Engage them by welcoming them into conversation. They may change their mind at some point.

If they don't, who cares? — raza

People who don't like racism...

"Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend"

Do you think this philosophy was in play when they addressed Sarah Sanders? — raza

I hope not.

Anyway, thank you for the poem.

It would have to be quite provable, otherwise it is tyrannical. Beyond all doubt. Competence over race. — raza

What would have to be provable? That they were discriminating? Isn't that how things stand?

THE LAW — raza

Like this?



Weren't you earlier defending the law's tyranny against illegal immigrants though?

You agreed law should be kept out of a private person's, including the operation of their private business, right to discriminate as to who to serve as customers. — raza

No, I didn't. I made some important distinctions and qualifications (including using words such as "gray area" "probably" and most importantly pointing out what I considered to be discrimination and not to be discrimination. You are just not reading my posts carefully enough.

E.g. Most obviously...

Someone who refuses someone on the basis of their race is a racist and definitely engaging in discrimination, which shouldn't be allowed. — Baden

You cannot make having racist views a criminal offense. — raza

No, but you can make racist actions, like refusing to hire someone because they're black or they're a woman, a criminal and / or civil offense. And we do do that in every developed country. But are you saying it's tyrannical to not allow businesses to refuse to hire someone on the basis of their race, gender, nationality etc? Do you think we would have a more harmonious and better society where it was legally acceptable for corporations to only hire white males, for example? If this is the case, then what you are really doing here is using the strawman of a tyrannical government to encourage a tyranny of business, which most likely would hurt the most vulnerable and cause massive social unrest. Why would you want that? Is it because of some misguided notion of "Freedom"? Or are you saying something more nuanced?

Quote me where I contradicted myself then. What I said above is a criticism of your argument not an expression of mine. I explained my position very clearly. This is just bad reading comprehension.

Prior to the civil rights protests of the 50's white business people were enforced legally to not serve black people.

Of course many wanted to serve black customers. — raza

Pointing out that discrimination used to be embedded in law is about the worst argument you could possibly make for having anti-discrimination not embedded in law.

It is hardly a grey area, surely. — raza

Maybe things are simpler for you because you have a tendency to conflate and ignore nuance. Sanders was refused on the basis of her behaviour not her group. No issue concerning discrimination. A person who doesn't want to write on a gay wedding cake may object due to their religious beliefs and there is an issue concerning discrimination but it's muddied by the fact that they may still want to serve gay customers but feel uncomfortable exclusively about the institution of gay marriage. Someone who refuses someone on the basis of their race is a racist and definitely engaging in discrimination, which shouldn't be allowed.

So yeah, Huckabee he did not say that. He also did not obviously "intend" to do what he did not say. — raza

And I say if you think he's not aware of the effect of his words, you are extremely naive about the nature of politicians. Maybe you just have a rosier view of them than me. That's your prerogative.

So if you support rejecting customers who have different political positions to the restaurant staff and/or owner do you therefore support a right for a Christian baker not to bake a gay wedding cake? — raza

I'd add that Sanders was refused because of her behaviour, not because she's white, not because she's a Republican etc. — Baden

I support rejecting customers on the basis of despicable behaviour of the type Sanders carries out as Press Secretary, and my support particularly concerns members of the elite. A regular couple who are gay or having a gay wedding obviously doesn't fall into that category. Having said that, I'm not sure there's much point in legally forcing Christian bakers to write messages on cakes that go against their conscience unless that would mean widespread unavailability of services to those affected. I would probably prefer that they be boycotted or the gay couple just move on to the next baker. It's a gray area for me at that level.

Occupy failed because sleeping in a park doesn't do shit. — Hanover

If you are trying to say they weren't well organized enough, I'd agree, and would invite you to write an instructional pamphlet for the next attempt at a left-wing revolution. I suggest "Hanover's Guide on how not to Sleep in the Park and Actually Get Shit Done!" as a working title. Thank you for your service and "Viva la Revolución! :strong:

Roseanne Barr said what she said and is removed from civil society. Bill Maher, when told by a Senator he could help work the Senator's fields in Nebraska said, "Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a house n*****. And after some feigned outrage just to be fair, Maher wakes up to work as usual. Suppose a former Trump advisor said that?” — Hanover

I've heard this what-aboutism so many times and it's just boringly easy to refute. I mean do you really think comparing a person of black heritage to an ape with the express intent of belittling them is the same as accidentally referring to yourself, not a black person, as a house n**** as a joke? Really?

If you are reasonable enough to realize the answer is "No" then your double standard disappears. Having said that, I don't like Bill Maher and I don't like his comment, so maybe there should have been more objection, but again the degree is not the same (plus, Roseanne has a history of similar offensive statements against minorities and Bill Maher doesn't).

And moving from racism to crassness and anti-intellectualism, Trump says all the nonsense he says and the left is outraged, yet De Niro hijacks an awards show and says "Fuck Trump" and receives a standing ovation. How about if someone said "Fuck Obama" at the country music awards and everyone stood up and cheered? No big deal? — Hanover

That's two words vs what? we must be into the thousands with Trump at this point. Having said that, there is hypocrisy there in terms of degrading public discourse. I would much prefer if he had been more dignified. But people stood up and cheered because Trump deserved it, basically. After his continuous crass insults of just about everyone else who opposes him, it was probably cathartic to see him get one back. So, you can't generalize without taking into account the behaviour of the target. Obama, whatever you say about him, and I don't like him either, was no Trump when it came to how he expressed himself. And would you be upset, for example, if a Republican said "Fuck the Ayatollah". I mean, does this apply to every target? Are we not justified in saying "Fuck X" publicly ever? In this case I don't support it, I think it was counterproductive, but I wouldn't rule it out tout court as being a legitimate form of protest.

You can rationalize the double standard all you want — Hanover

I've refuted it not rationalized it. But feel free to try to rebut. I honestly don't think you have much on this one.

...but what you end up doing is further polarizing. I'd even say that a large part of the right's embracing of Trump is his refusal to play by the left's rules of conduct. If you want to make sure that there are future Trumps, keep arguing that the right isn't allowed to be outraged and that the left has the right to speak more openly than the right. Next thing you know they'll elect another Trump to prove you wrong. — Hanover

I didn't argue any of that, so...

The hamster wheel of outrage will wear you out. — Bitter Crank

Dunno, I feel like I've got enough outrage for a few more revolutions yet. ;)

I'd add that Sanders was refused because of her behaviour, not because she's white, not because she's a Republican etc. And as with the Roseanne case, I think it sends exactly the right message.

Could you give me specific directions to this supposed statement? — raza

I didn't say he stated that. If I wanted to say that I would have said it. You can intend to do something without stating that you intend to do it. So, obviously he's not going to brazenly state that he wants the administration's supporters to violently intimidate the restaurant owner, but clearly if he makes inflammatory claims and continues to ratchet up the rhetoric that will be the result. I'm sure you're not naive enough to think he doesn't know that. The restaurant has already been attacked by the way. A protester has been arrested after throwing manure at it, which in itself is not so serious, but I doubt it's going to end there given the continuing intimidation.

And do you agree with the stand the restaurant took against Sanders? — raza

Yes, I wouldn't expect my staff to serve someone who happily takes a massive salary to lie to Americans, belittle the press, avoid legitimate questions, and spin and defend the indefensible especially concerning the recent border issue, particularly if I had Latino staff. It would be humiliating for them to serve someone like Sanders. And I see it as generally legitimate that those who are complicit in this administration's bad behaviour be publicly ostracized. Again, as with Roseanne, these are rich elites with every advantage. This kind of protest hurts them far less than they hurt the public sphere with their behaviour. It's the least that can be done.

So, do you support the administration's concerted attack on this small business owner?

The Trump machine is now accusing the Red Hen owner of stalking Sanders and ratcheting up the hatred against her. Mike Huckabee in particular is out for revenge. This is legitimate outrage in reverse, those who literally run the entire country trying to mobilize violence against a small business owner in order to scare others into not taking the same stand. :vomit:

https://www.rightjournalism.com/mike-huckabee-hen-owner-stalked-sanders-to-restaurant-to-continue-harassment-video/

should all America Citizens being giving a get out of jail free card, — wellwisher

You mean like Sherriff Arpaio who was actually convicted of a crime? Or all those others who benefited from Trump's political pardons?

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone except the most ignorant of Trump supporters.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/27/north-korea-nuclear-reactor-upgrades-summit-pledges

"North Korea has continued to upgrade its only known nuclear reactor used to fuel its weapons program, satellite imagery has shown, despite ongoing negotiations with the US and a pledge to denuclearise.

Infrastructure improvements at the Yongbyon nuclear plant are “continuing at a rapid pace”, according to an analysis by monitoring group 38 North of commercial satellite images taken on 21 June."

It does frustrate me that the bigger picture system is not something that allows outrage to function against itself. That's partly why Occupy failed. But I don't see that you've said much more than you have different priorities and your priorities are better. You've conceded the principle that outrage is a legitimate political weapon. I'm just for employing it more widely than you are and am less complacent about the results of not doing so.

I'd add that for me the outrage is justified not just by what was said but by who said it. Outrage should be employed to a significant degree to the extent the offender is part of the prevalent power structure. If this were just a random white guy on the street, I'd say some opprobrium would be appropriate but then forget him, leave him alone, give him the benefit of the doubt if it can be reasonably applied, and certainly don't try to intimidate him through social media or whatever (same goes for that woman in the YouTube vid, just leave her alone now, she's had enough). But when said offender is an integral part of the political game and it's something as serious as potential racism, then take him to pieces. The morality of the response here relates not so much to the particular incident but to the bigger picture of fighting back against the legitimizing of the damaging discourse, which is much more a problem when the offender is in a position of status, which in itself implies legitimacy. You've got to explode that link of racism-legitmacy, and that takes outrage.

I think his target handled it well by the way. A degree of outrage but he maintained his dignity throughout. That's about the right balance.

"President Johnson:..I don't want to follow [Adolf] Hitler, but he had an idea—

King: Yeah.

President Johnson: —that if you just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn't true, why, people'd accept it. Well, now, this is true, and if you can find the worst condition that you run into in Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or South Carolina where—well, I think one the worst I ever heard of is the president of the school at Tuskegee [Institute], or the head of the Government Department there, or something, being denied the right to cast a vote, and if you just take that one illustration and get it on radio, and get it on television, and get it on . . . in the pulpits, and get it in the meetings, get it every place you can, pretty soon the fellow that didn't do anything but follow—drive a tractor, he'll say, "Well, that's not right, that's not fair."

King: Yes.

President Johnson: And then that will help us on what we're going to shove through in the end. "

LBJ to King (1965) http://www.teachwithmovies.org/guides/selma-files/selma-supplemental-materials.html

The tactic of weaponizing outrage at its finest.

But are we on the shore building intellectual sandcastles here or have we actually got our toes in the water yet? The meta-game is to be above it all and imagine we're making a contribution simply by analyzing how fucked up each side is. Meanwhile society as a whole drifts towards some -ism that we, for real ethical reasons, object to but don't or can't do anything about. And rhetoric is the currency of politics whether we like it or not. Martin Luther King knew that as well as Hitler. Bernie Sanders knows it as well as Trump. Maybe a beach and the sea isn't the right analogy. Maybe a Starbucks cafe next to a dirty canal. So, it's a nice clean philosophical Latte or toxic political sewage. With all the action happening in the canal. So, we can talk about inauthenticity and games but we can also look at where real change comes about or not. Selma was a tactic; it was rhetoric and images and it was misleading and it was deliberately misleading, and inauthentic in some sense if you like. And there was outrage. And it worked.

But even when you're in that political sewage and you're stirring up outrage because you need it just to stay afloat, I agree you can recognize some distinctions. Jordan Peterson is not Hitler, and that white woman on the Youtube vid who called the police on a little black girl who was selling water to make money to help her family afford a trip to Disneyland (what a story!) is not necessarily a racist bigot, might generally be a nice person in fact, and definitely doesn't deserve death threats. Trump and his merry band of fascist ghouls on the other hand deserve any form of outrage that can tactically undermine them by fair means or foul.

So, I don't know, where do we draw the line between not being immersed in the spectacle and not being involved in the fight? which is a very real and toxic one just by its nature.

@frank @Hanover Just moved your civil war comments here for now (not sure if you want to make it a new discussion). Interesting stuff, but pretty far from the original topic of the other discussion.

OK fine, I'm on mobile and moving around and maybe not reading you all that clearly. But getting back to Roseanne, she has (had?) a lot of fans and a lot of Twitter followers. Think about the net effect of her legitimizing racism to all those people. It would have had some influence, it would be very naive to think otherwise, and the ensuing extra racism more than likely caused pain and material loss down the line. It's not something we can trace exactly, but that's what needs to be balanced when considering a just punishment. And considering all the money and privilege she has, losing her TV show is hardly very severe. It might seem so to her or her supporters, but that's a deficiency of perspective as far as I'm concerned. I don't know what the alternative would be, allowing the show to go on would have made ABC look racist, and it would have been boycotted anyway, and some of her co-stars probably would have walked off. If you're going to say it would have been better to do nothing, that would have certainly resulted in an absence of justice. So, what would have been just in your view?

You need to ask yourself this question @Hanover, do you want more racism, Islamophobia, and anti-semitism in your society or less? Because presuming you want less you need a deterrent. Why you're conflating that with dirty jokes or being vulgar I have no idea as that's a completely separate issue. I doubt anyone here would have objected if Roseanne or the idiot on Fox News had made a dirty joke on air.

I actually take a different approach. I think we ought stop disposing of people who cross these boundaries we set. People should be allowed to be more crass and vulgar without being completely ostracized. — Hanover

I don't think Roseanne needed to be thrown in the garbage for her comments. No one is better off for that. — Hanover

No, not crass and vulgar, racist. Roseanne rightly got thrown in the garbage for being racist, just like we throw people in the garbage here for being racist.

And yes we are all better off that a spoiled rich person with a stupid TV show got her stupid TV show taken off her for spreading racist and Islamophobic hate. If she were on this site, she would have been banned instantly and we would have been similarly better off. It sends exactly the right message.

You've made some good points @Mr Phil O'Sophy, which are in keeping with both the spirit and letter of the guidelines. I appreciate that (although I understand the other views here too considering the context). Anyway, I think we can move back on-topic now.

Absolutely agree for 99% of discussions here but not necessarily for this one. Refer you again to the OP.

[Cross posted. OK, you made some good points, for sure.]

Just to add to that @Mr Phil O'Sophy. Remember the OP. We are not in political philosophy territory here, really.

This place serves 7 purposes:
1) Debate about Trump.
2) Talking about Trump.
3) Shouting whatever you want at Trump.
4) Laughing, crying, hating, liking Trump.
5) Whatever else you want to do so long as it relates Trump.
6) Whatever else you want to do even though it has nothing to do with Trump.
7) etc. — René Descartes

No-one was banned directly due to this discussion and no-one will get banned for political views that are not very obviously racist or anti-semitic etc. tom got banned for stuff that happened afterwards.

I want to agree with you, and I do to an extent, but I also tend to feel that being philosophical in the face of the racism, xenophobia and / or general scumbaggery, lies and trolling of some of the Trump crowd (and I'm not aiming this at anyone specific in this discussion) is a dominated strategy and often tends to result in more of the same. Kind of like when faced with a barking dog you might have to bark back before you get things under control. Once they are then maybe dialogue is possible, but as I said before the kind of dangerous and demeaning rhetoric the Trump crowd regularly employs needs to be met with full force, and that won't always look very philosophical partly simply because it's in the political domain. And the futility of trying to be philosophical with someone who is being purely political was demonstrated earlier when reasonable responses to tom's off-topic distractions led to only more of the same. That's my take for now anyway. I'm open to being corrected.

Interesting article. Thanks.

I've never claimed border jumping is right (in general I would say it's not), but we can all play this game. Let's see, sexually abusing children is wrong and so is parking illegally, both have negative legal consequences, which are known. Therefore bad parkers are like pedophiles.

See? The analogy is offensive / inappropriate not because of a literal error in some comparable characteristic between the two situations, but because of its rhetorical / emotive content.

I accept you're not a racist if you say so. I'm just commenting on the effect of your words, and how they're likely to be responded to. If you can't stand the heat, don't start a fire.

Someone cannot be reasonably or rationally considered to be racist, in the context of an immigration discussion, if that same someone welcomes any race to legally immigrate. — raza

You made that claim after I rightly pointed out that you would be marked as a racist / xenophobe for comparing illegal immigrants to rapists. Which you will be. Folks aren't just going to bow down and eat up your rhetoric like it's doggie kibble. You're going to get it thrown back in your face.



Typical tactics of the Laura Ingraham / Sean Hannnity / Anne Coulter style dumb-down-right. Stoke irrational hatred of a minority group with suggestive rhetoric and when someone suggests that might have something to do with the minority group's race, start crying about how unjust they've been to you. Follow that up with a random strawman of your pleasing.

Those who think borders are important are apparently racist — raza

No, you won't be considered a racist and / or xenophobe for considering borders important my little snowflake (I'll bet everyone here does consider them important, I know I do), you will be marked as a racist and / or xenophobe though for comparing illegal immigrants to rapists, which you did do while contrasting rapists vs. boyfriends and legal vs. illegal immigrants.

Now let's see if you can work that out and respond to it without another self-pitying strawman / distraction.

I don't agree with that actually, but there is an element amongst right wingers whose rhetoric towards illegal immigrants needs to be combated with full force. Republicans is too broad a brush.

I'm not going to play the time wasting game with you. You're obviously a xenophobe to make that comparison. I'd guess racism plays a part in your hatred, but yes, I don't know that for sure. It's just an educated guess.

OK, another time-waster. Let me know when you have something of substance to contribute.

Comparing illegal immigrants to rapists just marks you as a racist/xenophobic moron.

Yes, she was being either stupid and/or crass. Don't know enough about her to know which or what combination. I would tend to gravitate towards the former though. I would like to think she is not as viciously anti-immigrant as some others in the administration.