I find that “Conservatism IS racism, misogynism and xenophobia” is little different than “Conservatives are racists, misogynists and xenophobics.” and hiding the insult like DigitalC did has been modded before. I felt attacked because I was called a racist because you know being a Republican that didn’t like Obama is all about him being black and I have been called both a racist and a xenophobe simply because I believe we should enforce our immigration laws like most other countries do. So I think it was directed at the conservative members of this board as a direct insult.
Again, you are changing what adaher said in order to fit your conclusion. There was nothing about “random sampling”. More importantly, he didn’t say they were bigots. He said they were low information voters. It was DigitalC who threw in the racist, etc comments. And I don’t think posters should be held responsible for things they don’t say but that you might extrapolate from what they said.
Which is subject to the immediate and predictable counterargument of “The handful of Trump supporters you know are hardly representative of all of them,” in a way that another statement generally characterizing all of them as a body, would not be. Things like this inform us that there is a difference between the two statements.
All of the Trump supporters I know are blonde, woo-believing hairdressers. But then I know exactly one person who will admit to supporting Trump.
Are you saying one is an insult, and the other isn’t? Should Trump voters take being called a “low information voter” as a compliment?
There are differences between all sorts of things. What counts are relevant differences. The difference you highlight is not relevant to the specific question of whether the statements insulted large groups of people.
And to be fair, it seems like most Americans are low-information voters so I gotta agree with adaher considering the same could be said for Clintion, Cruz, Sanders, Bush2, Obama etc. voters.
“All the Trump voters I know are low information voters”.
I just don’t see anything wrong with that. I wouldn’t even see anything wrong if he had added “I think that is pretty typical” afterwards.
I would not advise calling another poster here a “low information voter”, if that’s what you’re asking. Because you seem to imply that we can’t ever insult non-posters, which is simply incorrect.
Are there no Trump voters here? If I called all conservatives “low information voters”, should I be moderated?
You’re now completely changing the argument. My comment was with regard to your claim that a statement of the form “all {common expression for some subset of X} are ____” is not the same as saying “all X are ____”. But at least some others here seem to agree that it effectively is the same. Come on, if I say “every Trump supporter I know is an idiot” is there any reasonable way to interpret that other than a belief that Trump supporters in general are idiots?
In view of the last sentence, any statement you might make of the form “all the Trump supporters I know…” would be intentionally deceptive. IOW, you wouldn’t be in a position to make such a statement as an honest claim of fact unless you knew quite a large number of Trump supporters, because the clear implication is that what is true for your sample is true for the whole. If it wasn’t, there is really no point in making such a statement at all!
I’m not changing anything. I’m responding to your post. You added quite a bit extra from what was in adaher’s post, not me. Don’t blame me if I responded to those additions.
And yes, there are other reasonable ways to interpret the statement of “Every Trump supporter I know is X”. But first that assumes you even need to interpret it for more than what it is in the first place. I’m not seeing that you have to. But, if for argument’s sake you have to, one reasonable interpretation would be “Most [although not necessarily all] Trump supporters are X”. No need to extrapolate it to the worst case possible. Is it too much to ask that we wait until the poster actually says “All Trump supporters are X”?
Of course you have to interpret the statement for more than what it is. If you refuse to do that, communication breaks down entirely.
That’s the way people talk. They don’t spell out every detail they’re saying, but rely on the listener to understand context.
In this case, Adaher said: “I’m not convinced Trump voters are the party’s base. Every Trump voter I know is a low information voter that has never been on board with conservatism. Trump changed the base, he didn’t win the base.” The first and third sentences were general statements about Trump supporters. It’s obvious that the middle sentence was intended to support those general statements. Otherwise it had no place in that paragraph. It sounds like you would advocate taking that sentence as a statement about the few Trump supporters that Adaher knows personally and then sitting there puzzled as to why he’s relating this in the thread. That’s not a proper or realistic approach to discussions.
Eh. If you want to go that route we could just as easily argue that interpreting it so that it must mean “all Trump supporters…” is an insult to the poster since it implies the poster is too stupid to know the difference between “the dozen or so Trump supporters I know” and “every single Trump supporter out there, which is counted in the millions”. That is why I said that if you feel the need to extrapolate, give the guy the benefit of the doubt and extrapolate to “Most [but not necessarily all].” Especially since what we’re talking about here is whether a post deserves moderator action or not. Heaven forbid we actually ask a poster for clarification rather than jumping to conclusions!!
Actually I don’t think he meant “every single Trump supporter out there”, and that he did mean “most Trump supporters”. I was reacting to your suggestion that even that extrapolation was not necessary and that ideally we wouldn’t read anything more than what was actually said (you only suggested the “most” interpretation in a “for argument’s sake” context). This is not workable, as I pointed out.
But FWIW, I don’t know that there’s a substantive difference for purposes of MB rules between saying “most of Group X are …” and “all of Group X are …”.
What’s the relevance of a protected class in this discussion?
There’s a part of me that wants to say “pfffft. adaher was clearly inviting the reader to extrapolate the Trump supporters of his acquaintance to represent ALL Trump supporters.”
But I think I’ll hold off for now, and remark that sharp-eyed readers of that thread will note that one of my posts was a “nm.” JFTR, that post represents my having pulled back a statement, that, while contradicting Digital C’s assertion, could have been construed as having the same degree of partisanship that the Mod note objected to.
Not to answer for Merneith, but I’ll note that for purposes of analogy, Board rules about “hate speech” seem to map on to groups described as protected classes in general, and not so much onto chosen affinity groups that would not qualify as such.
Such is my impression, anyway. I welcome correction, should it be forthcoming.
Alternatively, why not just ask the poster if that’s what he meant before assuming you can read his mind?
But keep in mind that we’re not even talking about what you, as a poster, should think. We’re talking about what the mods should think about such a post. Do you really want all such posts to receive moderator action?
I perceive this as a moderator misstep. How could we have done better?
Refuted here:
Much better, though I don’t think there was line dancing involved. I can live with the remainder. DigitalC made a claim that could be substantiated and it would have a chilling effect on the fight against ignorance if such salvos were banned from Elections or GD. Sure the claim was insulting against an ideology. But it wouldn’t be hard to elaborate upon. The problem was that DigitalC made an inflammatory comment that was unsubstantiated, not softened and left without nuance.
That said, since it was borderline, tomndebb worded his note badly in my view. There was the potential for a claim that, while uncomfortable, would belong in Elections. I can see how Tom could have reacted that way, but given the overall themes of the Trump campaign, I don’t find DigitalC’s point to be obviously ludicrous, regardless of its accuracy.
No worries though, no warning was issued, yada, yada.
I doubt there would’ve been a problem with saying “Trump and many of his supporters have worked hard to earn their reputation of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia.”
Pointing out that conservatism, and American conservatives in particular, have been promoting and benefiting from racism, misogyny and xenophobia for decades now is an equally factual statement.
More to the point - it’s a debatable statement and one that should be acceptable for debate in the forum dedicated to debating partisan political statements.