If this thread were past-tense, it might be more useful, since liberalism is the prevailing political tide today - “what were some dog whistles of the left?”
Let’s rewind back to, say, 60 or 90 years ago. In a culture where people were a lot more hostile to, say, LGBT than they are now, how did people signal to their allies that they were supportive of LGBT, without the anti-gay folks catching on?
Gay people had to be underground all the time pretty much, and had to devise safe ways to connect with each other. That is really very different than white supremacists’ code words, isn’t it? Because the result of being found out in the first case meant dire consequences, even death, while the far right just gets sneered at for having cruel ugly ideas.
Why does MADD only care about drunk drivers? Shouldn’t they be doing something about gun violence? And why is DARE only addressing drug abuse? They should be taking on homelessness and political corruption. And why doesn’t Right To Life address gun violence, while we’re at it? After all, getting shot can take away one’s right to life.
That’s not a dog whistle - that’s focusing on one problem and crystalizing the message about that issue.
That’s not a dog whistle, that’s framing the issue.
Again, not a dog whistle, that’s framing. It’s addressing the position with a criticism from within the group. Jesus preached “love” and “judge not”, so it is pointing out the hypocracy of the fundamentalist position.
Indeed, it’s so hard to miss. Shame on Tim. The last sentence of a long article says “Black Lives Matter banners were also put up at Little Village’s iconic arch.”
Hurray, the full force of BLM’s is being brought to bear on black-on-black violence! Oh, wait. That link says “Installation of the banners comes weeks after anti-Black violence erupted in some predominantly Latino communities at the start of the month.”
Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946): “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. […] Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. […] Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.”
[quote=“Irishman, post:124, topic:914012, full:true”]
Why does MADD only care about drunk drivers? Shouldn’t they be doing something about gun violence? And why is DARE only addressing drug abuse? They should be taking on homelessness and political corruption. And why doesn’t Right To Life address gun violence, while we’re at it? after all, getting shot can take away one’s right to life.[/quote]
Why does MADD stick to the issues related to “drunk driving”, as in its name? Why does DARE stick to illegal drug issues, as its name state? Why does the SPLC stick to “poverty” in its name? Oh, wait…
Thank you, rowrrbazzle. I was going to point that out to our esteemed irishman but you beat me to it. If you live up to the name of your organization, you are just being honest. But if your name deliberately obfuscates your purpose, that could qualify as a dog whistle.
“Deliberately obfuscates”? What are you talking about? BLM has been very clear about their purpose from day 1. If you want to see obfuscation go watch FOX and how they will say BLM hate America and wish to disrespect soldiers or whatever.
Also, while it’s obviously fine for an organization to be focused on one thing, it’s been mentioned several times already that for the record, BLM have actually campaigned on general gun violence. But it seems you’re not going to let empirical facts get in the way of repeating a nonsensical talking point over and over.
Deliberately obfuscates? There is no obfuscation. Unless perhaps you would like their name to be “Police, Stop Killing Black People, And Stop Being Racist”. But that doesn’t go on a banner very well, and isn’t particularly snappy.
National Right To Life
Focuses on abortion, but says nothing about the Death Penalty, or gun violence, or car safety, or the death of George Floyd.
National Rifle Association - why does it care about handguns? They aren’t rifles.
The Salvation Army? They aren’t a military organization.
The American Center for Law and Justice - sounds like an organization to fight for victims of crime and wrongful conviction, not an organization to push a Christian legal agenda.
Once again, there is nothing deceptive or misleading about the organization name “Black Lives Matter”. That they don’t hold protests under that banner against street violence and crime is not relevant. They are not required to satisfy your sense of what their mission should be.
Maybe Tim is one of those who assumes all of BLM are closet Marxists due to one of the founders saying something about being a “trained Marxist” and/or fearmongering from Rudy Giuliani.
The new political party BLM has adopted Arnold’s Terminator 2 line “I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle” to read “BLM needs fourteen trillion dollars in Black reparations, a Black National Anthem to replace the racist Star Spangled Banner, and Black paint for the White House”. Terminator 2 I Need Your Clothes, Your Boots and Your Motorcycle - YouTube
Got a source for that? All Google can find has something to do with a Tucker Carlson video.
The other day I actually thought of some true left wing dog whistles.
“Natural” - plain meaning, exists in nature. Implied meaning, “healthy”. Nature doesn’t equal health. Deathcap mushrooms are natural. Organic produce is not – it is a monoculture of highly derived domesticated plants. Try living on a “paleo diet” of non domesticated fruits and veggies and you’ll see what “nature” is… its also natural for populations to be decimated by plague and for half of women to die in childbirth and half of everyone else to die before adulthood. So that’s a bullshit dog whistle and its more common on the left.
“Hollistic” - plain meaning, a doctor’s clinic that cares for your mental and physical health. Implied meaning, sometimes medicine doesn’t work; we should also try magnets and crystals and copper and psychic bullshit. No, just… no. Again, more common on the left.
That’s not what dog whistle means.
Check the definition of ‘holistic’. In medicine* it means comprehensive, considering the social and mental aspects of health and disease, absolutely nothing to do with crystals, magnets, copper or ‘psychic bullshit’. Holistic care defines the specialty of Family Practice medicine.
*definition taught by Massachusetts General Hospital when I was there in nursing school in 1981.
Paleo diet as Wikipedia explains also includes animal meat, just not eggs or dairy.
And where are you getting that holistic and Paleo diet is the purview of ‘liberals’? Or are a ‘dog whistle’ evoking any subterranean shared belief?
I don’t agree that it’s mostly left wing. Well, the crystal- essential oil stuff is but it’s mostly used for general goals like stress reduction and enhanced well-being, in my experience that crowd still embraces Western medicine when they actually get sick.
Right wing Republicans - specifically Orrin Hatch - were the driving force behind the legislation that enabled the supplement industry to avoid regulation. I’ll concede that it had large bipartisan support.
But hard right wingers are really quick to jump on the miracle cure bandwagon. Look at the InfoWars store or the entire Natural News website.And the COVID-19 response. And while you might think that the supplement pushing shill, Dr. Oz, King of the Scammers, is some kind of leftie-enabler - he’s actually turned into a hard right Trumpist. He’s found a more gullible audience on the right.
I’m not saying that people on the left don’t buy into this stuff, they do. But in general I find that that the health woo crowd has about the same left/right make-up as the conspiracy theorist community. They have a lot in common as the belief that there is a great conspiracy suppressing miracle cures is a key component of medical woo.
I said that, as a comment on Tucker Carlson’s strident but entertaining webcast.
Getting back to the OP: Since liberals are generally the majority overall, the only way to find some liberal dog whistles would be that you’d have to go to some environment where liberals are in the minority (maybe a conservative evangelical college, or church, or rural region) and see how they communicate. And it can’t just be that they’re a minority, they have to face some jeopardy that forces them to disguise their language.
I am sure we have some liberal Dopers who live in rural red or otherwise hardcore-Trump regions. Share?
I think if there were some, someone would have come up with them within 138 posts. You seem really invested in proving they’re out there somewhere.
The left and dog-whistling don’t really go well together. For example, alluding to Romney’s mormonism by claiming that “he’s not one of us”, might be a dog-whistle, but a true lefty should take no issue with which particular religion he practices. Dog-whistles are where you try to let a specific audience know that you are with them, without alerting the rest of the audience to that stance. Lee Atwater dropped this little fecal biscuit back in the 80s:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes. And all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
The only potential dog-whistle that I could see from the left in recent times would be some antisemitic code words from a few African American athletes or celebrities. Unfortunately for your premise, they sucked at it, as everyone saw it as what it was, antisemitism. Remember kids, if Professor Griff is your role model, you need to rethink things. Oh, and you’re also a shitty liberal.