Sure, but there are some who take "There are some elements of racism on the right" to mean "ZOMG EVERY RETHUGLICAN IS KKK FASCIST" when really what it means is "There are some elements of racism on the right."Originally Posted by Fishbreath
I'm not sure how Herman Cain's performance in any way dilutes racism that exists on the right. It's fairly common for people to single out what they consider to be exceptional individuals of the race they dislike as a means to insult the rest of the members of said race.
Plus, everyone knows that you can't be racist if you have a black friend.
Alex has my point, I think. I quoted HumanTon's bit of humor there, which, while I'm sure it was all in fun, is still the sort of thing that's vaguely insulting: "Republicans? Supporting a black man? Gasp! They're supposed to be racists!" You can find honest-to-God racists, anti-Semites, and all sorts of other folks with genuinely nasty prejudices in just about any large group. Unless their acronym has three Ks in it or they have their roots in 1930s Germany, assigning 'racism' to them as a motivating force is almost certainly scare tactics on the same level as, say, dismissing Scandinavia's overall economic stability by calling them a load of communists.
Meanwhile Rick Perry's still a birther.
No, this is a scare tactic.
See, I like to take a reality-based view of the world, Fishbreath. In this reality, I strive to make facts-based conclusions about the world around me, by observing people's actions and words. Obviously, I can never know their thoughts, but what they say and what they do is often indicative to me that a significant subset of republicans are, in fact, racist, although they've learned by now to hide it, as the societal view about racism has swung around in the last 50 years. By that same notion, I've learned to disregard people who mangle the facts and draw attention away from the truth - much as you are doing - by making generalizations and assumptions. Yes. There are racists in lots of large groups. And there are a lot of them in the republican party.
I've noticed a disturbing tendency on the part of those seeking to defend such behavior. Do you know what that is? Discrimination. The racists cry out about being discriminated against.
Boo-fuckin-hoo.
Do you know what that is? Discrimination. The racists cry out about being discriminated against.
Boo-fuckin-hoo.
So in your world everyone who complains about Affirmative Action or any kind of racial quotas is racist?
Clearly no, but the venn diagram on that one is worse than many Republicans seem to think.
Damn this forum is educational...you had me running to find out what a venn diagram is. I have seen them did not know the name for them.
Why do you think it is worse? Worse in comparison to one based on racism in democrats?
As an aside..the local paper ran a story last week about a black teachers aid in LA who was picketing with the OWLA group. A news crew interviewed her and she went off on how Jews controlled the the worlds finances (paraphrasing). The school district fired her the next day. Racism/ignorance exists everywhere.
Yes. And it is entirely possible that one group has more racists than another.
I realize that this is pissing in the wind, but in terms of our national politics the question isn't "which party has more racists?" That just turns into the inevitable war of anecdotes and it's a pretty useless discussion.
A much better question is "To what degree do the two parties tolerate bigotry in their ranks?" An even better question is "To what degree do the two parties appeal to bigoted sentiments to win elections."
I honestly don't think that most Republicans are racists; the percentage of Republicans who are bigots is definitely quite small. I do think that the Republican party has enough of a history with appealing to bigotry & tolerating bigotry such that I can conclude the GOP is more willing to tolerate racism and even wield it as a political weapon.
It is entirely possible...but does that possibility increase because a certain group disagrees with you politically and philosophically?
You know, this board is actually generally a fairly interesting read when I can have a discussion that doesn't devolve into insults within two posts. There was that brief back-and-forth I had on regulatory costs with Jason McCullough* that ended up with me finding flaws in my data and some facts and citations injected into the thread. It was an interesting and informative conversation, and even though I am so far in the political minority on this board just reading the thread titles is enough to drive my blood pressure up, it was still a conversation worth having.
So far as I've read, I can't put anything that involves you in the same category. You are neither interesting nor informative. You are, in fact, a shrill hack on the same level as Dawn Falcon and briankoontz, and belong on my ignore list alongside them. Congratulations.
* Since you do appear to be in this thread, Jason, I just read a poll of small-business owners that said (regulatory costs aside) a plurality of them view compliance with regulations as the largest obstacle to their growth. Unfortunately, I didn't think to save the link and figure out which thread those posts were in. Anyway, historical data on that would have been interesting to see.
Polls of small business owners are not useful for evaluating economic policy.
Was it this article, related to this poll?
Of course it does, it makes it far easier for him to not have to actually think about what the opposition says if he can paint them all with the brush of being racists.
Bravo. :P
Now we're getting to the point where I disagree. I'll concede that the GOP attracts the votes of white racists more than the Democratic Party, but I would put that on the racists more than the GOP, and (anecdote, I know) given that everything I've seen has the anti-Semitic vote trending Democrat, I don't think there's any moral high ground to be claimed by either side. Certainly I think it's disingenuous to ignore that there are plenty of Democrats willing to race bait if you're claiming the Republicans campaign on Protect Us From The Scary Black Man.I do think that the Republican party has enough of a history with appealing to bigotry & tolerating bigotry such that I can conclude the GOP is more willing to tolerate racism and even wield it as a political weapon.
To be clear, I'm not trying to say that there aren't plenty of people who discriminate on race out there. I do think that they're a demographic that is pretty much entirely ignored in the Republican Party of today, and since about 1990 at the very latest. It's not the sort of group you cater to, because they're horrible human beings and it's political suicide.
If it is those polls, please note they do not say that small business owners view regulations as an obstacle to growth. They say small business owners view regulations as a problem. Something can be a problem, but not an obstacle to growth, and vice versa.
I am not sure why we would think opposition to regulations is surprising, since regulations are always going to be problematic for businesses. Regulations are a way of forcing businesses to do things they wouldn't do otherwise. If regulations weren't a problem for businesses, they wouldn't be regulations - they would be best practices.
That's the one, thanks. Now that it's been mentioned, if you were to gather two or three of the other responses under 'economic malaise', they'd add up to something well above 'regulations', but on the other hand there are differences between lack of demand and lack of consumer confidence.
No, but I think it's useful if you happen to wonder why job creators aren't. Small business owner opinion is a lagging economic indicator if it's one at all, but it might be a decent leading indicator of jobs growth. That's why I wondered if there weren't historical polls.
Some conservative bloggers have been running the "OWS == Anti-Semite" thing pretty heavily in the last couple days, but the proposed meme hasn't seemed to get a lot of play outside their own editorials and Bill Kristol.
Richard Cohen has a rebuttal in today's Washington Post. he cites the Anti-Defamation League, who said “anti-Semitism has not gained traction . . . nor is it representative of the larger movement at this time.”
Last edited by Tin Wisdom; 10-25-2011 at 11:17 AM. Reason: Surprisingly, Fox News hasn't bitten either
I suppose. Also interesting is that (per the Politico article) only 12% of respondents think that the solution to that problem is fewer regulations, which I find interesting. I expect there are probably plenty of gains to be made in streamlining, though; regulations like those on PCI security standards would almost certainly be more useful for protecting consumers if they weren't outright ignored by the overwhelming majority of small businesses.
I didn't see it there but I can imagine Faux News played that for all it was worth.
To be clear: when I say "The Republican Party..." that's more shorthand for "The Republican Party leadership and its candidates." I also think it's uncontroversial to say that the Republican party is willing to tolerate racial bigotry to a greater degree among its followers than Democrats. See: Nixon and the Southern Strategy, "Niggerhead," the fact that the only bigotry they concern themselves about is when a white man is accused of bigotry (reverse racism!), etc etc. The party also has a troubling history with regards to racism in its slightly more distant past (think: 1960s) that it has yet to come to grips with. Yes yes I know all the old Southerners in Congress were Democrats; they left the Democratic party and were embraced by the GOP.
I also disagree with the idea that pandering to racism is political suicide. You see dog-whistle politics all over the place in GOP campaigns.
You know, not being a Fox watcher, I was simply taking that on faith based on a water-cooler conversation. A quick search on the Fox News website returns no hits, so I have to apologize... I just assumed they too would sink so low; I guess it's just Bill Kristol and the bloggers.
I'll edit my post.
No I really don't think it is. Especially in the case of regulation.
Small business owners will always oppose regulation. Imagine some perfect platonic ideal of a regulation, something that fully internalizes an externality with no overhead whatsoever. If you're the subject of this regulation you will rationally oppose it because it's eating into your profits. By definition internalizing an externality reduces profits because the definition of an externality is a cost borne by someone else. So yeah no duh business owners oppose that!
Take that, add in the hairy nature of polling (the way questions are phrased, etc), stir in the fact that small business owners trend Republican and the environment they surround themselves with (Fox News, WSJ, GOP politicians) is one endless screech against regulation and yeah it's not at all surprising they're not happy about regulation. It's also not particularly useful. And (and this is the kicker) there is a mountain of evidence that regulation isn't responsible for our economic woes, and other than a few polls and whiny CEOs there is no evidence that it is.
Again: Polling data on regulation has precisely no usefulness when it comes to evaluating economic policy. Zip. Zero. None. Nada. Zilch. lim x->∞ (1/x)
Do you have a source for that, or is it just your opinion?
Not trying to be confrontational -- I've just always mentally pictured small business owners as fairly liberal-ish. Most will take all sorts of tax breaks, government subsidies, etc. I might simply be projecting -- in my business area (government consulting), more government regulation tends to favor the small businesses over the large ones; it's far easier to get a contract as a small, woman or minority-owned company than a big one.
So do multinationals. I wouldn't consider them liberal because of it. Its pure maximizing profits/cutting costs.
I didn't quote the remainder of this paragraph (the bits where I don't think either of us have a chance of changing the other's mind), but here I think it would be less controversial to say that very few politicians anywhere are upstanding enough to question why they're getting a vote, much less to use that information to repudiate voters.
Okay, I lied. This is, as far as I'm concerned, an utter non-issue, and deserves about the same treatment as birthers and truthers.
I remain unconvinced that it's intentional. In the same way that some people I know will find plausible innuendo in the most innocent of statements, some people will find plausible racism in the most non-racist language.
I can't find the graph, but small business owners actually have the biggest partisan gap of any non-racial demographic; they're 2 to 1 conservative if I remember correctly. Andrew Gelman's has the best breakdown of voting patterns I've ever seen on this note.
I'm not really sure why Fishbreath is crying when this is, in fact, a close summation to my view. If you've ignored, well, shucks, but for the record I believe strongly in looking to reality and basing my perceptions off of that, instead of FB's molding reality to fit your perceptions. Dividing the world into "racist/not racist" categories is mostly a waste - except in blatant cases - but in a world where I move between different communities of people regularly, I see a lot of discrimination. It just so happens that most of it is coming from the small-minded "guns and Jesus" types I deal with, who inevitably assume I share their predilections simply because I'm white. Just because Jim Crow is gone doesn't mean there isn't plenty of bullshit spread around. It's just covered under a lot more layers. As jeffd says, it's shifted to dog-whistle politics - which, in my opinion, is worse. Because idiots like Fishbreath can use it to pretend that racism is done.
Also, cry more, FB.
Edit: It doesn't have to be intentional, and in fact that's half the point. The problem comes from people speaking out of their intolerant and bigot-slanted assumptions about the world. Doesn't make it any less wrong.
An Amazon review pointed to the paper and cites it as a more concise account of the ideas in the book, if anyone's less than enthused about buying the book sight unseen (for my part this is the first I've heard of it).
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote