I will assume your numbers are accurate for the sake of discussion (and I don’t have any real reason to doubt them). But if this logic is fair, wouldn’t it also be fair for a white person to be more leery of getting on a bus filled with black people than a black person should be to get on one filled with whites? Since actuarily speaking, we’ve established that a randomly selected black person is roughly 11 times more likely to murder a white person than a randomly selected white person is to kill a black person. (A dispute over this is what led EE to issue his only mea culpa to date that I know of—the fact that it’s the one he cited in response to Damuri challenging him on whether he had ever admitted error suggests that it is indeed likely to be sui generis.) Unless you want to just dismiss FBI statistics as someone did upthread (or maybe in another Pit thread), in which case your statistics are also moot.
We’re in the Pit, for chrissakes. This is a very self-selected group of contentious, even tendentious, folks. And it’s anonymous. Had James Damore or Jonathan Friedlund made their comments here, they would presumably still have their jobs unless someone doxxed them.
But even aside from life-altering penalties like that, many people (my wife is one of them) just don’t like getting any kind of harsh accusation hurled at them, and will bend over backward to avoid this. I would say this is the majority of people.
And you’ve been called racist? Really? As in, the kind of racist that carries a serious stigma among the progressive crowd you hang out with? Or is it just being called a reverse racist by your political enemies, that if anything gives you street cred among your allies?
I won’t change my mind. But like a lot of ideological purists on both ends of the spectrum, you don’t understand the importance of having pawns. You just want to righteously swing your king all over the board, unprotected, instead of keeping it protected by a wall of pawns. Those pawns aren’t true believers, so screw them! You only want the good people on your team. Anyone who would even consider voting for Trump is not a good person (and note that I don’t disagree!), so they can just bugger off. But as Adlai Stevenson famously (or maybe apocryphally) recognized, you need more than right-thinking folks on your side. You also need some wishy-washy dummies with questionable morals. If you tell those wishy-washy dummies to go hang, they will vote for the other side and you (we) will lose.
Should we throw away all our principles to attract those pawns? No. But I fail to see how standing firm for the principle of “don’t drag someone for characteristics they were born with and cannot change” is compromising any important principle at all.
This really might be the crux of the issue. It’s important enough that I have to lament that it’s sort of buried in a longer reply. But please “listen” to me on this.
You’re absolutely right that it’s not an accusation that shuts people down if they are over on the hard right or especially “alt-right”. If anything, it just gets them charged up and riled up, and provides something for them to bond over with their fellow righties.
But that is not the point! In fact, THIS IS PRECISELY THE PROBLEM. Again, let’s think about straight white teenage boys who are figuring out if they want to be Bernie Bros or Jordan Peterson followers or Breitbartians (or something else, but those three cover a lot of ground). Maybe they notice the multicultural “cool kids” at school are pretty hardcore “woke”, so they make some social inquiries, put out some feelers, to see if they can make it into that crowd. As straight white males, they have to “audition” more than others who don’t fit that description, or could be said to be on “probation” (if you want to dispute this, I’m just going to laugh).
If they then voice any skepticism about BLM, about deplatforming or other suppression of free speech, or comment negatively on someone like Jeong, they are very likely to be called a racist and that will “shut them down”. (It is true at older ages, too: you really think I speak freely at DFL meetings?) Either they will walk it back, curry favor, and maybe get back into the crowd’s good graces, or they will say “fuck this” and go over to the right, where they will be embraced. I would like for the left not to force this choice, which will quite often push them over to the other side and pointlessly lose us votes.
No, you don’t “detail” any mistake there. You loudly proclaim there is one, but you don’t actually identify a real error.