To name names, I suspect he is talking about “scientific racialists” like Chen01, Chief Pedant and a couple of others I might be blanking on that argue firmly ( and for awhile ad nauseam ) for lower average intelligence of certain racial groups based on genetic differences. They’ve been pitted multiple times, I’m pretty sure - you might enjoy the SDMB Bigoted Asshole Omnibus Thread for one. Probably you won’t, but there you go.
Unlike old S***fronter wave, who mostly couldn’t contain their vitriol after a week or two, or the I’m sure largely unlamented Lonesome Polecat who finally toed over the line and got his ass banned, the posters named above are generally citers of literature and purveyors of seemingly calm debate. Their worst habit ( arguments about their intellectual honesty and the rigor of their logic aside ) was mostly endlessly hijacking tangentially related threads with their pet obsessions ( OP: Why didn’t Africa more successfully resist European penetration? SR: Because Africans are genetically inferior, see random P. Rushton paper #13 ). I think they’ve had their hands slapped by the mods once or twice for that.
But mostly they keep their keels even, so they haven’t run afoul of our local authorities much, despite views many on this board find distasteful at best, evil at worst.
ETa: Oh, yeah - New Deal Democrat another one, though maybe just a troll. He did get banned.
And my own opinion is that, for whatever reason, critical mass has been achieved with Der in the overall community, and the Mods are finally starting to really take his infractions seriously. Why this wasn’t the case in the past I can only guess at, but I think that JC has shaken up the established rut wrt to DT, and that they are now looking at him and his posts very critically. I’ve noticed something else, and maybe it’s just confirmation bias, but it seems to me that the amount of vitriol spewed by DT has noticeably slackened, and he seems slightly less disposed to fly off the handle and think through his response before slamming it down. And I think that him finally getting some warnings, even if they aren’t fully justified NOW, is the reason. He’s finally realized that he can’t just do as he pleases or say whatever venomous thing he wants without repercussion.
As I said the last time this subject came up, I don’t want to see him banned. I actually think he can be a valuable poster, and he’s no dummy. What I want to see is him show some restraint, and if he can’t, to be put on a leash such that restraint is forced on him. I don’t think he’s being railroaded…I think for too long he’s had a clear path to do as he pleases, and now it’s not, and he’s having some issues dealing with the new reality. But, like I said, he’s a smart guy…I have faith he’ll figure it out.
Thanks, I appreciate that. I’ve never heard of Chen01, and only recall vaguely Lonesome Polecat (who I didn’t even know was banned), but Chief Pendant is certainly a long time poster. I don’t recall ever seeing anything like the vitriol that DT has shown in GD, but yeah, if he’s hijacking threads to talk about scientific racism that’s certainly distasteful.
ETA: And yeah, that thread definitely doesn’t appeal. Not that I don’t agree that racists should be pitted, but it’s not something I enjoy reading through. Ugh.
As you note, however, the thing is most posters who survive here very long learn to show at least a minimum of restraint. It’s part and parcel of staying in the community, and if you can’t do it then eventually you are gone, even if you’ve been here seemingly forever (DtC springs to mind). Der Trihs has always been given an incredible amount of slack, IMHO, and I think that now that slack has been taken away…and, perhaps, he’s actually on a shorter leash than most posters who, while saying distasteful things, do so in a way that is less abrasive. If he’s under a microscope now I say he has only himself to blame, as he’s agitated the entire community with his antics over the last few years and has pushed things to this point.
Do you think there is a useful distinction to be drawn between the following statements -
[ul][li]Anti-abortionists like it when women suffer and die[/li][li]Republicans want poor people to starve and then machine-gun the rest[/li][li]Blacks in the US have bad SAT scores.[/ul][/li]
Regards,
Shodan
A more honest comparison, in talking about the “scientific racialists,” would be:
[ul][li]Anti-abortionists like it when women suffer and die[/li][li]Republicans want poor people to starve and then machine-gun the rest[/li][li]Blacks in the US have bad SAT scores as a result of genetic deficiencies and racial inferiority.[/ul][/li]
It’s not simply about poor SAT scores, or lower results on IQ tests. It’s about explaining those things.
Right, but DT actually said those things. You are (I assume) implying the others from the context of what those others wrote by reading between the lines. It’s completely different. My guess is if anyone DID say what you said in your 3rd example they would have been, at minimum, warned for trolling. Correct?
I guess. It depends what level of implication you’re willing to infer from their statements.
For example, New Deal Democrat said:
I guess that it could be that such a statement might not be saying anything about racial inferiority. I’m willing to concede that the possibility is greater than 0.00001 percent that NDD isn’t making an argument about superiority and inferiority here. After all, claiming that a particular group is of low intelligence and prone to crime carries no negative connotations in our society.
It’s also worth nothing that the statement itself is problematic for other reasons. If he had said that blacks have lower SAT scores (as in Shodan’s example), or lower IQ scores, then that at least might have some basis. But simply saying “low average intelligence” is not the same thing, because it suggests that the low measured scores are themselves a reflection of inherent characteristics and a completely universal and objective measure of intelligence, rather than a product of particular social and cultural and economic opportunity and environment.
Probably.
My point was not to defend Der Trihs with that post. It was simply to note that Shodan’s examples did not adequately note the scientific racialist position.
Well, I think if someone quotes lower IQ scores and later says he has shown they have lower intelligence, then I’m not seeing that as particularly damning because we often use those interchangeably. If he just said “blacks are stupid, and you can tell by just looking at the stupid decisions they make”, that would be another matter.
IIRC, that’s more or less what IceQube got banned for.
But I think the scientific racist example is a good one. They weren’t really a problem in their own threads, but it was annoying that they’d jump in almost any thread about any social problem and basically say “its the blacks fault”. On the one hand, it wasn’t really off topic, since if you really believe blacks are sub-human idiots, then that’s obviously going to cause some social problems.
But most people don’t believe that, and so every single thread would go down the same road of them making the same arguments, and people offering the same rebuttles, regardless of the actual topic. It made the Dope a much more boring place and killed a lot of discussion.
Similarily, I’m sure Der Trihs really believes the Republican’s are evil. And if they are evil, bringing it up in a lot of threads isn’t exactly hijacking, it would certainly be relevant to almost every political thread. But since lots of people strongly believe that isn’t true, it ends up hijacking every political thread into the same endless argument, with the same people going over the same basic points, regardless of the actual topic.
Do you think there is a useful distinction to be drawn between the following statements -
[ul][li]Anti-abortionists like it when women suffer and die[/li][li]Republicans want poor people to starve and then machine-gun the rest[/li][li]Blacks in the US have bad SAT scores.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
I’ve already pointed out the difference: you’re a Republican by allegiance to the political values that define the Republican party, but you’re black by genetic happenstance. You don’t choose the latter, and it’s irrelevant to who you are as a person; but who you are as a person is exactly what determines your choice of allying yourself with Republican causes. So the unifying trait of blacks is their incidental blackness, but the unifying trait of Republicans is belief in Republican values. Thus, a broad brush isn’t necessarily unjustified in this case: ‘Republicans are fiscally conservative’ is just an apt characterization, because the fact that people lean fiscally conservative is what makes them self-identify as Republicans.
Now if a group self-identifies with values which are generally considered to be wrong or morally repugnant, characterizing them as morally repugnant is apt, as it is their morally repugnant views that unite them (‘members of the Ku-Klux Klan are racists’ simply states a truth, and it’s not hate speech to characterize them as such—and no, this isn’t a comparison between the GOP and the Klan, before anybody gets wrong ideas). The same broad brush can’t be applied to racial groups, as, again, it is not their views, beliefs, or anything other chosen trait that unites them, but merely the accidental factor of genetics.
Polecat didn’t get banned for his reasoning, but for not using code. Instead of going on and on about IQ scores he started calling blacks things like quasi-human. It’s the same thing, the same attitude; just without the thin pseudo-scientific facade.
Well, without getting too much into his exact quote en toto, and whether or not it had some “nuance” that gave him wiggle room, he used the term “pro to-human”. Call that bad reasoning or racists reasoning, I don’t really care. He got banned, after receiving a number of warnings, of doing what he was told not to do. If we disallow any nuance, he called blacks “pro-to humans”, which is not the same as saying they have, on average, lower IQ than whites. The latter is a statement of fact.
Now, others routinely call certain groups “troglodytes” which is exactly the same thing, but that goes by with nary a comment.
On another note, if ‘Republicans are intransigent’ is warnable, shouldn’t ‘the left hates free speech’ similarly be (perhaps moreso)? (FTR, I don’t think either should be, just to clarify.)
I think, deep down in their hearts, both sides probably do think equally highly of one another, it’s just a matter of bringing that egalitarian spirit to the front. That probably takes jackboots.
That’s a completely different thread than the one where Jonathan Chance gave a moderator instruction and then Der Trihs posted about Republicans being intransigent, so it’s irrelevant.
I think the problem is that whether one side is more or less “good” might be a productive argument to have every once and a while (perhaps in a thread with that name). But its all Der Trihs wants to discuss. And with only a nod to whatever the actual issue the thread was actually about.
And since its pretty hard for conservatives (and even some liberals) to just let “those guys are evil and want to kill everyone” to just sit there, it just ends with every thread getting pulled into the same repetitive argument. Happily, I think people have gotten better about just ignoring him in the last year or so, despite the provication. But its still a problem.
IIRC, when we had the same problem with the New Deal Democrat, the response was to limit the threads he could bring up his pet issue in to ones where it was explicitly part of the OP for that thread. I think something similar with Der Trihs. Say he has to keep his speculation about the wider moral standing of the people he’s arguing against limited to cases where the OP makes that part of the original question. That way his views could still get aired, without it becoming a killing word for everythread about anything even remotely connected to politics or religion.