You don’t get it, but I didn’t expect that anyone would.
Again, the political left in America can keep talking to “centrists” and “conservatives” this way – and they can keep getting their asses kicked in election after election.
Conservatives control the White House.
They control the Senate.
The control the House.
They’re about to control the judiciary.
They control the state legislatures --33 out of 50. One short of what is required to rewrite the entire fucking Constitution.
Maybe, just maybe, a change of tactics and strategy is in order.
But don’t mind me. Insult me. Ridicule me. Show me and everyone else on SDMB how fucking ‘smart’ you are.
I get it and I thought you made a valid point. There are all kinds of linguistic and social land mines out there now. If you don’t want to give offense and you do want strangers to know that you’re not an insensitive bigot/racist jerkface idiot, it’s hard to know how to convey that.
The safety pin thing is one recent way to say to strangers “I’m a safe person. You don’t need to fear me,” and the thread on that idea got shredded here by the resident cynics.
People’s skins are getting very thin… and we’re about to have probably the thinnest-skinned President since Richard Nixon at the helm. Soon lashing out at people who inadvertently give offense will be legitimized from the highest levels, and that will be the real “trickle down.” And civility will breathe its last.
Or else get rid of the electoral college. That would be more efficient.
What is this “way” that they are talking to you? This is not college or a diner. It’s your argument generalizing what “leftists” do. So what is it exactly?
What if the target electoral population is acting out of racism? Do you have a lecture for what liberals have to do then?
You do realize the Democrats got more votes than the Republicans did, right? And that’s been true for six of the last seven presidential elections. Sure, thanks to the Electoral College and gerrymandering and voter suppression, the Republicans win some elections but there’s no reason to pretend they’re the voice of the people.
So, that’s the only option, it is not possible that someone might be sincere about it? Not possible that someone might be comforted and encouraged by it?
And better aimed at the real reason the election went in Trump’s favor.
As long as conservative leaning rural states are overrepresented in the electoral college, Dems will always have an uphill battle. Its stupid to not only accept this uneven playing field without challenge, but allow it to dictate the party platform.
asahi, you seem to be conflating what some left-leaning individuals do with the Democratic party. I agree that word policing can get out of hand, but what does that have to do with poor whites continuing to think tax cuts favoring the rich will benefit them? What does that have to do with them reflexively rejecting healthcare reform, minimum wage increases, and other initiatives clearly aimed at helping regular people out? You are not showing how the dots connect.
I really hope you don’t think the main thing standing between working class rural whites and the Dem party are 20 year olds getting angsty about microaggressions on Facebook or transgendered barristas taking offense at being called the wrong pronoun. From where I sit, working class whites have been “angsty” about minorities for quite a while, and not because of what goes on in college compasses they don’t even attend. It’s because of the history of race in this country.
I’m a 54 year old white male liberal and I don’t believe any of that shit. The whole ‘flooding the country with non-whites’ idea is pretty much the exclusive domain of the white nationalists and racists and isn’t on my radar or in my vocabulary. Nor is the idea of rejecting immigrants based on some idea of how they might vote.
Don’t kill me, but I actually think the safety pin thing is kind of eye rolley too. Kind of smacks of “I’m not like those other white people! Don’t hate me, bro!” As if minorities are going around judging which white folks are for them or against them, and look, let me help you do that in the most superficial way possible!
I personally don’t need visible displays of allyship to feel okay around white people. It just doesn’t work like that for me or anyone else that I know.
Yeah, massive projection. Republicans try to make voting more onerous for minorities because minorities tend to vote Democrat. Therefore Democrats must want to flood the county with immigrants in order to win elections. Not because immigrants tend to be low violence entrepreneurs, that it expands the tax base, that it brings great new food and culture to the US, and that it’s a generally moral thing to do. No, it has to be to win elections.
Your opinion doesn’t mark you as a cynic, but condemning a well-intentioned idea by calling it “feel-good pap” does. That’s a quintessentially cynical expression.
Nonsense. Nobody is suggesting putting black people or brown people or yellow people or women above white men. The only thing these people are being promised is equality.
Of course, some white men are threatened by equality. If you’re a white male failure at life, you want a system that puts you on top even though you have no qualifications for being there.
Perhaps I’m a bit confused about this, but I was under the presumption that the safety pin meant support for immigrants and Muslims. Where did the whole “white liberal pandering hoping black Americans will think he’s cool” come into it? One or both of us seem to have misunderstood.
Yeah, being misgendered is at best a minor annoyance, but it’s one that often repeats itself ad nauseum, one that is often intentionally done by bigots to cause offense (and often an early warning sign that you aren’t necessarily safe around someone, something trans people have to worry about a lot), and a constant reminder of “I am not presenting as a woman” that is drilled through your skull every day of your life. Imagine if you were constantly misgendered, would that start to bother you eventually? I know if people kept calling me a woman, I would eventually get very cross about it.
If this is the kind of thing that courts an “anti-PC backlash”, the problem is not “too much political correctness”, the problem is a lack of understanding of trans issues and cis people being incredibly thin-skinned about accidentally upsetting things.
Likely confusion over whom the pin is supposed to speak to is another reason I question the point of it. If you wore one without intending to send a message to blacks (or gays, or women)–only muslims and Mexicans–how in the hell would I know that? I might assume things about your politics that I shouldn’t.
Why not re-read the original post I was responding to so that you can understand the context of mine instead of reacting to every comment you see? EP’s post was dripping with smug sarcasm, as if to suggest that I’m taking the position of some backwards hillbilly. In fact I very much support and defend LGBT rights – that wasn’t an issue and wasn’t my point. My point is, understanding goes two ways. I’ll make an effort to try to understand someone but don’t act like a snit (like the barista did) just because I refer to someone as a ‘he’ based on obvious anatomy rather than your preferred label. That’s one example. Academia is far worse and loaded with social landmines as one poster put it.
Now, I’m not saying that the main reason Hillary Clinton lost is because Caitlyn Jenner decided to come out of the closet, or that it was because of an overreaction to political correctness. What I will say is that when you start taking other factors into consideration I can understand how a large number of white voters feel ignored by both parties, but we’re talking about why the democratic party lost and why it keeps losing, so I’m aiming my lens and focus there.
Bernie Sanders said it quite well I thought: it’s a shame that his party feels uncomfortable talking to white working class voters because it should be pretty easy to unify people in this country according to economics. I don’t deny that republicans have worked overtime to divide the country with shameless race baiting but democrats have also over-emphasized identity politics. Democrats visit Las Vegas and talk about pathways to citizenship but almost completely ignore suburban and small town Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. These are people who grew up here, played by the rules, and are suffering just as much as anyone else. When people see that, it’s not hard to understand why they feel jilted and why they question the value of immigration and diversity.
I’m just getting to the tip of the iceberg. That’s one issue of many.
A bunch of white people are comforted and encouraged by it. Very few of the potentially persecuted are.
You know what comforts and encourages people? Activism. Protests. Direct engagement. A symbol that only signals “I’m one of the good ones!” just generates warm and fuzzy feelings among those who wear it.
I mean, I guess on the grand scheme of things, it’s harmless. But it’s not going to do anything either.
I could easily accuse you of being a doe-eyed idealist for thinking this thing is more than a Facebook fad. But I won’t do that.
When non-Muslim Americans start signing their names to Muslim registries and native-born Americans start blocking immigration squads from entering their neighbors’ homes and the cis gendered start going to work dressed like the opposite gender to protect their transgendered coworkers’ rights and white folks start asking the police to stop-and-frisk them to divert their attention away from the blacks and the Latinos, then I will cheer and feel heartened. But I just can’t be inspired by a safety pin, sorry. No one wants to be one of the “bad” guys. But you actually have to do something to show you are a “good” guy. Signaling you are one without demonstrating how you are one is just stupid.
I certainly applaud the good intentions behind the trend, but it really doesn’t replace old fashioned activism and political involvement, which is what is increasingly missing. And again, saying this as someone who votes pretty hard left these days, liberal voters generally advocate change but don’t really seem interested in putting forth the same commitment to their values that conservatives do, which is why we’re in our current state.
This goes back to something I pointed out with angry Bernie Sanders voters months ago. You can’t just show up every four years and claim that you’re involved. You can’t just show up every four years, and then sit out and hand the opposition party control of congress and then turn around and get mad at the president for not doing enough to support your own political interests. But that’s what happens. They vote once every four years (if that) and instead spend most of their time spreading memes on social media. That’s not how it works.
Someone replied upthread by saying “You do realize that democrats won the popular vote” and another poster added that “All we need to do is get rid of the electoral college.” Both of these posters obviously fail at American Civics 101, because they ought to realize that even if we awarded the victory to Hillary Clinton or Al Gore on the basis of the popular vote, that still wouldn’t fundamentally change the fact that republicans are dominating politics nationally and have been for a good 15 years or more. They know the rules. They know how to play the game. They know how to win. They’re more committed to winning than we are. That needs to change, or we’re going to be stuck with right wing rule for 50 to 100 years. We can’t just count on demography and win with identity politics. That was the assumption this year and it failed in a spectacular way. We need to protect rights of the vulnerable, absolutely. But we need less emphasis on what makes us different and more on what we share in common. Otherwise, this is what we can look forward to.