The word “racist” has a clear meaning.
Even if you could find some moron saying it’s racist for a white actor to portray a white character (or any of the other dubious examples you gave) that doesn’t make the word ambiguous. That individual is going against the generally-agreed meaning.
No I’ll stick to what I meant. Clinton didn’t run the presidential election as a state-by-state election. She ran it as a popular vote election and won the popular vote (Yay her) so I hope that comforts her while she’s busy being not-President.
Actually it doesn’t anymore, due to extreme dilution of the term by ‘progressives’. I have seen and heard people called a racist for thinking that it’s OK for people of any race to wear any hairstyle they want (there’s a video of an attack on a white guy for wearing dreadlocks that’s been posted before). And for singing along to a rap song that includes a particular, common lyric. And for casting a white actor instead of a Japanese actor to play a part in a movie even though Japanese people actually like the actor choice. And for arguing that everyone should be allowed in a discussion regardless of race. And putting aside the absurd stuff, there’s also the problem of framing anti-Islamic and anti-illegal-immigrant sentiment as “racist” when it’s actually not based on race.
There’s a lot of real, outright racism behind Trump’s election, and behind the extreme hatred for Obama. But calling it out becomes woefully ineffective when people are also called ‘racist’ for saying that it’s OK for a white person to wear dreadlocks or that white people’s opinions are legitimate too. And it gets even more muddled when bigotry against a particular religion gets called ‘racism’, because it’s specifically not about race. The term is so widely used that most of the people who might be swayed by the accusation end up feeling like ‘well, they’re going to call me a racist anyway if I wear my hair wrong, so who cares’ or ‘I may hate Muslims, but it ain’t because of their race, it’s because of Sharia law’.
So you think that her experience is relevant as ‘qualifications’, but that discussing what she actually did during the experience touted as qualifications is “just a bunch of non sequiturs?” It’s staggering the mental loops people go through to avoid criticizing the Clinton campaign.
I’m sure you can find examples of jerks, as I alluded.
But for now, the idea that everything is racist, I’m filing under “Political correctness gone MAD!” i.e. where conservatives scratch around for examples of a threat they *want *to exist.
I can honestly say I’ve never met the kind of shrill, super-progressive that seem to get so much coverage in forums like this. Never met one IRL.
But I’ve met plenty of old-fashioned bigots and racists.
There is no need to dilute the meaning of the word “racist” IME.
I looked this up. It was ONE PERSON! Or, to put it in percentages, 0.000000% of the American population. So…probably something worth bringing up, then.
Putting your fingers in your ears and insisting that calling people racists will work perfectly fine to win an election worked very well for Clinton, didn’t it? “Racist” is an insult that’s been thrown around more and more broadly over time, the idea that racist being used absurdly broadly is invented by conservatives doesn’t match reality. FYI, I’m significantly left of Clinton on pretty much every issue but gun control, so the implication that I’m just a conservative scratching around for a threat I want to exist is pretty amusing.
Of course a particular video only shows a small number of people, that’s just basic math. More than ONE PERSON has expressed the sentiment on this message board, though, so your ONE PERSON statistic is… actually not accurate.
How many? TWO PEOPLE!? THREE PEOPLE!? Will that push us over the 0.000000% threshold do you think?
More importantly, do I get to characterize Republicans by the actions of 0.000000% of that group? I’m pretty sure that more than 0.000000% of Republicans are sheepfuckers.
“Sure, sheep talk, but they lie!”
- Ancient punch line, first recorded in cuneiform.
I can honestly say that as a white female progressive surrounded by highly educated liberals focused on careers in social policy and practice, I encountered those kind of shrill, super-progressive people so often on Facebook that I abandoned social media altogether. They don’t even stop at lecturing outsiders; pretty much every day is a new treatise on Why White Allies Suck or Why Male Allies Suck and they might as well rename those This is Why We Don’t Have Any Friends. I was once an ardent supporter of the DREAMERs (immigrants who came to the U.S. without citizenship when they were very young, now seeking citizenship.) One of these DREAMER guys I knew, every other post on Facebook was ‘‘fuck America’’ or ‘‘White Allies Suck’’ until finally I just unfriended him.
Then there was the radical feminist man who responded to the most minor of disagreements regarding feminism with hyperbolic rage and insta-banning. At one point he blocked both my mother and my aunt for stating - politely - that they didn’t think hatred of men was a good route to go for feminism. He was kind enough not to ban me, but basically posted incessantly on my feed trying to explain why I’m wrong not to hate and fear men. Oh, and after the election, he unfriended everyone who didn’t vote for Hillary.
For every truly extreme lunatic in my feed, there was a host of others whining daily about some perceived injustice. One that comes to mind is a woman who identifies as a person of color because of some marginal native American ancestry (but who passes for white all the time) bitching that people say racist things toward the the Kajit (cat people) in Skyrim, the video game, and it’s hard enough she has to deal with racism in daily life. She was upset by NPCs expressing racism toward cat people in a video game. This woman is an attorney. And when I responded that perhaps video games, and indeed, creative works in general, benefit from aspects of realism, including racism between made up cultures, she told me that I don’t understand and have no right to disagree, because I’m white.
These are not stupid people. Top achievers, graduates of prestigious universities, some with law degrees, degrees in computer engineering. Most in their late 20s and early 30s like myself. Some of them very good people. But they were basically, I dunno, for a lack of better word - infantilized by an environment that rewards them for being Most Progressively Progressive, points accrued by being offended about stupid shit.
So when I say I left Facebook because of politics, it wasn’t from being exposed to ideas that upset me, it was because of the constant manufactured outrage, virtue signaling, whining and blatant disregard for critical thinking displayed by people who ostensibly share the same values as I do. It was embarrassing and frustrating.
I can appreciate that you haven’t been exposed to these people, but rest assured, they are out there. Worse, they are currently dominating the filtered media venues and blog articles that most young people are exposed to every day. So young people are shutting off their already limited capacity for critical thinking in the interest of tribal identification and virtue signaling, which I believe to be a very bad thing. (It’s not just young people or liberal people or X people, it’s the new America, but being myself a progressive Millenial, I find it particularly bothersome.)
The Other Waldo Pepper is right-ish. I believe a lot of the things he’s describing speak to racial ignorance or a failure to empathize with racial minorities and are worth discussing or pointing out in reasonable ways, but we certainly have diluted the meaning of the world racist. Here’s an interesting SlateStarCodex article about Trump on this very subject, You Are Still Crying Wolf.
Can we get into what the Democratic Party actually DID to ‘anoint’ Hillary, rather than what it hypothetically might have done if Sanders had, by some miracle, won more non-superdelegates?
Yeah, I know, Donna Brazile tipped the whole nomination process to Hillary. :rolleyes:
And then there’s the general notion of how awful a campaign Hillary ran. Yeah, so awful a campaign that Hillary pantsed Trump in all three debates, and with two and a half weeks to go, the consensus was that Hillary would win in a freakin’ landslide. At a point when, barring a terrorist attack, there really didn’t seem to be any avenue left for Trump to turn it around.
Instead of a terrrorist attack, of course, we got Comey.
It should never have been that close, and Democrats should never have nominated a candidate who was vulnerable to the whims of investigators. The mistake Democratic voters made was to assume that it was all bullshit anyway and that her unfavorables were baked in and couldn’t get worse. Heck, I assumed that. Until the email story came out and I realized that Clinton apparently shared her husband’s need to attempt self destruction whenever things seemed to be going well.
The lesson gained from this is a pretty easy one to remember: always start out with a clean candidate. Scandals can and do come up, but if a candidate doesn’t already have a bad reputation it’s survivable. It’s not one story that causes voters to bolt, it’s a pattern of behavior, and she had a long record of pretty consistently being dishonest, obsessed with secrecy, and never really able to make any of her campaigns be about anything but her. Obama probably could have gotten away with a campaign that was just about him, but even he knew something bigger was needed. Clinton never figured that out.
My view was that out of all the Republican candidates, only Trump could have beaten Clinton, any of the others would have been beaten handily. A Bush vs. Clinton, a Rubio vs. Clinton, a Kasich vs. Clinton… Republicans are famous for propping up establishment squishes, the electorate had seen this movie several times and weren’t having any of it.
Consensus with whom? The navel-gazing live in a media bubble water walkers on TV?
I live in a reliably blue collar union town industrial manufacturing town in the rust belt, or near enough. Bill came out for a speech late in the game, and there was almost nobody there except the press and maybe a few dozen people. The newspaper had some tightly focused shots that made the crowd look a little better and helpfully said “hundreds” showed up, but a wide photo proved otherwise to anyone that could count. This made me wonder about the level of support, a former president couldn’t draw flies at a campaign event for his wife. Meanwhile Trump was drawing huge crowds and filling stadiums. Gaslighting only works to a certain degree.
Seriously? Trump looked pants on head retarded at every debate, anyone who didn’t see that is simply living in a completely different reality.
Like SpiceWeasel, I’ve unfollowed multiple shrill ‘super-progressive’ people or left groups on facebook, twitter, and other social media, and avoid a few social groups IRL because of their extreme hostility, it’s not just something made up by conservatives. And similarly it’s not just first-year college students acting out their first time away from home, but professionals and people in serious college programs (med school, for example) Ironically, I think that I see more of it than some of the Democratic supporters in this thread not because I’m a conservative looking for it, but because I actually hang around in a crowd that’s decidedly not conventional and that’s distinctly not conservative.
How many fingers are you shoving in your ears? TWO FINGERS?!?!? THREE FINGERS?!?!? While there is only one person in that one video, there are vastly more than three people who have used ‘racist’ in an absurdly broad fashion. There are even more than three people who have expressed support for the actions in that particular video online, and there are also more than three people who claim that wearing dreadlocks is cultural appropriation.
Democrats patting themselves on the back that Trump couldn’t possibly win isn’t a meaningful ‘consensus’. Hillary’s own campaign thought she might win the electoral college but not the popular vote and spent effort rallying NY and CA for more popular vote (which means they didn’t share the ‘landslide’ consensus). 538.com actually gave Trump a 1 in 3 chance of winning right up to the end, which again is a clear disagreement that Hillary ‘would’ win. Conservative media like Fox was very gung-ho on Trump’s chances, as were Trump supporters. The ‘consensus’ was reached by not listening to any dissenting voices.
I’m also not sure what is meant when you say Hillary ‘pantsed’ Trump in all three debates - her supporters insist that she won each handily, but as I recall Trump supporters and undecideds didn’t actually give a lower opinion in surveys after the debates. The fact that she looked better to people who were already going to vote for her wasn’t going to make any difference in the election, it’s only if she could get some undecideds or Trump supporters to turn to her side or if Trump looked bad enough to make some of his supporters stop supporting him. And as far as I remember, she kept her image as a tool of the establishment with little charisma just like it was before the debates.
By what standard? By what measure?
Kevin Drum compared the major-party vote shares of the last several incumbent-party candidates to their predicted performance per Alan Abramowitz’ model*, and Hillary did better compared to the Abramowitz model’s prediction than any of the previous six incumbent-party candidates. His model says this race should have been a tossup in the popular vote.
Now I can hear people saying, “but Trump…” - well, Trump was a pretty strong candidate; he didn’t so much dispatch his GOP rivals as humiliate them.
When you suggest that it shouldn’t have been close enough for Comey’s late intervention to turn the race into a 2% popular vote win and an EC tossup…‘shouldn’t have,’ why?
And maybe not. But who was the great white (or nonwhite) hope who was going to do so much better? Bernie Sanders? Martin O’Malley? Cory Booker? Liz Warren? Joe Biden?
Five words:
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
John Kerry was a clean, scandal-free candidate, and this totally bullshit made-up scandal took him down.
- The model is PV = 47.3 + (.107NETAPP) + (.541Q2GDP) + (4.4*TERM1INC), where PV = incumbent party’s share of the major-party popular vote, NETAPP = President’s (approval - disapproval) in the last Gallup poll in June, Q2GDP is the annualized rate of increase in GDP in Q2, and TERMINC=1 if the incumbent is running for re-election; 0 otherwise.
Based on the polls at the time.