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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32640 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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I’d consider attacking a mixed race person based on their identity well beyond the pale. However this is a forum that vigorously defended a child rapist last week so unsurprised the reaction to Trump’s racism. Lot of weird people here.

  • -26

  1. He is attacking her for being a phony (Indian when it helps, black when it helps).

  2. She is 1/4 black. Is that really black? She is more non black than black. One drop rule?

He’s claiming she’s not really African American and as far as I can tell that’s just literally true- she’s not.

child rapist

Who?

I presume he's referring to Stephen van de Welde.

Link to discussion

I’d consider attacking a mixed race person based on their identity well beyond the pale.

For a moment, I thought describing his comment like this was weird, but then it occurred to me that using particular blunt and non-descriptive categories to describe a specific event in a way that attaches negative affect is a common enough occurrence that one of Scott Alexander's more famous essays on SlateStarCodex back in the day, titled The Worst Argument in the World IIRC, was based around it. Of course, this is my subjective take, but Trump's line, on its merits, seems far more similar to his attacks on another mixed race person based on their identity, Elizabeth Warren, whom he called "Pocahontas," presumably as a way to insultingly accuse her of opportunistically abusing her claimed heritage for career advancement. Except without the schoolyard name-calling, but rather making a pretty meaningful - though unfalsifiably vague - claim, that Harris is selectively emphasizing aspects of her racial identity opportunistically to garner points depending on the context.

Honestly, pointing out Harris's or Warren's alleged cynical racial maneuvering seems rather trite considering that's pretty much expected of someone ambitious and arrogant enough to try to be the next POTUS, and Trump of all people should probably know that, but I've never clocked him as the self aware type. Still, politicians at least like to roleplay being respectable, and they do it well enough to convince a lot of people, and certainly on its merits, the kind of behavior being alleged is not respectable, so I don't find the accusation beyond the pale. Rather well within the pale, in fact, to the extent that it's actually pretty damning to US journalism that in a country whose political discourse explicitly talks so much about how race should inform how we treat individuals and enforcing that with policy, the industry doesn't spend more time questioning politicians on how they might have cynically maneuvered the racialist landscape to consolidate their power. I don't know who'd be the ones to damn, though, because the journalists are ultimately serving an audience that just doesn't care about that.

He's not attacking her identity wantonly, he's attacking the way she uses it.

Speak about individuals, don't make (inaccurate) generalizations like this. If you want to accuse the person you're talking to of defending child rapists, fine, accuse him of saying that (and be prepared to defend it), but "this forum" did not "vigorously defend a child rapist." This is the sort of straw man that gets people bounced, and then they whine that we're banning people for going against "forum culture."

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