Not every part of a post responding to you is necessarily for your benefit. Other people may benefit having their attention drawn to such tactics.
You yourself seem to now be taking a black and white position whereby all references in this thread must, de facto, be concerned only with the very worst and most dangerous groups out there. That is not who I mean when I talk about “people you disagree with”.
Yeah, all the questions directed at me were completely not directed at me, got it 
I’m sure some evasive debate tactics are being highlighted here, but possibly not the ones you think.
Oh, and I’m calling “they were rhetorical” now.
No, I’m merely not excluding them from consideration, the way people who use “people you disagree with” weaseling language to mock the concerns of oppressed people attempt to.
In Castleberry Hill, the white people would just as likely call you out for your racist stickers. We Atlantans like our diverse city and aren’t so fond of white supremacists.
And that’s to their credit. I did suspect Martin had a very skewed view of what “the rest of America” is like.
He kind of jumped on that “high crime” a bit faster than one would think as well. Castleberry Hill is all kinds of hip.
Hey, me, too! I, too, am a straight white man who went to college and experienced, what did you say, “a certain amount of discomfort.” But I am STRONG and TOUGH and BRAVE and was able to TOUGH IT OUT when I was around people who were “different from me in almost every way.” And I too extrapolate from my own experience that if everyone else were just as STRONG and TOUGH and BRAVE as me, they wouldn’t need safe spaces either!
I laud things when they are “good ideas” and pooh-pooh things when they are “bad ideas”. I rarely consider things to be “different ideas”, and when I do it’s because I have no interest in the subject matter, at which point I’ll generally avoid expressing an opinion.
I can’t speak to every minority area in the United States but in DC and Richmond where there are significant minority populations and where I am very, very frequently, it would be abnormal for someone to be accosted for a t-shirt that was anti-Biden or pro-police. Now if someone was wearing Klan regalia, a Swastika insignia, possibly the Confederate flag in DC (less so in Richmond), there would be trouble. My main point is America isn’t a place where generally speaking you get fucked with for passive displays of political expression, that isn’t to say it never happens. But there’s a difference between saying something “rarely happens” and saying there are swathes of the country where a pro-police sticker on a t-shirt would be so egregious that it’d somehow be a big deal just to “walk around that neighborhood” with one on. Most people that get accosted over political displays are being a little more open about it than just a sticker or t-shirt.
A shirt under your jacket that happens to have the blue line flag would probably not get too much shit. Wearing the shirt with a light shining on it and making sure it is seen by all would indeed get you shit. It’s trolling, and it will get called out in real life just as on this board.
Those dipshits with the sticker and t-shirt linked to earlier? Trolls.
Well the scenario being depicted is different than the hypothetical @MrDibble posited. The depicted scenario is two people deliberately showing up at an event where they know such symbols and ideas are very objectionable and will cause issue. Dibble was saying you couldn’t even “walk around” parts of America dressed like that without trouble, and I’m saying I think that is wrong. I think you guys are dramatically overestimating the desire of regular Americans going about their lives to having political debates / confrontations in the street. The depicted scenario is a specific act of political antagonism, so isn’t comparable to “just walking around a specific area of a city.”
If anyone remembers that early 2000s internet troll who walked around black neighborhoods dressed in actual KKK robes for “laughs”, he actually had to spend several days to get good footage. Undoubtedly lots of people saw him and thought he was a fucking idiot, but most people just aren’t looking to engage with some idiot that is possibly unhinged or mentally ill.
That’s quite the exaggeration of what I was saying. But if you insist on viewing it in such a manner then it’s at your own insistence.
Was I? Can you quote me on that? Where did I say anything about “just walking”?
Because i was envisioning prominently displaying a sticker on a laptop in a shared public space, like the campus example we were referencing. That was the “them” we were referring to, after all.
Getting back to the topic–Maher like a lot of ultra-wealthy white media personalities with a comedy background tends to massively overexaggerate the harms, impacts and scope of things like “political correctness” and “woke culture.” There are absolute, IMO, situations when those things run amok in a detrimental way. When you have to cite a shitty study that was originally referenced in a National Review article and that was put out by the National Association of Scholars, and when Maher has done little work to really explore what is meant by “segregated dorms” in the survey, it’s clear he’s not being intellectually honest.
FWIW an example of woke culture going too far would be the incident in Mizzou where a student journalist at the school was covering a Concerned Student 1950 protest (these were a series of protests about race relations on campus that had ultimately resulted in the ousting of the University administration), an angry crowd basically asserted the journalist didn’t have a right to record or report on the protest because it made it an “unsafe space” for minorities, and a professor at the school was seen on film urging the crowd to “get him” which had been interpreted as potentially a call to harass or even commit violence on the student journalist. Generally speaking, you have no right to a “safe space” when in public protesting, nor do you have a right to accost or harass journalists, particularly as a university employee at a public university in a public place. The college ended up firing the professor.
The thing is it’s relatively rare that woke culture intersects with reality in such a way that is clearly fucked up and needs addressed. What we have instead if a lot of little wars between famous celebrities who don’t like being criticized, who then complain about everyone being PC. Joe Rogan is a great example, despite being against cancel-culture and political correctness, he has admitted he will never schedule a comedy show on a college campus anymore because of heckling and protests from the crowd (i.e. it isn’t a place that will treat him how he wants, by providing him a safe space for his comedy.) There’s not nearly enough actual examples of PC/woke run amok to fuel the regular air time these people have to fill, so you see Maher and Rogan types filling it with nonsense they distort instead.
I think there’s a serious discussion to be had about things like promoting the idea of a “Black National Anthem”, dorms that celebrate specific cultural heritages etc, but guys like Bill Maher and his TV show aren’t vehicles for serious discourse about such matters.
Believe it or not as you see fit. You seem comfortable with your misinterpretation of what has been said and not open to being corrected but I will correct you for the sake of wider understanding.
I didn’t mock anyone’s concerns. You’ve not understood what you’ve read or have read into it what you imagine is being implied. That would explain a lot.
Right. You’re not expected to walk away from Bill Maher’s bits that are anywhere from 2 to 10 minutes long and think…: “Right! That settles that!”
Maher is provocative and contrarian and a crank. His goal is to entertain and nobody can argue that given his long career, he’s not accomplished this with some considerable success. I don’t know how many threads we’ve head where he is mentioned by name over the years but it’s more than a handful. So it’s hard to argue that what he says is not provocative and doesn’t inspire deeper conversation. Even when he’s wrong - as you’ve demonstrated - it’s usually a conversation worth heaving. And isn’t that the point?
Which is a completely irrelevant and dumb standard to apply to the real world where folks actually still have some freedom of speech and thought. Segregation is flat out wrong and fundamental freedoms are still important.
Colleges and any public space for that matter can”t embrace segregation and exclusion to protect the feelings of those who haven’t matured emotionally.
Er, no, it was some gentle teasing about your unspoken and invalid underlying assumptions.
You brought your own experience into things, to talk about how you didn’t object to being at college with people different from you, as a way to buttress your point that folks from traditionally oppressed groups shouldn’t object.
Implicit in this point is the idea that your experience is relevantly analogous to theirs. I was making fun of that assumption: I deny that your experience, as a member of a traditionally privileged group, is relevantly similar to the experience of a member of a traditionally oppressed group.
If you don’t want to be teased for that implication, either don’t bring your own experiences into the matter, or recognize how they’re not especially relevant as a point of comparison.
Making light of their wanting a space free from bigotry as just not wanting to be around “people they disagree with” is mocking their concerns
no, wrong again. I did not make light of any individual’s nor any group’s concerns.
You just think they’re big babies, that’s all.