I tend to agree with this article; I don't think Donald Trump, a New Yorker and a businessman, is a racist.
However, the people who he surrounds himself with, are. This article makes no mention of Steve Bannon, who suggested too many Asian CEOs is a threat to civic society [0], and ran a website that peddled anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. Come January 20th, he'll be the chief strategist for the nation's highest office.
Nor does it mention Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who has ties to white nationalist groups [1]. He's now on Trump's transition team.
I don't doubt Trump's intentions, but it's looking like the alt-right is using his campaign (and will use his administration) for their own ends.
> However, the people who he surrounds himself with, are. This article makes no mention of Steve Bannon
That was my biggest gripe with the article. Otherwise I thought it was refreshing to read such a well-presented argument, regardless of whether or not I agreed with his points.
Back to the issue: the kinds of people Trump seems to be surrounding himself with shows bad judgment, which is very concerning and should not be downplayed. We have many reasons to be wary of his presidency but maybe they're not the ones people shout loudest about.
This article makes no mention of Steve Bannon, who suggested too many Asian CEOs is a threat to civic society [0], and ran a website that peddled anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.
Interestingly, an earlier version of the article did contain a defense of Bannon, concluding that the accusations that Bannon is anti-semitic suffer from the same issues as the accusations of Trump's racism. I can't find it online any more, but it included the sentence: I feel like a non-wolf-crying person might reserve “anti-Semitic” for the sort of people who don’t even have longstanding Orthodox Jewish friends/employees with degrees in Jewish Studies who are willing to write long defences of them.
I don't know if Alexander removed this section because he came across new information, or because he thought it was a distraction from the main theme of the article. Personally, I have no knowledge of Bannon other than what's been recently reported in the media. But without defending Bannon's other views, there does seem to be evidence that 'anti-semitic' may not be an entirely accurate accusation.
May I ask you what you hope to achieve by raising these points?
This question is not meant to be facetious, I would like to hear from you what effect you hope to have by raising them and who you hope to influence.
I have seen many many people raise points like this over and over again and have come to the conclusion that it seems mostly to be tailored towards people who already think such point raised are 'bad' and so it's of limited effect on those who might support Bad Thing regardless.
But I may well be wrong.
I'm aiming to come across as non-combative here and am interested in hearing how you or others who raise point like this hope them to influence others.
Perhaps you don't intend for them to do so and are just sharing an opinion? I have seen lots of people share this sort of thing e.g 'He's not X but others near him are X so I imply you shouldn't support him'.
That might not be your intent, but if it is, can you expand on how you think this would be effective?
And again, this isn't meant to be singling you out, I'm interested in the conceptual argument of how we influence others.
i would be wary quoting discredited outfit such as WaPo for proof. Of course they want Bannon to look bad - he is their political enemy. There is not much info in the WaPo article other than out-of-context, partial quotes and innuendo.
I too agree that Donald Trump is probably not racist - but I use that phrase in a very specific way: I mean only that I don't believe his actions are motivated by racial prejudice.
That, however, does not preclude wilfully pandering to & profiting from the racial prejudices of others - "acting racist" as compared to "being racist", if you will. And I believe he's far less innocent on that count.
For a good illustrative example, consider the historical incident where the DoJ sued him & his company for refusing to rent to black people[0]. I see no need to assume he did that out of any personal dislike of ethnic minorities - far more plausible, IMO, is that his motivation was the (arguably accurate, if distastefully cynical) notion that it was more profitable to discriminate: a combination of factors (eg, "white flight", and the generally-worse employment prospects for black people - ie, consequences of past institutional discrimination & of the prejudices of others) would have meant that renting to black people could be bad for the bottom line.
Or take his final campaign advert, with its ominous talk of a "global power structure" who "control the levers of power" over grained-up photographs of influential Jews[1] - again, I very much doubt Trump himself is personally anti-semitic; but I find it hard to argue with the interpretation (shared by the ADL, among others) that it was designed to pander to the anti-semitic sentiments that some parts of the electorate hold. And if reports from inside his campaign[2] are to be believed, Trump insisted on editorial oversight on every TV ad - so it's not like that could be passed off as, say, Bannon running that message without his knowledge.
That particular case does cause me to take exception to the article's somewhat histrionic passage about anti-Trump people crying "globalists? that means jews!": they're pointing out the anti-semitic euphemisms, not coining them - the author's shooting the messenger a bit there. That said, I do take his point that it could lead people who do earnestly blame "globalists" for their problems, with no prejudiced intent, into the arms of those who use the term in its anti-semitic sense.
Regardless, all-in-all, it's an interesting and thought-provoking essay - even if I don't agree with all of it.
Not renting apartments to black people is not racist? Proposing a ban on Muslims is not racist? Fear mongering about Mexican immigrants is not racist? Assigning strategic roles in his new admin to the likes of Bannan and Horowitz is not racist? Also, he's got 400 lawsuits against him including the fraudulent Trump University. That last point does not add to his racist credentials but surely it does undermine the notion that he has any moral standing by being a "businessman from New York"
A long, but good read if you have 30 minutes to spare. There's an interesting bit of context at the end of the post that put the whole thing in a new light, for me[1]. The careless presentation of misinformation has very real impact, regardless of political POV.
1. >Why am I harping on this?
>I work in mental health. So far I have had two patients express Trump-related suicidal ideation. One of them ended up in the emergency room, although luckily both of them are now safe and well. I have heard secondhand of several more.
1. Kudos to him for putting in the "Edit" about the inaccuracies in exit-poll data, but it's a really big "Edit" and casts doubt on most of his initial premise.
2. No mention of Bannon? This article was written yesterday, and we knew Trump had chosen Bannon to be his right-hand man long before then.
3. No mention that Trump believes that an American judge of Mexican heritage can't judge him? Of the birther claims? Or of playing to white fears with completely make-believe images of "inner cities" being war zones?
4. The jiu jitsu over saying that banning "All Muslims" from entering the country isn't really racism because "most Muslims are white(ish)" is nonsense.
5. And yes, it is special pleading. The author goes out of his way to explain things in a way that is unique to Trump:
> 15. Don’t we know that Trump supports racist violence because, when some of his supporters beat up a Latino man, he just said they were “passionate”?
> When Trump was asked for comment, he tweeted “Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country”.
> I have no idea how his mind works and am frankly boggled by all of this, but calling violent protesters “passionate” just seems to be a thing of his. I think this is actually a pretty important point. Trump is a weird person.
Oh. Ok. He doesn't support beating up people. He's just "weird."
----
Edit: Also the author seems to have confused two statements of "passion." Trump's tweet about "small groups of protesters" was made just the other day. Instead, after the beating up of the Latino man, he said
"I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate, they love this country, they want this country to be great again."
Note that not only is he calling those men "passionate," he is essentially justifying their actions by bringing up their "love of country," which is particularly telling in the case of men beating up an immigrant.
The first one was dismissive, the second one was supportive. Why not discuss them both?
The other one that jumped out at me was the taco bowl. I'm pretty sure lots of racists like tacos, tacos are delicious. So liking tacos doesn't say a whole lot. I'd go so far as to say that ham-fisted pandering using a taco bowl says more than liking tacos.
How seriously are we meant to take an article on Trumpist racism that includes:
"When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
Note how totally non-racist this statement is. I’m serious. It’s anti-illegal-immigrant. But in terms of race, it’s saying Latinos (like every race) include both good and bad people, and the bad people are the ones coming over here. It suggests a picture of Mexicans as including some of the best people – but those generally aren’t the ones who are coming illegally.
It's not just that Alexander chooses as the first words following Trump's most famous racist quote "note how totally non-racist this statement is", but also the degree to which his logic insults the reader's intelligence. Mexicans "include some of the best people" (note that Trump didn't say that --- he said that their best people don't come here), just not the ones who come here illegally (note that Trump didn't say that --- he's talking about all Mexican immigrants). Alexander's own paragraph isn't even coherent on this point!
Can you explain the problem with Trump's comment with the judge for me please? Assuming that Trump thinks/ knows he's being offensive to Mexican at large, wouldn't the idea of a judge, even an American one, with some relations to Mexico might not be impartial toward him be a reasonable idea?
Is it the notion of a judge being unprofessional to the point of biased an unacceptable thing to imply?
I think the main point the article makes, and maybe I'm willing to come around on it, is that the term 'overt racism' when referring to Trump is maybe exaggerated. Maybe it is 'only' 'subtle racism', while 'surrounding himself with open racists'.
But another issue that this article completely ignores is the subtle sexism that permeated the Trump campaign. Catch phrases like 'Trump that Bitch'; or when Guiliani says
"Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails?"
Note this was distorted by people on the left to show that Guiliani is openly sexist by ending the quote after 'woman', and pretending it didn't continue. But as a full statement, this juxtaposition of man and woman, one glorified and the other dismissed, phrased as a rhetorical question, actually reads pretty sexist to me.
I also tend to think the alt-right movement much bigger than the 50K that the author claims. It's not very monolithic, there are many related off-shoots. For example, the associated /r/TheRedPill has 170K members, and that's just one of them.
This is very extensive and on the face of it does something many pieces don't - back up the claims with sources (mostly).
I'm sure there will be argument over the semantics and specifics but that's not important to the points I want to make and which is implied in this piece:
1) If you continually brand some group of people as some derogatory thing if all they want to do is talk about an issue, it's only a matter of time before they stop listening to you.
2) If your only response to dissent to your world view is to brand the dissenter some derogatory term and then turn inward to others of your own mind, it's only a matter of time before you lose influence outside your inner circle.
3) You can't hope to influence others behaviour by labelling them something you yourself would hate to be labelled. The label may have no meaningful effect on them, other than to reject your statement entirely, thus actually diminishing your effect on them.
The trouble with all these things is people cherry pick statements, occurrences, inferences and associations to match their own narrative. This includes the media, popular groups and individuals themselves, despite the double standards this might expose when their favoured candidate/group does the exact same thing (of has done it previously).
Only through actually communicating with others of differing viewpoints in somewhat of a reasoned fashion can any effective influence hope to be achieved.
Point 16 brings up especially good angle on this so skip to that if you don't read the rest.
The conclusion is one I support strongly too - stop fear-mongering, stop labelling dissenters racist, stop playing identity politics.
As a side note it's happening here in the UK over Brexit. Despite unemployment going down, retail sales up faster than any time in the last 15 years, the economy growing etc etc it's all framed in the context of 'yeah but everything is going to go to shit and you're all racists for not wanting free movement'.
Sure, be suspicious/cautions/prepared of/for the future but don't actively sabotage it before it's happened, or all you've done is create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> As a side note it's happening here in the UK over Brexit
And I wish more people wrote pieces like this one that actually discuss the political/economic arguments without descending into name-calling. It was too hard to find well-written pieces on Brexit before the vote (perhaps harder on the Leave side but I'm not sure) and this is still the case.
Excellent article that readjusts the valid Trump criticism, and shoots down the more ridiculous accusations (although it's a bit too forgiving on certain issues, but the core of it is good).
I don't live in the US but this election has made me extremely sad. The amount of false information on both sides, causing both sides to become even more entrenched into their beliefs and hostile to each other.
And like I said in a previous post: at the end of the day, blue states voted blue, red states voted red and swing states were won/lost on very, very few votes. If you removed TV and media from the equation (that is, if you removed the ridiculous 1+ year long campaign season in the US), this election would look as if it were just any old regular election.
People like to say Trump is an outsider but this isn't his first presidential bid and he seems to have been preparing for this for a long time. And for an outsider, he knows how to play politics really well. He knew to hijack the republican platform in his favour, for example. He played the media like puppets, giving him a ton of free air time.
There's very, very real issues with not just his campaign but the upcoming 4 years. The people he already appointed, or is considering appointing to his staff for example (including the famous climate change denier as head of the EPA; and people are also already mentioning Bannon here in the comments). But when the data is drowning in a ton of nonsense noise about assassinations, conspiracies and ad hominems, neither side even wants to hear the issues anymore. When you've spent a year building up a few grand canyons worth of divide between the two parties, no matter how loud you shout the other side is not going to hear you.
Edit: This quote deserves a highlight:
Remember that thing where Trump started out as a random joke, and then the media covered him way more than any other candidate because he was so outrageous, and gave him what was essentially free advertising, and then he became President-elect of the United States? Is the lesson you learned from this experience that you need 24-7 coverage of the Ku Klux Klan?
Edit 2: Sigh, the article's been flagged. There goes any hope of actually having a discussion about shit that matters.
> Sigh, the article's been flagged. There goes any hope of actually having a discussion about shit that matters
Users flagged it, and were correct to flag it.
I understand the desire to use HN to discuss "shit that matters", a.k.a. political and social controversies, but it isn't what HN is for. Were we all to let it be what HN is for, HN would become like all the other places we come here to get away from.
This has been distorted by the political season. We can't expect to be immune to macro trends. But that makes it even more important to remind ourselves what HN is and isn't. Is: a place to gratify intellectual curiosity. Isn't: a political or ideological battlefield.
Was it the problem calling wolf? Or was the problem calling wolf and then devouring all the hens as soon as you got in power?
People are just confused with of all the rhetoric against war while the games continue in the Middle East. The war against terror while "moderate rebels" with ties to Al-Qaeda are treated as allies. The raising inequality paired with the dogma of the free market while we rescue banks as soon as the free market breaks down. Where the Democratic party approved NAFTA while being the natural allies of labor. Where Bill Clinton passed the Crime Law but is remembered as an ally of minorities.
In this climate where one position and the opposite one are true at the same time it's not strange that somebody like Trump can arrive, start spewing bullshit and still be taken seriously as long as he calls out the establishment.
The problem is of course that Trump winning is actually GREAT NEWS for the majority of the writers of the dross this article rails against.
I mean sure Bezos might feel a bit silly, you buy a whole newspaper to help influence the proles and they still vote wrong! But he's not actually writing the articles. The people writing the articles now have a whole juicy 4 years to peddle outrage and the eyeballs that fund them will lap it up.
The problem is that the vast majority of people creating content are not selling that content. We do not have a market of ideas or a market of information we have a market of viewer eyeballs. And in that market peddling emotionally appealing hyperbolic lies is apparently great business.
I've never heard of this guy or this website before, but I just spent an hour getting slammed with more truth and reason than I've read in the last two years combined. Mind blown!
They could be altered with the help of custom theming but you can always uncheck "allow subreddits to show me custom themes" preference to see the true count.
The interesting part of this article for me is the estimates for the tiny numbers of actual participation in Stormfront/kkk etc. Says nothing either way of course about more broad but lower-intensity attitudes nor of T's choices of associates and advisors.
Otherwise he makes a good point about some over-hyping of the racist tropes, but doesn't ultimately support his argument IMO. Other comments here have discussed that clearly though.
We've asked you already not to do exactly this: complain about downvotes with an extra helping of inflammatory concoction. We've banned this account and detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12980119.
I didn't bother replying to your second reply again because you're completely refusing to even consider that you are missing the point. There's no better way to display that than go full godwin in the middle of a discussion about polarization. Well done.
You're being downvoted because, like I said, you are doing exactly what the article is calling out. And now you're doing more of that bullshit, calling people whose point you don't understand "white angry males".
Normally I'd just think of your nonsense as a waste of time, but in this case it's actually extremely interesting to have you teach us by example.
[+] [-] JamilD|9 years ago|reply
However, the people who he surrounds himself with, are. This article makes no mention of Steve Bannon, who suggested too many Asian CEOs is a threat to civic society [0], and ran a website that peddled anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. Come January 20th, he'll be the chief strategist for the nation's highest office.
Nor does it mention Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who has ties to white nationalist groups [1]. He's now on Trump's transition team.
I don't doubt Trump's intentions, but it's looking like the alt-right is using his campaign (and will use his administration) for their own ends.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bannon-flattered...
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/11/02/what%E2%80%99...
[+] [-] dasboth|9 years ago|reply
That was my biggest gripe with the article. Otherwise I thought it was refreshing to read such a well-presented argument, regardless of whether or not I agreed with his points.
Back to the issue: the kinds of people Trump seems to be surrounding himself with shows bad judgment, which is very concerning and should not be downplayed. We have many reasons to be wary of his presidency but maybe they're not the ones people shout loudest about.
[+] [-] nkurz|9 years ago|reply
Interestingly, an earlier version of the article did contain a defense of Bannon, concluding that the accusations that Bannon is anti-semitic suffer from the same issues as the accusations of Trump's racism. I can't find it online any more, but it included the sentence: I feel like a non-wolf-crying person might reserve “anti-Semitic” for the sort of people who don’t even have longstanding Orthodox Jewish friends/employees with degrees in Jewish Studies who are willing to write long defences of them.
The reference is to this recent article by Joel Pollak, who claims that 'Steve is a friend of the Jewish people and a defender of Israel': http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/11/14/stephen-k....
Separately, Alan Dershowitz also says that accusing Bannon of anti-Semitism "demeans the term": http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/16/alan-dershow...
I don't know if Alexander removed this section because he came across new information, or because he thought it was a distraction from the main theme of the article. Personally, I have no knowledge of Bannon other than what's been recently reported in the media. But without defending Bannon's other views, there does seem to be evidence that 'anti-semitic' may not be an entirely accurate accusation.
[+] [-] PuffinBlue|9 years ago|reply
This question is not meant to be facetious, I would like to hear from you what effect you hope to have by raising them and who you hope to influence.
I have seen many many people raise points like this over and over again and have come to the conclusion that it seems mostly to be tailored towards people who already think such point raised are 'bad' and so it's of limited effect on those who might support Bad Thing regardless.
But I may well be wrong.
I'm aiming to come across as non-combative here and am interested in hearing how you or others who raise point like this hope them to influence others.
Perhaps you don't intend for them to do so and are just sharing an opinion? I have seen lots of people share this sort of thing e.g 'He's not X but others near him are X so I imply you shouldn't support him'.
That might not be your intent, but if it is, can you expand on how you think this would be effective?
And again, this isn't meant to be singling you out, I'm interested in the conceptual argument of how we influence others.
[+] [-] jazzyk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|9 years ago|reply
Both New Yorkers and businessmen have been racist before, and race based discrimination has been a not-infrequent source of legal troubles for Trump.
And that's not even considering campaign rhetoric.
[+] [-] EvilTerran|9 years ago|reply
That, however, does not preclude wilfully pandering to & profiting from the racial prejudices of others - "acting racist" as compared to "being racist", if you will. And I believe he's far less innocent on that count.
For a good illustrative example, consider the historical incident where the DoJ sued him & his company for refusing to rent to black people[0]. I see no need to assume he did that out of any personal dislike of ethnic minorities - far more plausible, IMO, is that his motivation was the (arguably accurate, if distastefully cynical) notion that it was more profitable to discriminate: a combination of factors (eg, "white flight", and the generally-worse employment prospects for black people - ie, consequences of past institutional discrimination & of the prejudices of others) would have meant that renting to black people could be bad for the bottom line.
Or take his final campaign advert, with its ominous talk of a "global power structure" who "control the levers of power" over grained-up photographs of influential Jews[1] - again, I very much doubt Trump himself is personally anti-semitic; but I find it hard to argue with the interpretation (shared by the ADL, among others) that it was designed to pander to the anti-semitic sentiments that some parts of the electorate hold. And if reports from inside his campaign[2] are to be believed, Trump insisted on editorial oversight on every TV ad - so it's not like that could be passed off as, say, Bannon running that message without his knowledge.
That particular case does cause me to take exception to the article's somewhat histrionic passage about anti-Trump people crying "globalists? that means jews!": they're pointing out the anti-semitic euphemisms, not coining them - the author's shooting the messenger a bit there. That said, I do take his point that it could lead people who do earnestly blame "globalists" for their problems, with no prejudiced intent, into the arms of those who use the term in its anti-semitic sense.
Regardless, all-in-all, it's an interesting and thought-provoking essay - even if I don't agree with all of it.
[0] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/06/se...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/us/politics/donald-trump-p... (subheading "I'm Going to Win")
[+] [-] ilostmykeys|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcphilip|9 years ago|reply
1. >Why am I harping on this?
>I work in mental health. So far I have had two patients express Trump-related suicidal ideation. One of them ended up in the emergency room, although luckily both of them are now safe and well. I have heard secondhand of several more.
[+] [-] SamBam|9 years ago|reply
2. No mention of Bannon? This article was written yesterday, and we knew Trump had chosen Bannon to be his right-hand man long before then.
3. No mention that Trump believes that an American judge of Mexican heritage can't judge him? Of the birther claims? Or of playing to white fears with completely make-believe images of "inner cities" being war zones?
4. The jiu jitsu over saying that banning "All Muslims" from entering the country isn't really racism because "most Muslims are white(ish)" is nonsense.
5. And yes, it is special pleading. The author goes out of his way to explain things in a way that is unique to Trump:
> 15. Don’t we know that Trump supports racist violence because, when some of his supporters beat up a Latino man, he just said they were “passionate”?
> When Trump was asked for comment, he tweeted “Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country”.
> I have no idea how his mind works and am frankly boggled by all of this, but calling violent protesters “passionate” just seems to be a thing of his. I think this is actually a pretty important point. Trump is a weird person.
Oh. Ok. He doesn't support beating up people. He's just "weird."
----
Edit: Also the author seems to have confused two statements of "passion." Trump's tweet about "small groups of protesters" was made just the other day. Instead, after the beating up of the Latino man, he said
"I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate, they love this country, they want this country to be great again."
Note that not only is he calling those men "passionate," he is essentially justifying their actions by bringing up their "love of country," which is particularly telling in the case of men beating up an immigrant.
[+] [-] maxerickson|9 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/11/do...
The first one was dismissive, the second one was supportive. Why not discuss them both?
The other one that jumped out at me was the taco bowl. I'm pretty sure lots of racists like tacos, tacos are delicious. So liking tacos doesn't say a whole lot. I'd go so far as to say that ham-fisted pandering using a taco bowl says more than liking tacos.
[+] [-] tptacek|9 years ago|reply
"When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
Note how totally non-racist this statement is. I’m serious. It’s anti-illegal-immigrant. But in terms of race, it’s saying Latinos (like every race) include both good and bad people, and the bad people are the ones coming over here. It suggests a picture of Mexicans as including some of the best people – but those generally aren’t the ones who are coming illegally.
It's not just that Alexander chooses as the first words following Trump's most famous racist quote "note how totally non-racist this statement is", but also the degree to which his logic insults the reader's intelligence. Mexicans "include some of the best people" (note that Trump didn't say that --- he said that their best people don't come here), just not the ones who come here illegally (note that Trump didn't say that --- he's talking about all Mexican immigrants). Alexander's own paragraph isn't even coherent on this point!
[+] [-] NhanH|9 years ago|reply
Is it the notion of a judge being unprofessional to the point of biased an unacceptable thing to imply?
[+] [-] ant6n|9 years ago|reply
But another issue that this article completely ignores is the subtle sexism that permeated the Trump campaign. Catch phrases like 'Trump that Bitch'; or when Guiliani says
"Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails?"
Note this was distorted by people on the left to show that Guiliani is openly sexist by ending the quote after 'woman', and pretending it didn't continue. But as a full statement, this juxtaposition of man and woman, one glorified and the other dismissed, phrased as a rhetorical question, actually reads pretty sexist to me.
I also tend to think the alt-right movement much bigger than the 50K that the author claims. It's not very monolithic, there are many related off-shoots. For example, the associated /r/TheRedPill has 170K members, and that's just one of them.
[+] [-] PuffinBlue|9 years ago|reply
I'm sure there will be argument over the semantics and specifics but that's not important to the points I want to make and which is implied in this piece:
1) If you continually brand some group of people as some derogatory thing if all they want to do is talk about an issue, it's only a matter of time before they stop listening to you.
2) If your only response to dissent to your world view is to brand the dissenter some derogatory term and then turn inward to others of your own mind, it's only a matter of time before you lose influence outside your inner circle.
3) You can't hope to influence others behaviour by labelling them something you yourself would hate to be labelled. The label may have no meaningful effect on them, other than to reject your statement entirely, thus actually diminishing your effect on them.
The trouble with all these things is people cherry pick statements, occurrences, inferences and associations to match their own narrative. This includes the media, popular groups and individuals themselves, despite the double standards this might expose when their favoured candidate/group does the exact same thing (of has done it previously).
Only through actually communicating with others of differing viewpoints in somewhat of a reasoned fashion can any effective influence hope to be achieved.
Point 16 brings up especially good angle on this so skip to that if you don't read the rest.
The conclusion is one I support strongly too - stop fear-mongering, stop labelling dissenters racist, stop playing identity politics.
As a side note it's happening here in the UK over Brexit. Despite unemployment going down, retail sales up faster than any time in the last 15 years, the economy growing etc etc it's all framed in the context of 'yeah but everything is going to go to shit and you're all racists for not wanting free movement'.
Sure, be suspicious/cautions/prepared of/for the future but don't actively sabotage it before it's happened, or all you've done is create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
[+] [-] dasboth|9 years ago|reply
And I wish more people wrote pieces like this one that actually discuss the political/economic arguments without descending into name-calling. It was too hard to find well-written pieces on Brexit before the vote (perhaps harder on the Leave side but I'm not sure) and this is still the case.
[+] [-] scrollaway|9 years ago|reply
I don't live in the US but this election has made me extremely sad. The amount of false information on both sides, causing both sides to become even more entrenched into their beliefs and hostile to each other.
And like I said in a previous post: at the end of the day, blue states voted blue, red states voted red and swing states were won/lost on very, very few votes. If you removed TV and media from the equation (that is, if you removed the ridiculous 1+ year long campaign season in the US), this election would look as if it were just any old regular election.
People like to say Trump is an outsider but this isn't his first presidential bid and he seems to have been preparing for this for a long time. And for an outsider, he knows how to play politics really well. He knew to hijack the republican platform in his favour, for example. He played the media like puppets, giving him a ton of free air time.
There's very, very real issues with not just his campaign but the upcoming 4 years. The people he already appointed, or is considering appointing to his staff for example (including the famous climate change denier as head of the EPA; and people are also already mentioning Bannon here in the comments). But when the data is drowning in a ton of nonsense noise about assassinations, conspiracies and ad hominems, neither side even wants to hear the issues anymore. When you've spent a year building up a few grand canyons worth of divide between the two parties, no matter how loud you shout the other side is not going to hear you.
Edit: This quote deserves a highlight:
Remember that thing where Trump started out as a random joke, and then the media covered him way more than any other candidate because he was so outrageous, and gave him what was essentially free advertising, and then he became President-elect of the United States? Is the lesson you learned from this experience that you need 24-7 coverage of the Ku Klux Klan?
Edit 2: Sigh, the article's been flagged. There goes any hope of actually having a discussion about shit that matters.
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
Users flagged it, and were correct to flag it.
I understand the desire to use HN to discuss "shit that matters", a.k.a. political and social controversies, but it isn't what HN is for. Were we all to let it be what HN is for, HN would become like all the other places we come here to get away from.
This has been distorted by the political season. We can't expect to be immune to macro trends. But that makes it even more important to remind ourselves what HN is and isn't. Is: a place to gratify intellectual curiosity. Isn't: a political or ideological battlefield.
[+] [-] carapat_virulat|9 years ago|reply
People are just confused with of all the rhetoric against war while the games continue in the Middle East. The war against terror while "moderate rebels" with ties to Al-Qaeda are treated as allies. The raising inequality paired with the dogma of the free market while we rescue banks as soon as the free market breaks down. Where the Democratic party approved NAFTA while being the natural allies of labor. Where Bill Clinton passed the Crime Law but is remembered as an ally of minorities.
In this climate where one position and the opposite one are true at the same time it's not strange that somebody like Trump can arrive, start spewing bullshit and still be taken seriously as long as he calls out the establishment.
[+] [-] Super_Jambo|9 years ago|reply
I mean sure Bezos might feel a bit silly, you buy a whole newspaper to help influence the proles and they still vote wrong! But he's not actually writing the articles. The people writing the articles now have a whole juicy 4 years to peddle outrage and the eyeballs that fund them will lap it up.
The problem is that the vast majority of people creating content are not selling that content. We do not have a market of ideas or a market of information we have a market of viewer eyeballs. And in that market peddling emotionally appealing hyperbolic lies is apparently great business.
[+] [-] motardo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garysieling|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r721|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gumby|9 years ago|reply
Otherwise he makes a good point about some over-hyping of the racist tropes, but doesn't ultimately support his argument IMO. Other comments here have discussed that clearly though.
[+] [-] guelo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nogbit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calimac|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ilostmykeys|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sctb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrollaway|9 years ago|reply
You're being downvoted because, like I said, you are doing exactly what the article is calling out. And now you're doing more of that bullshit, calling people whose point you don't understand "white angry males".
Normally I'd just think of your nonsense as a waste of time, but in this case it's actually extremely interesting to have you teach us by example.