"I'll personally f*****g kill Romney if he try's some dumb nazi s**t f**k that (sic),"
I looked through floatingsheep's other recent blogs and they didn't cover that one.
The problem I have with the lack of objectivity on racism is that it's actually counter-productive to solving the problem. Raising the alarm about one type of racism while turning a blind eye to other types of irrational hate smacks of hypocrisy.
Has anyone suggested otherwise? Seriously, has anyone made the argument that a death threat is ok?
This is the typical response of "look the other side does it to!". On top of it, the tweet you linked to has nothing to do with racism, just stupid partisanship. If you're so concerned about that, write your own blog post.
>The problem I have with the lack of objectivity on racism is that it's actually counter-productive to solving the problem.
You brought up a tweet that has literally nothing to do with racism, how does that counteract your claims of 'lack of objectivity'?
Nobody calls a death threat "hate speech." That is implicitly suggesting that the people who use the term "hate speech" don't consider it hateful.
Now if you queried someone directly, they would of course say it's hateful (I would think). So what that ends up suggesting is the term "hate speech" is really just a short-hand for racially derogatory statements. AKA racist comments.
People have decided the term racist and racism are too detached and not emotionally impactful, so now we have "hate speech" which is more forceful.
It does, unfortunately, seem to imply that somehow threatening someone with death is less hateful than racism.
Now, the post you were replying to seems to be a reaction to the post which uses racist tweets and hate tweets interchangably. That apparently stuck in his craw, so to speak, because there were plenty of other very hateful tweets going on during this election that had nothing to do with racism, yet they are excluded from a post discussing "hate tweets."
>People have decided the term racist and racism are too detached and not emotionally impactful, so now we have "hate speech" which is more forceful.
This isn't why the term hate speech came about. The term hate speech came about in order to have a word applies not only to racism, but also to sexism, anti-semitism, homophobic language, etc. It is an umbrella term that refers to speech that is directed towards people solely based on the (usually immutable) group to which they belong.
It is not a synonym for hateful speech. Hateful is its own term. E.g. "I going to kill white people because I hate them so much" == hate speech (and also hateful). "I'm going to kill that guy because I hate him so much" == hateful (but not hate speech).
For the record, I come down firmly on the side that both are wrong. But bringing up one when the conversation was originally about the other tends to lead to derailment.
Semantic wanking. If a conversation about Free Software was filled with discussion of Visual Studio Express, it would be just as silly as this.
"Hate Speech" was a term cooked up to bundle homophobic, racist, and anti-religious speech together. It means whatever the people who came up with it and publicized it want it to mean, and pretending that one doesn't know in order to have a strawman debate for you is a waste of everyone's time.
(Not that I don't find the term distasteful. I find the idea of criminalizing both internal states and speech pretty vile.)
Seriously, has anyone made the argument that a death threat is ok?
Arguments made by omission can be just as powerful as those made by commission.
This is the typical response of "look the other side does it to!".
That's entirely my point. That "typical response" is not logically unfounded. It's a rationale for behavior based upon the correct perception of hypocrisy.
This is why intellectual integrity is IMPORTANT. Intellectual integrity eliminates such justifications. Hypocritical approaches to racism will prevent us from ever really putting it in a context that will make it unarguably immoral.
You're confusing an excuse your mom didn't like with an actual rationale. A rationale is a reason for someone to do something. It's empirically the reason given for this kind of behavior in many situations.
We may not like that reason or think it's fundamentally the most mature way to behave - but it's still a reason. If you're saying it's illogical, it's not, game theory says that this kind of self-protective behavior is very logical when competing with other actors that are also being self-protective.
If you're not looking at this through our team vs. their team glasses, you might notice that the study didn't discover that racism was deplorable. It makes speculations about where racists among the twitter demographic in the US live, by taking advantage of an event which was bound to bring them out in force.
Caring about threats to Romney's life doesn't even make sense in that context. Caring about threats to Obama's life doesn't even make sense in that context, unless they called him a monkey nigger while doing it.
Please stop dividing the world into things that are for or against your football team.
>Raising the alarm about one type of racism while turning a blind eye to other types of irrational hate smacks of hypocrisy.
Are you seriously trying to say that paying attention to anti-black discrimination as a subject separate from anti-Kurd discrimination is hypocritical? I bet you wouldn't be saying that if the OP was about the distribution of anti-Kurd tweets.
Agreed. It reminds me a bit of the fallacy of criminalizing "hate speech", which you are seeing in Europe lately. It actually gives the bigots a bit of a legitimate grievance, in that their freedom of speech is being eroded. Besides, personally, if someone is eager to inform me about what an idiot they are, I see no advantage in legally preventing them. I think the cult of political correctness has actually been quite damaging to race relations.
What about the people that voted for Obama—just because he's black? Isn't that racist too? What about the people who voted for Obama out of fear of being labeled racist? Isn't that blackmail?
I've no idea how widespread those cases are, but I do wonder.
What about the people who voted for Romney because he is white? What kind of question is that even?
Suddenly when it's a black guy THAT'S the issue. How brain dead.
Wanting your kid to have positive black role models is not racist, no. That's a not very sophisticated but very valid and certainly not racist reason for voting for Obama that's entirely based on race.
What about the people who voted for Romney because he is white?
Those people are also racists, and frequently called racists. The double standard is issue here. White guy votes for a white guy because he's white means he's a racists. Black guy votes for a black guy because he's black means he's supporting change.
Worse yet, is that since I think Obama has done a horrible job and wouldn't vote for him, his supporters call me a racist. Sad state of affairs really.
I said it yesterday and I will say it again today: If you insist on playing semantic games and defining racism so weirdly I will happily admit to loving being racist in that way.
You mistake is to assume symmetry where there is none.
Wanting your kid to have positive black role models is not racist, no.
Voting for or against someone because of the color of his skin is racist by definition. You don't get to choose which color.
I imagine that you'd want to choose some particular definition of racism that meets your semantic needs, but that's not how this whole "logical use of language" thing works.
Not teaching your kid that character and political philosophy matter more than the color of a candidate's skin is bad parenting.
If I offended you, I apologize for that. I'm not trying to offend or label anyone racist, I'm trying to point out the double standard. Technically I'm baiting the discussion by begging the question:
If a white man votes for a white man because he is white, he is racist.
If a black man votes for a black man because he is black, he is participating in black pride.
Wait, what?!
> Suddenly when it's a black guy THAT'S the issue. How brain dead.
Nope, the issue is that the same standard isn't applied to BOTH groups. The same issue applies to the straight/gay debate: why is it discrimination when someone straight is in a straight-pride parade, but not a gay person in a gay-pride parade?
> Wanting your kid to have positive black role models is not racist, no. That's a not very sophisticated but very valid and certainly not racist reason for voting for Obama that's entirely based on race.
I'm not going to go into why I think Obama is a bad role model. I'm white, but I have people I consider as role models...
My black role models are:
1. A police officer in Baltimore, whom I call my uncle and has been there for me more than my biological uncles.
2. A parole officer in Baltimore for juvenile delinquents. He's in his job just to give kids a chance to work out their problems, and to change from the gang/criminal mentality they've had.
3. And a woman who, as a single mother, raised two daughters and sent them to college by hard work and sheer economy. And now she suffers greatly from diabetes and arthritis but still refuses to give up. She encourages ME every time I see her.
I've seen the lives of these people and respect them greatly. From what I've seen of Obama he doesn't even measure up. If he did, I could have considered voting for him.
So please, don't assume that I'm calling you names or wanting to attack you because you might've voted for Obama because he's black. I just want you to consider: could you have been racist? And maybe you'll think of me next time I vote for a white person, and think better of me than "he's racist".
In the former case, yes that's racist but there were probably fewer of them this election than the last. Also, there were probably fewer of them than voted against him because he's black.
WRT the latter, you don't have to reveal who you voted for so I doubt many did so out of fear (except maybe at those polling stations in Philly manned by the Black Panthers.) Peer pressure is a problem in elections, but it works in both directions.
What is sad as well is that that epithet is often aimed at Republican or right-leaning politicians of colour such as Condie Rice, Herman Cain, Colin Powell etc.
In 2000 Gore won 42% of the white vote and 90% of the black vote. In 2012, Obama won 39% of the white vote and 93% of the black vote.
So at most, Obama got an extra 3% of the black vote on account of his race, and lost at most 3% of the white vote. So on the face of it, a wash. Of course, the white electorate is over five times larger than the black electorate, so that's really -2.2%, +0.4%.
Even if Obama had performed at Bill Clinton's historically low 83% of the black vote, his popular vote total would have been only 1.3% lower. This may have been enough to make him lose the popular vote, but it would not have been enough to make him lose the electoral college (Mitt Romney would have needed to win the popular vote by 3% to have won the electoral college).
It's a little elevated but not much, I would guess any "reverse racism" going on is probably proportional or lesser than the people who didn't vote for Obama because he was black. Recall that black voters historically align with the Democrats in the 80-90% range anyways:
Even though the percent might not be much higher, it's really about turnout, not percent won. Twice as many blacks showed up to the polls for Obama than for Clinton. Obama was a "movement" candidate in the black community.
However, I'm sympathetic to your argument - I think blacks turning out for Obama was more akin to Irish Catholics showing up for Kennedy, rather than whites showing up for George Wallace - more of a pride thing, and a symbolic triumph over past discrimination, etc.
I'm reluctant to link to them because they were all Drudge Report style aggregators of the type that are frowned upon by HN. Anyone curious can just Google "Romney win riots" and see for themselves. We're talking hundreds or thousands of tweets of this nature.
To be honest, I'm not really bothered by either because it really just amounts to verbal graffiti. I don't think any of those tweeting were future black panther revolutionaries, any more than I think the ones featured in this post were future James Earl Rays. They're all just lacking empathy, common sense, and inhibition on Twitter.
Bah, I read news from as many sources as I can. I find that when people turn up their noses at FoxNews, the Drudge Report, Huffpo, or Salon just because of the source - it's usually because they're insecure about their fragile belief system... scared that they might read something that's true which will force them to re-think their positions.
Agreed, but HN has set a pretty high standard for sourcing, much to its credit. I wouldn't feel bad about posting ideological material from the WSJ, National Review, or NYT, but I would never post Drudge, HuffPo, Breitbart, Slate, etc. to HN, even though I check them out regularly just to get the temperature of the national discourse, and get a heads up on those occasional outlier stories that they're ahead of the curve on.
Besides, the foaming at the mouth, politics as bloodsport commentary can be a kind of entertaining guilty pleasure, kind of like outsider art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art
Mostly agree, in the same way that HuffPo isn't, but they provided direct links to the tweets, and with a little searching on twitter.com, it wasn't hard to find tons of tweets in the same vein.
I think that's exactly the point: why limit the analysis to racist speech (when the idiocy hurled on one side will be racist) and not equally bad - or worse - speech (when that other type of speech is on the other side).
It's sort of like tracking all the cases of food poisoning from pizza and ignoring the food poisoning from fish.
"Hey, I've got data that says that people get poisoned from other foods too."
Is that racism such as calling a person a monkey or a n*er, or is that violent speech absent of racial slurs? One could make a violent statement, a racist statement and a violent, racist statement.
The difference between threats and hate speech is that hate speech is intended to oppress an already marginalized group, as a group. That is, there are two criminal acts (1) threatening the individual (2) oppressing the group, happening as a result of one act of speech. This justifies a special treatment for it in law, differing from mere threats.
http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-supporters-on-twitter-...
What is any less hateful about them?
I looked through floatingsheep's other recent blogs and they didn't cover that one.The problem I have with the lack of objectivity on racism is that it's actually counter-productive to solving the problem. Raising the alarm about one type of racism while turning a blind eye to other types of irrational hate smacks of hypocrisy.