GIGO, voting age people not registered to vote aren’t the ones we need. Although sure, let’s have registration drives, couldn’t hurt.
The double digit ballot leads in December made sense to me. The special election results make sense. We have the most absurd disaster of a president, beyond what anyone could have imagined two years ago. So a five or six point lead on the generic ballot? That’s weaksauce in this context. Combined with all the statehouses, it tells me that Democrats are surprisingly weak and that after Trump goes away, we could be in trouble.
You think they’ll let us? The Pubbies in the various state legs have worked tirelessly to create an electoral Republican machine. A carefully balanced machine, perhaps even too clever by half. They spread out the votes very carefully, very precisely to give themselves a small but reliable advantage. It was very smart, in a ruthlessly cynical way, but like many smart things, delicate.
Which is just one of the many, many reasons Republicans would rather staple their scrotum to the desk than support a registration drive. The voting rolls already have the gated communities and the gun shows, they’d prefer to just leave things as they are. Are, me hearties, are! Are!
True. All the more reason we need every vote we can scrape up, for insurance.
You’re right though that they are spread more thinly and can therefore get swamped if the water gets high enough. I really thought it would be after the shit show of the opening year-plus of TrumpWorld, so it’s dispiriting to see those anemic generic ballot numbers. But maybe there’s some mismeasure there and the special elections are the better indicator. I sure hope so!
It makes no sense for you to complain about white men being slammed as racist when a casual search of your online presence shows you parroting the same white supremacist ideas that have kept racial oppression alive in this country and elsewhere.
It makes no sense for you to chatise liberals for alienating white men simply because they see an emergence of bald-faced racism and want to talk about it, when your own nonprogressive rhetoric about race alienates those who are afraid white men want a return to the racist days of 1950.
It doesn’t matter that no one chooses their race. It is in your power to choose what views you put out there, and it is those views that people will associate you with others. That’s the same thing you’re saying about liberals and the same logic applies to you and other white men. On this board, IIRC you have called yourself a racist and unapologetically so, and for all I know you want other white people to believe as you do. So if this nebulous group called progressives go ahead and assumes that white people believe racist things, then why would it bother you for them to call you racist?
The last sentence of that paragraph (that you didn’t copy here) apples to you. You’re someone who didn’t vote for Trump but are still pushing the stupid narrative that the white men who did (or may do in the future) aren’t really responsible for their own actions. It’s progressives who are driving them into the arms of a dumpster fire that they are incapable of seeing is bad for them.
How am I making an ad hominem attack by bringing up a thread that you started that is quite relevant to the topic at hand? I’ve not called you anything that you haven’t called yourself.
As the individual I believe he’s referring to, I’ll readily admit it was ad hominem in the literal sense of being directed “to the man”. But I think it’s hardly fallacious in either case, and seems relevant particularly for your argument: those kinds of attitudes are why concepts like white privilege are have value and shouldn’t be thrown out for the sake of (frankly undemonstrated!) political expedience.
The problem with bringing things in from other threads (other boards, even) is that people who weren’t in those threads only get your selected spin on what was said. You somehow neglected to mention that I have consistently supported reparations for slavery and dramatically increasing funding for educating black kids, funding social programs that benefit African Americans, etc. Or that Obama is my favorite president, closely followed by LBJ and Grant, specifically because of their strong records of supporting civil rights for blacks.
So now someone who wasn’t in that thread might be confused and wondering how to square all this, because they weren’t there for a long and very nuanced discussion that you have cherrypicked for your ad hominem attack in an unrelated thread. And pretty soon we’re relitigating a whole different thread here. That’s why you don’t do that.
That, and the fact that what I’m saying here is either right or not on its own merits. That’s fundamental to why ad hominem is a fallacy.
It isn’t taboo to talk about racism in conservative circles, even about its effect on voting patterns. The problem (from the progressive POV) is that it is also not taboo in conservative circles to talk about racism, and say something other than “it’s structural racism/it’s because of slavery/it’s the cops’ fault/it’s society’s fault/white supremacy” etc.
There is a passage in 1984 where Orwell talks about translating the Declaration of Independence.
I think something similar happens with discussions about race. It is almost literally impossible to translate “most of the black people who get shot by the police in the US were resisting arrest and presenting a danger to the cops and the public” into progressive-ese. The nearest one could come to doing so is to simply say “racism”, which is “crimethink” in the 21st century.
This is a statement of faith, not fact. To be clear, so would a definitive assertion of the opposite (that most were shot due to racism). There’s far too little data available about these shootings, as well as police conduct in general, to make such a definitive statehood.
And the latest election results show how laughable the idea that such assertions are “crimethink”.
Lol. There should be no confusion. Just like having black friends doesn’t preclude one from imbibing the cup of white supremacy, one can support pro-minority policies and still deeply imbibe too. One can even—gasp—call themselves a liberal.
There is no nuance that changes how you have characterized your own beliefsabout non-whites. No, you’re not out there advocating that the government round up all blacks and ship them back to Africa. That’s the hateful kind of racism that you want to distinguish yourself from. But if I were someone already inclined to think 1) white people are biased towards other whites and 2) whites see non-whites on the whole as genetically less capable than whites, it’s not like your posting history would disabuse me of that notion. I would certainly see you as part of the larger problem we have with race in this country.
And so I have to return to my soap box about accountability. Instead of acknowledging that yes, you don’t really believe in racial equality and yes, you consider yourself a paternalistic racist, and yes, you could see how someone could think you’re prejudiced because of that, you’re trying to downplay, excuse, and hide your true beliefs. All in the service of criticizing how progressives slam white men. Sorry, but you gotta try harder to not make this look so pathetic to me.
That would be a fallacious argument, but neither she nor I were taking that tack. It isn’t a fallacious appeal to authority to bring an umbrella when the weather forecaster says it’s going to rain; it’s not fallacious ad hominem to point out that your own views on racial traits engender and exacerbate the attitudes that you feel are so harmful to the democratic party’s electoral chances. It’s only fallacious ad hominem if someone is arguing your argument is incorrect specifically because you have some trait.
(Another fallacious argument might involve positing a scenario as a dire problem to be solved, but responding to requests for support with variations on “it’s just obvious”.)
Maybe; my inclination is to quibble but I won’t. But is it your contention that it would not be taboo in conservative circles to say that something IS due to structural racism, etc? If not then all you’ve done is point out that partisanship exists, congrats. If so your view is hopelessly naive.
Some people are talking past each other in this thread with two different and unrelated things.
The OP is saying that some white voters are abandoning the Democratic Party. Some people are retorting in response - “No, look at me, I’m white, and there are many millions of white people still in the Democratic Party.”
These are two completely different things. The OP is addressing a matter of change. The people trying to “refute” him are pointing at the* large size of a mass.* This is akin to someone saying, “Global warming is causing this glacier to lose X amount of ice over the past two years” and people scoffing, “Nonsense. Look at that glacier. It’s huge. It’s trillions of times larger than my house. It’s a really big glacier.”
Climate scientists have research indicating the existence of warming, its effects, its magnitude, and the plausibilty of putative mechanisms to explain it. Absent that, all we can really do is look and see the size of the glacier and remark that we don’t really see the problem.
Hiding my views? Pfffft. What, you think you hacked my emails or something? You got my views by reading them where I openly posted them under this same SN. :rolleyes:
Whatever, as long as people know that I supported those presidents and policies, and groups like the Black Panthers (I even spent a good part of a Saturday night kicking it with Bobby Seale), I’m perfectly comfortable with people knowing I don’t believe in perfect equality across all physical and mental parameters.
My eldest son is graduating from high school next weekend, and is a serious intellectual who could identify all 50 states and their capitals on a blank map before his second birthday. My youngest son is finishing kindergarten, but his speech is extremely limited, and he wears a diaper. Yet I love my sons equally and believe they each have the same worth and dignity, meaning they are equally entitled to fundamental human rights.
Are you familiar with the philosopher John Rawls and his concepts of the “veil of ignorance” vis-a-vis one’s “original position”? This is the liberalism I subscribe to, and it most definitely does not require an a priori belief in everyone being equal in their traits and capabilities.
I’ve highlighted a part of your post that’s standard right-wing straw-manning of reality: that “liberals” hold “an a priori belief in everyone being equal in their traits and capabilities.”
This straw man is quite ridiculous and I’m surprised that you feel comfortable in advancing it.
Of course it’s not ‘liberal belief’ that everyone is equal in traits and capabilities. But where liberals differ from right-wingers is in the knowledge that traits and capabilities can’t be predicted from irrelevant data such as the shade of a person’s skin.
That’s great! But unfortunately I don’t think this makes you the best judge of how discourse on the left needs to change for the greater good.
Your posts strongly suggest you have a vested interest in normalizing racist views as long as those views are non-violent and non-hateful. One way to achieve this normalization is to convince progressives that their anti-racist reputation is driving away potential white voters.
But in typical white-centric fashion, the consequence that such normalization has on minorities is ignored. It’s probably safe to assume that ignored minorities is why Clinton lost in 2016, and here you are, encouraging even more of that except in a more insidious, less defensible fashion.
Minorities don’t want your “paternalistic” love. What they want is to not have to work three times as hard to prove they are just as competent and capable as a mediocre white man.