick the Jews out of Britain, or make them wear gold stars” way you describe, but still in the “This person is Jewish and therefore I am immediately suspicious of them, associate them with my out-group and assume they are supporters of the evil Zionist regime of Israel, therefore I am likely to ignore their opinions and potentially ostracize them within the Labour Party, plus maybe use racial slurs or other rude stereotyping comments occasionally when caught off-guard” kind of way that characterizes quite a few people on the fringes of the British left at the moment. See the resignation of Alex Chalmers from Oxford University Labour Club for one example and the comments of the new NUS President for another example.
The difficulty with discussing this anti-Semitism / anti-Zionism conflation is that opponents of Israel sometimes accuse its supporters of using “anti-Semitism” accusations as a way to silence criticism of Israel, whilst Jews sometimes accuse self-described “anti-Zionists” of using that phrase as cover for their actually anti-Semitic views. In reality, I think both of these are real phenomena – some people are unfairly accused of anti-Semitism when in fact they are making careful and specific criticisms of Israeli government policies, whilst other people really do have anti-Semitic views and instead talk about being anti-Zionist as a more acceptable way of signalling this to their in-group.
I’m surprised given that you used Ken Livingston as an example that you didn’t also mention the campaign for the new Mayor of London that has just finished, where there was a much clearer and more widely used example of “dog whistle” politics, with the Conservative campaign being accused (with some justification in my view having followed the campaign closely) of trying to scare voters away from Sadiq Khan by using phrases such as “dangerous”, “radical” and “shared a platform with Islamic extremists” as not particularly subtle code for “he’s a dangerous radical Muslim extremist”. Again, the fact that this example was picked up on very quickly by most media just shows that its attempt to target its message only at receptive voters failed spectacularly. The campaign even tried writing some of its strongest messages to people with ethnically targeted surnames – e.g. a letter to anyone with the surname Patel (assuming they were Hindu and thus might dislike Muslims) saying Sadiq Khan threatened their family jewelry which the Conservatives rather naively assumed they must have hoards of. This approach might have worked well 30 years ago when direct mail had a greater monopoly of communication, but in the modern media age keeping the message targeted is much more difficult – all it takes is a few mis-targeted Patels to snap a photo of the patronizing letter and share it on social media and suddenly the dog-whistle is heard by pretty much the whole population.
Also as has been noted above Naz Shah is a woman.
The Alex Chambers resignation is another bullshit story. This emerged, as it always does, after the damage was done. https://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/zios-with-attitude.html
What’s with that link? Was Stormfront down?
The url makes it sound like it could either be one of those programs that try to rescue Jews from antisemitic countries to go and live in Israel, or that it could be a Stormfront thing, glad I didn’t click.
It’s not a nazi site as far as I’m aware. If it looks dodgy try this account from a Jewish Labour insider. Knew I should have checked this thread for replies.
https://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/zionist-royalle-finds-what-she-wanted.html
That blog is a great example of how, in my experience, British left anti-semitism shows itself. Nothing overt, nothing indiscreet; nobody gets called a y** or a k***, everything is superficially genteel and civilized.
It’s only when you look closely and realize that someone has dedicated an entire blog, going back to 2004, to criticizing Jews in various ways that the fridge horror strikes you. Three random clicks: Did you know Jews were heavily involved in the slave trade back in the day? Should we inspect Israel for nuclear weapons? Is the Guardian pro-Israel for reporting that Egyptians may have been involved in some kind of archaeological fraud scandal?
Simon – and I say this to you with deference, sir – please know that there are many for whom that blog itself, is a big part of the problem. To the extent that you yourself peddle in such odium, to the extent that you thought posting “Jews sans frontieres: An Anti-Zionist blog” would be a good defence against an allegation of Labour anti-Semitism – you are part of the problem.
I was looking for the story, which has been reported on various sites and didn’t go back through the post archive looking for more unsavoury stuff. I apologise. Here’s a more reasoned approach to the topic of Labour’s supposed anti-semitism problem.
http://www.leninology.co.uk/2016/04/the-antisemitism-panic.html
http://www.leninology.co.uk/2016/04/pitch-forks-at-ready.html
http://www.leninology.co.uk/2016/04/where-twain-meet.html
http://www.leninology.co.uk/2016_04_01_archive.html
http://www.leninology.co.uk/2016/05/yes-it-is-witch-hunt.html
Didn’t want to use the Lenins Tomb site as A) the name probably is a little off putting and b) I doubted anyone except the seriously interested in UK political minutiae would want to go through it. Publication order is oldest top to newes bottom.
I remember the first time I heard the BBC report on Israel as though it were a normal country instead of everything being about persecution of the Palestinians, which I agree is a serious problem, but which I don’t think should be the only topic.
Later, I found out that Al Jazeera was staffed largely from the BBC, which may explain some softening towards Israel.
“Fellow British politician Ken Livingstone defended him”
Minor nitpick, but, Naz Shah is a woman.
Fixed, thanks.
1. The existence of false callouts for dogwhistle doesn’t imply the nonexistence of dogwhistle.
2. Are any of these accusations regarded as accusations of dogwhistle by the accusers, in so many words?
3. I thought dogwhistle was supposed to be coded. These comments aren’t so much encrypted (to be comprehensible only to a specific audience) as watered down.
4. In fact, progressives should not be able to detect competent rightwing dogwhistle.
5. So maybe it is something else…perhaps the microagression thing,thy idea that if you do a tiny bit of something bad, that is as unacceptable as doing a lot of it.
On 4, I don’t think a reasonably competent dogwhistle requires literally zero detectability, just low enough that you can’t distinguish it from noise reliably. I think ramping up your sensitivity would let you react to them if you tolerate a ton of false positives, by e.g. reacting to anything sufficiently odd-sounding or unnatural sounding by assuming it means something sneaky is going on.
I think this is probably part of what has been going on.
The point of dogwhistles is to keep coalitions together. The goal is to signal your affinity with one part of the base without driving away another part that would respond negatively if the message were communicated explicitly. It is irrelevant if progressives can detect rightwing dogwhistles since they aren’t going to vote for the politician making them no matter what.
Quite. Livingstone’s comments, for example, are part of a longstanding strategy to elicit support from anti-Semitic Muslim voters without alienating liberals/progressives. He’s the most prominent exponent of this strategy in Britain, but far from the only one.
I only want to say that “gaffes are the royal road to the unconscious” is hilarious.
This is what Scott Adams repeatedly points us wrt Trump: once a narrative is established there is a huge confirmation bias and it acquires a life of its own.
Trump is a Republican, from a fringe side of the Republican Party. Republicans are generally anti-feminist and their fringe is often misogynist. So everything that Trump says that can even hint at being misogynist will be interpreted that way. Same with Cruz and “New York values”.
Similarly with Livingstone: Labour has had its share of fringe anti-Semitic members in the last few years (the European hard-left has a tolerance for anti-Semitism, which centre-Left parties have to be careful to keep at bay). So anything that a politician seen on the left side of Labour says that hints at anti-Semitism will be interpreted that way.
A lot of this is driven by the fact that just reporting what a candidate says and taking it at face value does not give a journalist enough opportunity to distinguish themselves and demonstrate their intellect and value. It is the ability to interpret which gives them the opportunity to distinguish themselves. And the more unique you make your take on what is “really going on” the more distinguished you become.
You see this a lot also in academia. You won’t get anywhere in the English faculty if you say the author meant what it seems obvious they were saying. The curtains can never just be blue. Advancement comes from skill at interpreting creatively, which triggers a spiral of ever more creative interpretations.
Exactly!
Combine this with the fact that the average journalist has little to nothing worth actually contributing and won’t bother researching to generate real expertise, and you get the modern media landscape.
It’s actually genuinely terrifying that older journalist are defered to for they’re knowledge of history (Larry King being a prime example of someone other journalist would turn to for context) as this means the actual journalist can’t be depended on to actually learn the history and generate their own expertise without wheeling out the old guys.
I think trying to identify dog whistles and SJWishness are efforts to address a genuinely hard problem– figuring out who you can trust.
Scott has a point that it’s possible and common to get so caught up in trying to read people’s subsconsciouses that their overt behavior gets ignored.
On the other hand, we live in a world where our reputations matter, and I think his piece about neckbeards shows he has a clue that insults add up. Also, insults wear on people, or at least a substantial proportion of people.
Trying to lower the sexual opportunities of people who already don’t have great opportunities is an attack, and Trump does that to non-beautiful women. And saying that an angry woman is having her period rather than addressing her actual point is a way of not taking women seriously.
This being said, Trump is overtly hostile to Mexicans (or Latinos in general?) and Muslims in ways that he isn’t to women.
Maybe that’s some of it.
But honestly, I doubt the journalists running hit pieces on Cruz and Trump are trying to figure out if they’re trustworthy. I think they made up their minds on topic a long time ago, and are looking for ammunition.
In the 1980s, it was alleged that heavy metal bands were including hidden messages in their records, telling their fans to kill themselves and suchlike. That doesn’t sound like a well intentioned effort to find the truth. It seems like more like motivated reasoning by people who hated heavy metal.
(I think it was Judas Priest that wondered why, if such things worked, they didn’t include hidden messages telling their fans to buy more records)
This. If Trump was in fact saying that Megyn Kelly was on her period, the point of saying so is to “explain” her anger at him and avoid engaging with her arguments – it’s not that I, Donald Trump, said something that could make a reasonable person angry, it’s that Megyn Kelly is on her period so of course she’s angry, nothing we should be paying attention to. This is a way of dismissing and delegitimizing a woman’s opinions and emotions – whenever a woman is upset with you, claim she’s on her period and you don’t have to listen to what she’s saying.
(Maybe similar to an experience I had where when I was a teenager my feelings were sometimes dismissed with “of course you’re upset, you’re a teenager and your hormones are being crazy so of course everything upsets you, it doesn’t mean I need to change my behavior”. Part of the problem here is that feelings should be taken into account even if their root is irrational, but also it’s just not true that teenagers, or women on their periods, can’t make rational arguments that should be evaluated on their merits!)
[Note that Trump says he was referring to her nose rather than her vagina, which is certainly possible. I’m just disputing the assertion that saying she’s on her period wouldn’t be sexist anyway.]
I missed this news story and now I’ve tried to catch up and totally don’t understand it.
Was she actually bleeding? Or is it a normal metaphor in the US to say that someone was so angry they were bleeding out their eyes or nose? I’ve never heard the saying before.
“Blood coming out of their eyes” is a fairly well-known phrase to indicate anger.
“Blood coming out of their [anything else]” is not a common phrase to indicate anger.
If you can widen the context a little from just anger…
“blood coming out of his ear”
– has sustained a head injury and is too shocked to notice it.
“blood coming from his nose”
– either frail, tendency to get unexplained nosebleeds, or weak and has just been punched
“blood on your hands”
-you know this one…
But I’d agree that what he meant was none of these. The larger point is that Trump is skilled in counter punching in today’s media environment, he shifts the attention from whatever point was being made, and now the egg’s on the journalist face, with plausible deniability.
My thoughts exactly. I agree with Scott’s larger point point ascribing hidden motivations to people you dislike, and I agree about the Ted Cruz example (don’t know the background of the other one). But When Trump insinuates that a debate monitor was being hostile towards him because she was on her period, that’s not a dog whistle – it’s just blatant sexism.
The problem I see with your argument that you are wrongly defining “dog whistle”. It’s not a way or effort to decipher the real beliefs of a politician by reading vague signs. It refers to a strategy in which a person tries to engage certain segment of the population by signaling fringe beliefs in a way that’s only recognizable to them. It doesn’t matter if the politician holds the belief or not, only that he is trying to exploit it for political gain.
Id Est: It’s not about if Trump is a misogynist, but about his efforts to engage a misogynistic part of the electorate with veiled misogynistic comments. (I’m using the case of Trump because in my view the one from Ken Livingstone is, as you say, due more to idiocy than antisemitism )
You are not talking about dog whistles but about something akin to the old sovietology.
Why does it matter? The point the article makes has nothing to do with the exact definition of dog whistle. Who is this a problem for?
People who dislike false statements?
People who like to be correct, like rationalists in general. I’m sure Scott appreciates the feedback.
There are two things under discussion:
a) Veiled comments, meant to only be understood as part of the audience while offering plausible deniability to the speaker
b) Slips of the tongue, where someone carelessly phrases something that could be interpreted the wrong way taken out of context.
You’re saying Scott is using “dog whistle” to mean b) whereas it actually means a). I think his point is more that the media tend to hunt for instances of b) and accuse them of being a). It seems both you and Scott aggree b) are not dog whistles.
I mean dog whistles are a thing. But the phrase has become, imho, a victim of a failure mode that happens a lot, mostly in ‘soft’ sciences and political discussion but often in other fields as well.
It goes like this:
1: A bunch of people who know quite a bit about a thing, possibly because they’re some kind of Expert but maybe just because they read about and discuss it a lot, come up with a word or phrase that describes a particular phenomenon. Within the context of the group, where people know the context and have a working knowledge of the subject area, the word or phrase is useful.
2: The media and/or People Who Are Wrong on the Internet pick up the phrase and, probably in good faith originally but with an eye to what gets the most attention, start overapplying and misusing it until it basically doesn’t mean anything of any use anymore.
3: (optional) People notice that the word or phrase is totally useless and meaningless now, and start wondering why the group from #1 would come up with such a meaningless and divisive concept, and update their models of the usefulness of listening to that group accordingly.
See also: ‘OCD’, ‘psychotic’, ‘hacking’, ‘safe space’, ‘sex-positive’, etc
If anyone is not aware, dog whistles were supposed to refer to things that totally are covert references and are intended to be understood that way by a specific subset of the audience. They are absolutely not something anyone says by mistake. The nature of dog whistles is that once one is universally acknowledged enough to serve as an example, people are no longer really using it, because it won’t work any more as a dog whistle. People may still use it as a kind of euphemism. Examples in this category would include ‘Urban’ (African-American), ‘family values’ (Christian social conservatism), ‘States’ Rights’ (historically, pro-segregation policies), ‘concern for our youth’ or ‘moral concern’ (UK Thatcher era, means ‘supports Section 28‘).
The idea is that in the heyday of their use – that is, before everybody associated these phrases with the policies in question – you could allude to your support for them in a way that would be picked up by a significant percentage of the intended demographic without scaring off more mainstream voters by referring to it directly, plus reporters won’t ask you questions about it because you never directly mentioned it.
Wait, do you mean, that dog whistles DON’T happen? Because I only heard the term a few years ago, but it seems inevitable — surely any politician with support from a base, especially a potentially controversial base, has lots of pressure to appeal to them, but also lots of pressure not to say anything that would be controversial to everyone else.
Or that they’re massively over-diagnosed? Because I hadn’t thought about that until you said so, but it seems likely — news and political opponents have every reason to seek them out whether they exist or not.
Dog whistles do happen, but most of the time the media don’t recognize them because the whole point of the dog-whistle is that people not in the know don’t hear them and most journalists have appalling mental models of their political opponents. Instead they mostly just take random things and try to interpret them such that they are a dogwhistle and then use it as ‘proof’ of their latent racism/sexism/whatever.
There’s a graduation on how “well hidden” a dog whistle can be – the stereotypical case, an actual whistle that only dogs can hear, is 100% undetected by non-dogs, but there is still use for intermediate cases, where the goal isn’t to go undetected but to offer plausible deniability. In which case it’s normal that the media reports on those.
There must be some name to the rhetorical trick that Livingstone used — purposely rephrasing something in the nastiest way possible, adding a bit of falsehood but leaving a tinge of truth so that the statement can be defended. What was his motivation?
I think it is the real-life, polarity-reversed version of being an Internet edgelord.
My best guess is that it’s some kind of (probably intuitive) attempt to influence the bounds of what’s sayable; if you say it, you’re using your standing to assert you can say it, and setting out that everything less bad than it is within bounds for subsequent conversation.
I’m not at all confident in it, because I can’t empathise with it properly and it mostly leaves me going “eurgh, stupid stupid stupid”. But it would go some of the way to explain why they don’t just *stop* doing it, or apologise much better than they do.
Using the terminology from these parts, it’s combination of maximum uncharitable interpretation with motte-and-bailey.
Making comments about a woman’s appearance is Bayseian evidence that that person is sexist. People who are sexist are more likely to pay attention to a woman’s appearance than people who aren’t, even if paying attention to a woman’s appearance is something that non-sexist people can do.
Of course it is also true that being a member of a minority group with a high proportion of criminals is Bayseian evidence that you are a criminal. We generally consider acting on that basis to be a form of prejudice that should be avoided. Acting as though a person is more likely to be sexist based on non-sexist Bayseian evidence is similarly a form of prejudice.
But we need to recognize that the use of Bayseian evidence this way is logically valid, and that if it is unfair to attack someone based on a dog whistle it is unfair despite the evidence, not unfair because of the lack of evidence. People who say that Israel should be moved to America are anti-Semitic with higher probability; people who make remarks about female anatomy are sexist with higher probability.
And at some point the probability may be high enough that it isn’t even a lot like prejudice any more. There aren’t minority groups whose members have a 50% probability of being criminals, but it’s entirely plausible that saying certain non-anti-Semitic things implies a 50% probability of being anti-Semitic.
“People who are sexist are more likely to pay attention to a woman’s appearance than people who aren’t…”
That only works if you adopt a pretty circular version of the word sexist.
There is no non-stupid definition for “sexist” because men and women are so tremendously different.
Noi, it works all the time. Remember how Bayseian evidence works: just because there are plenty of non-sexists doing it, it can still mean sexism is more likely.
So, where is the evidence that non-sexist people are less likely to pay attention to appearance? What’s the connection between superficiality and sexism other than they are both things we want to call bad?
(Some) sexist men judge women’s worth based on their appearance.
Ipso facto, they pay more attention to appearance.
It’s not a “number of times I noticed what a woman looked like” calculation. It’s the amount of weight being given.
No, rather it is the context it which the judgement is being made.
HBC:
It’s possible to find evidence in the vast majority of cases that a heterosexual man has preferences for which women he is interested in, because most humans have such preferences. If you refuse to consider such evidence as a general case for humans, and instead consider it on a case by case basis or only consider the case for men and not women, then you are making an isolated demand of the group in question.
Trump will die, because Trump is a mortal, and mortals die. However, claiming that there is Bayesian evidence that Trump is more likely to die is misleading, because it hijacks the Bayesian evidence for general mortal deaths without setting good priors for non-Trumps.
I’m pretty sure a massive majority of non-blind heterosexual men, sexist or not, pay a great deal of attention to women’s appearance.
Unless you’re being tautological and assuming “caring about appearance” is inherently sexist.
Caring is permitted. But there are acceptable contexts in which to mention it, and any kind of event at which journalists might be present is sufficiently a public event that you shouldn’t mention it.
There are many contexts in which it would be entirely reasonable for me to say that I find Natalie Dormer more attractive than Gwendoline Christie; if I said that even to a journalist while running a booth at a trade show then I would be deservedly pilloried for unprofessionalism.
“Caring is permitted. But there are acceptable contexts in which to mention it, and any kind of event at which journalists might be present is sufficiently a public event that you shouldn’t mention it.”
I think if you go back and look at all of the “sexist” Trump quotes, the vast majority of them occurred in contexts in which such talk was entirely appropriate (many of the worst offenders are from appearances on Howard Stern)
Most people pay attention to other people’s appearances, both men and women. That’s not necessarily sexist because appearances can tell us a lot about a person. Judging a woman by her appearance, especially her sexual attractiveness, more than you would judge a man is sexism. Especially in a context where sexual attractiveness is irrelevant.
I think the best example is politicians. We can all agree that politicians are mostly quite ugly compared to the general population. However, the Daily Mail doesn’t repeatedly run articles about the sexiness of male politicians on any given day, it does print loads of articles about female politicians necklines, breasts and so on.
If, as anecdote would have it, appearance is a much larger factor in then sexual attractiveness of women than that of men, then your argument doesn’t quite work: The fact that male politicians are not critisised for their appearance does not show that they are not evaluated with respect to sexual attractiveness.
On that sort of view, you might expect the media to pick up on inherent attractiveness characteristics of men other than appearance, whatever they are. However, the situation could still be worse: If sexual attractiveness of men is less tied to inherent characteristics than that of women, such as success in itself being attractive (and not only characteristics that correlate with success), then the sexual evaluation of male politicians is likely to be invisible insofar as it would, ipso facto, be reporting of their political standing.
I’m not sure how plausible to find that story because I don’t really understand the importance of appearance in male attractiveness. Research suggests that it is smaller than in women, but it’s unclear to me whether the difference is sufficiently large to give rise to the picture I’ve sketched above.
I can disagree with this. I’d argue that politicians are, on average, slightly more attractive than the general population, when adjusted for age.
That last part is crucial because the most physically attractive group in society – the young – is pretty severely under-represented among politicians. But if you compare your average member of Congress to your average 50-or-60-year-old, I’d bet that the Congress member would look pretty good.
If Trump is dumb enough to say out loud that he thinks women aren’t attractive without big breasts
This is inelegant and (doubtless unintentionally) misleading. I think the most we can say from that quote is that Trump thinks women aren’t as attractive without at least average size breasts. I think most men would agree with him on that.
Izumi Konata says otherwise.
I think you’ve seriously misread her. What she was trying to say is that there’s a substantial minority of men interested in women with smaller breasts and so she, with her substantially flat chest, is well placed to take advantage of this niche. It was framed as being supplemental to the understood default of “most men want at least average size breasts”, rather than replacing it.
Right, a non-trivial number of men have a preference for flatter chested women. That doesn’t negate anything I (or Trump) have said.
So I was going to write a comment on how I didn’t expect a president Trump to legislate in ways that disadvantage women and minorities (or at least not more so than another counterfactual republican president), but I Did expect more acts of racially motivated violence to happen if he wins. But then I realised that this impression I have is based almost entirely on how he treats race in his speeches, and I was conflating that with sexism. So, actually I don’t know enough about his position on women to make any useful comment!
Agree that press poring over speeches for ‘mistakes’ probably is unhelpful, but in the end the news reading populace in aggregate are probably largely responsible for that – I really get the impression that news organisations are ridiculously constrained in what it is possible to write and still make a living from. (That’s actually a big issue for me. News organisations in the 21st century are clearly a gigantic market failure, I would very much like to see some kind of solution)
I find that the solution is to ignore the opinion sections of most newspapers (usually, after a while, you can tell what the columnist is going to write just by his or her name anyway and it is rarely very insightful) and delegate that to blogs like this – where you meet a variety of people of very different opinions (including ones I had no idea existed before, such as the one whose name is spam-filtered here) and where despite this, the discussion does not usually degenerate into a fight (sometimes I feel like some people are going close to that even here, but given how widely diverse the opinions here are, it is still an acomplishment that it only happens to that degree and relatively rarely).
If you are looking for a “societal” solution and not just a personal one, I don’t know. State-run media are definitely not a better choice in my opinion. I do think that the BBC is actually better than many US new sources (although I basically only know the ones cited here and it is often as “look how terrible this journalist is”) although I do find some things annoying about them as well. More importantly, it does not prevent people to read The Sun (which I don’t know very well but I gather that it is a tabloid) instead. I think that subscription-based media ameliorate the problem a little, but still, at the end of the day, the media produce only that what they think their readers will read (not necessarily what they will like, or rather it is sometimes useful to write something they will be outraged about because it will make them share it all over the social media). In this sense it is hardly a market failure. It is just that most people don’t want to consume news to get a more accurate picture of the world or find out about what is happening but rather to feel better about themselves and their pre-existing views. The news outlets match that demand perfectly. Some of them are a bit better, because not everyone is like the people I described, but you cannot expect the journalists to be that much more insightful and thoughtful than the average person.
> I find that the solution is to ignore the opinion sections of most newspapers
Unfortunately, that’s been pages 1 through 78 for a while now.
Obviously, even reporters do not report in a completely unbiased way. A solution is to pick ideologically opposed (but not too ideological) new sources, compare how they report about the important events. If you can, you should choose some that don’t have a reputation of being dishonest (i.e. knowingly saying things which they know are not true). You can usually ignore anything that does not get a bigger coverage.
In fact, I have some doubts about there being a point in reading the newspapers at all (I still do it, although I try to limit the time I spend doing that…I have an excuse for reading German media which is to practice my German but I am trying to limit even the BBC to skimming through the main events of the week on Saturday or something like that). It is maybe 10% useful information and 90% noise. One particular example of almost pure noise are the weekly polls about politics here in Germany (I don’t know if they are done with such a frequency elsewhere). So you can read stuff like “party x gained 1% since last week because of [an ad hoc explanation by the journalist] and party y lost 0.5% because of [a different ad hoc explanation]”. Given that those differences are well within the error bounds, this is just complete junk. But people like to read stuff like that because it makes politics look more dynamic (“our team is winning”) and therefore entertaining.
Bad financial journalism is even worse for that.
The Financial Times is still reasonably competent, in that it has a body of journalists who together have a reasonable idea what the companies in the FTSE350 are doing and who have a clear sense of what’s signal and what is noise, but the BBC’s “market commentary” is just paragraphs of content-free reaction to each morning and each afternoon’s wiggle in the FTSE100 graph. The BBC has reasonable macroeconomic expertise, but the correct reaction to wiggles in the graph is silence.
I agree with the general point on dog whistles (there’s already plenty of things to discuss in people’s explicit statements, let’s not try to extrapolate even more), but to nitpick a bit:
Well, lack of public relations ability, or of a filter between the brain and the mouth *does* seem like it could make someone unqualified for being chief spokesman of the Nation.
Unsuited, not unqualified. He is qualified.
Why, what’s the difference? The ability to speak gracefully the way a president should is a qualification he does not have.
From Wikipedia:
Think of it like this – the asshole programmer from MIT who worked for NASA for ten years prior to receiving the programming position interview at your company, and who pisses off everyone at your company, is eminently qualified for the job. He is also extremely unsuited for it.
“Qualified” could mean “meeting the legal qualifications.”
But it is more likely a speaker will use it to mean “possessing qualities needed to succeed.”
Whether you correct them depends on whether you want to be charitable or pedantic.
Didn’t you already write about something similar? Seems quite strange to deny the reality of it now.
Livingstone does seem to have a bit of habit of putting his foot in it; http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/65425/ken-livingstone-jews-wont-vote-labour-because-they-are-rich in addition to the examples mentioned above. So I can see why people would be suspicious of him and tend to treat the most recent incident as supporting their suspicions.
Did you have another compact phrase in mind that captures the sense “low-grade disrespect for Jews as a class that nevertheless doesn’t meet some minimum bar for anti-semitism”?
This right here is, in my opinion, the nature of Labour’s antisemitism problem, such as it is, and it’s the same thing that’s behind most antisemitism in the left. It goes like this:
1. Buy into part of a stereotype – ‘Jews are rich/powerful’
2. That doesn’t feel like racism or antisemitism, cause it’s a good thing! It’s not like you think they’re bad – who doesn’t want to be rich/powerful?
3. It is just and righteous to fight inequality and ‘speak truth to power’ and ‘punch up’ and so on. Rich and powerful people are legitimate targets.
4. Sloppy thinking blurs the distinctions and reasoning
5. You’ve now got an ethnic group on your list of legitimate targets
> 1. Buy into part of a stereotype – ‘Jews are rich/powerful’
How does one “buy into” a fact?
Jews in the UK have tended to be rich and on the right — e.g., Tory Benjamin Disraeli was Queen Victoria’s favorite prime minister. Jews, especially those in the gold and diamond business in South Africa, played a sizable role in financing the right over the years, e.g., a Jewish South African mining baron financially bailed out Winston Churchill with a huge gift of money in 1938 at a historically crucial moment when Churchill’s giant debts threatened to drive him from Parliament so he could earn more money as a writer.
So it’s not surprising for a Labour leader to argue that Jewish support is hard to win because Jews tend to be affluent. In Britain that’s somewhat true.
“Fellow British politician Ken Livingstone defended him”
Defended her.
I really really hate the dog whistle analogy for the simple reason that actual dog whistles don’t work like the metaphorical “dog whistle.” A real dog whistle is something that the dog, for which it is intended, can hear but no human, for whom it wasn’t intended, can. The metaphorical dog whistles almost always trigger the party that is not the dog. The again, as the Last Psychiatrist says, if you’re reading it, then it’s for you.
And therein lies the secret of today’s media narratives. According to whatever journo is penning the story, you’re not supposed to hear the dog whistle but you totally do. You know, because you’re just that smart to see through the sophisticated coding being employed. So the reader gets to pat themselves on the back for being both not anti-semitic or racist and savvy enough to pick up Ted Cruz’ anti-semitism or Donald Trump’s racism.
The amusing thing is that Ted Cruz actually did use a dog whistle at one point and it worked exactly as intended. After one of the early primaries he said something about the body of Christ rising up and carrying him to victory. The journalist reported this as if Ted Cruz implied that Jesus would return to ensure his victory in the primaries. To a practicing Christian the phrase “the body of Christ” in that context means the group of followers.
Dog whistle success.
Dog whistles are meant to sound normal to everyone else and particularly appealing to those you’re whistling at. If this meant those not being whistled at thought he was actually saying he’d be backed by the second coming it sounds like a serious dog whistle fail to me.
For a dog whistle to work others need to be able to process the key bit in a different way. E.g. if someone says ‘support marriage’ I might think they mean ‘tax breaks’ which I don’t feel that strongly about but it might be code for ‘oppose gay marriage’ for those who care most. My US history is patchy but I think people saying they supported ‘States’ rights’ was at various points code for ‘specifically slavery/discrimination’ (so for instance someone who was a passionate supporter of State’s rights would be less likely to support the rights of a state to refuse to send a runaway slave back to their owner than someone who didn’t talk about State’s rights so much)
The “support marriage” example is a good one. Almost, anyway, since I don’t think too many people were fooled at the time gay marriage was being debated, so it is more of an example of trying to accentuate the positives than hide anything.
“Promote women’s health” is probably another example where liberal women hear it as primarily about abortion and the general public hears it as about a wider range of topics all equally.
But… that’s not a dog whistle either. There’s nothing “secret” about it. It’s a widely-known and openly acknowledged bit of metonymy that’s, like, 2000 years old. The fact that the media somehow didn’t understand it proves mostly that they’re willfully clueless about their own cultural heritage, not that Cruz successfully pulled off some ninja dog whistle.
@ pale red Anonymous
The amusing thing is that Ted Cruz actually did use a dog whistle at one point and it worked exactly as intended.
Exactly as intended? Rather, I’d guess by good luck.
1. To co-believers, Cruz says things like “the body of Christ” — a familiar metaphor to them.
2. The Shallow Media took it literally* and published: “Zombie Jesus! Nya nya silly Cruz!”
3. To better educated people this mistake functioned as a dog-whistle (though unintended by anyone) and they barked: “Nya nya silly Shallow Media!”:
4. Result: Shallow Media has egg on its face, and Cruz gets credit for a cunning billiards shot.**
* or pretended to
** Personally, I doubt if Cruz intended anything at all.
If you can hear the dog whistle, you are the dog.
If Ted Cruz’s reference was a dog whistle – coded language that only racists could hear while normal people would regard it as benign – then it seems it’s the liberal media who are the racists. A conclusion that will be more appealing to some than others, admittedly.
That seems to ignore the possibility of failed attempts at doing things.
That’s because the actual dog whistle is directed at journalists and it says, “See that man, you dogs of the press? Attack! Attack!”
And then they attack, each incident plastered all over their various output organs. Seem to be a well trained breed.
Actually, the metaphor is not that bad. A dog whistle is meant to get the dog to react, not to communicate more profoundly.
So in this model, you say “welfare queen” to get them to react on their hatred of those lazy black people, and you say “New York values” to get them to react on their hatred of Jews. But then someone who is observant enough could see how people react to that, and deduce that this is actually a coded message. In short, get a detector for the ultrasound that lets them notice the use of a dog whistle without actually hearing it.
I’m not saying the thing with NY values has any truth to it. It seems much more likely that Cruz was just attacking Trump, Clinton and Sanders in one soundbite, using the anti-elitism that resonates well with a portion of the Republican base. But that’s more because of the specifics than because dog whistles can’t exist.
You misunderstand me. I don’t think it’s a bad metaphor, or that dog whistles can’t exist.
I was quite serious in my conclusion that the liberal media are the “dogs” – the ones who bark crazily at secret messages only they can hear.
I agree. It often appears that the ones shouting about “dog whistles” are the only ones reacting, and the supposed targets of the whistle are like “huh?”
The typical Cruz supporter in the Great Plains is unaware that a very large fraction of the New York media people they don’t much cotton to — e.g., Geraldo Rivera — are Jewish. It’s just not something that comes up in the mental sphere of Hank Hill types. Geraldo Rivera, Donald Trump, George Steinbrenner … they all just seem like obnoxious New Yorkers to Cruz voters.
In contrast, the New York media people who don’t much like Cruz’s supporters are well aware of the immense disparate impact by white ethnicity in the media, the Forbes 400, and so forth. But the people currently on top don’t see much value in a well-informed discussion of what kinds of people get on top. Really, what’s in it for them? So, they’ve done a very good job of encouraging crimestop in the mental processes of the great majority of Americans on these subjects by berating anybody getting even close to such questions, and thus making clear that it’s Not Respectable to think about these things. So most people adopt what Orwell called “protective stupidity.”
I think that last quote about Hitler cuts both ways with respect to your thesis. Yes, it’s an example of people trying to read into a political figure’s words rather than taking them at face value, and being disastrously wrong. But people are also saying that Trump’s more extreme views are just an act to appeal to his base. It’s the same kind of “mind-reading,” but in a different ideological direction, so it seems incongruous with your earlier Trump examples.
Incidentally, do you ever listen to Sam Harris’ podcast? This is something he complains about frequently. Almost to the point of tedium, in fact, but I understand why he complains about it so much, because he has a group of fairly popular antagonists who seem to be gleefully and probably knowingly fabricating insidious alternate meanings to his every statement. (These people include Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan. In some circles, “Greenwalding” has become a new term for this sort of behavior.)
Here’s the thing about the Trump and misogyny / Trump and sexism / Trump and women thing. He does the opposite of dog whistling on the subject.
There are a million and one ways to look at someone’s physical appearance and guess with a pretty high degree of accuracy which candidate they support – especially earlier in the campaign season when there were more candidates and people could choose someone closer to their heart. Walking down the street on primary day in my town I could guess from 20 paces away who was for Bernie or Hillary or Trump – Kasich supports were totally undercover though (these only candidates with any support in my town).
To put it mildly – women who support Bernie or Hillary tend to be pretty ugly. Women, for very good reasons, are sensitive about that sort of thing and so build bubbles around themselves where the very idea of pointing out that woman is unattractive is taboo. Trump lived his life in a way that’s a rebuke to their existence and when he talks about what makes women attractive and what doesn’t it sets certain women off for understandable reasons.
— Ann Coulter
Admittedly, statistically married women are 20 percentage points more likely to be Republicans than single women. So, maybe there is some truth to it.
Something similar applies to Scott’s first point too.
There are lots and lots of Jews in the media and it’s a known, consciously used strategy. Here’s a quote from Spencer Ackerman (Jewish) from journolist (Ezra Klein’s old listserv (also Jewish)).
When you’re part of a tiny minority and you actually are involved in a conspiracy to push a policy (mass immigration) on a body politic that hates that policy then preemptively accusing others of bias towards your group can be effective if you control the megaphone.
Bingo! (You’re an anti-semite, by the way.)
Hey, you can save some space by just enclosing the name in a few parentheses.
: )
*”Married women are more likely to be Republicans, so Republicans are prettier.”*
Gee, I wonder if there are any other correlates for being Republican that could explain why so many of them are married?
Okay im fascinated by this , I have to ask what do supporters of each candidate look like. What physical traits do you use to guess these sort of preferences?
A wag on twitter put it this way:
“You can tell a man’s politics from his upper body strength. A woman’s by her waist size.”
Strong men – more right-wing/against redistribution; fat women – more left-wing/feminist?
Ding ding ding!
This is so, so ludicrous, that it’s probably just an attempt at trolling, but whatever:
Trump has very little support from college-aged women, thereby you are implying that the vast majority of girls in college are pretty ugly. I leave it to the reader to decide if that’s true.
Ehhhh i mean if you want to play devils advocate
http://jezebel.com/5950013/hot-or-not-why-conservative-women-are-prettier-than-liberal-ladies
And thats from jezebel which isnt exactly an outpost for the Heritage foundation.
He’s suggesting a general trend, which can be true on the average without being true about the college subgroup.
Furthermore, even in college, it is plausible that the majority are less attractive than the Trump-liking minority, even if they are still attractive on an absolute scale. For instance, suppose that liking Trump is correlated with belief in traditional gender roles, and that in turn is correlated with paying attention to one’s appearance.
It’s not implausible to say that supporter’s of Trump are on average more attractive than of Sanders. It’s implausible to say
Honestly, I think this statement is different from merely suggesting a general trend.
And he did not merely assert they were less attractive, but ugly. So every single non-ugly female supporter of Sanders and Clinton counts as evidence (though not proff) against that statement.
Supporters of Trump have a lower socio-economic status than supporters of Clinton and Sanders, which in turn is obviously correlated with looks.
By the same reasoning used in your college example (which is not valid reasoning), I could ask why you think that black people tend to support Trump.
This is AAA grade bullshit served to you by an upper class press that assumes bigotry comes from people not of their class. Median household of Trump supporters (in states with exit polling) is 72k, median of Clinton and Bernie is 61k.
Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/
Hm, that’s interesting, and makes my argument fly out of the window completely. Thanks.
Don’t worry, I’m sure if they’re ever forced to acknowledge that, the media will slide right back into its “Democrats are the party of the people while Republicans only represent the interest of the rich elite!” rhetoric that has served them so well every other time!
You do know something can be both offensive to your sensibilities and true right?
Your reaction is pretty much a concrete example of what people who rail against political correctness are yelling about.
Stereotypes exist for a reason. They weren’t pulled from thin air by evil x-ists trying to pollute the minds of the pure with oppressive memes.
So in conclusion, somebody makes a statement that is controversial, provides nothing but an anecdote, not a shred of plausibility, you come along and claim without evidence that statement to be a stereotype, and from there it follows that it must be true. Interesting.
>Stereotypes exist for a reason. They weren’t pulled from thin air by evil x-ists trying to pollute the minds of the pure with oppressive memes.
“All stereotypes are true”. On SSC.
…maybe the people who said the comments section is going downhill have a point.
“Stereotypes exist for a reason” is not the same thing as “all stereotypes are true”. Your post, for example, exists for a reason. A more sensible/charitable interpretation would be “it shouldn’t be the default, unquestionable assumption that all stereotypes are false”.
Elsewhere in the thread you argued that someone who made a generalising comment about women would probably be more likely to hold sexist attitudes than would a randomly picked individual.
What is that, if not stereotyping?
@Anonymous
That just sounds like simple statistics, with the premise that “holding sexist attitudes” is positively correlated with “making a generalising comment about women.”
Technically all stereotypes are true, in that they provide predictive power better than chance (except in the rare and short lived scenario where they have only recently ceased to match up with reality and are on the way out).
“Black men are violent” matches up with the massive prevalence of the black population in prison
“Asians are hard working” fits with the data which says Asians are more socially mobile than the general population
“Men are rapists” (left wing stereotype) fits with the data which says the vast majority of sexual assailants just so happen to have 2 chromosomes
The argument against stereotypes isn’t that they aren’t true, they provide valuable knowledge that is incredibly useful when lacking other knowledge (your walking alone down a dark street, do you walk towards the young black men or the young white women), it’s that they’re damaging when taken to far by a critical Mass of the population.
The idea that all stereotypes are wrong is a weird byproduct of the culture wars where people with sacred beliefs will twist themselves into the most absurd positions to avoid signaling anything other than “Fuck the outgroup”
>“All stereotypes are true”. On SSC.
No, all stereotypes contain truth or a meme would never have become widespread enough to become one.
Something that is blatantly untrue either never becomes a stereotype or quickly fades out of the collective consciousness.
Leftists being homely misfits has been around for a long time.
So if every stereotype contains a grain of truth, should I search my matza for the toenail of a Christian infant?
Even the most pernicious lie (Jews eat Gentile babies) contains a grain of truth (Jews eat).
lol
The anon said that the truth in a stereotype is necessary for the meme to spread. So you are claiming that the idea that Jews eat babies spread because people understood that Jews eat.
I remain skeptical.
I don’t think that “Jews eat Christian babies” is what we mean by “stereotype”. It’s not a general characteristic of Jews, it’s a specific (false) accusation.
“Jews are greedy and stingy” is a stereotype, which (like the others) has some kernel of truth while being not true of every Jew.
I don’t see how you’re distinguishing between “accusation” and “stereotype” here. In both cases a claim is made about Jews; the only difference is that in one case the claim is true of no Jews and in another case the claim is true of some Jews.
(And that can’t be your distinction between “accusation” and “stereotype” because it would be circular reasoning: if you define a stereotype as a claim which can sometimes be true, then of course every streotype will have a kernel of truth by definition.)
The true part is that Jews eat matzoh and non-Jews don’t.
This was truer back when there was more religious differentiation. These days, there are more non-observant Jews and more Christians doing some sort of Seder and/or attending Jewish Sedars and/or eating matzoh because they like it.
And if the accusation was that Jews are poisoning the wells? What’s the kernel of truth, that Jews with access to wells exist? What’s the kernel of truth in “Jews have horns on their head”, is it that Jews have heads?
I think people are falling for the nerd trap of taking aphorisms extremely literally.
“Stereotypes exist for a reason” does not imply (in the “A → B” sense) that absolutely every stereotype is factually true. A counterexample of an obviously untrue stereotype is useful, because it demonstrates that stereotypes are necessarily crude and only provide weak evidence. But it doesn’t mean one should disregard stereotypes out of hand either.
Also, falling into a different nerd trap myself, I’m not sure that the Blood Libel really counts as a stereotype exactly. A better example of a stereotype utterly unmoored from reality would be one of the goofier stereotypes I’ve heard, that Asian women have sideways genitalia. No idea where that came from or how common it is but it cracked me up when I first heard it.
You notice that blood libel and eating christian babies is conspicuously absent from modern antisemitism, its almost as if false stereotypes have a half life.
Although agreed these really don’t neatly fit into the realm of stereotype, mostly because i don’t think anyone actually believed them in a “bet you 50 buck we find the blood of a christian baby if we search X jewish houses” (indeed even the most virulent anti-semite would admit, if pressed, that destressed christian babies would be more common in christian households) rather these memes are the result of group hate fests and needing something to justify themselves (just like i doubt any SJWs actually think they’ve found a virulent racist when they catch someone in a gaff, they just want to justify their tormenting someone for fun).
Compare that with “chinese men run small businesses” and “black men are criminals”,
if we surveyed 100 chinese men and 100 of the general population i would put down money, as would most people, that there is a higher prevalence of small business ownership in the chinese male population.
Likewise i would put down money that more black men had been to prison than the average rate of the adult population.
The hatred of stereotyping seems to be an isolated demand for rigor.
We yell at little old ladies for saying “black men are violent”, then go back to discussing “the prevalence of violent crime in the black male population”, its basically discrimination against people who speak at an 8th grade reading level
You’re not really supposed to talk about “the prevalence of violent crime in the black male population” either. I don’t think it’s a matter of register, it’s a matter of sending the right signals and using enough indirection to indicate that you don’t really want to talk about the prevalence of violent crime in the black male population but you have to as part of your academic work or whatever. People who talk about race scientifically without proper hygiene just get labeled as “scientific racists”.
It was my understanding that the truth behind “Jews are poisoning the wells” is that Jews weren’t dropping dead of the plague as often (largely because their ritual practices gave them better hygiene than medieval Christians in Europe) although I haven’t verified this and might be repeating an urban myth.
Really, the true part of a lot of these Jewish blood libel type accusations is “Jews are an insular community that put their own people’s interests above ours and have weird rituals we don’t understand.” And in many of the specific cases it was “And little Ivan went missing and is presumed dead.”
The old versions of the blood libel have died off since now everyone even remotely aware of Jewish practice knows what matzah is.
But one older anti-semitic lie is still going strong–the Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracy theory still has followers because it remains a fact that Jews are disproportionately influential and successful in business.
And blood libel still exists too, just in a more modernized form–accusations that Israelis harvest Palestinian organs to use in Jewish patients.
I refer you back to SolipsisticUtilitarian’s comment. The contention at issue here is not “Trump supporters are more attractive, on average, than Hillary or Bernie supporters.” It is “Hillary and Bernie supporters tend to be ugly,” based on purely anecdotal evidence. I could *literally* make the opposite claim, as I know many supporters of Bernie and Hillary who are non-ugly, and, in many cases, quite attractive. But I am not going to make that claim, because I recognize that my sample is highly biased, and my evidence, therefore, thin.
That said, I do think it would be a fun parlor game to guess at which primary candidate had the most conventionally attractive supporters, on average. I’d say probably either Kasich (because they tended to be upscale traditionalists) or Bernie (because they tended to be young).
Kasich supporters were not upscale traditionalists. Those were Cruz and Rubio supporters.
Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition— a history of non-Jews inventing their ideas about Judaism.
Yes, I’d expect the order of pulchritude of female supporters to be Bernie>Trump>Hillary, based mostly on age.
I’m sure even bringing it up makes us all sexists though.
Wow, what a great anecdote! You looked at women you thought were unattractive and just *knew* they were Democrats!
Anecdotally, I know plenty of attractive Clinton and Sanders supporters of all genders. Clearly, my hunch that Clinton and Sanders supporters are hotter than average outweighs your hunch.
I really expect more from a supposedly rationalist forum.
Let me be as charitable as possible to the original claim here by purple anon. It could well be that being unattractive correlates (maybe even causes) a lowered quality of life, which in turn correlates (definitely causes) a desire to be politically contrarian, since, well, whatever we’re doing clearly isn’t working given how bad I’m having it, right?
Hence, if OP purple anon lives in a conservative area, dissenters would be liberal and unattractive to him. And vice versa.
This accords with my own anecdata, anyway.
Even if anon’s claim is true, they explicitly provide their “evidence” – they could just tell which strangers supported who while walking down the street.
No but that’s my point though – maybe he really does have a good heuristic which works for his immediate vicinity after all. My personal experience is almost perfectly inverse because attractive people where I come from, those fuckin’ normies, tend to just not care at all about politics and just go with the flow with a kind of smug, self-satisfied mild liberalism in a slightly unconsidered, unreflective way. Maybe he’s witnessing the same thing in his area, but in reverse…
…ah, fuck it, I’m working way too hard to salvage the shitposting of an idiot. Never mind.
Hmmm I actually think that contrarianness and attractiveness have a u-shaped curve. The least and the most attractive tend to be contrarians. I used to be a fat kid a while back and was a contrarian who cared about politics cause fuck it no need to hide my interests it cant lower my popularity ( I was a liberal). Then as I lost weight and puberty started kicking in ( but not yet had its max effect), I then became apolitical, then later as I got quite buff and classically handsome by the standards of my social group ( am a minority so I take a hit for that in general population attractiveness rankings), I had the power to say what I wanted and openly quote my newfound libertarian views. A strong jawline and broad shoulders gave me greater latitude to express my opinions because people are willing to forgive slightly contrarian opinions from attractive people.
How do you know that you were right? Did you ask them to confirm your predictions? I’m having a hard time believing this. It sounds like you’re just assuming you predicted right.
Again, I don’t really think you have any real evidence for this.
I think the taboo around pointing out that a woman is (/would be agreed by a majority in our society to be) unattractive is good and helpful. It exists not to spare those women’s feelings, but to combat the idea that women’s primary value is in their attractiveness.
This, I think, is the root of the claims that Trump is sexist. I don’t think Trump is a misogynist, but it’s hard to argue that the owner of the Miss World franchise (and source of the “not a 10” quote) is not actively promoting the idea that women’s primary value is in their looks. Trump may not be a sexist as defined in the post, but his worldview is sexist.
Only counted button wearers or pro canvasers. In NY there’s a high density of both and Sanders supporters look exactly like you would expect – the guys are skinny weak looking losers and the women are fuglies. Hillary gets the uptight scolds over 40.
Yes, this is a sample bias based on who’s passionate enough about a candidate to wear a button or canvas for them.
To put it mildly – women who support Bernie or Hillary tend to be pretty ugly.
This is just a trollish shitpost. DAE think democrats r ugly?
I have several problems with this post; I think it’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the modern accusation of racism, sexism, or any of the other unpleasant -isms means.
Naively, we might think of “racism” as referring to some distinct mental state. To be a racist is to think a certain way, to believe in a certain ideology that, at its core, explicitly states that one race is inferior. Under this reading, if we call a statement racist, what we are really doing is drawing an inference between the statement and some hypothesized mental state belonging to the speaker.
The view espoused – perhaps in articulately, but still, I think, espoused – by SJ types and even more mainstream liberal thinkers is that statements and actions can be facially racist. That is, they are racist without reference to some core mental state/ideology on the part of their utterer. These statements and actions act almost autonomously. For example, an older white man who calls a black woman “articulate” and “refined” likely has no hatred in his heart for black people. But his comments – positive on the surface – unearths a history of racism (particularly, the idea that intelligent black people are exceptions to the rule, “a credit to the race”). This is the ide of the micro aggression. A racist, in this reading of racism, isn’t someone with a particular mental state indicating hatred of another race; rather, it’s someone who makes racist statements and acts in racist ways without attempting to address and correct their behavior.
When Donald Trump says that, for example, a federal judge cannot preside over his case because of his ethnic background, that is a facially racist statement. Trump can go on about how much he loves Hispanics all he wants (and ultimately, no, I don’t think Trump has some Hitlerist belief about Hispanics being literally Ubermenschen), but that doesn’t change the fact that his statement is facially racist.
I think you make a further mistake in assuming that dog-whistles indicate something about the mental state or the utterer. The whole idea of dog-whistling is to signal to *voters* that you belong to a certain tribe. I don’t know if Cruz meant “New York Values” as a dog whistle, but even if he did, that doesn’t mean he deep down dislikes Jews or anything like that.
If dog whistling wasn’t a real thing, Trump wouldn’t have the support he does among the ideologically racialist alt-right. The alt-right sees Trump as one of their own (or close enough) despite his protestations that he isn’t racist. Now, the alt-right may or may not be right – that’s for history to decide – but Trump has definitely said the sort of things that make them *think* he’s with them.
“The whole idea of dog-whistling is to signal to *voters* that you belong to a certain tribe.”
That’s not a dog whistle. That’s just politics. You don’t buy a dog whistle to communicate to your dog that you’re really a dog, as well. You buy a dog whistle to communicate to your dog in a frequency that human beings can’t hear.
Why would Trump need a dog whistle to communicate with alt-right? His statements about Mexicans and Muslims are pretty clear indications of where he stands on immigration. Personally, I think his positions and the positions of the alt-right are clearly racist, but I don’t see what the dog whistle claim adds to this analysis other than as a way of flattering the reader for being clever enough to see through what wasn’t particularly difficult to see in the first place.
I don’t think this is very predictive. Let me propose an alternative hypothesis that I think better explains what’s going on.
The SJ view is that whites, men, and conversatives are bad. If the same statement is made by a conservative white man and a liberal latina woman, the former will be condemned for it and the latter will be lauded for it.
For example:
You may recall Sonia Sotomayor saying, in 2001, the following:
Did the anti-racists and anti-sexists say “well, Sotomayor thinks that ethnicity and sex can influence decisionmaking, therefore she’s a bad choice for the Supreme Court because of her racism and sexism”? Or did they say “yes, this is exactly why we need her on the court”?
I agree with Ken White of Popehat when he criticized her for saying that, pointing out that it gave cover for genuinely nasty things like Trump’s Judge Curiel stuff.
Having said that, I think this is slightly uncharitable. Sotomayor wasn’t suggesting that a white man wasn’t Qualified to be a judge. It was that she was Qualified Plus, since she had all the resume and greater life experience. There’s a distinction there.
I’m going to reiterate that it was a stupid thing to have said nonetheless, because I suspect it will be necessary.
Also, she said “a wise Latina woman”– that is, not just any Latina woman.
The question is – was she implying that among Latina women, she was uniquely wise, or that Latina women generally are wiser than their non-Latina counterparts?
I believe that she meant both, disjunctively. Viz., that in order to achieve the Qualified Plus status that she possessed, she had to fulfill the two separate and unconnected conditions of being “learned and intelligent” and “Latina”.
But I can understand why it was taken as straightforwardly implying Latina=necessarily wiser than any others. Hell, for all I know, that really was what she meant.
It was that she was Qualified Plus, since she had all the resume and greater life experience.
So if I say that a white man would be Qualified Plus to be president, on account of all the cultural heritage running successful polities, would that be OK? And if I then indicate that we obviously want the Most Qualified president?
It’s not OK, and I believe I explicitly indicated as such.
But it is different from claiming that a white man inherently and by definition cannot be POTUS. Which is the comparator here.
If everyone accused of blowing a dog whistle were to be extended this level of interpretive charity, that would be a good thing.
Justice Sotomayor’s career has benefited from affirmative action, which she has promoted going back to college years, and her wise Latina quip was intended to promote more affirmative action for wise Latinas like, to pick a nonrandom example, herself.
erenold – I think you’re being a bit uncharitable to Trump. He didn’t say Curiel was unqualified to be a judge, but that he was unqualified to judge HIS case. He was basically accusing him of a conflict of interest.
And I thin Sotomayor’s comment is worth beinging up here, because basically she’s saying that a judge’s race is an interest, and affects their judging. Well, if being Latino can affect your judging positively in some cases, can’t it affect it negatively in others?
I don’t tend to think that’s a significant distinction – if someone really is racially unfit to serve as a judge in particular cases, then he’s unfit to serve as a judge, period. Ken White made a very important point here – a key pillar of confidence in a judicial system is that judges must not just be impartial, they must be assigned impartially. A justice system doesn’t work and can’t inspire confidence if you are drawing from a fundamentally different pool of jurists from me every time we go to court.
As for this:
I unreservedly agree with you.
Trump’s argument seems to be that he (Trump) has said bad things about Mexico, therefore a judge with Mexican heritage is likely to be prejudiced against him because of those statements. I don’t think this is a particularly sound argument, but even if it were true it doesn’t imply that judges of Mexican heritage are unfit in general.
One might consider whether a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan might have a reasonable complaint about a black judge presiding over a dispute involving him but completely unrelated to race. Ken White says you’re not allowed to make that complaint, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true; it seems quite reasonable on its face to suggest that a judge of race or ethnicity X might be biased against a notorious (truly or not) hater of ethnicity X, even if as a matter of public policy the courts don’t accept that argument.
Wait, sorry, I don’t follow this. Why not? As I’ve said, I think – and I believe that the legal practitioners’ consensus certainly is – a judge can only be meaningfully described as ‘fit’ for office if we can trust him to adjudicate impartially in every matter brought before him regardless of its subject matter. He’s either fit to judge everything or nothing at all.
To me, it follows that if you say a ‘Mexican’ judge cannot hear your case impartially, then he is not fit for office period; if the only reason you believe that judge cannot hear your case impartially is because he is Mexican then necessarily you are implicitly saying all ‘Mexican’ judges are necessarily unfit for office.
I consider the sexist stuff goofy in the main, I consider his response to the Orlando shooting incomprehensible. But this is the first time he has said something I genuinely consider dangerous to your Republic. It seems to me to be a fundamental assault on one of the most basic tenets of liberal democracy.
I mean it seems overwhelmingly obvious that the only reason Trump is saying this is to pre-emptively call into question the decision if/when the judge decides against him.
It seems likely that Trump (or some advisor he actually listened to) believes that the potential damage for a finding against him in the case (without qualification) is greater than the potential damage for calling into question the judge’s objectivity.
Trump has already planted the seed such that, if/when the judge rules against him, he can brush it off and say “this is no big deal at all, everyone knew this biased judge was going to find this way, don’t worry, i’ll be appealing my unfair treatment (which won’t be decided until after the election)”
Quare – does that make it worse, or better?
In my opinion, better. Shows that it’s not just Trump spewing hate for no reason, but rather a somewhat intelligently calculated political and legal strategy.
By that reasoning there’s no such thing as a judge with a conflict of interest and any judge who recuses himself for a conflict of interest should be immediately fired because admitting that might be unfair in even one case makes him generally unfit as a judge.
That’s simply not true, or we wouldn’t have recusals at all.
Judges aren’t expected to be able to judge everything impartially, that’s why judges somewhat frequently recuse themselves. Justice Kagan recused herself from at least one case recently, can’t remember exactly which one, but she had argued it in her role as solicitor at a lower court. This doesn’t make her generally unfit.
Wasn’t there some connection between judge Curel and La Raza? That would seem to be a more direct connection to “likely opponent of Trump” as opposed to “merely has Mexican heritage”.
Beyond that though there is certainly a strain of thought, evident in reaction to Clarence Thomas as well as Sotomayor, that judges are expected to rule in a certain way as “representatives” of their race and face a backlash if they don’t.
I’d heavily wager that if Trump wins the case, the judge will get at least some degree of “Uncle Tom” type slurs thrown at him. Maybe he’s above all that and can still rule impartially, but it’d hardly be shocking if it has some effect on him.
You’re all right, but let me rephrase that – a judge must be able to adjudicate all conflicts impartially less the rare, minor and not presently triggered exception of a ‘personal’ conflict of interest, within the boundaries of what that term of art specifically means. I.e., matters in which he has a personal interest (personal meaning personal, not racial, not political, not anything else). It does violence to the concept of a conflict of interest – which, again, is a specific term of art with a specific meaning – to suggest that ethnic heritage should be included.
Gbdub – I’m not certain, but I believe that’s an entirely different Hispanic lawyer’s association also called ‘La Raza’, not the National Council. Nor, I’m given to understand, is there much overlap between the activities of the two. I may need to be corrected on this though.
I believe you meant Untermenschen 😉
I did. I typed that comment out on my phone. Auto-correct butchered a few things.
I don’t think ‘ road to the unconscious’ is central to dog whistle accusations. Quite often you can thing someone is dog whistling insincerely. It’s about saying things which seem undramatic to most people bit to some particular group suggest you’re a partisan for them. It’s a summary of exploring the fact that different people will hear the same words differently. E.g on immigration, some people think ‘ control of our borders’ means we know and can control what’s going on, some that immigration will be cut sharply and maybe some that we’ll kick out foreign-looking or sounding people. It’s a blurry category, partially because it overlaps with euphemism. So I’d someone says they’ll make sure housing in a city only goes to people with ‘SimCity values’ this could be empty, could mean something about values or could be code about keeping out a group not ethnically sim.
On pointing out all the press highlighting dog whistles – that seems to me to be a pretty generalizable argument that subterfuge doesn’t exist because all the examples on the press weren’t successful.
On an unrelated note, this post reminds me of the pilot of West Wing. And if I wax lyrical about how great I think West wing is some might read that as a dog whistle of Democrat sympathies!
On an unrelated note, this post reminds me of the pilot of West Wing. And if I wax lyrical about how great I think West wing is some might read that as a dog whistle of Democrat sympathies!
But if I say I also get that WW vibe from the post (which I didn’t until you mentioned it, and now can’t get it out of my head) and go on to say that Toby Ziegler is awesome and that I loved a great deal of TWW, esp in the early years…
…and It Is Known that I don’t have Democrat sympathies…
…does that make it a neutral reference?
No, seriously, is that how dog whistles work? Because I have never been able to figure this out.
In all seriousness: yes, what your intent/position is or seems to be will affect what seems to be dog whistling. Which also leads to the situation where people can say punchier things if it’s in an area where they’re associated with the other side. So if someone from a historically very pro-immigrant type group says we need to do something to ensure better integration or ability to speak the host country’s language, neither the hard-right nor the media are likely to see this as a coded ‘I’m going to deport people or cut them off from services because they seem too foreign’. Whereas if someone fairly anti-immigrant already does it, both will.
Why Why Why Godwin yourself?
are you really this bored with your site that you just want to see it burn?
and about Ken Livingstone
when someone expresses the zionism=nazism meme that means that they would tolerate violence against jews as long as it is justified as antizionism
“When I think of “sexist” or “misogynist”, I think of somebody who thinks women are inferior to men”
Barbara Res said:
“He said: “I know you’re a woman in a man’s world. And while men tend to be better than women, a good woman is better than 10 good men.” … He thought he was really complimenting me.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html
I know this is missing the point, but implying someone is better than 10 other good candidates put together really is complimenting them, it’s just that the quote upset Res for obvious reasons.
Further up the page, erenold says as to what constitutes sexist behavior:
“I merely need to exhibit a pattern of behaviours in which I systematically treated women unfairly because they were women (as opposed to genuine factual differences, for instance, because they are physically weaker, physically indisposed on a certain schedule, less good at realistically portraying Conan the Barbarian, etc.)”
One could charitably say that Trump’s use of “in a man’s world” implies Trump considers the frame of discussion to be one in which the factual differences between the sexes play a role. One of the biggest points of contention in the debate over sexism is the size of the area where we are permitted to acknowledge that the sexes are different. It’s still possible to consider Trump’s definition of this area to be overly broad and thus subconsciously sexist, but it would rule out overt misogyny.
This seems a little uncharitable. You make it sound like one side of the debate are aware of sex differences that they are censoriously forbidding you from acknowledging. But I think they are arguing in good faith and genuinely believe that innate sex differences are small to non-existant in many areas, and other areas where sex difference is real it is often irrelevant.
‘Permitted to acknowledge’ was perhaps a strong phrase, and is likely a result of my bias on the issue, but I think the point in general stands. Differences that are ‘small’ or ‘real but irrelevant’ are still there, and we can disagree over what counts as relevant.
I can certainly argue that the reaction to, to pick a well known example, Larry Summers arguments about cognitive differences between men and women suggested that the experimental results he brought up were not to be discussed. How do you determine if the differences are relevant if it is assumed for political reasons that they are irrelevant until proven otherwise and, as in the corporate world, suggesting that you even think about ‘irrelevant’ differences can be taken as evidence of bias and thus render you legally vulnerable?
Yes, I think it’s a super interesting and difficult question, because we don’t want to censor ideas, but at the same time, we don’t want to create a hostile environment for some people by having our leaders say that their group is just inherently no good at [activity X].
Personally, I’m open to scientists in the context of debate about sex differences discuss the possible causes of sex difference in various activities, so I don’t think he should have been fired on the basis of that talk*.
On the other hand, I have a lot of sympathy for female mathematicians who have been hearing that they’re naturally not as good as men all their lives. It must be very dispiriting to hear it again from someone in a position to hire and fire them. Especially when we can never know how much someone’s belief that a specific group is less capable is going to bias them against hiring and academically supporting members of that group.
*And there is some suggestion that he wasn’t.
” because we don’t want to censor ideas, but at the same time, we don’t want to create a hostile environment for some people …”
Of course people want to censor ideas, especially empirically accurate ideas about mean differences and variances. Larry Summers, James D. Watson, Jason Richwine, they all lost their jobs for being empirically right … to encourage the others.
“On the other hand, I have a lot of sympathy for female mathematicians who have been hearing that they’re naturally not as good as men all their lives.”
And this is part of the problem in that female mathematicians, or those that claim to speak for them, are hearing discussions about mean differences and variances as slurs against individuals.
One of the problems seems to be that we have a fairly easy to understand model of the difference between males and females in athletic performance based on physiology. The men’s world record for the 100m dash is 9.58s, and for the women it’s 10.49s. Looking across most records, the top men’s record is about 5-10% faster than the top women’s record. It’s a simple, objective comparison. The problem, I suspect, is the tendency to mentally apply this paradigm to more subjective comparisons. When we hypothesize that there are more males than females in the 99.99% bracket for mathematical ability, it does not mean we believe that the top women are 5-10% worse at math than the top men.
Likewise, a woman that can run the 100m in 15s is just as fast as a man that can run the 100m in 15s, even though more men can run the 100m in 15s. It makes no sense to say ‘there’s a man that ran the 100m in 10s, therefore a woman that ran the 100m in 15s is not as fast as a man that ran the 100m in 15s’. When dealing with a broad group such as ‘female mathematicians’, we’re dealing limited to having to use vague criteria to compare people, like ‘does this person have a PhD in math’ which maps to ‘can this person run the 100m in less than 15s’.
And the woman who ran the 10.49 second 100m dash 28 years ago was pumped to the max on artificial male hormones after calling Ben Johnson for training advice. She immediately retired after tougher drug testing was instituted in 1989.
>One could charitably say that Trump’s use of “in a man’s world” implies Trump considers the frame of discussion to be one in which the factual differences between the sexes play a role. One of the biggest points of contention in the debate over sexism is the size of the area where we are permitted to acknowledge that the sexes are different.
Of course it is. Trump is saying that this is a “man’s world” because “men tend to be better than women”. This is widely considered to be both false and rooted in sexism where it does appear.
Even if this is untrue, you haven’t proven that, merely asserted it.
I think “in a man’s world” was used as “in a setting that is male dominated”; that’s the usual meaning of the idiom, anyway. The statement that “men tend to be better than women” is separate; you might reasonable consider that one sexist. However, if that statement was not prejudice but based on his experience with men and women in that setting, you risk labeling “recognizing an actual pattern” as “sexist”.
I know I’ve proven nothing. I said that this was a charitable interpretation of Trump’s statement.
“The person I hired to be my personal representative overseeing the construction, Barbara Res, was the first woman ever put in charge of a skyscraper in New York…I’d watched her in construction meetings, and what I liked was that she took no guff from anyone. She was half the size of most of these bruising guys, but she wasn’t afraid to tell them off when she had to, and she knew how to get things done.”
I’d consider it reasonable to assume that if someone is the first woman to do something, then the setting is one that is male dominated. Reading the description further bears out this supposition.
Naz Shah is a woman.
Re: the specific object-level issue of Trump and sexism:
I don’t think that Trump’s comments show that he has some kind of generalized contempt for women, but they do suggest that he doesn’t compartmentalize his sexuality very much when he’s interacting with them, and often lets his thoughts about their whether or not he would fuck them or they would fuck him dominate his evaluation of them. (This is especially prominent in some of his comments about female contestants on “The Apprentice,” or the way that he mixes appearance-based insults into his attacks on enemies like Rosie O’Donnell.) In that way, he’s sort of like tumblr feminists who go to great lengths to attack fat aspie neckbeards– they might not have some kind of generalized contempt for men, but the way they frame their comments suggests that a man’s attractiveness shapes how they feel about him in important ways. I think that this pattern of behavior is bad, but that it’s probably not “sexism” as it’s traditionally been defined. Unfortunately, the universe of clickbait political journalism doesn’t reward nuance or carefulness with definitions.
I think this pattern of behavior generally is sexist because
(a) in society as a whole, it’s much more common for this to apply to women – in general women are evaluated for their attractiveness much more than men are
(b) given existing gender imbalances of power, most people with significant control over people’s livelihoods are male, so even if men and women did this to each other equally, it would still have a disparate impact on women
(c) in the context of the Tumblr feminists you refer to, I think in many cases there’s significant prejudice against men, so it’s still sexist (or if one prefers the other definition of “sexist”, then it’s gender-prejudiced, whatever)
(d) specifically in the context of someone who’s trying to be President (or the CEO of a company, or even a manager, really), this is really good evidence that the impact of this person in that role would be sexist. Like, if a female manager makes employment decisions about men based on their attractiveness, but she hires women irrespective of their attractiveness, the impact of her being in that role is biased against men because she’s forcing men, but not women, to do the additional labor of becoming attractive. Similarly, if Trump becomes President and makes employment decisions in this non-sexuality-compartmentalizing way, the impact would be biased against women. Plus of course if he actually talks to his subordinates in this way, that also introduces a sexist impact because in general people tend to dislike being assessed sexually at work, so he’d be creating a hostile workplace for women but not men.
Also, Trump isn’t bisexual, so judging people based on whether he wants to fuck them will only apply to one sex.
You can’t generalize that rule, though, unless you want to argue that all non-bisexual people are inherently sexist.
All non-bisexual people who significantly judge people of their preferred gender by their appearance in contexts where their appearance shouldn’t matter.
(I should have said in part (d) above that this part doesn’t fully apply to bisexual people. Though as a bisexual person, I think my standards for men and women are different enough that if I hired people based on their appearance the impact would probably be kind of unequal anyway.)
This is my thought on the issue too. I think there is a large extent to which Trump does act on a lot of stereotypes regarding gender. And the attacking people on looks thing is a part of this.
I do think, especially in the Livingstone case, there’s a deterrent effect that has to be considered, in addition to the question of his policies. I read something Ross Douthat wrote a long time ago when he was at the Atlantic, making the case that adultery really should be semi-disqualifying for a politician. It wasn’t that he thought infidelity makes you a worse statesman, but that, by making an example of these prominent figures, we reinforce a societal norm against infidelity, for people who aren’t public figures. Livingstone’s a similar deal — making an example of him reinforces a societal norm against anti-Semitism. (I’m not sure whether I believe this myself, actually, but an argument could be made to that effect.)
Also, if you’re unfaithful to someone you supposedly love, why should anyone think you’ll be faithful to the interests of thousands or millions of people you don’t even know?
People compartmentalize.
Explanation: He never loved Hillary in the first place – she was a tool to help him advance his political career (as was he for her)
If all the real marriages out there lasted as long as the Clintons’ fake marriage, we’d be in much better shape.
Well, back in the day when marriage was primarily thought of as an economic transaction, divorce rates were pretty low, right?
Well sure. Those are *terrible* examples.
So maybe we can try to find some good ones. Consider this, with Lee Atwater describing the Southern Strategy:
It’s this that people are guarding against. Do people overdo it and see this in cases where it doesn’t exist? Probably. But saying that it doesn’t exist is… unlikely.
We *know* that people don’t always say what they really believe. We know that at least some of the people who passed them believe that voting restrictions are set to favor Republicans. But the language is about “preventing fraud”.
Are there cases of this doublespeak on the left? Assuredly, and I’m probably going to hear all about them, in detail.
Given that people like to present their best arguments, and the stakes are winning lots of power and prestige, is it any wonder that words gain new meanings?
But tax cuts really do have hardly anything to do with Black people.
And before there was a GOP southern strategy worth any salt (1968, when winning the Carolinas and TN from Wallace was crucial to Nixon’s victory), there was the Democratic abandonment of the segregationists in 1948. I honestly don’t think Eisenhower 1952 and Goldwater 1964 actually had any conscious “segregationist strategy” in mind, but they did get segregationists’ votes.
In context the thing about tax cuts is: “You say ‘we’re going to cut [program that my constituents think is a political sop to black people] because it costs too much and we want to cut taxes and the savings have to come from somewhere. In a perfect world it’d be cake for everyone but we all need to make sacrifices.’ My political opponents will freak out, attack me, call me racist if they want, but they can’t prove anything, because of my speech about taxes. So I don’t lose all, or necessarily even most, of the blacks or equalists who were intending to vote for me. But when [the demographic of my constituents that I have pre-judged to be racist] hears about this, they’ll think ‘Oh hell yeah, he’s racist just like me.’ and vote for me.”
Except those are still terrible examples of a “dog whistle.” Those are examples of politicians trying to use language with the intention of hiding whatever structural racism might be implicit in their policies, thereby letting their voters off the hook for voting for policies that others see as racism.
That’s the exact opposite of how a dog whistle works. That is still a phenomenon worth mentioning, but it’s probably best to actually get an accurate description of it.
How is using terminology designed to disguise the racism inherent in your goals without preventing people who are racist from recognizing and supporting it “the exact opposite of a dogwhistle”?
I think this is Scott’s fault – most of this post deals not with dogwhistles, but instead uses gaffes as examples, a distinct but related concept.
A dog whistle is a term that doesn’t mean what it literally means, but rather is code for something else.
‘Tax cuts’ are not code for something else. When right wing people ask for tax cuts, they do ask for tax cuts.
When they ask for tax cuts on things that ‘inner city people’ abuse, then the quoted part is a dog whistle for black people. But then that part is the dog whistle, not the part about tax cuts.
You can’t evaluate the desire for tax cuts in the broad populace unless you understand what the broad populace thinks revenues are being spent on.
Now, I think if you had run that poll in 1980, you would have seen welfare in the spot that foreign aid occupies now. (Citation needed). And furthermore, if you had asked what people thought the racial breakdown was, it would be even more out of whack. (Further citation needed).
In other words, I posit that the desire for tax cuts is associated with a perception about who is getting the money. When people want a balanced budget and tax cuts, but no cuts to social security, medicare, or existing debt service, and want increases in military spending, it’s very hard to think that the desire for tax cuts aren’t motivated by thinking that ‘others’ are ‘abusing’ the system and getting something for free.
I think that there is a more simple explanation: people have been told time and again that the government is wasteful, so they believe in ‘free money’ by getting rid of inefficiencies. Some people see these inefficiencies as ‘free loaders’ cheating the system (which to be fair, is an actual issue that happens in welfare states) and some people go further and believe that this is done by certain races and thus are racist. But it’s not necessary to be a hateful/racist person to have a belief in major inefficiencies in government.
It’s similar to how most Americans believe that large amounts of healthcare money goes to claims and tort reform can drastically cut costs.
Another explanation is that most people have no holistic view and act like small children in a candy shop: I want that..and that…and that….and that… As most people don’t calculate the actual consequences of their wishes, they never get a reality check.
PS. In general, it’s my belief that people’s opinions strongly match the biases in the media. The tendency by the media to focus on sensational stories, problems and such, result in a very distorted view on the world.
That quote proclaims a belief that voting restrictions do favor Republicans, not that they are set to favor Republicans. It’s perfectly consistent to think that voter fraud is generally pro-Democrat and that legitimately preventing voter fraud benefits Republicans.
You should read the whole interview, not just the bit that gets endlessly quoted, because Atwater doesn’t way what you think. It’s quite clear that what atwater is saying is that shouting n**ger used to work, then it stopped worked so you had to find issues BESIDES race to motivate them. He goes on, explicitly, that Reagan had never done racebaiting, that reagan had been campaigning on the same issues for decades, and that it was southerners who came around to him, not him dog whistling southerners. When he talks about a “southern strategy” he’s talking about the racial strategy that democrats used to use to win elections, but which doesn’t work any more.
To quote him “But Reagan did not have to do a southern strategy for two reasons. Number one, race was was not a dominant issue. And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been, quote, southern issues since way back in the sixties. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the issues of economics and of national defense. The whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference. And I’ll tell you another thing you all need to think about, that even surprised me, is the lack of interest, really, the lack of knowledge right now in the South among white voters about the Voting Rights Act.”
Not sure if this is the best place to ask this, but I was reading rationalwiki’s entry on Scott and this caught my eye:
“Alexander finds the logic of effective altruism difficult to accept intellectually, having come up with a very counterintuitive thought-experiment about it, but is inclined to offer effective altruism his moral support anyway.[citation needed]”
Is this true? If so, can anyone point me to Scott’s discussion if it?
You should probably ask on the Open Thread.
I don’t know what they’re talking about.
Probably ethical offsets.
Maybe this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/04/a-series-of-unprincipled-exceptions/ ?
RationalWiki is not rational. It is a place where some SJWs write down their arguments as reference material to use in debates with their opponents.
See:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/f5b/the_problem_with_rational_wiki/
The Scott Alexander article on RW hilariously reads like the internal debate of someone being torn between his admiration for Scott on the one hand and the RationalWiki peer pressure to scorn everything LW-style-rationalism related on the other.
I’m mixed on this. Your take fits pretty neatly with the way I view politics and media coverage. However, a specific example you gave makes me want to disagree.
I actually think Ken Livingstone is an anti-Semite. Or at least he is on some level. The Israel stuff makes it complicated, but I’m pretty comfortable stating that the vast majority of people who are passionate anti-Zionists object to the state of Israel not just because they believe it to be a uniquely awful state, but also because it is a Jewish state, at least on some level. And i’m usually a proponent of taking people’s beliefs at face value, and not trying to ferret out hidden meaning, but I honestly think this case is an exception.
I don’t know if it qualifies as anti-Semitism, but it’s definitely a problem. I also don’t know if Livingstone’s Hitler quote proves anti-Semitism, but I do know that many anti-Zionists traffic in and rely on some pretty convoluted and tortured historical revisionism to make their case, and that theory would fit right on a Mondoweiss comment section.
I guess I’m saying that your argument could be formalized into a pretty useful rule of thumb that had only a few exceptions, which I realize then makes it of hardly any use at all.
I don’t know about Ken Livingstone, but my limited personal experience with the British uni left is that absolutely there is a problem with anti-Semitism, particularly as their left has made a tacit alliance with their Asian Muslim minority. And I’m not talking about the kind of dog-whistle anti-Semitism SA describes here, but the full-on version including mocking of noses and body odors.
I doubt Livingstone’s much of an anti-Semite, except insofar as he’d happily spout anti-Semitic slurs (or anything else similarly offensive) if fealty to his radical political allies demanded it. He’s virulently anti-Israel in the same way that he’s virulently anti-US or anti-Conservative–they are his political opponents, and no charge or insult is too ugly or offensive to wield against them. Many of his political friends are anti-Israel, whether in solidarity with Middle Eastern Muslims (many of whom are unabashedly anti-Semitic as well as anti-Israel), or with global NGOs (for whom anti-Israel activism is a lucrative line of business) or with anti-American agitators (for whom Israel, a strong US ally, is a useful proxy for America). So he lobs all sorts of absurd slanders against Israel. But I doubt they’re any more absurd or slanderous than those he lobs against any of his other targeted political opponents.
“He says particularly absurd things about Israel, but that’s for political purposes, not because he’s anti-Semitic” is a distinction without a difference and could be applied to blatant anti-Semitism as well as to the dog whistle kind: “he doesn’t really believe Jews deliberately spread AIDS, he’s just saying that to make his followers happy”.
Well, I’m not sure what the link between opposition to Israel and anti-Semitism would be, if not related to underlying mental state. Personally, I believe that the connection between anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Semitism is more tenuous than most of Israel’s supporters believe–and I say that as someone who supports and defends Israel frequently. I see little distinction, for instance, between leftists’ irrational obsession with Israel and its earlier irrational obsessions with, say, Nicaragua, Chile, or for that matter South Africa. (Ugly though Apartheid was, it was positively benign by comparison with what was going on elsewhere on that continent at the time.) The common thread, I believe, is hostility to the US and its allies, which is a longstanding leftist tendency, and which appears to be more than sufficient to generate irrational hatreds of random pro-US countries around the world, including Israel.
Past a certain point it really doesn’t matter if someone hates Jews first and expresses it through hate of things associated with Jews, or if someone just happens to hate the things associated with Jews first.
Besides, people often can’t compartmentalize well enough to prevent disproportionate hatred of Israel from leading to standard non-dogwhistle anti-Semitism.
I think there might be a distinction here in that earlier leftists were obsessed with whatever Kremlin wanted them obsessed with. Now they presumably are on their own and so this might be genuine somehow.
Back in the days of the Soviet Union, there were plenty of leftists who would very loudly and frequently denounce the Soviets as “Stalinists” or “state capitalists” or whatever, yet still enthusiastically support every single Soviet puppet going up against a US client or ally. It’s possible that these leftists’ anti-Soviet rhetoric was merely deliberate cover for secret abject fealty to the Kremlin, but I’m more inclined to believe that their guiding principle in international affairs was knee-jerk anti-Americanism, which led them to support anti-American forces, however unsavory and Soviet-tainted, at every opportunity.
Current sentimentality about communism:
Terry Gross interviews Nicholas Casey, a reporter who’s currently covering Venezuala and who previously spent some time embedded in the FARC, a revolutionary/criminal organization in Colombia.
Venezuala has become a nightmare– Chavez and his successor Madoras wrecked the economy and the result has been dire poverty as a direct result of extreme unthinking redistribution. It’s not just that the price of oil fell, it’s that the government gave away the money which was needed for the maintenance of the oil industry.
What’s shocking to me is that, in the second half of the interview about the FARC (kidnappers, rapists, slavers, murderers), Gross and Casey seem to be kind of nostalgic and tolerant about the communistness of the FARC subculture. They’re also horrified, but still, I’d say they think the Communist trappings are kind of cool.
At this point, I expect that any right-winger reading this is cracking up. Why didn’t I know this already? I sort of did, but this broadcast makes the matter so very clear.
The link is to a transcript. I don’t think there’s any strong reason to listen to the podcast unless you like podcasts, want to judge what I’m saying about the emotional tone more carefully, or want to hear Chavez’ singing.
Dan,
I think you’re being too charitable – virtually EVERY Communist front group took its marching orders directly from Moscow. To the extent that they claimed to be anti-Soviet it was a giant smokescreen appealing to the notion that communism, by itself, was a perfectly legitimate ideology and that it was unfair to bother people for merely having the wrong beliefs. This was an entirely deliberate tactic.
Many people who were opposed to gulags still considered the Soviet Union the lesser evil. And only the “official” communist parties were Soviet front groups – a lot of other groups sprang up during the Cold War (Trots, Maoists, etc.) which weren’t.
@ Matt M
That’s a pretty big claim, especially considering the “circular firing squad” nature of most communist fronts.
You might think you hate Lenin, but you don’t hate Lenin 1/10th as much as a Trotskyite hates Lenin. 😉
While I can’t guarantee that EVERY communist front group was taking orders from COMINTERN, Verona has revealed that a whole hell of a lot of them were.
Reading about the amount of front groups that say, immediately changed from “keep the US out of the war” to “we must defend Europe NOW” when Hitler broke the nonaggression pact with the USSR is truly hilarious. The American Peace Mobilization, for example, was a Soviet-controlled front ostensibly created for the purpose of promoting peace and brotherhood around the world. When Hitler declared war on Stalin, they literally changed their name to the American Peoples Mobilization and their purpose to encouraging a quick wartime mobilization effort. You know, to help our poor brothers and sisters in England and France.
It is evident that the Left has an irrational obsession with the Jewish state in particular. But is this true because leftists have an irrational hatred of Jews in particular, or because they have an irrational hatred of any vaguely European population existing in a vaguely colonial context?
Look at the hysterical vituperation leveled at Rhodesia and South Africa, for instance. In its heyday, it was just as obsessive and disproportionate as their opposition to Israel. There were worse places to be black than Rhodesia. The reason why these states inspired such revulsion in leftists is not because of what they were doing, but because of who was doing it to whom. Notice that their unctuous concern for the human rights of the Zimbabweans evaporated the instant Mugabe came to power. Leftists were attracted to these causes because it was a continuation of their domestic politics: it was about reprimanding the bad white man for being mean to the noble savage, and provided a way for them to totally smash a society that reminded them of their own. Another wonderful decolonial conflict was the Falklands War, which demonstrated that leftists, like Tony Benn, would even let the same junta which they had been condemning as a murderous fascist regime “liberate” their fellow citizens to deprive their domestic enemies of a military victory and the attendant prestige. The Israel–Palestine conflict today is the main target of such passions because it is the last remaining holy site of the Third Worldist crusade.
Nonetheless, I would not describe the Left as being anti-white. Leftism is, after all, a white-people thing: it condemns white people for failing to conform with a higher standard of civilized conduct than they could expect from their swarthy puppets.
That’s not quite true- Benn wanted to evacuate the islanders to Britain.
While I’m not familiar with the British internal politics surrounding the Falklands, I think this is pretty accurate.
I will add though that there is a long post-WW2 history of disproportionate responses to atrocities committed by white people, and above all, atrocities committed by right-wing white governments, even in contexts where colonialism is not an element. E.g., Franco’s government vs. the Warsaw Pact governments.
I think all of this ties into Scott’s ideas about the outgroup. Once upon a time, Franco and South Africa were the outgroup. Now Israel is the outgroup — it’s the stand-in for the Republicans. This issue is complicated a bit in the U.S. though by the fact that many Jews who are otherwise die-hard Democrats are also strong supporters of Israel. I suspect it’s largely for this reason that the movement lacks the strength of late-80s anti-Apartheid at present. Of course, the most fervent anti-Zionists I’ve known have been young Jews, so I’m not sure about the longevity of this situation.
Europe has a much smaller Jewish population (attributable to true anti-Semitism). It also has a large explicitly anti-Semitic Muslim population, which perhaps gives cover to the native populations by shifting the Overton Window — arguments calling for the “right of return” and peaceful dismantling of Israel perhaps don’t seem so anti-Semitic by comparison when your neighbor is more or less calling for a Second Holocaust and, by virtue of being an underprivileged and misunderstood person, is unpunished and uncriticized for it.
As I mention above, I think the common thread isn’t white vs. non-white but rather pro-US vs. anti-US. Russians are pretty white, but Soviet interventions around the world, often on behalf of the most appalling tyrants imaginable, never seemed to get the left’s dander up. If you line up countries and international groups that the Western left supported enthusiastically over last half-century on one side, and those the Western left vehemently opposed on the other, the pro-US vs. anti-US correlation would be pretty glaring.
Yes, I think the left’s love affair with Islam is largely because Islamic groups are currently the most credible opponent of the US.
I don’t think it’s quite that dishonest– there really is prejudice against harmless Muslims.
I said “largely”. Note that the love affair extends to non-harmless Muslims (e.g. the coverup of Cologne).
While your thesis obviously plays some role, I think it’s incomplete.
The evidence indicating the phenomenom is something broader is:
– half the Jews in Israel aren’t white or European
– so many of the anti-zionists canards used are the exact same as historical anti-Semitic canards
– Israel is not just some foreign land, but really is the homeland of the Jewish people
And also part of the homeland of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians…
It was never the homeland of any of those people, any more than the Phillipines were the homeland of the American people.
So do you support moving most of European people back to Scandinavia on the basis that the tribes that gave their names to regions such as Normandy, Burgundy, Lombardy and so on originally came from there?
More seriously:
Generally, reasonable people recognize the fact that, even if its creation was ill-thought, now Israel is a state that exists and that it is populated in large part by people who were born there. Even then, you can be opposed to the aggressive colonization practices, and the colonies ARE foreign land occupied by Israel.
I long for the day when Aelia Capitolina will be returned to the Senate and People of Rome, SPQR!
But the Romans themselves were immigrants, of the tribe of Aeneas, by their own admission!
Rome for the Etruscans!
Not him, but right of conquest is distinct from permitted immigration and settlement. The former provides a permanent justification for your presence. The latter does not – the permission may be rescinded by the authority that granted it; in the case that the original authority does not exist, the successor state will do; if not even a direct successor state exists, then the loss should lie where it fell.
This must be a European thing because the idea of leftists hating Jews is such a weird concept to me. When I think of those on the left, I think of Bernie Sanders and Jon Stewart. I know that there is some anti-Semitic people in America but the possibility that one party in this day and age will have an “antisemitism” problem seems bizarre.
America is an extremely tolerant place; Europe, not so much (atleast, regarding Jews).
The situation for Jews in Europe is quite dire.
The accusation does come up in the context of Israel/Palestine debates.
It probably wouldn’t be difficult to find red tribe members willing to swear to you that Sanders and Stewart are both “self-hating Jews” fully capable of antisemitism
I’m not even sure it’s antisemitism as such. Large factions of the European left have a strange hatred towards the USA and tend to choose the opposing side when possible (i.e: Islamic state is too beyond the pale, Putin not so much.)
The USA supports Israel, so they will support Palestine and they’ll even be the underdog.
It’s not really just a European thing; it’s just more common in Europe because they have a larger and more fundamentalist/anti-Semitic Islamic population that the Left has made a Faustian bargain with in order to gain power. This is especially true in Britain, where I did my undergrad studies. I’m now in America for my postgrad work, in New York, and there are leftist social-justice groups like Students for Justice in Palestine who do much the same thing that their counterparts in Britain do.
Speaking of dog-whistle politics, that’s what comes to my mind now whenever someone talks about dog-whistles: the whole “We’re not anti-Jewish, we’re anti-Zionist” fig leaf isn’t very convincing when the people on campus who use such logic are also the ones I’ve seen screaming “Zionist pig!” at any random guy in a kippah, which is quite a few guys in NYC.
This seems to be exactly correct.
My personal and limited experience is that the white Labour supporters will not say anything Jew-related. If you did, they would probably socially punish you for doing so. But if a Asian Muslim takes the stage and rabbits on about world conspiracies, why then “you have to understand his perspective, Erenold. You have to see it from his point of view.”
It’s hateful and stupid.
The left and right are both inconsistent (in different ways) on Jews in the US, but there are certainly antisemitic leftists, and I mean full on Jews did 9/11 type stuff not just vaguely unsettling double standards about Israel. This shouldn’t be surprising, the racism=prejudice+power thing is incredibly suited to anti-semetism, which is based on fantasies of Jews being super powerful.
@Yakini: against that “white people” hypothesis, there’s little condemnation of Australia despite Australia’s historical treatment of Aboriginals and current racism, and there’s no boycott Australia movement.
While Australia does have a shameful history in regards to its treatment of Aboriginals, at present Australian Aboriginals have full de jure legal equality with white Australians. Equating their current situation with that of Palestinians in the West Bank is absurd.
@NN: I was responding to Yakini’s claim that:
Australia is clearly a vaguely European population, existing in a vaguely colonial context. I saw nothing in Yakini’s original claim limiting it to situations that could be equated to Palestine, let alone equated to Palestine right now.
@Tracy: The original claim could probably do with a qualification that leftists may have an irrational hatred of a vaguely European population existing in a vaguely colonial context if such a thing were brought to their attention or had a clear relevance to their own contexts. The Arabs have oil money, there are several hundred millions of them, they have religious and cultural influence, and so the Palestine issue is going to get a lot of attention focused on it and thus a lot of play in leftist circles. The Rhodesia/South Africa thing is a no-brainer; the trans-Atlantic slave trade is the Original Sin of Western societies per the left and thus issues of white colonialism in African nations are of deep relevance to them. The Aborigines on the other hand, nobody knows much about them, they’re not really a prominent or visible cultural group, and it’s considered basically an Australian issue, while the Scramble for Africa involved many different European powers.
It seems clear to me that black and Hispanic issues get more play in American racial discourse than Native American issues because the Natives have neither cultural/social/economic power nor numbers, and probably not even much visibility either considering a good chunk of them live on reservations that non-Natives rarely step foot on while another good chunk of them are the product of generations of intermarriage into white and black bloodlines and mostly indistinguishable from those populations.
The BBC brings up Aboringinal problems (past and present) now and then, and the Australian government apologized to the Aborigines.
Imagine that in Earth-Q, after WW2 the Chinese somehow managed to invade a big part of Palestine, scared the Arabs out, established big Chinese-only settlements, treated local Arabs worse than the Chinese, and won wars against neighbors who objected to this. Now a lot of local Arabs would have objections to this Chinese state, because it’s Chinese. Would the Arabic anti-Chinesism from earth-Q be that different from anti-Zionism in our world?
I’m trying to distinguish hostility to Israel because someone doesn’t like Jews, from hostility to Israel because someone doesn’t like the fact that this state was established by “non-local people”
I’m glad you chose China as your example, because we do in fact have a situation where China invaded and occupied foreign land: Tibet.
There is a free Tibet movement among European/American liberals, but it nowhere near as loud or extreme as the free Palestine movement. There are coffee shop here in the UK and they’ll proudly state they boycott Israel, there is a big boycott Israel movement in universities. You don’t see anything movements of similar size and energy trying to boycott China.
How much of that difference is because Israel is full of white skinned culturally European people, and how much of that difference is because Israel is full of Jewish people?
I don’t know. But there is known antisemitism in far left groups, and known antisemitism in Islamic groups, who’re typically aligned with the left in Europe/American. So the answer is going to be at least some.
Those can be contributing factors, but so are the ties between Arabs and western countries: there are Arabic immigrants, exchange programs with Arabic universities, trade, oil, the legacy of colonialism, etc. – all opportunities for Arabs to bring up their dissatisfaction with Israel. Tibetans don’t have nearly as many opportunities.
Tibetans have the Dalai Lama, and Trendy Western Buddhism as practiced by Blue Tribe at least claims to be the spiritual equivalent of the Original-Recipe Asian Buddhism that the Dalai Lama speaks for. Not sure if that dynamic holds in Europe, but in the US it does serve as a channel for a fair bit of discussion of Tibetan politics.
Well, to the extent that “Tibet is a place that I have heard is Not Free and I think it ought to be Free”, constitutes political discussion.
Ehhhh… the Dalai Lama doesn’t emphasize this, but Tibetan Buddhism is really weird. It’s the branch of the religion with the most Tantric influence, to the point where you could almost describe it as a syncretic religion like Jainism; it’s very insular; and it also incorporates a ton of esoterica that you won’t find in the religion’s other branches.
Trendy Western Buddhism, on the other hand, is abstracted and sanitized to the point where it’s barely a religion at all.
Note that the claim I was referring to was specifically asymmetric. Trendy Western Buddhists claim the Dalai Lama as one of their own, not vice versa. This still gives Tibet a channel into American political opinion that, while perhaps theologically unjustified, is nonetheless real.
I wonder if it’s a feeling that we expect China to behave badly in respect of basic human rights but we hope Israel can do better. Instead we get to hear about this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehavam_Ze%27evi referring to Palestinians as “lice”.
It’s horribly messy and trying to say you oppose some of the ways Israel behaves is inevitably labeled as antisemitism. Perhaps knowing that will happen even if the criticisms can be justified tends to produce a may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb mentality?
Having a negative opinion of Israeli government policy or society is no evidence, to my mind, of anti-Semitism. Being an activist against that government and society? For many, many of those activists the only way you can reconcile them devoting their lives to this particular cause and not any of the other, objectively more pressing human rights concerns around the world is to conclude that they may have a little bit of a complicated relationship with the Jewish people.
Do you have similar skepticism about the motivation of activists against, say, American police brutality, since they aren’t protesting the far worse brutality of North Korean police?
@NN
Of course not. BLM activists are fighting about issues that affect them, their families, and their communities. I don’t agree with them a lot of the time, but I don’t question their motives.
@Barry: So protesting against things that do not affect you or your community directly is suspicious unless you choose to protest the most evil thing you can think of?
Don’t you think the fact that the Israeli policies get a disproportionate amount of good press in the US kind of justifies the disproportionate amount of bad press they get compared to, say, North Korea, which is much more evil, but who everyone agree is super-evil so there is no point in repeating it?
Yes, I think that the Toxoplasma of Rage Effect plays a significant role in this.
And how much of that is because China gave Chinese citizenship to the people of Tibet, and improved their standard of living from their previous anachronistic theocratic feudal system, while Israel treats Palestinians as subjects with no rights, has worsened their standard of living (in relation to neighboring Arab people and quite possibly even in absolute), and has facilitated the establishment of a theocratic regime in Gaza?
That’s factually incorrect according to all objective sources, and even according to Palestinian self-reporting.
Man, they just can’t do anything right. Unilaterally give up a valuable territory for the sake of peace, then get blamed when the people of that territory democratically elect a death cult to govern them. Its almost as if you’re saying that the Palestinian people have no moral agency.
When you find yourself defending China’s conquest and occupation of Tibet, maybe it’s time to stop and reflect.
A lot of the irrational but fashionable beliefs about Israel that people hold these days are the equivalent of slipping A != A into a system of formal logic. All the other statements of fact in your system have to distort and warp to accommodate the contradiction. At the end of it, you’re defending suicide bombing, or massive military conquests, because that’s what’s necessary in order to keep A not equal to A.
This is a prime example of what we’re talking about if the regime is composed of people who would be a minority in the US/would rather vote Democrat than republican, then the left will bend over backwards and squint as hard as possible to say that they’re the best regime possible in a fallen world, whereas if the regime is composes of white people (or just right-wing people) then clearly they are the worst regime on the planet and stopping them is the most important thing happening in foreign affairs.
The sheer colloquialism of left wing foreign policy is mind boggling, like sure the Republicans don’t like Venezuela’s government but there aren’t movements trying to stop it from existing. Where as for the left EVERYTHING is an extension of US is an extension of campus politics.
@ Luke
I agree with what you’re saying but I find myself moderately annoyed that you chose Luke in place of Steve.
I don’t get it
is there another CIA stooge running around?
Is it a reference to former Canadian prime Minister Steven Harper?
The reason i use “CIA stooge” in my name is a reference to the CIA funding abstract expressionism as a way to fight communism, the joke being if you assume, in adition to modernism, post modernism was also a CIA weapon to confuse and disorganize the left, then all of a sudden the state of the far left makes way more sense.
Care to elaborate? I maintain that the living standard of the average Tibetan improved because of the Chinese conquest. Can you refute it?
Funny how I feel the same for lots of Israel supporters.
Take up the Yellow Man’s Burden…
I think David Chapman put it best:
Why should we assume the Tibetan regime would modernize? The Dalai Lama in exile has condemned the old system – but a Dalai Lama secluded in his palace and dependent on the old religious elite may very well not. Tibet without Chinese intervention might very well be a theocracy where the majority of people still lived in serfdom.
@birdboy2000: Well, even Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia’s economy is dependent on exporting oil to the rest of the world, so you could argue that it was more susceptible to outside pressure than an independent Tibet would be. Also, Belarus apparently reintroduced serfdom 2 years ago with little international outcry.
So you may have a point.
@ Luke
It’s a inside joke / shibboleth, don’t sweat it.
@ NN
That’s moderately disturbing. What’s more disturbing is that I hadn’t heard anything about it till now. Surely it can’t be as bad as it initially looks.
*Gives self that “oh you sweet summer child” look*
Whatever the motivation of the Chinese government, the conquest benefited Tibetan peasants.
You mean like North Korea?
An autonomous Tibet in 2016 would still have been a fedual theocratic country with more technological gizmos. Something like Yemen or Taliban-era Afghanistan.
I don’t know much about Livingstone. Perhaps he is anti-Semitic. I’m just not sure his one comment gives us any evidence that he is.
Agreed, however taken together with all the other stuff we have to go on may qualify as evidence.
There is a common misunderstanding that politicians get embroiled in “scandals” when they say or do embarrassing or appalling things, which result in “political damage”, or even their “political demise”. In reality, the cause-and-effect relationship is the opposite: a politician’s opponents are constantly trying to characterize what he or she says or does as embarrassing or appalling, and the politician’s friends and allies are constantly dismissing these accusations as minor and irrelevant. If the politician is politically strong–that is, if his or her friends and allies are more numerous and powerful than his or her opponents–then the friends’ and allies’ dismissals work, and the accusations don’t stick. Conversely, if the opponents are more numerous and more powerful, then their characterizations win out, and the politician is embroiled in a “scandal” with potentially serious consequences.
Note that the actual nature of the allegedly embarrassing or appalling words or deeds is scarcely relevant–a politician with sufficiently numerous and powerful friends and allies can, say, drive a woman off a bridge to her death and flee the scene without reporting it, without significantly damaging his career, while a sufficiently embattled politician can be utterly destroyed by, say, repeating a sentence too many times in succession during a debate.
One particular accusation that’s very popular in this game is the accusation of prejudice against an entire class of people, because it stands a chance of winning (or at least to appearing to win) most of that class of people to the opponents’ side against the politician in question. Hence the “dog whistle” formulation, which can be used to turn almost any word or deed into a supposed signal of prejudice against some large constituency. But nobody should be fooled into taking any of these accusations at face value–they’re merely part of the normal cut-and-thrust of modern gladiatorial politics. And they don’t work against a politician who’s not already somewhat weakened by unpopularity (lack of sufficient friends and allies) for one reason or another.
So much this. I was saying this when everyone was making fun of Tony Abbot’s gaffes.
If people liked him, they would have just chuckled about him biting into an onion, and they would have interpreted saying “shit happens” to soldiers who lost a buddy more charitably.
I don’t like the guy, but couldn’t help but be bemused by the whole thing. People didn’t understand the inside of their own heads. They didn’t like the guy because everyone turned on him after his government’s horribly inequitable budget in 2014, not because of the goddamned onions.
I observed something similar about 6 years ago in Czech politics. The prime minister of the time was leading a very shaky 102/200 parliament majority (and if I remember correctly the 2 extra were people who left the social democrats, who were then in the opposition to support his center-right government) and it was increasingly hard for him to keep his position. He then had an interview in a virtually unknown magazine for gays where he said some controversial stuff (I forgot what it was exactly, it was probably rather stupid since the guy did like saying provocative things for their own sake…I think it was definitely interpreted as anti-semitist and anti-gay though, I think it was not all that different from his usual antics, however) which was completely unrelated to his politics. But since his government was already very weak by then, his political opponents took the chance to popularize it and make a scandal out of it and he resigned a few weeks later from the post of both the party leader and the prime minister.
Replying only to increase visibility —
If you do not acknowledge that politics is an unceasing war, you understand nothing of it nor its appendices (like political journalism), i.e. Dan Simon is essentially right. Scott’s failure point is the confusing of the epistemic with the instrumental: yes, such allegations might be entirely untrue. So what?
I wish we could vote on comments.
Me too. It seems we’re in the minority, but Reddit-style upvoting would make scrolling through this morass of comments much more efficient.
There’s an extension for it, ask in the open threads.
But extensions have much lower uptake among readers than site features do.
Interesting way of looking at this – thanks.
edit: Reminds me of how no one (with power) seems to care about the Clinton emails thing – if instead she was on the ouster with the Democrats establishment, it would presumably become an a big scandal and excuse to dump her for their preferred candidate.
This can be formulated in the opposite direction. Someone on the Clinton side could just as easily believe that the only reason that Republicans are pushing the Clinton email scandal is that Clinton is a big-name player within the Democratic Establishment, and had she been on the outs with the Democratic party, the scandal wouldn’t exist at all.
Why can’t both be true? The politicians have to face the opposing party as well as competitors within their own party. Both want to get rid of possibly skilled competition and both like to kick when the competition is down.
It’s possible that both the Republicans play up the scandal because it’s an attack against Clinton and the Democrats play down the scandal because she’s their front runner.
What seems to be contradictory is ‘this isn’t a scandal because the candidate is popular’ (which is what the original post implies) and ‘this is only a scandal because the candidate is popular’.
My claims are that (1) these accusations are salvos in an ongoing battle between a politician’s friends/allies and opponents; (2) whether one considers a particular accusation is a big deal or an overblown trifle depends overwhelmingly on which camp one belongs to, irrespective of the details of the accusation; and (3) if a particular accusation appears to “damage” a politician, then the damage is a symptom, rather than a cause, of the strength of that politician’s opponents, and/or the weakness of his or her friends/allies–again, largely irrespective of the details of the accusation.
Yeah. The most egregious example of this was Romney’s binders full of women “scandal”. Not only was it a completely innocuous statement, but if Obama had said those exact words he would have been feted as a great progressive champion of women’s rights, while when Romney said it it was apparently proof that he secretly hated women and wanted to treat them like objects or whatever.
That incident pretty much shattered my faith in rational politics (don’t shoot me, I was young and naive!). Not only were the entire ‘respectable’ media running with it but all my friends and peers who were normally smart and rational fully bought into the narrative as well. It was crazy.
The binders full of women attack has come home to roost. Some democrats made it clear that any republican candidate would be attacked as sexist.
They didn’t get the least sexist candidate. The got the candidate who is best at resisting the inevitable attack.
a politician with sufficiently numerous and powerful friends and allies can, say, drive a woman off a bridge to her death and flee the scene without reporting it, without significantly damaging his career.
Another example:
A political appointee with significant and numerous enemies can be accused of “using degrading talk about sexual subjects in front of female underlings at a previous job”. This accusation becomes the center of the confirmation hearings, and nearly derails the confirmation process. [*]
A political candidate is accused of bringing female government employees into a hotel room, dropping his pants, and encouraging them to suck on his dick for a promotion…and somehow evades the accusation. [**] He succeeds at transitioning from State-level politics to National-level politics.
Both of these instances happened during a decade which had feminist lawyers working very hard against “sexual harassment” in the workplace and in politics.
[*] one female former co-worker of this appointee testified that the atmosphere of degradation existed. Several other female co-workers testified that the atmosphere of degradation and harassment was not present.
[**] in this case, the politician in question was often defended by leaders of the feminist movement of the time.
I am interested to know who these politicians are.
I’m guessing at least one is Bill Clinton
The first mentioned by the grandparent is clearly Clarence Thomas. I don’t know who the second is, but context suggests that it’s Bill Clinton.
Similarly, who is the politician who did the hit-and-run?
Ted Kennedy, dead now but a long time bugbear of right wing radio.
I chose Chappaquiddick because it’s literally the worst misdeed I know of that a politician has survived politically in modern times. If you have an even more extreme example, I’d be very interested to hear of it–I use this example frequently to explain my ideas about political “scandal”, and I’d be happy to switch to an even more striking one.
So really?!
The law doesn’t apply in the US if your politically popular enough (and a democrat) and the only reason hillary’s getting so much grief on the email thing is she’s right on the edge of not being popular enough!?
I’d usually dismiss this stuff as conspiracy theory but I kind of believe it.
Are there any examples of Republicans getting away with stuff like this? Or have they spent to much political capital on actually having an ideology that acknowledges trade-offs?
@Dan Simon: Non-US example, but you might want to look at the career of Charles Pasqua in France.
short, probably biased, summary: at the age of 15, he was a resistance fighter against the nazis. Because of this, he kinda of got a pass on everything. When Charles de Gaulle was president, he made himself indispensable to the right and was basically in government or legislature more or less continuously since 1959. During this, he’s been associated with the darkest side of government (notably repression of political dissent), involved in many financial scandals, and probably ordered the assassination of another member of government (the instruction was re-opened recently, many years after the fact, now that he’s dead and can’t pull strings any more).
@Subbak: Sorry–I was thinking of US politics. My impression is that European politics puts US politics to shame in the area of really nasty skeletons being permitted to reside quietly in powerful politicians’ closets, widely known yet undisturbed.
As far as what we’d think of as person-to-person crimes, there was that time Dick Cheney took a man into the woods, shot him in the chest with a shot gun, and a week later the man he shot got on the news and apologized to Cheney for getting shot by him.
As far as what we’d think of as political crimes, the Iran-Contra scandal, the assassination of several world leaders by CIA, and several coups in foreign countries have either Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld as the executive of the operation in question (during their time in the various Republican administrations of the late Cold War).
As far as “We’re totally ignoring how historically dumb and shortsighted this specific policy proposal was.” there’s Ronald Reagan’s opening of the North Slope to take-what-you-want oil drilling.
@Nicholas: The Cheney thing was an accident that did not result in a person’s death and where (unless I’m unaware of something) he did not do anything wrong after the fact like fleeing the scene. That makes it probably less bad than Ted Kennedy, although still pretty bad.
Of course if you believe Cheney shot the other person intentionally that’s another thing but is there any reason to believe that?
Fucking Berlusconi.
@ Dan Simon
I chose Chappaquiddick because it’s literally the worst misdeed I know of that a politician has survived politically in modern times.
Ted Kennedy’s career did not survive undamaged; he topped out as an influential Senator, no longer an obvious successor to JFK and Robert Kennedy.
Chappaquiddick wasn’t a political misdeed, where the facts can be disputed. Nor was there any possible political or financial motive. It was a failure of physical courage and judgement in a sudden crisis . Therefore, “not Presidential material”.
@houseboatonstyxb, that’s the whole point–political “misdeeds” are very much in the eye of the (often partisan) beholder. The facts of Kennedy’s behavior, on the other hand, are both undisputed–with plenty of supporting evidence–and pretty clearly grounds for prosecution. It’s exceedingly rare for a politician, let alone a nationally prominent one, to face such a combination and emerge not only unconvicted but repeatedly re-elected.
(Alcee Hastings is perhaps the closest equivalent, but personally I think of criminal negligence causing death as far worse than mere corruption. You may disagree, though.)
vis. Cheney and Shotgunning, consider: If you absent mindedly or recklessly failed to observe the proper signs at a crosswalk and jaywalked into oncoming traffic, you would be at fault, and may reasonably be expected to apologize even if you were injured. At any shooting event, there are similar rules. If you ignore them and walk into the firing line, you are at fault even if you are injured.
@ Xeno
With any shooting I have done, this is a shared responsibility. You have a responsibility not to put yourself in harm’s way.
But the far larger responsibility falls on the one pulling the trigger to make sure they have kept track of where the people they are hunting with are in relation to themselves and to make sure they know exactly what they are pointing their gun at before a shot is fired. The shooting was a negligent but human incident, but Whittington owed no one any apology. Your point would stand if they were skeet shooting.
@reader,
Perhaps, but Whittington appears to have chosen to apologize, and continued to support Cheney. As our host implores us to niceness, I think we should accept this apology as honestly motivated sincere. Is there reason to believe otherwise?
Nicholas: The oil drilling example isn’t a scandal, it’s a policy disagreement. Also, assassination of foreign leaders is generally considered a valid(if rough) way of conducting foreign policy. That’s the sort of thing enemies do to each other – look at the Iraqi assassination attempt on George Bush the elder. And as others have said, the Cheney thing seems like an honest mistake that was dealt with properly, not particularly scandalous(though certainly late-night comedian fodder).
Iran-Contra was legitimately bad, but you’re still only 1 for 4, and otherwise confirming Dan Simon’s “scandals are mostly concrete examples of bias” theory.
@Dan Simon: Ted Kennedy pleaded guilty and was convicted.
@Xeno
Yes to doubt the sincerity of the apology you have to make a few assumptions. How reasonable any of these assumptions are I guess is up to the individual. For me the strongest one would be that I assume a high level of public relations coordination. This is based mostly on the fact that all involved were in the same party and knew each other socially. Once I make this assumption, I see Dick Cheney or by extension someone on his staff sign-off on the apology. Then I have to assume me and Dick Cheney have such a different view on morality that his allows him to do things only bad people would do in mine.
Mostly I was concerned with letting the idea stand, that the person pulling a trigger is not the one ultimately responsible and am limited to how much I care what the ex-Vice President of a country I don’t live did.
A surprising number of issues fall into this framework. I’m in the middle of reading Michael Hayden’s book, and he tells a story of a time the NYT got their hands on information about a classified program. They brought the journalist and his editor in, made the case that, yes, there’s a story here, but publicizing it would be dangerous to the nation. They agreed to not publish it with the understanding that if the gov’t guys got a sniff of another news organization finding the story, they’ll let the Times know so that they could publish first.
Literally years later (so it wasn’t so pressingly necessary to publish that they wouldn’t sit on it for years), the Times revisited publishing. The gov’t brought them back, made almost the exact same case, which hadn’t really lost any strength. Nevertheless, the Times published it. Hayden recalls asking an individual involved why they handled it differently. The response he reported: “The President is weaker now.” Boom. “Scandal.”
That was about some NSA stuff, yeah? An odd thing about that is that (if I’m not mistaken) a presidential election happened during the years they sat on it. So either his point is that you sell more papers when it’s a scandal about an unpopular president, or it’s that the story wouldn’t have hurt the president in his “popularity mode”. Might it have even helped (e.g. by providing a “The government is doing everything to keep you safe” narrative)? Hmm.
American politics has some of the most absurd ‘scandals:’
– Howard Dean got undone for screaming off key into a microphone along with a crowd of screaming people. His voice was isolated and the crowd cropped out of the video, so his opponents could treat him as if he was on The Voice.
– John Kerry got attacked mercilessly for being more heroic than his opponent, but not looking like a hero. So they used people’s prejudice of what heroic people look like as ‘evidence’ that he was lying. His opponent actually dodged active service…
– The “Mission Accomplished” sign on the carrier that George W. Bush held a speech in front of, was actually to celebrate a record set by the aircraft carrier. It became a symbol for Bush’ hubris.
– Al Gore being attacked for claiming to have invented the Internet (while he actually only claimed to have fought for the funding, which he did do).
I’m late to the party (and fairly new to the blog!) but I’ll note that journalists have their own way of describing this give-and-take.
Here’s Jamelle Bouie:
“Some politicians, unlucky ones, make mistakes that define their entire careers. For Dan Quayle in the 1988 presidential election, it was a brief comparison with John F. Kennedy. For Howard Dean in the 2004 Democratic primary, it was “the scream.” For Rick Perry in the 2012 Republican primary, it was “oops.” These weren’t the worst mistakes ever made, but they were emblematic of each candidate’s weakness—flubs that reinforced critiques from rivals and the media. Dean screamed just as pundits questioned his temperament for the White House, while Perry stuttered in the face of uncertainty about his intelligence.”
In other words, the gaffes that stick are those that illustrate popular narratives. This doesn’t contradict Simon’s argument, just tweaks it. For a scandal to break, you need 3 criteria: 1) a caricature of a politician that’s well known in political circles, 2) a memorable event that reinforces the caricature, 3) a political network with enough clout to give the story heft.
The point is that political teams don’t just compete to invent gaffes. They also compete to spread stereotypes (Republicans: racists; Democrats: wimps) that will be conducive to gaffes. And this is often acknowledged in the press.
Actually, this preparatory work is probably the more important part of the process. Once you’ve got a good caricature going (Rubio the Upstart Naif, Romney the Heartless Plutocrat) you can twist almost any statement to reinforce it.
You might say this gives too much credit to pundits, who like to act as if they control these kinds of grand narratives. But the analysis is perfectly compatible with a gladiatorial view of Washington, in which political factions compete to invent caricatures and pundits simply echo and amplify what the Beltway spin doctors are saying.
This is almost Attack Ads 101. If you define your opponent in the public’s mind before he can define himself, he’s going to be crippled from the start. The best example of that I know was an attack ad here in Canada against Stephane Dion, the newly elected Liberal Party leader. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEH_hprcs6g is the ad.
For context the guy talking at the beginning was Michael Ignatieff, Dion’s biggest opponent in the leadership race, and deputy leader of the party at the time the ad ran. The next election happened a year and a half later and Dion led the party to what was then its lowest support level in the history of the party. (Amusingly, Ignatieff was leader the time after, and did even worse)
>In reality, the cause-and-effect relationship is the opposite
Only partially. The magnitude of the misdeed generally matters – or, at least, what it can be spun into, and not all misdeeds or mispeaking can be spun in the same way. If your strong take was true, politicians wouldn’t bother to dig up dirt on their opponents, they just take some random mispeaking and hammer on that. But some attacks are ineffective, and politicians do look for dirt. Hence the impact of a proto-scandal can’t be explained exclusively by political strength, but a combination of factors.
And take, eg, Bill Clinton and Lewinsky. Bill survived that well due to political popularity, but it was undoutably a scandal (and generally recognised as such, though sometimes seen as a “minor” scandal). As I recall, Bill’s popularity increased during the investigation. So here we have something that failed to damage the president, actually the reverse, was overcome for political reasons, but yet was seen as a scandal. I don’t think you can define scandals purely by political force alignment.
Oh, so that’s what the damn gorilla’s name was. RIP Hamrabe
Propaganda works through constant repetition. Good propaganda leaves a tiny little loudspeaker in a person’s brain that chants the message for them at the slightest provocation, without any conscious thought or memory recovery.
The ideally propagandised group can have an entire conversation of soundbites without any actual information being developed or exchanged. If the person responsible was listening, he would smile and think “ah, good old number 27. That should lead right into—yep, 38. Good thing we added that to preempt 3—that always had the potential to derail things.”
If you criticise a person for fifty different things in fifty different ways, it makes for terrible propaganda. Your poor audience would have to think, to make judgements and connections between different concepts!
But if you criticise them for the same thing no matter what they do, pretty soon you’ll have your sign-wavers and brick-throwing protestors and suicide bombers all on-message and ready to go when your opponent comes to town.
It becomes even more simple when you criticize all your opponents for the same thing, whether that makes sense or not, because then you don’t even have to explain anything when you decide to target a new person.
(Example.)
I’ve seen this in spades with trump. Whenever he comes up in conversation, inevitably someone will say something about him being hyper conservative. The man is the least conservative Republican candidate in our lifetimes by far! They’ve just associated the left-right spectrum with good-bad, and since Trump = very bad (for mostly non-policy reasons), he must be very conservative. If you’re going to hate someone, at least know WHY, sheesh. I wouldn’t find this so notable if it weren’t for how often I’ve seen it pop up among people who consider themselves fairly informed.
Answer: Because people use “hyper conservative” to mean “very Red Tribe” and the central example of the Red Tribe in the Blue Mind is the borderer culture, hourly wage employed, primarily white, low status inhabitant of the Rust Belt that DT does more to speak to than any other politician.
People hate Trump for his tribalism, and for his choice of tribe, and because he’s generally sort of a dick, not for his explicit political platform.
Yeah, Ken. I particularly liked that time 10 years ago when he compared a Jewish journalist to a Nazi concentration camp guard. And was then suspended from being Mayor of London for a while.
This was about the time I left the Labour Party because I found its anti-semitism disgusting (this was one reason among about three big ones).
So, I think this was a bad example. Otherwise, great, article.
(further discussion of anti-semitism in the left in the UK:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/2016/apr/30/labour-antisemitism-ken-livingstone-george-galloway)
It’s not a bad example. It’s a good example of what’s wrong with Scott’s reasoning. He’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater–yes, accusing someone of making a dog whistle can be wrong for the reasons described, but it’s a case by case thing. Some things are more strongly associated with X-ism than other things and you can’t make a blanket rule saying that all dog whistles are real, but you can’t make a blanket rule saying they are all imagined either. Scott tried to make a blanket rule saying they are all imagined, and so he tripped up on a real one.
Scott’s exact words:
I wish I could force people on this blog to pass a basic reading comprehension test before posting.
Scoptt made a big post about how dog whistles are miagined with a little disclaimer at the end. You don’t avoid saying what you said because you tacked on a disclaimer.
A big post that never claims they’re all imagined but does explicitly claim that they’re not all imagined. Honestly, this really shouldn’t be difficult for anyone to parse, let alone (presumably?) anyone out of grade school.
> You don’t avoid saying what you said because you tacked on a disclaimer
Right, but you do avoid saying what you _didn’t_ say. The post is highlighting cases of the concept of dog whistles being abused, and clarifying that it doesn’t mean that they never exist in genuine form.
If someone writes a post about how (e.g.) accusations of the ad hominem fallacy are commonly misused, that doesn’t mean that it’s claiming that the fallacy never occurs. Especially when there’s a clarification for the reading-comprehension-impaired that it’s explicitly not claiming the fallacy never occurs.
Are you blind? Scott openly dog-whistled that all accusations of dog-whistling are invalid!
Which is, of course, exactly what a dog-whistler like Scott would want you to think!
Yeah, not letting that slide past. Labour has a section of it’s membership that is fairly negative about Israel. Who knows, there may be some genuine antisemites in there too. However, there’s a skunk stripe of racism straight down the middle of the UK parties of the right but it rarely gets called out by the media.
I think it’s hard for most people to believe quite who much of the UK media is controlled by right wing billionaires who really like things stitched up just the way they are. Whatever else you can say about Ken he’s certainly of the real left not the pseudo Toryism of Blair and his chums. The amount of character asassination he had from the journalist in question and the paper for which he wrote was consdiderable. Doesn’t excuse what he said but there’s no mouth too small that he couldn’t put his foot in it.
You can see the same thing happening to Jeremy Corbyn. Constant press about how he doesn’t dress properly, doesn’t bow enough when the Queen’s about, is ineffectual as a leader and on and on and on. Then there’s mysterious “enemies of Corbyn lists “found” in a pub. Zinoviev letter anyone? And now he’s apparently prevailing over a bunch of rabid antisemites and refusing to deal with it. Except it’s pretty much bollocks. Here’s a good analysis https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/jamie-stern-weiner/jeremy-corbyn-hasn-t-got-antisemitism-problem-his-opponents-do
More evidence of how much the Labour are antisemites is a media driven moral panic has been posted since but I haven’t got the patience to track the links right now.
It would be nice if the left could reach a consensus about how sensitive to be regarding identity politics. I don’t mean to say that article is wrong that the anti-semitism drama is overblown, only that when people make statements of equivalent severity about muslims, women or trans-people the identarian tend to condemn them in the harshest terms.
It’s weird that statements and actions that are possibly anti-semetic are ok, but anything possibly anti-islam (eg) is a no-platforming offense.
“It would be nice my outgroup was more homogeneous, then my outgroup homogeneity bias would be accurate.”
Haha! Yes, you make a fair point!
Despite that, I am going to stand by my bias and say that anti-semitism gets a far more free pass from the British left than other forms of prejudice.
It isn’t just the British left that doesn’t take anti-Semitism seriously. Look at any north American discussion of privilege and jews (a group that has experienced genocide in living memory) will be in conspicuously left off their list of disadvantaged people.
Jews aren’t disadvantaged to the left.
And if you aren’t disadvantaged your never a real victim
They didn’t experience genocide in North America in living memory. In North America they experienced some discrimination in college apps in the same “we don’t want them taking all the slots” way Asians get it now. And most of the statistics people will trot out as proof of “white privilege” apply even stronger to them. It’s hard to see them as disadvantaged when they’re so, well, advantaged.
I imagine the German left takes a different view, in accordance with their different history.
Anti-semitism was a big deal in pre-WWII America. Jews have faced more discrimination than any other European ethnic group.
That they have succeeded in spite of this oughtn’t make them “privileged” if “privilege” is supposed to be the accumulated benefit of not being historically oppressed.
Sunzuanime, I think you’re underestimating the extent to which Jews were discriminated against in the North America during the first half of the 20th century. My grandfather remembered seeing signs at pools in New York saying “No dogs or Jews allowed”. And yes, if he were alive today he’d be a centenarian, but I think prejudice went far beyond college applications.
When my family was looking for a new house (suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware in the early 1960s), we moved to one that had only recently started accepting Jews, and noticed one that still didn’t accept Jews.
The Further Left always had a weird inconsistent attitude for Jews decades before Israel/Palestine was a thing. There is a reason why the German socialist August Bebel, one of the founder of the SPD, referred to anti-Semtisim as the socialism of fools. Jews always represented bourgeois values and capitalism to a certain segment of the Left. It continues today.
The point is that while being excluded from elite society kinda sucks, it’s not really comparable to the gas chamber or the master’s whip. And I’m not sure “Jews were excluded from elite society, so the advantages they now enjoy are not a sign of privilege, but rather their just reward for their racial superiority” is an argument the left is really equipped to appreciate.
I’d prefer if you found evidence of that “skunk stripe” you claim in the right wing. Of course there are racists in UKIP, UKIP themselves admit that’s a problem. It’s a little different when Labour claims to be THE anti-racist party, yet it’s riddled with anti-semitism.
WRT the sexism examples, I think you’re missing an important angle: the women holding up those signs DO think that Trump’s statements are sexism proper, and not just dog whistles for sexism. There’s a strand in feminism today that takes any comments on a woman’s appearance to be sexism, so for Trump to be talking about 10’s in the first place is already inexcusable.
This doesn’t require any special reading into Trump’s words, just an especially narrow concept of acceptable discourse.
“A person who is flat-chested is very hard to be a 10”
Is he talking about women? Most flat-chested people are men. It’s good to be a 10 or some other number, like 15, right?
This is some excellent shitposting.
Seriously, women can diss men for their appearance (“neck beards”, etc.) and that’s acceptable, but a man can’t express his own aesthetic preferences?
How many women are attracted to hollow-chested men? Should we condemn them for sexism because the guy who looks like a stiff wind could blow him away… just doesn’t inspire any romantic interest?
If a well-known politician of either gender ever mentioned “neckbeard” or something similar, the shitstorm would reach proportions rarely seen before. Mocking people on their appearance is considered extremely rude in today’s society, and often interpreted as having negative prejudice towards the group you mock.
There are exceptions, but not linked with gender: For some reason mocking a politician’s small size (or, apparently, small-sized hands) is not considered in the same way. See for example how the media treats fat jokes on Chris Christie vs. tiny hands jokes on Trump or short jokes on former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. However in both those cases (Trump and Sarkozy), we’re talking quick-to-anger individuals with a history of getting overly upset at those insults and trying to overcompensate, so maybe that’s what somehow makes it okay in the eyes of the media.
While I’m all for pointing out the ridiculous double-standards that women create, do you have evidence it’s the same women, or the same people attacking the first and defending the second?
Presumably this is referring to a Donald Trump rating of sexual attractiveness, scaled from 1-10. I presume he would rate men low on such a scale for other factors as well.
Really, are we required to find all people of equal attraction now? Are we required to pretend that every person is equally beautiful to us? Because even if we are, it’s only ever going to be pretense, and it seems more useful if people can at least get a sense of the criteria.
And didn’t Donald Trump judge beauty contests? Contests that women entered willing knowing full well some would come out on top based on physical features?
In practice, you’re usually allowed to have and express preferences as long as you make it clear that you know that they’re ‘problematic’ and are ‘working on’ them. Self-deprecating humor is a good way to do it.
But that’s more of a second-order effect rather than the explicit aim: in theory there’s no problem with having preferences, it’s just that since any particular preference can be criticized as reinforcing some form of oppression none of them are safe. Especially in heavily-SJ places where people know what the words ableism or ageism mean it’s very difficult to find traits which are ‘safe’ to prefer or disprefer.
It seems to affect women a lot more strongly than men though: if you’ve been to college in the last decade, chances are you’ve hooked up with at least two or three allegedly bi- or pansexual girls who express absolutely no interest in dating anyone but straight men. But the inverse is extremely rare.
It’s so delightful how many people we have on here willing to explain in detail what “social justice people”, “Leftists”, and “progressives” believe. That saves us all an inordinate amount of effort in seeking out and talking to people that actual identify with these labels.
Having belonged to a group obviously disqualifies you from talking about how they behave. How foolish of me to think otherwise.
People can go against the oppression hierarchy and state a preference for overweight people or people of color and then they are safe from that criticism.
Of course, as male sexuality is ‘problematic’ by definition there is always a fallback, so then people get accused of having a fetish and objectifying people who are overweight/old/handicapped/etc. Any preference can be vilified that way, so no man is safe. Of course, when the SJWs themselves have preferences, it’s ‘who they are and their sexuality should not be policed!!!!11!!’.
There is scientific evidence that female sexuality is different from male sexuality and far more ‘open.’
That said, a lot of social justice types seem to be into collecting labels like scouting badges. The more you have, the easier it is to win social justice debates based on identity.
I think it’s quite difficult to state a romantic preference for people of colour without it getting rapidly interpreted as fetishism; the major complaint you see from black women talking about their dating-site experiences is that people view them as an opportunity to carve a different-coloured notch on their bedpost.
@Anonymous
Well, that is sort of what happens when you start kicking people out of your group for heresy – by definition, they haven’t been convinced that you’re right, so when asked on the matter, they will say so, and if they’re particularly articulate they will also say why.
When your heretics happen to have good points, this is a bad sign.
@Skivverus
I don’t see how your reply is the least bit responsive.
I’m criticizing the rabid strawmanning and weakmanning of the aforementioned groups that goes on here. Why not let people speak for themselves instead of going on impassioned rants about Leftist this and SJW that?
If you have nothing else to talk about because your whole political philosophy is reactive and is devoid of content in the absence of the hated enemy or a convenient strawman thereof, well it isn’t much of a philosophy then, is it?
Why not, indeed? It’s not like we’re driving them off with pitchforks.
@Anonymous
Our comments merely state that people exist who do these things and describes what they do.
It’s only straw manning if we would state something like: ‘all SJWs do this’ We did no such thing.
@Aapje
If the comments were:
“I know someone, call her Mary, that thinks that thinks it is okay to express sexual preferences as long as you make it clear that you know that they’re ‘problematic’ and are ‘working on’ them …”
or
“According to tumblr_user_2343, it is okay to express preferences as long as …”
or even
“When I was an undergrad, I knew a group affillated witht the women’s center that had the norm it is okay to express …”
then your comment would be apropos.
Instead we get sweeping statements about what huge ill defined groups of people do, say, or worse yet believe.
“Yeah, how could you get the impression that the left are a bunch of blood-thirsty lunatics from the history of communism?”
“Jews aren’t disadvantaged to the left.
And if you aren’t disadvantaged your never a real victim”
“It is evident that the Left has an irrational obsession with the Jewish state in particular. ”
“Russians are pretty white, but Soviet interventions around the world, often on behalf of the most appalling tyrants imaginable, never seemed to get the left’s dander up. ”
“Yes, I think the left’s love affair with Islam is largely because Islamic groups are currently the most credible opponent of the US.”
“It’s not really just a European thing; it’s just more common in Europe because they have a larger and more fundamentalist/anti-Semitic Islamic population that the Left has made a Faustian bargain with in order to gain power. ”
“Where as for the left EVERYTHING is an extension of US is an extension of campus politics.”
I have not seen this research, but I am extremely doubtful about it. If I’d conducted the same study 2500 years ago and chose to nudge the Athenians and Spartans about it, I’d have found the completely opposite result. There is a only sort of halfway joke about psychologists being very good at figuring out the mental workings of white male affluent college-aged Americans, and this is one example where I’d say it probably holds up.
Well, women differ not just in conscious behavior, but also by their response to erotic images:
http://www.sexscience.org/PDFs/Gender%20Differences%20and%20Similarities%20in%20Sexuality%20Final.pdf
For example, women generally get physically aroused by mating monkeys, while men generally do not. This indicates that women are more exciting by the act of sex and less by the participants.
I’ve always been attracted to women who are an odd number of centimeters tall.
You can have a preference obviously. But saying: “This person is a 10 and this person is a 1.” implies that their attractiveness is inherent in themselves as opposed to the product of your preferences. That is problematic.
In addition, certain preferences while not problematic in and of themselves, are the product of social norms which are problematic. Acknowledging this fact is important because when you hold those preferences, it is particularly important that you not act in ways that reinforce those problematic norms.
The fetish around women’s small body sizes sucks for many reasons. It drives women to unhealthy life choices, makes women who cannot achieve the ideal feel bad about their bodies, causes women who do not match the ideal to be devalued in many ways. (not just in the dating pool, but also when evaluated in general such as for jobs) It’s fine if you prefer thinner women. There is nothing wrong with that. But it’s important that when you speak of it, you not reinforce the idea that women who are not thin are ugly and less valuable. A woman who is not thin isn’t a 1. She’s just someone you’re not attracted to. Don’t reinforce social norms that cause harm to others.
I have a feeling you would identify with this character.
Difference between the Howard Stern show and a wedding reception, perhaps.
Also, differences between being asked for one’s opinion and volunteering it because someone made an obviously hyperbolic compliment.
Also, differences between describing Trump’s actions and specifying what my own would be.
THIS POST IS A TEN.
http://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/5711227_700b_v1.jpg
I agree with this analysis, as it accurately describes how and why I consider DT’s reported comments sexist, and I will try to defend the claim being made therein. So, uh, please wish me luck.
Scott’s definition of sexism:
Merriam-Webster’s definition, for no reason other than that it is the first google response for “sexism” I get:
It appears to me that Scott’s definition is the non-central one here. Specifically, as lawyers would put it, the standard he expects is higher. I do not need to think women are inferior to men, or hate them or think they shouldn’t be allowed full human rights or jobs etc., in order to treat them unfairly. I merely need to exhibit a pattern of behaviours in which I systematically treated women unfairly because they were women (as opposed to genuine factual differences, for instance, because they are physically weaker, physically indisposed on a certain schedule, less good at realistically portraying Conan the Barbarian, etc.) That falls far short of what Scott requires. Can we agree on this definition going forward, or are there challenges to it?
Continuing the legal analogy, Scott has imported from seemingly nowhere a requirement of mens rea – actual intent to harm. That does not appear in either the dictionary definition or, AFAIK, the popular usage, making it a “strict liability” offence.
If my definition is correct, then not much more need be said. Men are rarely (though occasionally) criticized for their appearance, particularly on the campaign trail and in the workplace. Women frequently are. This is unfair, as it is equally irrelevant to their job performance. This is unfair, because as a matter of fact it makes women feel uncomfortable and excluded from the workplace. In short, I do agree that comments about women’s appearances are inherently sexist, because they have a deleterious effect on women in the workplace and are not made with anything near as much frequency or invective about men. I stop short of saying it is ‘unacceptable’, but certainly it fulfills the lowered threshold test of ‘unfairly treating someone because of their gender’.
Trump owns the Miss USA beauty pageant. A woman’s beauty is directly relevant to her qualification for the job of Miss USA.
Is it a UK-US culture clash thing that for me defending someone from charges of sexism by saying they own a beauty pageant seems topsy-turvy?
Yes, nothing seems “topsy-turvy” to Americans. We call it “ass-backwards”.
It doesn’t seem topsy-turvy to me – I consider beauty pageants a willing buyer-willing seller transaction, and I tend to be impatient with the argument that beauty pageants impose externalities on all other women elsewhere.
What I don’t understand is its relevance. Unless he was literally acting in his capacity as a pageant owner/judge at that very moment when the comments were made; or unless the comments were made about an actual pageant contestant, or at least in some other way tangibly related to Miss USA. That doesn’t seem to apply in the majority of cases.
It does appear to me as if it’s being used as a blanket defence for any and all comments made by DT at any time, which I can’t quite unpick, but it’s possible that I misunderstand that argument’s specifics.
Men are rarely (though occasionally) criticized for their appearance, particularly on the campaign trail and in the workplace. Women frequently are. This is unfair, as it is equally irrelevant to their job performance.
Not in customer-facing roles it’s not.
Men more rarely get criticized for their appearance in customer-facing roles. For example, they’re not expected to put on make-up (yes they are expected to shave their face, or at least have a groomed beard, but the overall level of grooming expected from men is much lower than for women).
So even if you argue it’s relevant to their performance they’re still treated unfairly as they are expected to do things their male counterparts aren’t.
How is beauty necessary for a customer-facing role? A pretty waiter isn’t necessarily more likely to get your order correct; a pretty shop assistant isn’t necessarily going to know the stock better.
Based on tipping patterns – we can conjecture that the appearance of a waiter is more important to a customer’s satisfaction than the likelihood of getting the order correct.
Beauty may not be “necessary” for a customer-facing role, but it is a job-relevant factor, for the same reason attractive people are used in advertisements, entertainment, and related industries.
This is just scratching the surface, but should give you an idea of what would happen if you had two otherwise equal restaurants, but one staffed only ugly servers, while the other only staffed attractive servers –
Beautiful Faces Have Variable Reward Value: fMRI and Behavioral Evidence
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627301004913
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS IN THE BODIES AND FACES OF OTHERS: AN FMRI STUDY OF PERSON ESTHETIC JUDGEMENT
https://www.ucm.es/data/cont/docs/114-2015-01-16-Martin-Loeches%20et%20al%202014.pdf
The Neural Response to Facial Attractiveness
http://www.csuchico.edu/~nschwartz/The%20Neural%20Response%20to%20Facial%20Attractiveness.pdf
Gender differences in the motivational processing of facial beauty
http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Mazar_LearningMotivation_2008.pdf
The thing is, this experiment has been played out over the history of the relevant industries, and it continues to be even now.
Successful businesses thrive. The rest die.
@Matt M: That’s an argument against tipping. It’s grossly unfair that tipping is justified as a necessary incentive for the waiter to work hard, but in practise is only an unfair reward for factors unrelated to waitering skills. Seems like the world would be a better and fairer place if everyone were paid a living wage and tips were not a custom.
@Z I’m not saying that people don’t treat the beautiful better. I’m saying that shouldn’t.
I also don’t think the waitresses looks are enough of a factor to kill a business. The history of the relevant industries varies from culture to culture. Restuarants still thrive in modest cultures where women don’t do ccustomer facing roles. The are cultures like the French where service is regarded as a skill and pays well, and people still go to restaurants despite the waiters not being chosen on looks. Perhaps I am just typical-minding but I’ve never known anyone to make a choice about where to eat or drink based on the looks of the staff.
Even if it could be shown that the looks of the waitress is enough to sink a restaurant, it still wouldn’t apply to lots of other customer facing roles like receptionist, store assistant, sales, helpline etc.
Among many other factors, physical beauty makes interacting with someone more pleasant.
Flick has apparently never heard of Hooters.
These seem like very weak arguments against the obvious point that most of DT’s comments were made describing people who were neither Miss USA contestants nor receptionists. Indeed, most of the comments, including the ‘flat-chested 10’ one and the one described below about ‘men being better than women’, were describing all women generally. I believe I specifically addressed the issue of treating women differently when their gender or appearance was in some way inherently related to their jobs. This is about all the other times.
I agree with you, erenold. The above arguments are weak and appear to me to be good examples of motivated reasoning.
However, I also agree, the examples documented for DT don’t meet the dictionary definition of misogyny.
With the other examples I could better understand the problem and maybe it warrants a separate treatment from usual hyperbole.
However, my personal experience (in a different country) was like this: in school, a lot of the children openly said racist and sexist and anti-semitic things. Later, these people didn’t say racist things to me (as an immigrant-looking person) anymore, but some of those same people became people who dislike immigration. And some of the people who said sexist things then, still say sexist things to me, but not to women, or not to some women (ho/housewife-thinking).
So, in my personal experience, there really are a lot of people who know when to hold their tongue and there are correlations of these things spoken in “private” and those spoken in “public”.
Do others have wildly different experiences?
Of course, in the presence of strong countervailing actions, maybe these mindsets should count less. I’m not sure DT’s actions, on balance, have made the world a better place for women or not, but I guess that’s not the point here.
But yeah the other examples were better. But they were fairly Israel-specific. There is, in that case, at least in some places a reason why there might be more coded language there, because e.g. Germany has fairly specific hate crime laws and we do actually find things like Neonazis wearing kufiyas, previously more of a leftist symbol here, and other coded messages. But of course your examples still seem like overreactions.
So, these don’t seem to be the best examples, neither in the sense of steelmanning nor strawmanning dogwhistle-logic, because
a) you, Scott, may misjudge codes in other cultures (maybe Britain leftist politics counts here), in the sense that some commenters think he’s obviously misstepped according to local culture, that you may not have known
b) I’m not sure, but for me it helps to see the point to have been the target of racism, but also to have been presumed “in on the joke”, because I don’t look the part. Maybe similar to the experience some women make once they “qualify as buddies” or lurk in a male-dominated space. I don’t know how that works for Jews in America, is there a lot of genuine anti-semitism that you’re exposed to as a kid, or is this fairly abstract for yourself?
Like, have you had continuous personal interactions with people who spewed anti-semitism in early life, but became “civilised” later on? Don’t they have “tells”?
This is interesting.
I think the closest thing I’ve experienced is this: My mother has always wanted me to lose weight. In the past, she would make comments about my appearance and say I should lose weight to look better. Over time, she has learned that I react very defiantly to statements like that, and she mostly stopped making them. Now, she tells me I should lose weight for health reasons, which I think is a much stronger argument. However, because of the history of our disagreements, I tend to suspect that a concern for my appearance is still one of her driving forces, which tends to occasionally be confirmed when she still says something about it. And to a lesser degree, I tend to suspect that polite people who are socially farther from me, who wouldn’t tell me I look bad and should lose weight, might also think so – especially if they make any food/health-related comments – because I’ve experienced that opinion so much before.
Yeah, people minding their words around overweight people is something I see too, including sighs of relief when the fat person acts self-aware/deprecating/makes light of the situation after a slip of the tongue.
I agree with your argument. Sexism can be seen as a set of cultural expectations not just a set of nice clear beliefs (“thinks women should not vote”).
Perpetuating them is included in the broad definition of being sexist. In the same vein, breaking down traditional gender expectations (support women who do math, men who ballet, whatever) can be defined as fighting against sexism.
On the other hand, this makes any sane person a sexist.
Yeah, most of the definitions I’ve seen here of “sexist” boil down to “think there are any differences at all between men and women.”
Which may well be the actual meaning; I certainly get that impression from feminists often enough, but I’ve grown ever less sympathetic to their cause since deconverting.
Extrapolating a bit and continuing the analogy of sexism to a criminal offence, it strikes me as potentially part of the problem is that there are two separate “offences” being conflated into one.
One is the dictionary definition of sexism, systematic treatment of women in a less-preferential manner for no reason other than that they are women. Let’s call this sexism simpliciter. I catch myself doing this from time to time – explaining to, rather than debating with, a female colleague, interrupting female colleagues more often. The penalty for this is and should be “hey man that’s not cool.”
The other is, e.g., calling a woman a “cunt” in public, deliberately and consciously hiring resume-equal male job applicants on the basis that “men are superior”, etc. The key difference is not only in how it’s expressed but its motivation – hating women, thinking them unfit for employment generally, etc. This is perhaps the definition of sexism that Scott has in mind for this essay. The penalty for this is, but perhaps should not be, nasty stories in the NYT, losing your basketball team, informal disqualification from the office of POTUS, etc. Let’s call this “aggravated sexism”.
Which category DT’s comments fall into is an exercise left to the reader, but is this a helpful starting point in trying to reconcile terminological distinctions?
The first two examples in your second paragraph seem totally different. One actually causes objective harm, the other is a vulgar insult. It kind of serves Scott’s point actually – it’s boorish, but not necessarily indicative of actually treating women unfairly relative to men.
I honestly don’t get the freak out over gender-specific cuss words. Why is “cunt” or “bitch” so much worse than “dickhead”, “cocksucker”, or “asshole”? I mean, if you can say “man” and “woman” at all (which most of us are okay with) why shouldn’t we say “dick” and “twat” as gendered insults (or at least, why would the latter be worse)?
I use them not as proof of “aggravated sexism” in themselves but as proof of the underlying mental state of genuinely disliking women. Hence the mens rea connection.
But why is calling a woman a “cunt” in public evidence that you’re a misogynist and not a misanthrope? Why is it evidence that you have negative feelings toward “women”, as opposed to just that particular woman – maybe she’s legitimately unpleasant and you’re just vulgar?
EDIT: whoops, replied to wrong level. Supposed to be a response to erenold’s 12:42AM.
No worries, I got it.
Yeah, what you describe, an equal-opportunity asshole, is certainly possible. Let’s exclude the ‘cunt’ example for now if it’s controversial, since it’s not key to my argument.
Whence that focus on the workplace? Nobody was talking about not employing flat-chested women.
The one thing that for some reason NO ONE seems to bring up:
Trump insults *everybody*, not just men and women. He made fun of Rand Paul for being short. He said about Jeb Bush: “just got contact lenses and got rid of the glasses. He wants to look cool, but it’s far too late”.
In fact, the constant insistent that criticising women is somehow worse than criticising men, and therefore Trump is sexist, is in itself sexism (benevolent sexism towards women)
In all of these cases the problem isn’t so much that he’s insulting people, it’s that he’s insulting people for things that have nothing to do with their work or their “self” – specifically for their bodies. I think that insulting people for their bodies is always wrong in a way that approaches ableism (or actually is ableist, depending). The sexist part is that he consistently insults women in a very gendered way that focuses on their appearance even when it’s irrelevant, and insulting women for their appearance is really a quite strong insult in our society. (To me it seems obvious that women’s worth is equated with their appearance much more than men’s is, which I believe to be a sexist state of affairs, and I think Trump’s gendered choice of insults is part of that and contributes to that.)
I agree. But that isn’t exclusive to women. It seems obvious to me that men’s worth is equated with professional and financial success far more than women’s is. Seems just as sexist.
@JakeR: I dunno; seems to me that teenage mothers who claim benefits and don’t necessarily work are pretty roundly condemned by everyone for being parasites i.e. professional and financial failures.
Even middle class stay-at-home mums get a fair bit of criticism for ‘wasting’ their degrees or ‘doing nothing’ with their lives.
Women are also harshly comdemned for financial and professional failure.
And they’re in the double bind of also being condemned for financial and professional success – what kind of cold-hearted monster leaves her kids in childcare instead of raising them herself?!
> The sexist part is that he consistently insults women in a very gendered way
Trump’s insults towards Jeb Bush were heavily gendered, implying low testosterone and whatnot. His supporters went nuts for that.
In general, this all seems so pointless. The guy is a thoughtless, boorish asshole towards everyone who gets on his bad side or just wanders through his field of vision; isn’t that enough to criticize him on? Why is it necessary to carefully parse his assholery as if we were analyzing the Kabbalah?
It may be useful because “Trump is coming after [group you most closely identify with]!” is more motivating than “Trump is a jerk.”
Eh, Trump gets his own appearance criticized constantly. “Orange monster”, “Orange garbage fire”, “small hands”, etc. Look around, you’ll see it everywhere.
He doesn’t give out near as much as he gets dissed.
I already commented on how I find the small hands thing weird (in that the media somehow finds it funny), but to be fair the hairstyle is his decision. I think mocking his hairstyle is on the same level as mocking someone’s kaleidoscope tie, i.e. I don’t see any problem with it. Even if he has zero sense of taste he should be able to hire an advisor who can give him pointers on how not to look ridiculous.
This is because “men with big hands” is in fact in itself a dog whistle for “men with large penises”. Repeatedly mentioning that Trump’s hands are small is supposed to be a dog whistle for Trump having emasculate genitals, with the non-dogs being children and FCC censors.
Well, Trump did insult “Little Marco” on those grounds also.
@Nicholas: I’m not even convinced that is the entire explanation for why the insult is used, but even if it was, it doesn’t explain why people consider it more OK to say “Donald Trump has a small penis” than “Chris Christie is super fat”.
Mentioning that Trump has small hands isn’t a dog-whistle, it’s just a euphemism; everyone is supposed to get it, it’s just a bit too crude to claim your opponent has a small penis (though I won’t be TOO surprised if Trump does so about someone on Hillary’s side in so many words before November).
I think the “small hands” thing was an attempt by Rubio to attack Trump on his own level. It wasn’t entirely unsuccessful; Trump carried on about it way longer than necessary.
Also Chris Christie’s weight gets brought up a lot in NJ. He had bariatric surgery before his presidential run in order to make it less of an issue (well, that reason is speculation, but it’s common speculation). If his campaign had lasted longer we’d have seen a lot more shots at his weight, probably not just from Trump.
You idiots, the small hands thing is because Trump was famously enraged when a reporter referred to him as a “short-fingered vulgarian” and sent him pictures of his hands for years afterwards.
“Trump insults *everybody*”
Along similar lines, is calling a woman he wants to insult a cunt evidence of sexism if he also calls men he wants to insult pricks?
It’s plausibly Bayesian evidence for it, in that one of those words is vastly stronger than the other and we often consider insults evidence of *ism in proportion to their strength.
You can’t derive that from their denotative meaning, but that’s language for you.
Which one?
I’ve always thought of them as equivalent, with “Dick” and “Bitch” being the lesser (more socially acceptble) forms.
“Cunt”.
I see “prick” and “bitch” as roughly equivalent, and “dick” as milder than either.
Huh TIL.
I agree that “cunt” feels much stronger than “prick”.
For what it’s worth, I’m American, and I’ve heard that in British English “cunt” is much milder than it is for us.
“Cunt” in American English (very unlike Australian English, where even the SJWs call each other “cunts”) is basically still taboo. You don’t call someone a “cunt” unless you want a permanent exit from any sort of polite society. This makes it quite popular among edgelords of course. I’m not sure there’s a similarly strong male-gendered insult.
I think the male equivalent to “cunt” (in America vs UK) is “cocksucker” which is both vulgar and homophobic.
“cocksucker” is an anti-gay slur, dontcha know?
I think it’s more that swearing in general is less of a big deal in most (though not all) UK subcultures than in most US ones. “Cunt” is still the strongest swear word in the UK, but that still almost certainly makes it a bigger deal there than here. In my (urban, artsy) social circle it’s a complete non-issue, but still not quite punctuation the way “fuck”, for example, is. In at least some rural northern working or lower-middle class circles, on the other hand, it’s still completely taboo.
This is an odd claim to make on a comment that’s about Trump. If you ask someone to describe Trump, there’s a good chance that you will hear the words “orange combover.” There’s a thing that happens with feminism and ant-racism and LGBT activism that is usually associated with their opposite where all sorts of bits of conventional wisdom get folded in an treated with very little scrutiny.
Going through the field of Republican canditates it strikes me that I don’t recall anyone, other than Trump, making remarks about Carly Fiorina, but I revall lots of comments about Cruz’ punchable face. And bot Christie and Huckabee have been targets for weight comments most of their careers. When I think about who does and who does not attract appearance comments, it’s not so much sex as how much you deviate from the standards of conventional attractiveness.
This is a fair objection that has gotten me to rethink that particular point, so thank you.
Is it possible however that the window of ‘conventional attractiveness’ is significantly wider for men than women? Particularly as it includes sartorial choice, which is virtually a non-factor for Western male politicians.
I.e. Trump attracts such criticism because his appearance is, objectively, very very much non-standard, let alone by the standards of POTUS candidates. (I’ve seen articles where Chinese netizens express disbelief that his hairstyle in particular is not Photoshopped.) Whereas Hillary attracts appearance-related criticism merely for being an older woman, for instance.
Is it possible however that the window of ‘conventional attractiveness’ is significantly wider for men than women? Particularly as it includes sartorial choice, which is virtually a non-factor for Western male politicians.
I think this is correct.
Weight illustrates this well, I think. Fat people in general are targets of prejudice (Chris Christie is indeed a good example). But our beauty standards are such that a man has to deviate somewhat substantially from the ideal weight before he’s considered fat, whereas a woman need only deviate a bit. For example, at least from what I’ve seen, it’s very normal for a man to have his belly protrude noticeably forward above his pants, especially if he’s wearing a tucked-in dress shirt, and this is unremarkable unless he is really very fat. For a woman, the same amount of belly is considered ugly.
More generally, I think people remark upon men’s attractiveness if they are very attractive or if they are very unattractive – there’s a broad middle ground where men just look pretty normal and people just don’t feel compelled to evaluate their attractiveness, especially in a professional context. I think for women that middle ground is much narrower, if it exists at all, and a woman’s attractiveness is considered a really central thing about her.
That’s my sense of it as well.
I have myself never seen anyone pointing out literally the first thing I personally notice about Trump – he’s very, very overweight! Maybe not morbidly so, and certainly he was helped by having Chris Christie around as a comparator, but certainly unhealthily so, no?
I find it difficult – correct me if I’m mistaken – to believe that political women could get away with a comparable BMI without it being a topic of discussion.
At least according to OKCupid statistics, the opposite is true. Most men are considered of below-average attractiveness, unlike most women.
Anecdotally, it seems to me that most famous male politicians are publicly mocked by any slight physical defect or unusual sartorial choice. To some extent this also applies to female politicians, but when it happens the feminists promptly screech “MYSOGGYKNEE!!!”
To kind of combine the conflicting observations of OkCupid and the presidential race:
Men are usually not evaluated primarily on their attractiveness, unless it stands out (like being very fat). So it’s not that the window of “conventional attractiveness is signifacntly wider”, it’s that the window of acceptable attractiveness before it get’s noticed is wider. However, when men are being judged by their looks (like on dating sites), they fare worse than women.
re: OKCupid stats, I don’t think they’re very relevant to politicians who are much more groomed than the average person. I would assume male and female politicians put a comparable amount of effort/staff in personal grooming (Bernie Sanders not included), whereas the average man grooms much less than the average woman.
Even on OKCupid: for men, looks matter less for actual messaging (ie the thing you care about, you don’t care so much about the rating). It’s often summarised as a minimum standard kind of thing. And yes, a lot of men don’t meet the minimum standard.
For women, looks matter much more for messaging.
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/
This may sound as if women are harsher judges, but from what I know, it’s the target that matters, not the judge. Men are on average uglier than women, period. I don’t know if OKCupid has released such analyses for homosexual and bisexual judges, but from what I hear and read, the same distribution of ratings should emerge.
So, vV_Vv you’re wrong for substantive outcomes. And it may even be argued, due to the inter-sexual-orientation agreement among judges, that men’s window of conventional attractiveness has an _even_ lower lower-edge, because men are intersubjectively less easy on the eyes than women (be that because of biology or less grooming or culturally ingrained preference or whatever).
While I agree that women are judged more harshly for their appearance than men in professional contexts, this was a terrible example in the specifics. Due to sex hormones, men and women have different fat storage patterns. Men tend to store fat around their abdomen first and women tend to store it around their hips and butt first. On average, I would expect a women with a belly the size of an overweight man’s (proportionally to height) to be a complete blob all over, just as I would expect of a man with an ass the size of an overweight woman’s. And if on the other hand the woman does just have fat mostly around her belly like a man, many people will find that unattractive because it goes against female secondary sexual characteristics.
I’d say that it is the opposite: men are simply not allowed as much choice and with that limited choice there is much less to criticize.
For example, no man I know would ever wear shorts to work. Since this rule is so strict and a simple pass/fail, it is easy to follow. In contrast, women have the choice to wear dresses or skirts, but with this comes a grey area of skirt length, shaving the legs, etc that leaves women open for criticism if they go ‘too far’. Men simply never enter this grey area.
Another example is events like the Oscars. Take a look at the red carpet pictures and compare the men to the women. Most men wear the same thing: a black tux. Women are all over the place. Imagine making a job out of criticizing the men, you’d die of boredom. But with women there is much more to argue about (and plenty people, men and women, love critiquing the fashion choices of famous women, who in turn often cater to that by wearing ‘fashion’).
Whenever men do step out of line and get ‘fashionable,’ they get criticized just as much as women, IMO.
There’s more going on with those suits and tuxes than you might think. Because the rules for men’s formal wear are so strict, the differences are less obvious to people that don’t spend a lot of time wearing (or at least discussing) it, but it is “fashion”, and it’s absolutely possible to make bold choices within that context. And celebrities do, all the time.
It’s just that the rest of us only notice it when it looks like this.
Have you seen Don Cherry?!
Tentative assertion: Our last two presidents (maybe three if you count the makeover) have been the most in-shape people to have held the office. And by in-shape I mean jogging/pilates/yoga body, not something like can hammer iron pylons for 12 hours straight, ride a horse a 1000 miles, etc 😉
Probably one of the defining characteristics of our time is the increased interest in physical training, especially for over-40 executives. I suspect both Bush’s and Obama’s political handlers consider their physique confidence inspiring and a large asset.
Which makes the 2016 showdown view from waist to shoulders even more dissonant. But while neither are conventionally attractive, I’d have to give Trump the edge in body language and physical charisma and power-wagging [a la Jack Donaghy]. Agreed?
@Nornagest
That really just supports my point. The only people who care about these tiny differences (OMG, the sleeves are invisible!!!11) are hardcore fashion people. Most people only notice the biggest errors (like a suit that is 10 sizes too big) or simply find it immensely boring because the same ‘errors’ are made time and again.
By contrast, no person will fail to notice the differences between even the most basic dresses.
The range of variation in what people notice is huge.
A man (probably moderately deep into the autism spectrum) told me that he didn’t notice a difference between what I was wearing (t shirt and sweat pants) and what another woman was wearing (long gown, somewhat low cut, with an organdy jacket with some gold ornamentation), and I believe he was telling the truth about what he was not noticing.
We were at a science fiction convention, of course.
And I think most people would be amazed at how much I don’t notice about cars.
Yeah sure and women seem to be (cultured to be) more interested in fashion on average than men. As far as I encounter criticism of how people dress, it seems to be done by women at least as much as by men.
To me, that makes the accusation of misogyny rather weak, unless one wants to argue that those women are women-haters.
I am surprised that people still use that definiton of sexism on a place like SCC, even Scott. Sexism is not necessarily hatred of women, it’s treating any person differently because of their gender. I am quite critical of SJWs but I think they got it right on this one:
Women criticising other women for their appearence is a good sign of entrenched gender norms, i.e. the relative importance of looks for women compared to men. This may not be necessarily bad, I think it’s not the end of the world, but the double standard exists.
Now, that SJWs attack men if they judge women based on appearance, but certainly do not when it’s a woman who is judging is another matter.
Sounds like sexism is good?
If you’re going to define “sexism” as “any differing treatment based on gender”, then I don’t think you can necessarily treat it as negative, or at least not react as negatively as you do to the “actively treat women as inferior” type.
I kind of see that as the problem with the expanded definition of sexism (and racism, for that matter). The response needs to be proportionate to the offense, but the “dog whistle” approach treats minor gaffes as major crimes.
@gbdub:
I agree. It’s a classic motte-and-bailey: Oh, sexism is not just hatred of women, it’s treating them differently. Thus, as you treat women differently, you are sexist and therefore also misogynistic.
No, I think that’s wrong, though. Again, this is Merriam-Webster:
It has to fulfill a two-part test. One, are you treating women differently? One bee, is there an genuine occupational reason you are treating women differently (e.g. I want to cast Conan the Barbarian and I will not consider casting a woman, period)? Two, is that treatment ‘unfair’ or negative?
That’s the dictionary definition and it seems both ‘useful’ and ‘true’ in the sense that it reflects popular usage.
You can unfairly favor somebody.
Did anyone make fat jokes about Christie without most of the media at least going “hey, not cool!”? Did, in fact, any of the non-Trump republican candidates go there?
As I said in another post there seems to be an exception for short size, and apparently short hands, that suddenly make it OK to mock a person’s looks.
Someone (may have been Scott Adams, can’t remember) pointed out early on that Trump has almost certainly been more criticized based on his appearance than any candidate involved in this election cycle, and any candidate at all in recent history (mostly relating to his hair). It goes ignored because “making fun of Donald Trump’s bad hair” has been a cultural meme since the 80s, such that nobody even realizes when it happens anymore.
He can do something about his hair. He can do something about the spray tan and the white raccoon eyes from the goggles.
I feel perfectly justified in criticizing/ mocking things people have the ability to change, but I hold the line at things which cannot be fixed in, at most, a couple of weeks. Thus, I point and laugh at absurd makeup, but I don’t make fat jokes.
This is the usual pattern. When people say “Women are unfairly targeted by $THING”, what it almost always means is “Women are targeted much, much less by $THING than men are, but since I view women as innately precious and cherishable and men as innately disposable and degrading, I get upset and remember it when it happens to women and do not become upset and do not remember it when it happens to men.”
It’s exactly the same kind of thinking that leads activists to say that it’s proof of how much society hates and threatens women when 25% of the homeless in a region are women, or 10% of murder victims in El Salvador are women. They are literally and not figuratively incapable of perceiving bad things happening to men, and so always conclude women are disproportionately victims, even though this is never true.
@erenold
There are challenges.
There are reasons mens rea requirements were once so common in the common law, and the broad change to strict liability has been for the worse. In practice, the charge of sexism falls even on patterns of behavior premised on genuine factual differences — but let that pass, for strict liability would be inappropriate regardless.
Perhaps the largest effect of shifting this to strict liability, undesirable to some and the point of the exercise to others, is that there is no safe harbor. To treat all the same is to fail to accommodate vital individual needs (“the fabled offer of milk to the stork and the fox”); to treat each differently is to discriminate.
And if all are guilty, then everything lies in the charging and sentencing. This would be as nothing if, as you assert below, the penalty for sexism simpliciter, was a “hey man, that’s not cool.” Strict liability for parking tickets doesn’t bother most because the penalty is so minor. When the penalties for parking tickets are not minor, you get the sort of revenue-by-fine system seen in Ferguson… and then strict liability is felt to be (and is!) a grave imposition.
Indeed, you attempt to reimport the mens rea distinction below, to split off sexism with severe penalties from that which should (your word) be punished only by ‘hey man, that’s not cool.’ So why try to strike the mens rea requirement initially?
This post is very confusing. Are you claiming there’s a broad movement in American? Anglophone? law to strict liability criminal law?
True in every Anglophone country I’ve seen, both in the criminal law itself (though with occasional reverses of direction) and more dramatically in the gradual displacement of law by regulation, which is usually strict liability.
Consider sentencing enhancements, or the more general shift to civil tools such as forfeitures or the various UK civil orders (most famously, the ASBO, though that’s been superseded).
I can’t speak the to UK, but in the US there’s no shift to strict liability. Such crimes remain extremely rare (about the only one I can think of is statutory rape, and that’s longstanding).
I don’t see what sentence enhancements have to do with anything, you can only have a sentence enhanced if you’ve been convicted beyond a reasonable doubt of a crime, which almost certainly will have involved a mens rea element. Also, in the US there’s a line of case starting with Apprendi v. New Jersey that constitutionalizes sentencing enhancements.
In terms of regulation being strict liability, that looks to me like a category error. There’s only a place to attach a mens rea requirement (or more properly scienter requirement if we are talking about a civil context) where there is punishment. When the government goes to actually try to sue or prosecute someone for breaking regulations they have to rely on statutory law, not regulations for the elements to be proved.
Concur that sentence enhancements require predicate crimes, concur that predicate crimes in the US are still primarily mens rea (statutory rape and felony murder being the big exception). When the enhancements are comparable to or greater than the punishment for the underlying crime, it’s debatable whether the mens rea requirement still has teeth.
Concur that Apprendi and Alleyne pushed back on sentence enhancements and mandatory minimums, but they both did so by increasing jury involvement. (Yes, Apprendi specifically involved a mens rea enhancement; see Dean for a controlling holding that minimums/enhancements do not require mens rea.) There are other pushbacks: consider the ruling in Black and Skilling that honest services fraud is (almost) void for vagueness, lacking a bribe or kickback… but consider that one in the light of the increased use of RICO in prosecutions.
As for regulations, you’re correct that there must be an authorizing law for an agency and its regulations, but that authorizing law does not need to provide elements. Often it delegates defining the elements to the agency, sometimes setting the severity of punishment to the agency, sometimes even the jurisdiction over a case breaching those regulations to a court established and staffed by the agency.
@notes,
There’s an is/ought distinction here, I think. I’m not claiming that we should treat sexism allegations as strict liability – I’m pointing out that the dictionary definition already does so. And it already does so because that’s exactly how the term is conventionally used. Hence you hear people using the phrase “unintentionally sexist”, which by definition excludes malice.
And it’s precisely because I’m troubled by the idea that I could lose my job (for example) for being perceived to have talked over women or mansplained to them that I think it’s important to distinguish sexism simpliciter and sexism with malice aforethought. I agree with you that to treat the former as the same as the latter would be terrible.
Thanks for the clarification!
No worries! If anything, it’s probably my fault for being unclear.
Really? Because I’m pretty sure no one in their right mind would dare call a female politician fat or old, while those insults are regularly leveled at male politicians. Trump’s hair is a frequent topic of discussion this election cycle, and his penis size actually came up at the debate!
As for the workplace, well, the most stereotypically masculine workplace we have – the military – has a host of physical and grooming standards, requiring more effort than any makeup counter.
Please see j r’s comment thread above https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/#comment-373790 – I think you raise a good objection re: Trump specifically, but the picture is considerably more mixed elsewhere, and part of that is because Trump really is sui generis as regards his appearance.
I’m also detecting a cheat when you include physical standards as part of the military’s requirements for male appearance. Firstly, they’re required for female soldiers as well mutatis mutandis, secondly the physical standards are there because physical strength is actually integral to a soldier’s occupation.
Or so my drill sergeant used to claim, anyway. Man, fuck that guy.
I wonder if American’s are politer about female politicians than Brits? In the UK Ann Widdecombe was universally criticised for being incredibly ugly. Jess Phillips MP has recently been the recipient of a barrage of tweets from men reassuring her that she’s too ugly to rape. The Daily Mail runs regular stories about female MPs in parliament having necklines too low.
Wouldn’t you say that the military is hyper-masculine workplace, because it’s the pinnacle of manliness rather than the example? Stereotypical masculine workplaces would be more like construction sites for the working class, tech and engineering for the middle class?
I think the level of attractiveness-policing of American female politicians is approximately similar, maybe less than you describe. There are definitely cruel tweets. I can’t think of an equivalent malice in our equivalents of the Daily Mail (I’m thinking of online conservative news sources). Regardless, calling them ugly is usually taboo, hence controversy when Trump did it.
Actually I can think of one woman in the political sphere who has been the subject of frequent looks-based attacks (with “she’s a man” transphobia often mixed in): Ann Coulter.
There’s a fair amount of stuff on the Internet saying that Michelle Obama is transgender.
I’d forgotten about that. Yeah, some very nasty stuff has been directed at her. Ugh.
I think this is mostly just human nature.
Claim: In our species, across cultures and time, women primarily get sexual and social status from physical appearance, while for men it’s from personality and achievements.
Whether you like it or not, that’s who we are, and it will influence daily life in societies made up from our primate species. Especially in elections, which are to a large extent popularity/social status competitions.
I think you’re quite right, on reflection. But given that rapine, murder and theft are also within our natural condition, does this preclude us thinking of gender-based appearance scrutiny as A Bad Thing and trying to make it no longer a Thing at all?
To bring together two different comments I’ve made in this thread: I think if you take ‘gender-based appearance scrutiny is A Bad Thing’ as a general rule and seriously apply it then you will do tremendous damage to things that both men and women like. If you’re going to try to do this in a more targeted and measured way, though, consider whether ‘gender-based appearance scrutiny’ might be too specific a concept, and whether there might be something analogous that is applied to men, that this metric doesn’t pick up.
If the idea of preventing women from shaming and excluding men for being creepy or wimpy seems abhorrent, perhaps there’s something to be said for allowing people to hold and act on gender-specific preferences after all? Alternatively, you could take the route of whole-heartedly embracing anti-sexism as being about raising the status of women, rather than literally being about opposition to gender differences, and care less about trying to defend your values as a logical, internally consistent system. (Yes, I’m serious!)
Agreeing with me is no way to start a fight!
My thought on that is that you *can* fight your nature, but it’s hard, so you need to pick your battles. Mostly the best thing is to accept your urges and biases, be aware of them, and try to compensate when it makes sense.
The ones in other people I think you just need to accept.
It’s interesting that we’ve someone managed to reduce “rapine, murder and theft” enormously in a few generations. I don’t think it happened by people fighting against their true nature. I’d say it’s happened through changed incentives and much increased prosperity. People who have something to lose don’t act as recklessly.
Black anonymous, you’re actually kind of an asshole, and I’m also actually a guy. But thank you for your insightful contribution that enlightened me and caused me to radically rethink my worldview in favour of yours. As I am sure was your intent. Please carry on advocating your politics in this manner so as to maximize your number.
Pink anonymous and squirrel:
I’m making a much more limited claim than I believe is being debated here. Specifically in the context of evaluating female employees and politicians, their looks are completely irrelevant to virtually any aspect of their job. So why include that as part of the metric, and why not try – as charitably as we can – to reduce the amount of emphasis that we collectively place upon it? On reflection, it could well be that we are wired to do so – but isn’t it at the core of rationalist thought to overcome our meatbrains in favour of the more correcter thing to do?
This isn’t some kind of wider comment on society at all – unless I have misunderstood you.
“Specifically in the context of evaluating female employees and politicians, their looks are completely irrelevant to virtually any aspect of their job.”
Politics is a giant popularity contest. How can you possibly claim looks aren’t relevant?
You have just summed up the primary spiritual belief of half of this board and your host in one sentence, as part of a strawman about why someone else is wrong.
(Hint: Computers run on rocks and jet fuel.)
…
Remind me never to ask you for IT help.
Matt:
It’s irrelevant to the job they’re trying to do, which is govern effectively and well. I see it as a problem of democracy that there are unrelated hoops they need to jump through beforehand.
Nicholas:
(sorry ignore this I completely misunderstood you)Part of “governing effectively” is “convincing people to go along with your ideas.” Appearance is relevant to this. Whether we’re talking about delivering a policy speech to the public, trying to rally your allies in Congress, or negotiating a trade agreement with Putin – your appearance (and general charisma) will affect your success.
Seems to me like your problem is less with democracy and more with human nature. Might it be nice to live in a world where people weren’t constant judged according to their physical attractiveness? Sure, I guess. But we don’t.
I’ve considered your argument, but I still have to respectfully disagree. The perspective from which we’re answering this question matters – are we considering the potential leader as voters, or as some kind of Debbie Wassermann Schultz candidate-vetter?
If it’s the latter then sure. We should give preference to selecting candidates for general consumption given that people will judge them based on their attractiveness. You’re right. But if it’s as voters, and we know that attractiveness is so infinitesimally a part of their job (how often are they negotiating with Putin, and how often would big breasts be effective in getting him to stop/start bombing Syria? I’m highly dubious), then the fact that everyone else is doing it doesn’t matter. We shouldn’t do it. I try to make a point not to in my own country’s elections.
“The perspective from which we’re answering this question matters – are we considering the potential leader as voters, or as some kind of Debbie Wassermann Schultz candidate-vetter?”
See, I theoretically agree with you that maybe we *shouldn’t* do this, but I think most voters voluntarily adopt the latter role, as that of a candidate-vetter. Consider how much of the primary process is dedicated to candidates trying to talk about how “electable” they are, or how often you see an argument of “you should support X because he can win.”
Especially in a highly visible and famous role like President. If you’re a conservative and you want to convince other Americans that conservatism is awesome, who do you want making that case to the public on your behalf – Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon? To the extent that political leaders are the “public face” of particular values, it makes sense that people with those values want an attractive person to put on their posters and send up to podiums to give speeches and what not.
Similarly, if you are running a private company and are recruiting an employee for roles in which they will interact with the public on a regular basis, you will prefer someone who is attractive, for obvious reasons. I’d be really interested in a study that examined whether CEOs were disproportionate more attractive than other c-suite level directors. I’d almost certainly bet they are. Because the CEO has to go out there and talk to investors and journalists and sell the public on the idea that your company is really good.
Hummm… these are good points, indeed. Let’s try to reconcile where we disagree.
1. We both (I believe) share the logical premise that a priori, attractiveness should not matter to a politician, since in an utopian and wholly rationalistic world this would be irrelevant to his actual job, governance.
2. We both share the empirical premise that this is clearly not so in the actual world.
3. We both share the empirical premise that this is so because a certain number X of voters require, for reasons that are mostly irrational, attractiveness in their political leaders. You rightly, I think, point out that a certain number Y of voters do not value attractiveness in their political leaders per se, but rationally want to back a winning horse that can get things done for them, and all things being equal an attractive candidate, who has the support of X voters, is superior in that regard to an unattractive candidate. Y voters are actually thus acting rationally. X+Y combined represent a formidable political constituency in their own respect. All good thus far, I believe.
4. Here’s where I suspect we disagree. Do you believe this is immutable, and that we can never break this cycle? Bearing in mind that we only need to break X in order to get Y to dissipate – is this impossible? I think reasonable people can disagree here.
For a host of subjective reasons I’ll not bore everyone with listing, for my money, I consider Germany the most rationalist country in the world. It is the country in which dispassionate, pragmatic, efficient technocracy is most revered, and chest-beating jingoism most despised. (I bring this up not to convince anyone of this entirely subjective evaluation, but just for context on my personal views.)
And look at their leader. I hope I am not being sexist when I point out that she is perhaps not what Donald Trump or any one of us in particular would consider a 10 – yet she has amassed tremendous power and influence across all of Europe, has very high public approval by the standards of western politicians, and in general will probably go down as one of the most noteworthy leaders of the modern age.
And I ask myself – if the Germans can do it, why can’t we?
At a very general level, no, I don’t think we can break the cycle. I think that most people rationally understand that bias towards the attractive is irrational in most circumstances, but it still happens, because most of the bias happens at a subconscious level (I would expect attractive waiters to receive higher tips, even at a rationalist meetup dinner).
I used Nixon as the prototypical example of a fairly unattractive person who was nonetheless able to achieve huge political success. Merkel would be another example.
At a micro level, on a case-by-case basis, I think the bias can be overcome. One can fashion an argument that Nixon or Merkel or someone is *uniquely qualified* in terms of the other “relevant” attributes such that it doesn’t matter that they are unattractive.
But in the context of five GOP senators with nearly identical positions running for the nomination, I would generally expect the most attractive one to win, and I don’t have a huge problem with that.
(It’s worth noting that to me, as an anarchist, virtually all mainstream American politicians are practically indistinguishable when it comes to ideology as far as I’m concerned, such that I’m fine with anyone deciding among them by bizarre/irrational methods. But if the race was between Ron Paul and Elizabeth Warren, I might demand a higher standard)
“Atrractiveness” in the context of politics isn’t the same thing as “would someone want to have sex with them”. Someone can have a physical appearance that projects power and is effective politically without being a Miss Universe contender. Furthermore, this is more of a distinction for women than for men, because male attractiveness is more related to power in the first place.
Matt:
Yeah, that’s fair enough, then. My personal opinion is that it can be done on the macro level – and in any event I believe that trying our best is worth our time. (Where macro is defined not as 100% of the population but sufficient to neuter X and render them no longer worthwhile allies to Y.)
Jiro:
True and important. But if you saw Angie on the street and you had no idea who she was, would you really believe her appearance projected power and charisma? It doesn’t work for me personally.
When you look at the more broad class of ‘characteristics that determine attractiveness to the opposite sex’, rather than specifically at appearance, the picture seems less clear. For example, men are quite frequently criticized for being insufficiently masculine, and perhaps even more frequently for being creepy.
OK, I’ll accept that at least for the sake of argument.
The step from “It is unfair that women are more frequently criticized for their appearance” to “any particular instance of criticizing a woman for her appearance is unfair” isn’t sound. Further, while you deny a mens rea requirement, your definition does require that the purported sexist be the one engaging in the behavior, and do it because the person involved is a woman. Trump criticizes the appearance of both men and women, and as far as I can tell does not do it _because_ the person involved is a man or a woman.
Hmmm… before I respond to this, can I get an elaboration on
If the objection is that a single instance is insufficiently probative, I would point out that I carefully mentioned “pattern of behaviours” in my original formulation.
I’ll accept the second part of your comment tentatively, pending further thought, about DT being an equal-opportunity offender and thereby being excused from charges of sexism – though I do think Nancy Leibowitz has a point here (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/#comment-373810) when she points out that implying that a Kelly was being harsh on him because of her period is inherently sexist.
Also
Would it be possible for me to ask you to fight my definition as aggressively as possible, rather than accept it for argument’s sake? I suspect this is at the core of my disagreement with Scott, tbh. Scott’s thinking of the kind of sexism that gets people fired and gets an SJW hatemob going. I’m thinking of mansplaining. My assertion is that the dictionary and the popular definition agree with me. That seems central.
I agree with the gist of your criticism; it addresses the one area in the article where I don’t really see things the same way as Scott.
Basically, Scott’s definition of sexism is a fairly literalistic one in which context plays no role. This is fine for arguing that Trump is not actually *personally* sexist, and I agree with Scott as far as saying that there’s little evidence of actual deeply-held sexist beliefs on Trump’s part. But what many of us care about more is not what his actual deeply-held beliefs are (if he even has any; a lot of politicians apparently don’t), but what kinds of attitudes already present in a significant portion of the populace he is (deliberately) stoking with his rhetoric. To me it’s obvious that he’s going out of his way to fan the flames of several common forms of bigotry, including sexism.
And by the way, I completely disagree that the remark about “blood coming out of her whatever” was innocent, but that’s more a matter of a purely social sense and not something I can really argue.
Didn’t he run the Miss Multiverse pageant or something? Where women are actually given official numerical scores and ranked? Why should this somehow make it a worse issue?
Beauty pageants are widely understood as a situation where explicit judgement on looks is acceptable (although even there it is softened by bringing in other factors, like a talent portion, if only for plausible deniability). Judging on looks can still be considered boorish outside of that. If a politician suddenly started wearing nothing but swim trunks, his having once been a life guard wouldn’t amount to a defense against the culture’s nudity taboo.
(Meanwhile, the idea of a Miss Multiverse pageant raises all sorts of nifty questions. How is a contestant compared to her own alternate-double? Are the beauty norms and standards of different timelines acknowledged?)
Yes, time to tread carefully when the media starts bringing out words like “clearly”, “unmistakably”, “openly” and “nakedly”. Almost as bad as “debunked” and “refuted”.
It occurs to me that you can perform this sort of quasi-Kabbalistic “interpretation” even in good faith. If you’ve ever defended the gaffe of an in-group politician with “he was caught off-guard! / he mis-spoke! those aren’t his real views!”…how do you know?
I mean, you can have priors. I think Dan Quayle (or maybe Bush) once said he believed in the important of parent-child bondage. I assume he meant bonding. I don’t have any proof he meant bonding. But everything else I know about the world suggests I should interpret it that way.
If people interpreted each other charitably, what would happen to Twitter?
There would be a strict 140-charity limit.
Wait, what?
This is like what I said in one of my posts:
“The popular display of the Confederate flag at present cannot possibly be generally a symbol of slavery or racism. What, do Democrats seriously think that White Republican Southerners bearing the Confederate battle flag are going to rise up, march into the inner cities, put the n*ggers back in chains, and drive them to the countryside to push their unemployment rate to Soviet levels? Do they think they’ll re-institute segregation and Jim Crow the moment they’ll get their hands on government without Federal obstruction? It is obvious that even Democrats cannot be so lunatical as to believe such things. ”
Also, dog whistles do exist. But typically they stand for something concrete. I had the feeling the whole ridiculous Syria strike non-proposal in August 2013 was one giant dog-whistle. But to whom? Possibly Saudi Arabia and Turkey. I did not for a minute think Obama was ever seriously considering strikes on Syria.
I doubt the Confederate flag shows secret racism, but I would expect people who fly the Confederate flag to be more racist (within the relevant Overton Window) than people who don’t.
I’d expect people who use the word “N*gger” in their post (quoting themselves) to be more racist than people that don’t.
🙂 Funny, but consider the context. Sure, I have semi-seriously proposed limiting the franchise to white males under the age of 30, on the basis that this is the most revolutionary group of people who are most closely connected to the lessons of the past few years. But I never use the term in everyday language, and am only using it to double or triple the offense people would experience while reading my wildly implausible and offensive hypothetical scenarios, which are already offensive and implausible enough as they are. Mostly, it’s out of anger with those who say that the confederate flag is racist, therefore it must never receive any person’s support. I still can’t tell what, exactly, these people are thinking.
Sure. But what’s the point of left-wingers denying the typical “Southern pride” justification? And, again, if modern confederate flag-bearers do get into total power, what are they gonna do to harm minorities? I doubt it would look something like the Redemption of 1876-1900.
Why would it be okay to fly a Confederate flag and not a nazi flag (I’m not saying allowed, I know flying a nazi flag is legal in the US and I’m not having that debate here and now)?
In particular, there are a lot of people who, with good reason, associate the Confederate flag with a “fuck black people” symbol. When someone keeps flying it even though they have made their problems with it clear, it’s kind of spitting in their face. If you think “flying the Confederate Flag to celebrate Souther pride in is OK”, then by that same token you should think flying a nazi flag to celebrate the first highways built in Europe should be OK.
It’s not a bad analogy, because both German and Southern pride have been heavily stigmatized. Far out of proportion in my view.
That might seem prudent when you’re thinking about it in a “Never Again” sort of way or are pushing an internationalist ideology. Though ultimately, as in the case of Weimar Germany and the South during Reconstruction, stripping people of their pride and sense of community leaves them open to demagogues and extremists who are willing to provide it.
I don’t think liking ‘Gone with the Wind’ and respecting Stonewall Jackson, or enjoying ‘Das Boot’ and respecting Rommel for that matter, should be considered a black mark on your character. Not all of history is pleasant but people will respect their ancestors nonetheless.
I think that longevity is one of the main reasons. Hitler ruled over Germany for about a decade, while the American south has had a distinct culture for hundreds of years. Nazi Germany isnt really seperate from the rest of germany and therefore the flag isnt a part of their heritage like the Southern flag is a part of Southern Heritage.
@Anonymous: OK, I’m not American so I guess my US history is spotty, but was the Confederate flag used at all before the civil war? Because if not, it was in use for an even shorter time than the nazi flag, and entirely associated with a war to defend the right to have slaves.
@Dr Dealgood: Plenty of people who enjoy “Das Boot” would be appalled at the idea of flying a nazi flag, and I assume the same is true of people who enjoy “Gone with the Wind” (or even the much more pro-South “The Birth of a Nation”) with regard to the Confederate flag.
re: pride of sense of community, it reminds me of that.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/fm/a_parable_on_obsolete_ideologies/
There is no “Southern flag”. Hitler ruled Germany for longer than the Confederacy existed. If longevity grants legitimacy, then the Nazi flag is more legitimate than the Confederate battle flag.
I have no problem with Southern pride. There are lots of things to be proud of – good food, good manners, pleasant people, and everyone is proud of their own culture. There is nothing to be proud of about the Confederacy. It was borne in treason by fools in defense of a cause which was, as Grant said, “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse,” who were too stupid to realize they could never have won the fight they started.
Semi-related: the swastika meant something completely different before the Nazis appropriated it. I am entirely in favor of people displaying swastikas because they like the design, or because they like having a visual representation of the four faces of Brahma or whatever.
Also–the crucifix is a symbol of one of the most horrifying forms of execution that has ever existed, and yet today it is seen as a positive image.
In particular, there are a lot of people who, with good reason, associate the Confederate flag with a “fuck black people” symbol. When someone keeps flying it even though they have made their problems with it clear, it’s kind of spitting in their face.
That someone has emotional reaction ‘X’ about thing ‘Y’ is not a requirement that I have the same reaction to Y.
In terms of Confederate vs Nazi debates, however, it’s possible to substitute the German flag for the Nazi flag, if one wants to celebrate German culture. There is not a handy substitute for the South to use for celebrating their culture.
Which is part of the point – to many people, the anti-Stars and Bars campaign isn’t about promoting racial equality, it’s about making Southerners feel bad about being Southerners.
Hitler ruled Germany only for a small percentage of the time Germany had a flag at all. The South only had a flag as the Confederacy.
If the only time Germany was a country was under the Nazis, I’d expect a lot more Nazi flags, since there isn’t any other choice.
When I was in Japan for the first time during the winter of 2000-2001, I saw a young woman cosplay in a complete SS uniform. The only difference was that she was Japanese and had a long purple hair. She was doing this in a public area.
I wasn’t triggered but it did strike me that it was a good thing that this would be considered socially unacceptable in most of the United States and Western Europe.
The Nazi regime was truly horrible and we should be shocked by their imagery. I don’t necessarily think being nonchalant about everything is good.
I wonder how much the Japanese learn about the general horribleness of the Nazis though in their educations.
I’m not American so I guess my US history is spotty, but was the Confederate flag used at all before the civil war? Because if not, it was in use for an even shorter time than the nazi flag,
Southern culture has existed, distinct from American culture, for centuries. It has, distinct from American culture, much to commend. Nazi culture, distinct from German culture, existed for less than a generation and had, distinct from German culture, almost no commendable aspects.
That the former Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia is now taken as an emblem of Southern culture, is an accident of historical vexillology of no great significance – as note that most people cannot recognize the actual flags of the CSA or the historical origin of the oft-misidentified “confederate flag” unless it is spelled out for them.
This, means now what it is perceived as meaning now, without regard for what it may have meant in 1855, 1865, or 1875. And this,
and entirely associated with a war to defend the right to have slaves.
…is incorrect. Some people now associate it in that manner, some do not. From 1979 to 1985, a period longer than the entire civil war, that flag was throughout American culture and with little controversy associated with approximately all of the positive aspects of southern culture and approximately none of the negative ones. Times change. And historical fact, whether from 1865 or 1985, is a poor guide to understanding modern perception.
The flag means what people want it to mean, and they won’t always agree on that and they may change their mind.
More recently, the Confederate flag was used as a symbol of supporting segregation.
I have no idea what a good substitute symbol for pride in the good aspects of the region would be.
“More recently, the Confederate flag was used as a symbol of supporting segregation.”
And more recently than that, it was a simple for liking country music, cheap beer, and NASCAR.
But then some kid shot up a black church and it turned out he liked it too and since then it has once again become a symbol for slavery, oppression, and racism.
Weird how that works.
No. In fact, what we usually think of as the Confederate flag wasn’t even the flag of the Confederacy; it was the battle standard of certain Confederate military forces.
(Even before the end of the Civil War, though, some Southern citizens had started treating it as a regional symbol. I don’t blame them; it’s a much better design than any of its national flags.)
I’m not sure if this is a valid argument, but black southern culture isn’t wildly different from white southern culture, at least in some respects, but I haven’t heard of black southerners using the Confederate flag to symbolize their culture.
http://texasconfederateveterans.com/BlackSupporters.htm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/21/outspoken-black-advocate-for-the-confederate-flag-killed-in-miss-car-crash/
(This post not necessarily intended as a serious argument.).
https://www.graywolfpress.org/blogs/appropriation-cultures-percival-everett
A little fiction on the subject.
If you’ve spent enough time with working class people in Arkansas, you would have seen it firsthand.
While almost no one I’ve ever known to use the flag down here is racist, they almost all have a decidedly anti-government outlook.
I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard it called the “confederate flag” in person by another Arkansan, instead it’s always referred to simply as the “rebel flag”.
I’m not sure if this is a valid argument, but black southern culture isn’t wildly different from white southern culture, at least in some respects, but I haven’t heard of black southerners using the Confederate flag to symbolize their culture.
Leaving aside how the flag has been coopted by a variety of people – because one can find examples of everything – the South isn’t the only place where there is a difference between the culture of one race/ethnicity and that of others. The symbols for “Mexican” rodeos in Colorado, f’zample, are not the same as the PBR in Calgary, despite the overlap.
For what it’s worth, I think the anti-Confederacy movement misjudged their hand and moved a little too soon. Had they been content to wait another generation, this wouldn’t have even been an issue.
Again, if people aren’t going to promote something other than Dixie and the Rebel Flag (and yes, it’s interesting that it is being labeled “the Confederate Flag” than the previously more common ‘Rebel’ moniker, because why do you hate Rebels? Are you a Sith?) as a cultural touchstone for the region, they would be better served in just saying “racism is bad” and cutting out the middle man of “racism = CFB = bad”.
If you want to show your German pride, the most obvious way is to use an actual German flag (I’m wearing a shirt with the German flag on it right now). If you choose the Nazi flag, you must be intentionally indicating something other than German pride. With southern pride, it’s less clear. There’s not a more obvious symbol that one is from the American South than the Confederate flag (one could use the flag of their actual state, but it doesn’t mean quite the same thing and most of them aren’t immediately recognizable), so I’m inclined to give Confederate flag displayers a little more latitude.
A little fiction on the subject.
Heh. (Very well written, by the way.) But without much…I would want to say charity, but ‘faith in the future’ is closer to what I mean, I think.
People from outside the South sneer at eating watermelon, grits, fried chicken, cracklings and hushpuppies, as low class ‘black’ things, but that doesn’t stop white Southerners from liking those. Or talking in a Southern accent.
The irony is that the “Stars and Bars” that most people think of when they hear “Confederate Flag” started as exactly that. The flag of the Confederate States of America looked like this. The flag currently known as “Confederate Flag” is actually the battle standard/guidon of Robert E Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Lee was seen by many on both sides as the living embodiment of everything that was to be admired about the South and Antebellum society in general. This made him (and his standard) a natural symbol for reconstruction-era southerners to rally around.
It’s interesting to bring up Rommel though. For a long time, Robert E Lee seemed to occupy a similar space of “worthy opponent whose military record merits respect, even if they fought for ideals we find abhorrent today.”
I was certainly brought up to believe that by my military-buff but completely blue-tribe father. One of his favorite movies was Gettysburg, where Martin Sheen brilliantly portrays Lee as something of a God on Earth (no coincidence the follow-up movie was titled Gods and Generals).
But that seems to have taken a sudden change over the last five years or so. Who is to say that it won’t eventually change for Rommel too?
Fellow Arkansan chiming in. Not only is it called the “rebel flag”, but the phrase “The South will rise again!” is popular amongst its admirers.
re: Rommel, it strikes me that I should really ask my German co-workers what is the opinion of him in Germany. The image I had was sort of like that he was (along with Speer) one of the “slightly less bad” nazis in that they (probably) had reservations with the whole let’s kill all the jews thing. Sort of like Italian fascists. That wouldn’t make them good people, but less toxic than the ones who actively participated in and encouraged the Holocaust. I would still be suspicious of someone who considers him a hero.
Wiki says Rommel wasn’t a member of the Nazi Party, though he doesn’t seem to have been particularly opposed to it either, at least during its earlier history.
I seem to recall that the Nazis had a lot of trouble penetrating the high officer corps of the German army, a fact that may have contributed to them building their own private army in the SS. A lot of those guys were linked to the old-school aristocracy, while Nazism drew most of its support from the middle and working classes and tailored its style and rhetoric accordingly.
Well, if you can show me a substantial group of people flying the Nazi flag to celebrate the Autobahn, we’ll talk.
On the other hand, Hindus who display a swastika as a positive symbol in their religion should be deferred to, unless they start ranting about Aryan supremacy.
Meta comment: I’ve heard the nazi/confederate flag comparison before, and it was just met with cries of Godwin, its interesting that in this place people point out a relevant difference.
@Brian
“Well, if you can show me a substantial group of people flying the Nazi flag to celebrate the Autobahn, we’ll talk. ”
This may be difficult because flying the Nazi flag is illegal in Germany. (exceptions exist for educational purposes)
My example was deliberately ridiculous, but if you want something real and sort of close, spend enough time in comment sections of newspapers (a.k.a. the cesspit) and you’ll inevitably find someone going “Well, say what you want about Hitler, but at least he got the German economy back together”. Which is blatantly transparent code for “I think Hitler was a great guy”.
So sure I can’t find an honest example of people praising positive aspects of the nazi regime without them not-so-secretely saying they’re nazis. But OTOH I don’t really believe people who wave the Confederate Flag / Rebel Flag to honor “Southern culture” are doing so entirely honestly.
Now I haven’t really addressed before your argument of there being no other flag, instead I’ve used the nazi comparison which is not entirely appropriate. I’ll admit that’s because I hadn’t quite articulated the following argument:
What did Southerners use before the civil war to signify Southern pride? You mention that there was a distinct Southern culture long before the civil war, so I assume that it must have had symbols of its own? And if not, couldn’t people simply use southern state flags? Couldn’t people simply use the shape of the South (maybe with a US flag underneath) to signify pride? After all, this is already common for Texas.
Rommel is not at all equivalent to general Lee, for the simple fact that Lee wasn’t forced to kill himself by two generals as a division of soldiers surrounded his house.
In popular culture in the west, Rommel is seen as a tragic victim because of his mistreatment by the regime he aided, and is next to Medea in the list of people that the blue team pity. Lee is just a very effective dead hero from the wrong side, and is more like Guderian than Rommel.
Rommel is not at all equivalent to general Lee, for the simple fact that Lee wasn’t forced to kill himself by two generals as a division of soldiers surrounded his house.
I can’t speak for Germany, but I’m pretty confident that the popular conception of Rommel in the United States has relatively little to do with his suicide and more to do with his archetypal Magnificent Bastard status. Which puts him pretty close to Lee in being perceived as a supremely talented commander, fighting bravely to defend his country without condoning its villainy, and ultimately doing the right thing in the end.
If the Germans see him differently, I’m not sure who they would see as a Lee equivalent. Doenitz, maybe, but again that may be shaded by my American perception.
Maybe it reads differently in Europe, but I’d be more inclined to treat it as code for “I like saying edgy stuff to wind people up”. More evidence of being an asshole than evidence of any serious bigotry.
I don’t know. There are lots of Southern regional symbols, some of which have unfortunate connotations in some contexts (“Dixie”), some of which don’t (magnolia flowers, the cuisine). But while there was definitely a cultural divide, I think it’s safe to say that antebellum Southern culture was less unified than anything you’ll find after the war, for reasons which are probably obvious.
Many of the Southern states didn’t have state flags before the war, or had different ones. And a lot of the modern state flags of the South are based on Confederate national flags, more or less transparently; until 2001 (and still for Mississippi), representations of the Confederate battle flag were common design elements. Many still resemble the Confederate national flag.
I don’t see much of that about Hitler, who occupies a unique space as “pure total evil” in polite society.
But you DO see plenty of things like “at least Mussolini made the trains run on time” or “at least Stalin got Russia industrialized” and things like that.
Say what you like about Hitler at least he killed Hitler.
I hope you realize why we’ll never pick a substitute.
And why would we? The Yankees don’t have a problem with the flag — they have a problem with our existence. That a distinct Southern culture continues to exist is what offends them.
Yeah, but he also killed the guy who killed Hitler.
I have no idea, but the fact that a perspective is unthinkable (viz. not in the Overton window) now doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way after a major realignment. You are proposing a major realignment.
Of course, banning symbols on grounds of possibly contributing to some unspecified bad thing in the future is probably a bad idea.
I wouldn’t. The confederate flag is mainly a statement saying “I don’t like yankee (or New York) values imposed on me” The original value that was imposed happened to be about race, but things have changed.
This explanation covers every single confederate flag carrier I’ve met, some of them are also black.
I was referring to typical Democrats, as represented by all but one Dem US House members.
@E.Harding
My reply was to Scotts “I would expect people who fly the Confederate flag to be more racist”.
I suspect you and me are more or less on the same page.
I think part of what the confederate flag represents is a form of regional patriotism: “My ancestors fought courageously in a losing cause and I’m proud of them.”
How would you feel about a German man saying the same?
@Subbak – About the same as a Confederate descendant. It’s fine to take pride in your ancestors sacrifices and battlefield heroism, as long as the pride doesn’t extend to the ideology they were fighting for.
But the flag represents best what people are fighting for, not the individual sacrifice. So if you think their fighting is commendable even though the ideology and government they were fighting for was evil, then why should you honor them with the symbol of that government?
So if you think their fighting is commendable even though the ideology and government they were fighting for was evil, then why should you honor them with the symbol of that government?
What substitute symbol do you propose they use?
And they fought in a losing cause which was a law to keep slavery alive!!!
I feel like there is a real cognitive dissonance when it comes to commemorating dead soldiers.
On the one hand, as a society, we don’t generally hold individual soldiers responsible for the justness or injustice of the war their leaders send them to fight. This may or may not be okay. I, personally, think it is wrong to fight for a cause one thinks is unjust just because one is following orders, but many others seem to think that patriotism and unswerving devotion are more important than whether or not one’s leaders happen to be correct in a particular case (or that their correctness is not for the individual soldiers to judge).
If we agree that individual soldiers are responsible for fighting for an unjust cause, then I think we have to seriously reevaluate all the respect we give to veterans of, for example, the Vietnam War. In fact, it seems like most soldiers should be convicted of murder.
If, on the other hand, we agree there is some merit to the idea that fighting for your country is different from just fighting, and that different standards must apply when one’s nation advisedly or unadvisedly chooses to send people to war, then it seems like we can’t celebrate the Vietnam vets while tearing down all the statues of Robert E Lee (as they are currently trying to do in NOLA).
Either we’re comfortable celebrating the patriotism of people who died for a cause irrespective of the justness of the particular cause or else we have to start being a lot more stinting with our praise of veterans, and possibly even jail a great many of them.
Though I think the Vietnam and Iraq Wars were largely unjust, I am very uncomfortable jailing or hating on veterans of those wars (outside cases of obvious abuse like Mai Lai and Abu Ghraib), so I do think that, so long as we have governments of the sort we have now, and the attitude toward military service we have now, we have to apply a somewhat different standard to soldiers than to someone who just shoots somebody on the street.
Related is the Japanese Prime Ministers’ refusal, thus far, to bow to pressure to stop visiting the Yasukuni Shrine commemorating Japanese soldiers who died in the Pacific War. I think their cause was as unjust as the South’s cause in the Civil War, but I still think it would be horrible to tell everyone “no, you cannot mourn grampa who fought and died for a cause he thought was just, because we now know he was wrong.”
From my family lore of another civil war, I would imagine that this is not only about those who fought courageously, but also about those who died – or perhaps even more about those who died.
I am not from the South, so I may be wrong about this particular situation. Still, imagine your family tree is littered with names of people who died in a war, some fighting, some completely senselessly as helpless victims.
I’d fly the flag of my side (more precisely, the side my relatives died on) as a tribute to the dead. (Not if it was a flag generally accepted to have bad connotations. However, the current outrage over the Confederate flag seems to be very recent, very politically motivated, and perpetuated by politicians who not all of us are sympathetic to, so this situation is certainly not unambiguous.)
In the spirit of nitpicking– even if you want to celebrate Confederate soldiers, that might be different from celebrating Lee, who had a lot more choices than an average member of the army did, though I believe he was more at risk than a modern general would be.
Given Lee’s extensive prior military background, I think it would have been much harder, and seen as much more of a betrayal, for him to claim some sort of “conscientious objector” status, than for the average 18-year old Southern farmhand.
He even opposed secession personally, and some have argued, slavery itself (though the case for that may be weak), so it’s clearly a case of someone doing what his society demanded of him, given his prior training, without much regard to the desirability of the cause.
We might say it would have been better for him to defect to the “right” side, but given that, on his value system, that would have been a terrible betrayal, it’s hard to make a case that he acted wrongly by his own lights.
So unless we want to endorse the principle that a general should switch sides any time he thinks his side is in the wrong (and maybe we do? but I don’t think most would), I don’t see how we condemn Lee.
Confederacy was fighting to secede and govern independently (however brutish it was). All states that wanted to secede did so voluntarily, not after they were invaded and their president replaced with a puppet. Nazis were expansionary and evangelical, starting with France which was clearly “not theirs”, and even had begun training governors for individual provinces in North America for when they got there. (source: Ken Burns’ The War).
Second difference pertains to Overton window creep, which is considered more an element of the Nazi rise to power and the Holocaust. It would have been very un-German to smash someone’s windows a couple years before Kristalnacht at which point it became quickly became uber-German behavior. The symbol and the movement quickly converted civic behavior toward a negative. Meanwhile, the confederacy was not markedly different in their social treatment, pre/post the time their symbol stood for something. For this reason, it would be more disturbing to start see swastikas on the uptick
There’s a middle ground. Lee just doesn’t get statues.
@onyomi
It’s basically because an army has to be coherent and hold together in order to maintain the state’s sovereignty. If all the soldiers become radical individualists, they might engage in motivated reasoning not to fulfill their role during a war. Some may not agree, but that’s the reasoning behind honoring the soldiers even if the war was dumb.
As for Lee, the question should be asked regarding his personal ideology. Was he pro-slavery, or did he fight out of nationalistic duty? When combined with the first matter, it’s an important difference.
“There’s a middle ground. Lee just doesn’t get statues.”
So any nation or culture determined to be on “the wrong side of history” is not allowed to commemorate their war dead?
Also, I think there is at least some difference between proposing a new statue, today for Robert E Lee, which would raise the question of why we’re choosing to single him out for commemoration at this particular point in history, and proposing to tear down a statue of him which has been standing for 100 years, which, to me, smacks of trying to sanitize history.
@Cypher
“As for Lee, the question should be asked regarding his personal ideology. Was he pro-slavery, or did he fight out of nationalistic duty? When combined with the first matter, it’s an important difference.”
My sense is that he was against secession, personally, and ambivalent about slavery; the problem is, on his value system and the military culture he was trained in–one which I think continues to some extent today–I think cowardice and betrayal would have been considered much greater moral failings than fighting for an unjust cause.
And, as John Schilling said, Southern culture was distinctive and not at all all bad. To the extent Southerners think he was fighting for “the South” as a broadly construed cultural entity, I think it is justifiable to have a statue of him, even if it would not be, were we to think of him as purely fighting to maintain slavery, which is not how I think he would have seen his own actions, nor how he is perceived by most Southerners today.
I believe Lee’s writings made it very clear that he felt a solemn “duty” to fight for Virginia, and would have done so regardless of the particular issues involved.
My personal opinion is that all monuments commemorating dead soldiers should stress that war is a horrible thing and that these people were victims of human folly, and not make them “heroes dead for a noble cause” or something.
Now obviously the vast majority of monuments fall short of this. For example, according to Wikipedia, there are less than a hundred WW1 monuments in France that can be qualified of pacifist, and I think every city, town or village has at least one WW1 monument, which means they must be more than 30 000 of them.
So it would be pretty hypocritical of me to ask that the Southern civil war monuments respect this while all others do not. So I think that until society gets over the whole patriotism and war glorification thing, having “normal” civil war monuments in the south is fine. And having monuments for German soldiers who died in WW2 should be OK.
Flying the flag is a different matter. In my ideal world, monuments to dead soldiers would have no flags because this shouldn’t be about patriotism which i s a thing I reject anyway. However, for flags that are heavily associated with oppression, there is an extra objection available. Nevertheless, a Confederate flag on a monument to dead Confederate soldiers is IMHO not nearly as bad as one flying in front of a state capitol.
I’m sometimes uncertain if people recall that as the Civil War broke out Lee was an officer in the (federal) US Army, not some Virginia militia. In onyomi’s framing, Lee “switches sides” by continuing to serve his commission, and doesn’t “switch sides” by resigning his commission and subsequently accepting a command in an army at war with the one he was just serving in. A third option, resigning his commission and retiring to somewhere people won’t bother him, seems not to have been considered, but is implied to somehow also count as “switching sides.”
I think it’s quite fair to condemn someone for voluntarily accepting a new commission to fight a war that they think is wrong.
I wonder how our descendants will feel in 100 years, when the flag they’re all arguing about region-priders flying is ISIS’s, and the general whose statue is being torn down is Osama bin Ladin’s.
Robert E. Lee: Roughly neutral on slavery, weakly against secession, in favor of the United States of America but not unconditionally so, unconditionally opposed to anyone invading the Commonwealth of Virginia for any reason, unconditionally opposed to anyone fighting a protracted guerrilla war in Virginia for any cause. One ought to think twice about waging war in Virginia while such a gentleman is alive.
@Nicholas
I’m surprised we haven’t abolished the Stripes/Stars yet. After all, we had a disastrous loss in the War of 1812, which was purely a result of our aggression against Canada. How can we subject Canadians to a life of knowing that all of us jerks still have a positive opinion of then-President James Madison?! Forget “Father of the Constitution”. Does. Not. Matter.
John Schilling,
I think one of the more interesting things that is generally unknown to the public about the civil war is all the states (including Virginia) that fully intended to not secede and to remain neutral right up until the moment that Lincoln decided to march his army through their territory over their objections.
If the whole “maybe the confederate flag stood for racism, segregation, and domestic terrorism, but now it just stands for southern pride” argument was valid, the sort of people who fly the southern flag would be willing to admit that the confederate flag stood for racism, segregation, and domestic terrorism. But they’re not, because they identify with the groups who were engaged in the racism, segregation, and domestic terrorism, and regularly apologize for those groups. Which is about as much of a QED as you could want as to what they mean when they talk about “southern pride.”
For fucks sake that’s why no-one actually flies the confederate flag outside reenactments. They fly the Rebel Flag.
Do you actually know people who fly the rebel flag personally Patrick? Is that what they’ve actually told you?
Because I know lots of these people personally and the ones I know wouldn’t hesitate a second to tell you that the Confederacy sucked.
Matt M
“I think one of the more interesting things that is generally unknown to the public about the civil war is all the states (including Virginia) that fully intended to not secede and to remain neutral right up until the moment that Lincoln decided to march his army through their territory over their objections.”
Um, that sounds to me like they were already thinking of themselves as not subject to the federal government.
Um, that sounds to me like they were already thinking of themselves as not subject to the federal government.
Yes. This was a fairly typical stance for individual states at the time, who had the impression (from statements in the Constitution, of all places!) that the power of the Federal Government to compel the states to do things was rather sharply limited.
This had been the default position of the Founding Fathers, had been in slow and gradual decline over the near-century since 1776, and took until WWII to become pretty much obsolete. It’s always been highest in those regions physically and culturally furthest from the northeast seat of power.
Um, that sounds to me like they were already thinking of themselves as not subject to the federal government.
In rather the same sense that the British voters now considering the Brexit think themselves not subject to the Federal Government of Europe.
Does the Union Jack become symbol of intolerance and bigotry, if the Continent decides it is? If Brussels decides to march an army through the Chunnel (as if), do we blame the British? Does it matter who wins, or that the population of the remaining EU nations is larger than that of the UK?
Oh, did someone install a federal government in the EU without telling me?
More seriously, you really can’t compare USA pre-civil war and EU now. One of the very big reasons is that the executive body of the EU derives from the national executive bodies, which make up the European Council and appoint the European Commission (a.k.a. European Government). The legislative body is however not directly dependent from national politics, which is why many people who would like to see a tighter union (i.e. something closer to a federal Europe) wants to expand its relatively limited powers. The Commission also doesn’t directly implement European administration but rather makes sure national governments do, with the Court of Justice as its only enforcement tool if they don’t.
Also, while I’m not saying the EU is entirely toothless, but its teeth only go so far as the treaties, so the most severe thing it could do if a country was entirely ignoring its laws and decrees would be to unilaterally denounce the treaties with them. So a war would not only be unthinkable for political reasons, it would be unthinkable because there is zero legal basis for it.
It is not a very subtle secret symbol, but it still is one. The racists who fly the confederate flag don’t care if leftists believe they are racist, or if moderates suspect they are racist. It’s not the end of the world to them if someone calls them racist without having any solid proof – in fact, sometimes they even enjoy this scenario. What they do care about is having plausible deniability – which, in the cultural context of the South, the Confederate flag can provide them. A secretly racist politician would be ill advised to associate with the flag, but some hick who just wants a job at the local manufacturing plant can afford much less subtlety.
I think you are wrong if you believe Confederat flags are a blatant symbol of racism. The flags are all over the place in the South. Almost all the people who associate with one deny explicit racism, and fairly often they even sound believable when doing so. I’d estimate over a third of all flag users are being truthful when they say they do not (significantly) sympathize with racist beliefs. Therefore, Confederate flags are not a strong predictor but only a moderate predictor of overt racism, which means they are a workable symbol for secret racists.
Although, now that I think about it, it’s more like the combination of plausible deniability and the costs to accusing someone of racism together are what allow the flag to be a usable symbol. If either existed without the other, I think the flag would finally go away. As it is, the flag is something even vehement nonracists will pointedly ignore or perhaps politely criticize, while racists can use it to coordinate almost unopposed. So, you’re kind of right, but kind of not. The flag is far from the best secret symbol of racism imaginable, but racists in the South still use it that way and get a degree of success from it.
I’m not sure how far back this story is set, but I talked with a woman who said she was from Florida, and it wasn’t until she was in college that it occurred to her that the flag might be offensive to black people. When it did occur to her, it seemed entirely reasonable.
I’m estimating that she was in college some thirty years ago or so. Maybe forty years ago.
I had something similar occur to me in grade school in 1990 or so. IIRC, this fellow also maintained that he knew a bunch of non-racist KKK members.
Let us suppose that an aspiring politician in the American South has a Confederate flag flying in his front lawn. He explains when questioned that the flag celebrates his Southern cultural heritage, and is in no way meant to glorify the practice of slave-ownership.
I agree with you to some extent, in that I don’t think that the display of the flag is evidence of some secret set of beliefs that he is trying to keep hidden. I believe that he means what he says.
But presumably he chooses to fly the Confederate flag despite knowing that the entire African-American community is near-unanimously opposed to its display (as are many other individuals). So although his statement does not constitute evidence that he would re-enact slavery if given the opportunity, it does constitute evidence that he values his own personal notion of cultural heritage more highly than he values the opinion of the entire African-American community.
And if the man is an aspiring politician, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with assuming, based on this evidence, that he will value his own personal notions over the opinion of the entire African-American community in other policies, too. Potentially including policies with much greater impact than the display of flags.
OK. But changing the symptoms is not necessarily the same thing as changing the cause.
>He explains when questioned that the flag celebrates his Southern cultural heritage, and is in no way meant to glorify the practice of slave-ownership.
I disagree we have access to all our own motives and desires when it comes to signalling!
In fact, I totally disagree with Scott on this. In this age when people won’t use obvious slurs to reveal their beliefs, you have to look a bit deeper.
With politics, much of what comes up will be unexpected and the planned reaction can’t be specified in advance, and politicans values will influence how they react. We therefore have the right to comb through their lives and utterances for evidence of their true values.
I agree.
It’s how we know every leftist is a blood-thirsty lunatic deep inside. All the unicorns and rainbows are merely a facade.
Proof of their duplicitous demeanour is the fact that they assume others have the same inclination for tactical hypocrisy:
They cloak their daggers, so naturally, they assume that everyone else must too.
(Whether I am sarcastic or not is irrelevant, if you think about it, since that in itself is revealing of deep seated, censured dark thoughts!
Psychoanalysis is so awesome.)
This is what the alt-right already believes.
Yeah, how could you get the impression that the left are a bunch of blood-thirsty lunatics from the history of communism?
Even Scott, the lowest T most milquetoast of leftists has come out and said that he’ll keep the blood thirst limited to banning commenters on his blog – until the left gains more power, then the limits come off. What do you think the point of “be nice until you can coordinate meanness” was? Why does he always only criticize SJWs for their tactics with posts that can be summed up with – “gee guys, hold off on the terror portion until you consolidate enough power to actually kill all your enemies rather than piecemeal hounding them out of jobs”?
And with good reason as Jason has so helpfully illustrated. 😉
In all seriousness though, Geryon is correct and that’s why we can’t have nice things.
Awesome so we can just go off our gut feelings of whatever other people are thinking and project our insecurity onto them. Sweet!!! let the blood war commence!!!
Fuck argument and charitable interpretation and reason.
Philosophy is dead,
Socrates was wrong,
freedom is a lie,
western civilization is a failure
Kill the outgroup
We know they deserve it, why else would we hate them.
If however you think argument and reason and engaging with each other are good ideas then the idea that we can see people’s true motivation by interpreting them in the most awful way is a terrible development. And one the supposedly broadminded and tolerant left is all to keen to give in to
Fie on goodness, fie!
“values his own personal notional of cultural heritage more highly than he values the opinion of the entire African-American community.”
You mean, is his own man with his own thoughts and opinions, and doesn’t submit to the demands of others that he pretend their worldview is the only legitimate one?
Has indicated that he represents the white community that likes Confederate flags and does not represent the black community which does not.
I find the chronic attribution to the entire black community the opinions of a handful of pundits to be, well, racist. Most of the black community does not support or like Black Lives Matter, but that fact gets zero airplay in discussions of dogwhistling. Black people aren’t a monolith and often have conflicting subcultures warring it out ideologically, even if they vote a certain way most of the time.
As a UK onlooker I’d be genuinely interested to know if there were stats on this.
If black people don’t want to be treated like a monolith by politicians and those whose job is to obsess over politicians, maybe they should stop voting like one.
@Matt M: If one side of the aisle wasn’t so obsessed on demeaning them, maybe they would stop voting almost exclusively for the other one?
Hey, I’m not complaining about how they vote.
Just saying that it doesn’t strike me as credible to say “we are unique individuals with a wide variety of interests and values” when it turns out that 90% of you vote the same way all the time.
Their reasoning for doing so may be very well founded, but still – if you’re going to act like a single-issue voting bloc, don’t be surprised if people treat you like one.
Circular logic. The “demeaning” is not falling in with the Democratic demands, such as AA and other such prescriptions.
Black voting isn’t quite that monolithic. Black men vote differently than black women, and have lower turnout. Married black women also vote at less than 90% D. Single women vote D a lot, and there was a clear Obama-only increase in turnout and D voting among black women in particular (though not so much among black men).
40% of blacks don’t vote, and even at 90% D, that means half of all blacks aren’t pulling a lever for Democrats or necessarily support Democrats or even progressive/liberal ideological views. Case in point is Black Lives Matter, not supported by a majority of blacks at all but presented as “how black people really feel about being in fancy white college!” by both sides of the aisle.
@TPC: By “not supported by a majority of blacks”, you mean only a minority will actually say they support it, and most are apathetic, or that more blacks oppose it that support it? Because the first is hardly surprising (for any protest movement, most people don’t care enough to support), while I have a hard time believing the second. If it is the second, do you have a source for that?
@Matt M: So people who generally vote the same can’t be unique individuals? A person’s interest are only defined by how they vote? Or am I misunderstanding what you are saying?
re: being single-issue voter, I don’t know and can’t know what it’s like to constantly experience racial prejudice. It does not seem unbelievable that, for the current political overton window, the most important issue for people who undergo it is reducing that prejudice, which few candidates even address.
“@Matt M: So people who generally vote the same can’t be unique individuals? A person’s interest are only defined by how they vote?”
To the extent that politicians care about those individuals – absolutely. You may be a unique and beautiful snowflake at home, but if the political class notices that there’s a 90% chance your vote will be decided based on your race – what particular incentive do they have to discover and speak to your individual issues?
@Matt M: There may be some miscommunication issue. I was not aware of a recurring complaint by black people that politics think they only care about a single issue (whereas I’ve heard this complaint from women). I assume if politics performed better on the issue of racial equality, then that complaint would start cropping up, and indeed you would see less of a voting block behavior.
On the other hand, I’ve definitely heard a complaint by black people, and really all marginalized groups, that the dominant groups tend to paint them in just one brushstroke. This is the classic complaint than when a black person (or a woman, or a Muslim, etc…) does something, they’re automatically thought of as representing all black people, whereas if it’s a white Christian or atheist male, then he’s only representing himself. I thought you were talking about that complaint, and saying it’s unjustified because of the voting-block behavior of black people, which struck me as odd.
The most recent survey on the topic (reuters, IIRC) showed a majority of blacks did not support BLM. Anecdotally, I’ve seen a number of blacks consider it a gay movement rather than a black one due to the predominance of Ls and Gs in its leadership. And some others (particularly among black women) have noticed it’s also got a lot of mixed-race and foreign-born leadership too, so they are not supportive of it as a movement representing American-born, fully-black Americans.
The complaint I’ve heard is that BLM focuses too much on killing by police and too little on black people killing each other.
I’ve had trouble getting bloggingheads videos to run in my browser, but the mp3 works reliably.
Can we do the same twist on various rude behaviors, where disrespecting some group makes you an underdog maverick? I’m not sure you will like the results.
Unfortunately, we already have.
The Confederate Flag isn’t really a dogwhistle (in the sense of being a secret signal of support for racism that’s only known to racists). It’s just a whistle (in the sense of being widely understood to be an open signal of support for racism).
Sure, you might not mean to signal racism (at least primarily) by flying it, but there’s no way that that potential interpretation is _unknown_.
Everyone who flies a rebel flag knows that people from outside the South are going to think they’re racists all of a sudden. Other Southerners are likely to see it in a different light however.
If you’re running for office in the South you might use the flag to signal that you’re an outsider to national politics, and therefor dedicated entirely to the South. That’s how it would read to me anyway.
I think the groups doing the interpretation of the Confederate battle flag as “racist, full stop” have some bearing. If that interpretation is primarily done by the media and people outside the South, then a person continuing to fly the flag under the explanation that it represents Southern heritage and defiance is adding the implied statement, “and I don’t give a damn what you Yankees think it means.”
It may be more likely, post-Charleston, that someone flying the flag will be doing it for not-racist reasons, fully aware that that interpretation exists, because the concerted Blue Tribe opposition acts as an intensifier of the intended symbolism of Southern heritage and defiance.
According to CNN’s polling, 72% of African Americans see the Confederate flag as a symbol of racism. http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2015/images/07/01/confederate.flag.pdf This isn’t even close to unanimous.
And this was a poll where the respondents were primed with questions about the Charleston shooting, likely skewing the results in an anti-flag direction.
It’d be interesting to see that value broken down by region. Are we talking about 72% of blacks in Chicago, 72% of blacks in Atlanta, or 72% of all blacks everywhere?
They make some attempt to break it down by region, but they didn’t poll enough black people to escape the sampling error in any region except the South.
It was poll conducted by CNN to get a snappy headline in the wake of a national tragedy, so it’s bound to be shoddy work.
What I’d be more interested in though, is a similar poll which wasn’t taken during a national anti-flag smear campaign.
Also keep in mind “I see this as a symbol of racism” =/ “it should be banned/removed by force”
I mean, despite appearances, it is TECHNICALLY still possible to support free speech even for speech you happen to disagree with.
Discussion of whether the Confederate Flag “is racist” definitely produce more heat than light. It does almost always signal support for the “cause of the Confederacy” at some level, although there have been people who used it, even entirely outside the USA, as a generic symbol of rebellion.
Following from this, it’s a safe guess that a Confederate flag-waver either doesn’t know why the Southern states seceded, knows the evidence but for some reason interprets it differently, or (much less likely) actually supports slavery.
How many Confederate flag-wavers have you actually met? I’ve met several, and know some of them very well, and this doesn’t even slightly describe any of them.
To a man, they’ve all been too apolitical to care about the Confederacy. They mostly just like to think of themselves as rebels and so utilize the rebel flag to make that point.
Another example: There was an episode of ‘Married with Children’ (set in Chicago) back in 80’s or 90’s where Kelly wore a rebel flag patch on her jacket. It wasn’t part of the plot, it was just an incidental touch to make her look more rebellious. This apparently used to be a mainstream position, even outside the South.
When I lived in Seattle, I used to read a great column by a black woman journalist there. I remember her describing something that happened to her one day. Her car broke down and she was standing on the side of the road. A friendly white guy with a pickup truck with a gun rack and a Confederate flag on it stopped and picked her up and gave her a ride into town, to the towing place, so she could go get her car towed.
I don’t think she asked him what the flag meant to him. But apparently it didn’t mean he hated black people.
I’m willing to treat “apolitical” about the flag as implying “doesn’t know why the Southern states seceded”.
Indeed, as I mentioned in my comment, it’s been used by many as a generic symbol of rebellion, perhaps not even having heard of the Confederacy at all. But that doesn’t automatically mean the people who dislike the flag are mixed up or have an incorrect interpretation.
I guess I wish the flag’s defenders could at least acknowledge the logical basis of opposition, beyond accusations of mere mindless spite against the South. In fact, being apolitical about the Confederacy actually provides great middle ground for meeting halfway — the party who doesn’t care about Confederate history could see how someone who does might not look on it with kindness, while hopefully the anti-Confderate can sympathize with the other’s apathy.
A symbol can connote racism without entailing that all who bear it are bound to be entirely racist, or even any more racist than average. Heck, it’s logically possible for that story to happen even if the guy had a flag that literally said “I hate black people”. His actions merely conflict with a message that he presumably doesn’t believe (maybe he can’t read English, or has a private meaning in his head for words like “hate” or “black”) — his actions don’t cancel out the meaning entirely. I don’t think the Confederate Flag is nearly so clear-cut and blatant a message as that, but my point is it’s a mistake to try interpreting the message purely in that way.
I can acknowledge the logical basis of opposition. I would rather people not have Confederate flags around, myself.
If most people who sport the flag don’t care about the Confederacy at all and your interpretation of their use of that flag is that it “almost always signal[s] support for the cause of the Confederacy at some level”, then you do have an incorrect interpretation of their motives.
I don’t think any of them would deny the logical basis of your argument. At least, I’ve never seen that happen. What they seem to be busy denying is that they’re racists, support slavery or are, as John Oliver helpfully puts it, “the worst people in the world.”
It’s worth bearing in mind here that we’re not talking about state flags and displays of the rebel flag in public areas, but about people choosing to display them at their own cost for their own reasons.
The fact is that quite a large number of anti-flag people are out to try to shame people into conforming to their tribe’s arbitrary set of acceptable symbols. Whereas the vast majority of pro-flag people aren’t trying to force anyone else to do anything at all.
I believe the best course of action with respect to the rebel flag, as with so many other things, is to live and let live
I think this is correct. However, another point of view to consider is that flag-supporters have a valid reason for asking, “why now?”
In an era when anti-black racism has been significantly on the decline, rather than the rise, the sudden, vehement fury over a flag that has been an ever-present part of southern life for over a century is seen as not a genuine reaction to a societal problem, but a manufactured one. The fact that the people claiming grievance are direct political opponents of the people who have traditionally used the flag only confirms it in their minds: this isn’t about someone genuinely taking offense, but about maneuvering for political power and advantage by demonizing the opposing tribe.
To many people in the Red Tribe (and even to some people like me who aren’t, but are simply outside the Blue Tribe) this is just the latest in a long line of the Blue Tribe proactively looking for things to take offense over rather than reacting with genuine offense, because their culture is one where oppression is the central and only important narrative of human existence, and victimization is equated with righteousness and deservedness — and hence authority and a claim to power.
In this context, it should be easier to understand why people would support the rebel flag despite its historically racist connotations — because it’s a literal symbol of rebellion and disgust for the opposing tribe and seen as a defensive reaction more than an offensive one.
That said, just because I can understand the reaction and even agree that the Blue Tribe attacks on the flag are largely an attempted political power-grab, I still don’t think it should be flown in public. But I think that should be voluntary, as a matter of good manners and consideration for those people who are genuinely and rightly offended by its association with an organization best known for defense of a great evil, regardless of its other cultural merits. Not because it automatically makes you a white supremacist to fly it.
Z – “I don’t think any of them would deny the logical basis of your argument.”
Z – “arbitrary set of acceptable symbols”
So, does it have a logical basis, or is it arbitrary?
Cypren – where I’ve lived, just a shade north of the Mason-Dixon line, opposition to the use of the rebel flag has been constant. I suspect that what changed was that black people and those of a similar attitude got enough power that they could finally demand it be taken down with a reasonable expectation of success. That fits the trend you identified.
Perhaps unexamined premise: “Slavery is racist”? Certainly not all historical Slaver was race-based, e:. Slavery in the Greco-Roman era.
Did Late-Renaissance Early-Modern Europeans enslave Africans because they were a different race (and despised/devalued them on that account?), or because of the accident of History that European Colonial powers has had a manpower demand in their Colonies at the same time African Slave societies were selling?
Arguably the first incidence of chattel slavery in what would become the US was a Black man enslaved by another black man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Casor
Similarly, there were free blacks in the Confederate states that were Slave Holders.
http://www.teachingushistory.org/lessons/BlackSlaveOwnersinCharleston.html
http://www.nola.com/175years/index.ssf/2011/08/1855_free_people_of_color_flou.html
Counter point: From memory I believe that the Virginia Ensign was added to the State flags of several Southern States in reaction to the Civil Rights acts of the 1960, however I’m unable to find a cite and may be mistaken.
Doubtless Jim Crow laws, etc. were unjust, race based and properly described as racist, however it worth considering that much of the Former Confederate States Economies and most of their political power was destroyed in the Civil War, and that Blacks in the South were a stark reminder of that fact. Add in that the Federal Government failed to deliver on assorted promises of “40 acres and a Mule” and left a whole former slave population with few skills, almost no education, and little capital in a disrupted agrarian economy, and with temporarily out sized political power during Reconstruction. Reconstruction policies failure to resolve these conflicts left the South a mess for everyone.
Is it therefore simply enough to say the Confederate Flags are symbols of racism?
Slavery may not have started out as a racial thing, but by the founding of the US — and certainly by the civil war — the belief that blacks were an inferior race was well-established.
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech
As for the flags, the Stars and Bars represent the Confederacy; the stars each state, and the bars not representing anything in particular but rather there to keep a resemblance to the US flag (a sentiment that would later be regretted). The white field in Stainless Banner was taken to represent the superiority of the white race; that makes it and the “Bloodstained banner” which followed explicitly symbols of racism.
The Battle Flag also represents the Confederacy itself, a star for each state. And it represents the superiority of General Lee’s flag designers over those in the rest of the confederacy. The Stars and Bars wasn’t too bad except its too-close resemblance to the Stars and Stripes, but the Stainless and Bloodstained banners were awful.
This thread reminds me of how many people in the U.S. support post-invasion “nation-building” efforts but are stilled cheesed about the Civil War.
There are lots of people in both of those groups; what’s your estimate on the size of the overlap and why? And how many have you talked with?
Talked with about this subject? Zero, but the list of people I have non-structured conversations with is very limited. Any estimate of the number of people I’ve talked with at all who hold both views would be based on where I was living, etc.
My guess about the overlap is that it’s pretty substantial but certainly far from universal. There’s a lot of military support and participation in the south and the view that not supporting what the troops are doing is not supporting the troops is pretty common.
Possibly the same people who think of Japan, Taiwan, and Western Europe post WW2 and S. Korea post Korean War as examples of nation building?
There’s a lot of military support and participation in the south and the view that not supporting what the troops are doing is not supporting the troops is pretty common.
There’s no shortage of Northern coastal elites who will proclaim their support for the troops while not supporting whatever invasion or intervention is taking place this week. They believe that the troops are being endangered and their efforts wasted in stupid pointless foreign wars, but since that’s what the Evil Folks in Washington insist on, they’ll support the good people stuck doing it.
I think it would be a mistake to conclude that Southerners who support the troops necessarily support whatever nation-building is taking place this week. Many of them, I think, believe that the troops are being endangered and their efforts wasted building stuff for our enemies when they should be killing our enemies, but since that’s what the Stupid Folks in Washington insist on, they’ll support the good people stuck doing it.
A claim that Southern and/or Red Tribe America support nation-building needs to be based on more than general pro-military sentiment.
You might be surprised how many Vietnam vets down in the southern Midwest and the South proper have strong views about non-intervention in the Middle East. I certainly have been in the years since I’ve moved down here and took a job where I do a lot of small talk with a wide slice of people from most of MO, southern IL, Northeastern AR, and large swaths of KY and TN.
Though the proposed alternative tended to run more along the lines of more drone and airstrikes and less along the lines of ‘moderate US policy so as not to inflame Islamist sentiment so they leave us alone.’
Yes. But more fundamentally, I’ve never seen the point in objecting to dog whistles.
Whether the Confederate flag is a dog whistle or not (or, perhaps more likely, if it is to some who like it but is not to others who like it), then trying to stigmatize it will, at best, cause some other symbol of Southern Pride to be adopted — the mint julep, Stephen Foster, palmetto trees — which will over time acquire all the connotations of the original symbol.
If it’s a dog whistle, all the dogs will hear the new one just as well as the first. You’ve imposed a minor inconvenience on the dogs but have done nothing to address the problem of dogginess.
If it’s a harmless symbol of cohesion and fellow-feeling, the new symbol will serve just as well — but you’ve annoyed people who wish you no harm. If you then latch onto the new symbol and call that a dog whistle as well, you’ll annoy them even more. In time, you may annoy them so much that they do come to wish you harm.
(Moreover, what is the freaking harm in a dog whistle to begin with? It’s a way of saying, “I’m a dog and I know there are a lot of dogs out there, but we are all a little ashamed or nervous about it: we know the rest of the farm would disdain us for being dogs.” If you root out all the possible dog whistles, you’re not going to root out the dogs; you’ll just back the dogs into a corner where they’ll have to publicly espouse dogginess. You may not like the results, because you’ll probably find there are a lot of dogs that weren’t hearing the whistle but will hear the barking.)
If the dogs need to be put down, having them openly barking makes it easier for the vets to find them.
Is it anti-Semitic to want and support Jewish people moving to Israel?
I think if it’s so that there are fewer of them in your own country, yes.
If it’s just because you think they’d like it better there or something, maybe not, but I think it would be a terrible idea to say it because you will definitely get confused for the first group of people.
Is there any difference if a Jewish person expresses this sentiment, vs. a non-Jewish person? (Can a Jew be anti-Semitic?)
Yes, just like an African-American can be racist, and a woman can be sexist. It would, of course, be marginally less likely than for a Gentile.
There are those who would claim that women cannot be sexist, and american blacks cannot be racist. You might dismiss them without a thought, but of course the dismissing viewpoints not sufficiently close to yours in argument-space is precisely what being closed-minded is.
Well an African-American could be racist AGAINST asians, for example, but a Jew can’t be anti-Semitic against some other group of people. I think it’s much rarer for a black person to be racist against other black people than to be racist against asians or whites, but I’m sure it does happen.
Anonymous, I recommend that you refer to the post on trolling. We can’t be bothered with refuting absurd arguments all day long that hinge on re-defining commonly accepted words as convenient.
Yes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hating_Jew
I’m very concerned because I think the Jews want to drive the elephants to extinction because the trunk of an elephant reminds them of an uncircumcised penis. I’m absolutely serious about that… Jews are sick, they’re mental cases.
Dear Mr. Osama bin Laden allow me to introduce myself. I am Bobby Fischer, the World Chess Champion. First of all you should know that I share your hatred of the murderous bandit state of “Israel” and its chief backer the Jew-controlled U.S.A. also know [sic] as the “Jewnited States” or “Israel West.” We also have something else in common: We are both fugitives from the U.S. “justice” system.
Both quotes by Bobby Fischer (He denied being Jewish, but I am not sure in the ethnic or religious sense).
Last I checked his family was jewish on at least one side, but no religous pratice for one or more generation before him.
Thanks for the answers.
Tangentially – what is the minimum standard for being sexist nowadays?
There isn’t one. Anyone, at any time, can come to the conclusion that a person is sexist, and use their first amendment rights to express that.
Yes, there is a difference, but also yes, a Jew can be anti-semitic. If I, as an Orthodox Jew living in Israel, say that “I would like more Jews to move to Israel,” it’s reasonable to interpret that in a non-antisemitic sense. If Karl Marx or Bobby Fischer, both of whom were of Jewish ethnic background and confirmed anti-semites, said the same thing, we should probably interpret it in an anti-semitic sense.
Marx wasn’t an anti-semite. He was anti-religion, but there was no racial character to his opposition to Judaism as a faith – an opposition mirrored by his opposition to pretty much every other faith.
Birdboy, Marxwrote something called on the jewish question, full of quotes like
What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.…. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”
And many other quotes that are as bad or worse liking Jews to a money-grubbing, parasitic race who can only be redeemed by giving up their identity and assimilulating to the wider society.
The average gentile or even non-ideologue jew could be expected to be reliably identified as anti-Semitic for quotes such as these, but as an ethnic Jew and then founder of a very academically influential movement that spawned many More Marx often gets a free pass.
I’ve read “On the Jewish Question” and still don’t consider him an anti-semite. Hostile to Judaism, sure (and just as hostile to Christianity) but you’re missing the distinction I’m making; anti-semitism suggests a racial inferiority, not something which could be removed through assimilation.
“Money degrades all the gods of man and turns them into commodities,” incidentally, struck me as the real point of that piece. Well, that and “No one in Germany is politically emancipated. We ourselves are not free. How are we to free you? You Jews are egoists if you demand a special emancipation for yourselves as Jews. As Germans, you ought to work for the political emancipation of Germany, and as human beings, for the emancipation of mankind.”
Wanna bet?
So Zionists are (or may be) anti-Semitic?
Of course Zionists may be antisemitic.
IIRC from Timothy Snyders Black Earth, the pre-war Polish government really did support Zionism as a way of getting Jews out of Poland. To the point of supporting Zionist attacks on Britain in Palestine whilst trying to get Britain to ally with Poland to protect it against Nazi Germany.
When the media and others point these things out, my thinking is that they’re actually pointing out the politician’s failure to perform the shibboleths of their readers’ tribe. The things you are and aren’t allowed to say are arbitrary, but if you were a member of the right tribe you would know which ones you are and aren’t allowed to say. Thus a gaffe is something that outs a politician as not a member of a tribe – and thus not worthy of that tribe’s admiration.
The better politicians become at performing membership of tribes they don’t belong to, the more subtle the distinctions between allowed and disallowed utterances must become in order to distinguish true tribe members from imitators.
Bingo. But I think it’s meant as something more than that. Most Dems do really think that “Trump’s a racist and sexist”! is a winning argument to undecideds.
It won’t make the undecideds support your guy, but it very well might keep them from supporting Trump.
This, but not necessarily because it makes them like Trump less. It’s because calling someone sexist or racist is an obvious prelude to attacking their supporters.
“Trump is racist” also can mean “I will be nasty to you if you support Trump.” Many people take the warning and don’t support him. Why risk a decent relationship for a candidate the undecided voter doesn’t feel strongly aboutn.
I think it’s simpler than that. Trump and Cruz etc were running as republicans. Racist/sexist etc are leftist political insults (anti-semitic is more bipartisan). They effectively have no meaning beyond ‘this person is bad. Don’t vote for him.’ Of course leftist media outlets are going to find ways to attack any republican candidate as sexist/racist etc no matter what they say or do. If the republicans somehow reanimated MLK and ran him tomorrow the media would suddenly discover that he was secretly a racist white supremacist all along who hates women and jews. It’s just standard political shit-flinging really.
Racist and sexist obviously have meanings beyond “this person is bad”, even if some people might be too liberal in their use.
Is saying that people are complaining that someone is “not a member of the tribe” an anti-seimitic dog-whistle?
Exactly! It’s like, I understand how broaching the subject may be admissable in the abstract and cool on its own terms, but who apart from someone at least ever so marginally more amenable to anti-semitic thinking would even bring it up? At least relative to someone who NEVER would?
That’s where we’re at now.
I think many of the more thoughtful progressives know that Trump is no klansman, but you see this rhetoric (as I did just today) because it’s a useful strategy for motivating their side to get out there and prevent him from becoming president. The opposition at any given moment, as you know, always THE WORST POSSIBLE MANIFESTATION OF ITSELF EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD because it’s useful to believe that. Only in retrospect, when they’re no longer a clear and present danger, can the truth be uttered (e.g. with Reagan, it seems).
I basically agree with this, but would offer one caveat, which is that people’s comments can often help indicate when an existing policy or organizational principal or whatever is MORE COMPLEX than it appears to be – that while it shouldn’t be discounted completely it should be investigated and perhaps not treated at face value. For example, say you go to interview the (male) CEO of a company that is famous for promoting women. The COO attends the meeting with you and the CEO, he treats her respectfully, but then as soon as she leaves he looked at you, rolls his eyes, and says “Dames! Amiright?” Nothing about the external situation has changed, but perhaps things aren’t quite as they seemed, and perhaps this has implications for judging why the CEO pursued these policies and what he might do in the future. Thus while as I said I agree 99% with this posts, I do think that on-the-faceism can be taken too far; just as dog-whistleism can be (and is). Trump might be an example of this.
Turn the tables and say that after an interview that consists of 2 interviewers (1 male and 1 female) and 1 interviewee (male) ends, one of the interviewers, a female, leaves. As the interviewee is about to leave, he remarks to the still-remaining male interviewer, “Dames! Amiright?” Would the male interviewer higher him? If the male interviewer later tells the female interviewer what happened, would the female interviewer hire him? And if the electorate is the interviewer and presidential nominees are interviewees, would we (depending on who “we,” is, of course) want to hire this interviewee?
With a politician, of course, they have voting and policy records, so you can always go with that. But politicians to have terms and it’s not always easy to remove a politician from office once they’re there. (Let’s say a politician wins 55% of the vote. Once he’s in office, he starts talking smack about the 45% that didn’t vote for him. But to impeach him, you need 60% of the vote. Shouldn’t the 45% be concerned that they’re stuck with this guy for the term?) Plus, Trump has never held a political office in his past, right? So we can analyze his business practices (but these are private matters and thus he’ll have an easier time hiding or doing PR-makeup on them – I mean, the quote above is from his book, which can’t exactly be assumed to be unbiased) but not his political practices.
Do dog whistles immediately mean that the person is secretly evil? No. But should we ignore all dog whistle-remarks? I don’t think so. I think it’s totally fine to use them as opportunities to investigate someone’s political record – because we should be investigating everyone’s public political record all the time, anyway. Politician’s do have power and we consider their words to often be more powerful than the average person’s – otherwise, we would never interview them in newspapers and on TV since we would purely use their past voting records to analyze them.
Basically, society seems to evaluate people in society in different ways, depending on the person’s profession. You can evaluate them like the SATs evaluate students – purely their record – or like interviews – that involve a lot of dialogue that doesn’t get written down at any point. We seem to evaluate scientists like the SAT evaluates students – we value Watson for his contributions to DNA even if he is sexist and racist. We seem to evaluate politicians like interviewers – even if a politician’s records and accomplishments are so-so, we tend to give a lot of praise for powerful or skillful orators. And if we praise politicians for good speech, it’s natural to criticize them for bad speech. I can’t find any sources now, but I recall that there have been studies showing that people are happier when a leader/president they have inspires them regardless of the political leader’s actual policy success. I imagine if the political leader does the opposite and has gaffes and faux pas all the time, there’s the opposite effect. Past political records are the most important thing, but there’s no need to willfully ignore dog whistle-remarks.
My reaction to the “dames” hypotheticals is that they tell us very little about the speaker other than that he isn’t as careful as he might be about what he says. There are lots of ways in which men and women have different styles and there is nothing particularly odd or misogynist about a man finding some feature of women’s style of interaction irritating or a woman finding some feature of men’s style irritating. Most people, if they were honest, would confess to being bothered by some characteristics of even their nearest and dearest–certainly my wife, current holder of the world’s record for having put with me for the longest time, would.
It’s a bit of a jump from “that feature of that woman’s style of interaction irritated me” to “dames,” with the implication that it’s true of women and general, but a much larger jump from that to “he has a low opinion of women.”
I’d be willing to bet that it correlates with other sexist attitudes.
Just wondering – would you also be willing to bet that a white person having black friends anti-correlates with racist attitudes? I would, but the standard claim seems to be that of course it doesn’t. Though perhaps that’s due to common tendency to see matters in terms of blanket proof/disproof rather than varying degrees of likelihood, correlations, etc.
I think it’s also that the “I have a lot of black friends” is often seen as a convenient lie, given that for sufficiently public people we already know who they associate with.
And then there are people who manage to sound even more racist when they use that defense, like that French politician (Nadine Morano) who, after making a racist comment about Arabs, said “I’m not racist, I have a friend from Cameroun, she’s blacker than an Arab”. Yeah…
I think it depends on how sarcastic the remark is. Someone who repeatedly judges all women after an encounter with an individual woman probably has some sexist tendencies. But if said in a clearly facetious way, then it just means they have a (perhaps off-key) sense of humor and aren’t necessarily sexist at all.
>Watson
>Sexist and racist
Thanks for the chuckle. Pretty good post in any case.
As an aside:
Alan Greenspan was long looked upon as a feminist because of all the promising female economists he hired and surrounded himself with. In his memoirs, he replied that it was nothing of the sort- they were less desired by other shops on the street because they were women, so he could pick up great talent at a lower cost; it was simply being a shrewd businessman and exploiting a market inefficiency.
I wonder if Trump is similar.
Note that this is not unique to current media, as shown by the fact that someone connected Obama misspeaking and saying he’d been to 57 states with ‘taking oaths to the Muslim Brotherhood’. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rep-louie-gohmert-obama-57-states-gaffe-hints-at-loyalty-to-islamic-states/
I make no claim as to the relative frequency of these incidents.
The most amusing part to me of the “57 states” line is that he was running in the primary at the time, and in Democratic primaries, 57 different states and non-state groups vote(the usual 50 plus DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, Marianas, Samoa, Virgin Islands, and Democrats Abroad). I didn’t realize this until last year.
If you look at the full clip, it’s clearly not what he meant, but it’s still funny.
It’s similar to people who mock G.W. Bush for “misunderestimated.” A politician made a simple gaffe, and it’s taken as a larger indictment of him.
There’s plenty of good reasons to dislike President Obama. That he was exhausted on the campaign trail and mixed up the number of constituencies and number of states isn’t one of them.
Also, I have occasionally pointed out that some Gaffes “Misunderestimated” , “Decided” get wider circulation than others, as “57 States” or Marine “Corpse-man” or “Have you seen the Price of Arugula?”. If you have heard only one or the other, you may be in an echo chamber.
I had actually forgotten about the “corpseman” one, since as you said, it’s not published by regular media outlets (especially comedians) the way that Bush’s gaffes were.
It probably doesn’t hurt Obama that many of the people that mocked Bush on national TV would have made the same mistake themselves. (I’m in the Corps of Engineers, and it’s common for “corps” to attract mispronunciation and misspellings–“US Army Corp of Engineers”–even by fairly educated people.)
“Misunderestimated” was not a gaffe. It was a tongue-in-cheek mockery of the people who were misunderestimating him, and they were too blinded by superiority to notice. It sums up his entire political career in a single word – it sounds stupid, and it pisses off the self-described elites, but it’s really not stupid at all.
It wasn’t even that much of a gaffe. “Misunderestimated” is a bad word, but “overhyped” and “overexaggerated” are bad in precisely the same way and I see people using them all the time.
I’m glad I took a moment to hover over some of the links. Otherwise, I might have taken at face value Scott’s assertion that declarations of Trump’s open misogeny were all over the media. How had I miess this? I read more newspapers than anyone I know. So it turns out what “all over the media” meant was a handful of bloggers, alternet and maybe something in Glamour magazine. Hoo-boy. Talk about sensationalizing things. I expect much better from this blog.
Well, everyone seems to think that Trump is “openly sexist”. If that notion was only advanced by the blogs Scott cites, and not by the newspapers you read, perhaps that just means the blogs are actually more mainstream than you think, and the newspapers less.
Doesn’t this link back to what Scott was saying about Tribes. How, on the face of it, it may seem impossible for Scott to know so few republicans despite living in a republican state and 40-50~% of the American people are republicans. Yet, when you factor in how we can become isolated within our social groups, so unintentionally, with the subtle politicisation of things as mundane as what restaurant you eat in.
When Scott says that *everyone* thinks Trump is openly sexist, he’s really just falling victim to a trap he has spoken about himself. What he means to say is *everyone I come into contact with* thinks Trump is openly sexist.