Believe it or not, asahi, you’re actually being too optimistic there. Jim Crow isn’t the means to hold onto power; the purpose of power is to pass Jim Crow laws. Oppression is, itself, the goal. Remember, when the North Carolina Republicans passed around e-mails on how to most optimally gerrymander, suppress, and otherwise skew the vote, they didn’t ask how Democrats usually vote. They asked how black people do. They don’t want black people voting, even the few who vote Republican. And they don’t care about white Democrats voting, except in so far as we’re likely to give too much power to black people.
You sure know a lot about me. Or rather, some Earth-3743 version of me. :rolleyes:
Of course I wouldn’t vote for you even if you didn’t say anything out of bounds. I don’t agree with pretty much anything you stand for - although, like most conservatives these days, you don’t stand for solutions to national problems so much as standing against the solutions that others come up with.
Like it says, lead, follow, or get out of the way. Conservatives aren’t leading us anywhere, they aren’t willing to follow either, and they damned sure aren’t willing to get out of the way and let others try to address our problems.
And just from the discussion we’re having, remarks by Cindy Hyde-Smith that you regard as innocent are blatantly racist. So trust me, if you were to run for anything, I wouldn’t have to say a damned thing, because most people would notice right off the bat that you were crossing all sorts of lines.
I am not defining terms, I am using them as they have been used for years up until this presented a made up opportunity for your side to take a jab at a Republican.
Despite your insistence, the term “public hanging” does not simply mean any hanging that occurs in public. It has a specific, well-known meaning that is not really debatable in good faith.
Do a google search for “last public hanging.” Ignore the results you get about this election. Tell me if you see one single mention of a lynching referred to as a “public hanging.” You’ll find none.
Ah well, that’s the clincher. Since you have baldly declared it, it must be true.
Last one. I promise.
New photo exhibit examines California’s history of lynching and frontier justice
Hey I found a few, and I didn’t even have to use Google!
As I said: you don’t get to define terms.
Lance found four in less than 30 minutes, including one that postulates that the word ‘lynch’, by definition, means ‘public hanging’.
Care to comment?
UltraVires, can we pause for a moment and ask what effect this statement had on your opinion of Hyde-Smith? It seems to me that you don’t see the statement as racist. That you are applying a degree of epistemic charity clearly beyond all of us. So before anyone says “how could this be a dog-whistle, nobody is falling for it”, uh… here we are.
But at best, this statement is, as TruCelt points out, fairly disturbing. But if I had to guess, I’d say you, UltraVires, seem to be showing more overt support for this candidate since she made that statement. So where does that leave us?
I’d posit that the use of a “dog whistle” isn’t really to “secretly” communicate with the racist base. Rather, the idea is to use a piece of jargon which many people will see as racist, but those motivated to give the candidate a pass will not. When you hear “public hanging” in the context of “old white person in mississippi”, doesn’t your mind immediately jump to “lynching”? Well, maybe, but if you like that old white person, you’re probably thinking, “Wait, they wouldn’t say something like that. Clearly it’s not racist. Maybe it’s just a saying?”
This has three effects - it puts the candidate in the news, it rallies the base, and it sucks all the air out of the room. Instead of talking about policy or what the candidates will actually do in office, now the discussion is about “is this candidate racist?” And for a party whose agenda is, by and large, horribly unpopular, that’s a really good thing - they want to be talking about base-rallying wedge issues like racism, rather than, say, about whether their candidates will repeal Obamacare.
It’s deeply fucking cynical, but it’s also the strategy that Trump used to great effect, and it’s so easy to do - as long as you’re fairly sure you’re going to lose less support over your statement than you gain by rallying the base and controlling the news cycle, it’s a great strategy. That said, it seems to be backfiring here. Maybe talking about a public hanging and openly advocating voter suppression (in a way which immediately makes people think “racial voter suppression” given the context) was a little too on-the-nose - the point of these statements is that a motivated reasoner can reasonably interpret them as harmless, and this one is really fucking stretching it. But kudos to you for finding a way, I guess.
(This may not be a bad time to remind people of a past UltraVires post on the subject of race, here: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=21287852#post21287852 )
Since you have baldly declared that the term ‘public hanging’ by definition doesn’t include lynchings, no matter how public they might have been, I don’t think you can complain.
But yes, candidates who see the world through a lens of prejudice will have to ‘walk on eggshells’ to avoid accidentally saying things that exemplify that world view.
You’ll have to excuse me if I lack sympathy for that particular set of difficulties.
Two Nooses And Six ‘Hate Signs’ Found On Mississippi Capitol Grounds
Nothing to see here. Just your ordinary everyday references to a time when hanging was a legal execution method in Mississippi.
Too soon to tell of course but that specific sort of thing is indeed occasionally a false flag.
Somebody posted a Facebook meme showing Florida State’s black football coach with a noose around his neck.
http://www.sportingnews.com/us/ncaa-football/news/fan-targets-florida-state-coach-willie-taggart-lynching-meme-university-president-john-thrasher/hf29zi1fir971kt0tso6uis5b
Why would someone falsely point out that hanging was once a legally accepted method of capital in most of the United States?
That doesn’t even make any sense.
I’m not claiming that it makes sense or doesn’t, just pointing out that people sometimes do use lynching imagery or make-up threats as a false flag to either gain sympathy/attention or make people look (more) overtly racist.
I apologize. I’m doing a poor job of pretending that a noose is not inherently racist in 2018.
Carry on.
Lance Turbo, you’re arguing against a point that Ludovic isn’t making. Of course the noose is racist; everyone knows that. And the nooses might have been put up by real racists, for purpose of making a racist statement. Probably so, in fact. But it’s also possible that they were put up by non-racists, in order to try to make the racists look bad. Which is somewhat redundant, because the racists generally do a good enough job of that without help, but people (even people with enough sense to dislike racists) sometimes do foolish things.
Apparently, they were put up as part of an anti-racism protest, according to the notes that were left with the nooses: