Would you say the same if it were white guys talking in the same manner about black women? I understand the idea of “punching up” vs. “punching down”, but you don’t seem to engage at all with my point that we don’t choose what race and gender we are born. No one should ever be disparaged for a characteristic they are born with and can’t help. How is that a controversial position?
And if a few people who did not vote did, specifically of the demographics are reliably D and voted in larger numbers for Obama but did not bother this time, Hillary Clinton would be President today.
If one is going to argue partisan political expediencies then the imaginary shift of a few white voters to GOP from D on the basis of taking offense (at a media critic’s wondering if a character in a film would have been better cast as Black or another who bemoans that another movies Black characters are “formal and orderly obstacles” or even another critic who describes a show in which the rich, white people living in the same building as the of color main character does assume he exists simply to make their lives easier*) is way offset by the importance of maximizing turnout in groups that favor your side strongly and have voted before.
I will continue to argue that we can and should fight for every vote but not by pandering to those fictional snowflakes who if they do exist at all would be among the least likely to vote, even in a general election year, let alone in midterms. I will posit very strongly that these few critics’ complaints about movie representation threaten to turn off virtually no real white dudes to liberalism and none who would have voted in any case.
*Seriously, these “microaggressions” are the anecdotes offered up of “sneering progressives”? Oy.
Some of the tweets I linked to had hundreds or thousands of likes and retweets.
How is the fact that white people get treated differently than other races a controversial position?
The funny part is how you think that hasn’t been mentioned a billion times including by yourself.
Other than fringey weirdoes, who is disparaging anyone for being white or being a man?
Also, still waiting for you to quote the post that you think I’m wrong in. But I think I’ll be waiting forever, since apparently you don’t have one. Which makes it kind of weasely, IMO, that you said, over and over again, that I was wrong, without quoting what you thought I was wrong, and even though I asked you too, and never took it back.
Well golly gee, hundreds you say? About how many people are in the US again? How many people believe in lizard people? If your hypothetical “liberal” tweeter has more followers than the number of people who believe the moon landing was a hoax, then you might approach having a point.
Ah yes, thanks.
Yes, that is especially ironic when their attempts to understand Liberals amount to reading other conservatives tell them what liberals think - which almost never has anything to do with what liberals actually think.
Hell, I actually wrote to CNN yesterday and asked them to stop publishing ‘opinion’ pieces by Conservatives that do exactly that.
The controversy is over recognizing it as a problem rather than an actual privilege or merely an immutable fact of life. For those who do recognize it as a problem, the controversy is over whose responsibility it is to fix it - IOW whether or not I am forced to admit the liberals are right and that I need to make a change in myself.
Even if I concede that it’s an bullshit reason to switch from Democrat to GOP, the perception still exists in the minds of white voters that the Democrats are unwelcoming to whites. Without changing a single policy position on the Democratic side, what would be the harm in trying to counteract that perception? Denounce the movie critics, and the crazy antics of the college campus left. Why would it be bad for the next Democratic Presidential candidate to denounce this?
Feelings are always valid. But, sometimes they are based on misunderstanding of intentions.
I dont know how many different ways we can say this. White people are not under attack. I’ve said this, many others on this board and irl have said this.
There are, however some very hard realities that we all need to recognize. There are things in our society that we have let slide for too long: the environment is in crisis, poor and middle class people are having a harder time just surviving than ever before, and, yes, there is still racial disparity in this country. We, as a society, all bear responsibility for this even if you* as an individual are not to blame.
Saying that man is too blame for climate change is not the same as saying that you are to blame - you may have reduced your carbon footprint to almost zero. But that doesn’t let you off the hook. Society is still at fault and you are a part of society.
Just the same, no matter your feelings about the term “white privilege” the reality is that white people in America, as a whole, exist in a privileged state when compared to non whites. You may, as an individual, have had the most unprivileged of lives and have worked tirelessly for racial just, but that doesn’t let you off the hook. Our society is racially unjust and that’s on all of us. And if that makes you feel uncomfortable, good. you should be uncomfortable, we all should.
And it’s wrong to say otherwise. Pouring the old coke into new bottles is kinda how we got here in the first place. it’s still the same old coke. And if not shrinking from the uncomfortable realities looses “our side” some votes, well that just means we have to work harder to convince that we are right - on the merits of the argument, not by changing the packaging.
American citizenship is hard, it’s supposed to be hard. It’s the hard that makes it great!**
mc (maybe naive, but an idealist, nonetheless!)
- this is the generic you, I’m not attacking Velocity, just using his post as a jumping off point.
**with apologies to Jimmy Dugan
I think I see the problem now.
Wait, what? I’m confused too. Which “other party’s views” did you think I was agreeing with?
Let me try to explain it this way, as a brief little aside that hopefully won’t derail the awesome purse-swinging going on in this thread:
I don’t have any illusions that anybody in politics is perfect, but overall I think the policies generally supported by most Republicans are better for the country than the ones generally supported by most Democrats. There are some specific areas of disagreement that I have both with President Trump and with traditional Republican orthodoxy, and a few areas of agreement I have the Democrats, but 80% friends and all that. All of that seems unrelated to the thing that I (IIRC) “admittedly agree[d] with” in this thread, which was SlackerInc’s main point: Democrats seem to use poor word choices and alienate people with their aggressive focus on “white privilege”.
Does that clear up some of the confusion?
Does somebody else have your password?
Now:
It’s a sidetrack, yes, but you’ve been asked which policies those are, and why, multiple times on this board and you’ve responded only with Fail.
I was being charitable by calling it *my *confusion. That appears to be have been too subtle.
Okay, Andy, since you keep asking, I went back what is now several pages to find the posts you wrote that I disputed. I started to say “…and I’ll take one last shot at explaining why you were wrong”, but who knows! Anyway, first there was this one, which I’ll link to instead of quoting because what you quoted was longer than what you wrote:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20953510&postcount=601
The stuff you quoted there, of course, is precisely what EE has now disavowed.
Then a couple posts later you responded to BPC’s accurate refutation of EE’s post (the same one you had just quoted) with this:
So your basic thesis here would seem to be “white people are more dangerous to black people, but Slacker is falsely claiming that black people are more dangerous to white people”. Is that fair?
(Now, I agree that neither is very dangerous to each other, but that in itself calls into question the appropriateness of a slogan “black lives matter”.)
But you have conflated some things here that shouldn’t be compared the way you do. By ignoring the likelihood of any randomly chosen white person being a murderer of black people (and vice versa), and insisting on only evaluating your claim based on the likelihood a person of either race is a victim of murder by a member of the other race, you’ve done something like saying “women named Emma are much more dangerous than men named Dedrick, because your risk of being killed by an Emma is much higher than being killed by a Dedrick”. The latter part of that is quite likely to be true, but it’s specious, and it certainly doesn’t mean “Emmas are more dangerous than Dedricks”.
Please tell me that one got through to you. How could it not?
Elvis, it is you who are very confused. Ditka and I have opposite agendas, but what he is saying makes sense and he has not contradicted himself.
No, dude. That dog won’t hunt. The vast, vast majority of tweets get no more than a literal handful of likes. The vast majority of people tweeting never have a single tweet get hundreds of likes, much less thousands.
ETA:
The rare voice of reason! Maddening, isn’t it?
“I hope you lose this argument (even though I think you’re right) because … an electoral boon to the GOP.” doesn’t present any issues for you? He’s agreeing we have the right position but wants it to fail anyway because tribe.
No. He addressed that to me. He was saying that I am right that Democrats could make their brand stronger, attract more votes, without actually changing policy positions, if liberals would take my advice. But he doesn’t want Democrats to have a stronger brand, because he doesn’t agree with Democratic policies, so he wants Democrats to attract fewer voters and thus have less of a chance of implementing their policies.
Right, Ditka?
ETA: If there’s any “contradiction” there, it’s that he is taking a slight risk, by agreeing with me, that the rest of you will go “shit, maybe he and other conservatives really are laughing all the way to the bank here” and change your ways. Unfortunately, though, I think he has pretty accurately surmised that you won’t in fact come to your senses.
This is similar to the other thread where you said pretty much the same thing. And when asked which Democratic policies you think are bad, you stated something about minimum wage and your hope that it was abolished. When asked whether or not you thought abolishing the minimum wage would be good for most poor people, you conveniently stopped posting to the thread.
So? That is my point. A hundred likes on a tweet from a moron does not a “Liberal” position make.