"You are still crying wolf"

[mjr]

This is quite the interesting article from a non-Trump supporter about Trump.

It's quite lengthy, but I think it makes some good points. The author doesn't think highly of Trump -- at all. He also comments that "Trump is just randomly and bizarrely terrible."

But he does use a lot of sources and numbers to back up what he's saying.

Article: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16...l-crying-wolf/

[Gravekeeper]

This is just a tiny representative sample, but the rest is very similar. Trump has gone from campaign stop to campaign stop talking about how much he likes and respects minorities and wants to fight for them.

Author seems to have forgotten how Trump announced his candidacy and the biggest cornerstones of his talking points and plan. You know, the Muslim thing and that entire Wall thing. Oh, and you know, picking Mike Pence. One of the most virulently anti-LGBT politicians in the country.

Crying wolf is fine if the wolf really is outside fucking your mailbox and muttering its daughters name.

[kathykit]

This is quite the interesting article from a non-Trump supporter about Trump.

It's quite lengthy, but I think it makes some good points. The author doesn't think highly of Trump -- He also comments that "Trump is just randomly and bizarrely terrible."

That's a interesting article. Really admire the author try to find many statistics to support his point.
He is right, many Asian support Trump. And everyone have right to choice. He mention many"STOP" at the end. Interesting!

[Hyena Dandy]

Author seems to have forgotten how Trump announced his candidacy and the biggest cornerstones of his talking points and plan. You know, the Muslim thing and that entire Wall thing. Oh, and you know, picking Mike Pence. One of the most virulently anti-LGBT politicians in the country.

Crying wolf is fine if the wolf really is outside fucking your mailbox and muttering its daughters name.

And you're missing the point of the article. Did you read the one that it's a response to? Talking about how calling all these previous candidates "Racist" took away the power from when Donald Trump ran with genuinely horrible policies?

The concern about crying wolf is not "Is he a bad candidate?" It's "What if someone worse comes along?" It's in response to the rhetorical power lost from constantly calling every Republican politician who comes along a fascist, until now we get someone who has some very heavy authoritarian-nationalist and racist tendencies, THEN what do we call him?

Seriously, if an "Open white supremacist" is a man who takes an extra day before renouncing the endorsement of a KKK leader, then what the fuck are we going to call the ACTUAL KKK LEADER?

Mitt Romney was "Racist," so Donald Trump, who actually DOES seem to be racist, is "Openly racist." Then what? If you ask Donald Trump if he thinks that black people are genetically inferior, you'll probably get "No." At the very most ridiculously terrible, you'd get equivocation.

Then what do we do when someone says yes?

When the guy who says he understands the grievances of the Black Lives Matter movement and respects that, but still thinks an increase in policing is necessary, is an "Open racist" what would we call a candidate who advocated that black people are inherently mentally inferior, and that their own inborn tendency toward crime made police violence against them justified? Do we call them genocidal?

Okay, sure. And then if someone advocates genocide?

Hitler didn't put out goofy propaganda of himself eating a bagel and talking about how much he loved the Jews.

The article hardly says that people are crying wolf because Donald Trump is a fine president and his policies will work out just great. Or that there's no reason to be concerned about his tenure in office. The danger of crying wolf is that we overuse our rhetorical power for when we will actually need it.

My boyfriend's from Indiana. I know goddamn well that Mike Pence is a shitty leader. I don't like that he's now a heartbeat away from the highest office in the land. That was one of my biggest reasons to vote against Trump.

We wasted the term "Racist" on a Massachusetts moderate. So who would believe us when we used the term on a racist? And if we use "OPEN racist" on Trump, that'll just give more cover on the guy who doesn't say "Illegal Mexican immigrants are, largely, terrible people," but actually says "All Latinos are criminals."

[Greenday]

We wasted the term "Racist" on a Massachusetts moderate.

I can't remember any moderates running in recent history.

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

The concern about crying wolf is not "Is he a bad candidate?" It's "What if someone worse comes along?" It's in response to the rhetorical power lost from constantly calling every Republican politician who comes along a fascist, until now we get someone who has some very heavy authoritarian-nationalist and racist tendencies, THEN what do we call him?

And this is a concern that has been voiced by many liberals before. Systemic racism/misogyny is not individual racism/misogyny. And if you are going to call individuals racist or misogynist for ticky-tack reasons, you run into the problem of defaulting everyone to "well, everyone's racist so whatever." When I was a kid, calling someone a racist or a misogynist was actually a big fucking deal because it meant you had stepped over a very obvious line.

Now, I'd say its close to being a non-deal because certain people/groups are so free and easy with it because their world view is entirely tribal to the point they don't recognize much plurality. So there's no real societal pressure from those words, even though it makes us all uneasy.

Jon Stewart actually has my favorite current hot-take:

"The liberal community hates this idea of creating people as a monolith. 'Don't look at Muslims as a monolith. They are individuals, and it would be ignorance.' But everyone who voted for Trump is a monolith, is a racist? That hypocrisy is also real in our country. This is the fight that we wage against ourselves and each other. America is not natural. Natural is tribal. We're fighting against thousands of years of human behavior and history to create something. That is what exceptional about America. This ain't easy. It's an incredible thing."

[Anthony K. S.]

The danger of crying wolf is that we overuse our rhetorical power for when we will actually need it.

I think that the author makes a legitimate point. However, I also think that the situation is not nearly as clear-cut as he's making it out to be.

The danger in calling people racist for trivial things is not that we won't be able to use the charge against somebody who actually is openly racist. It's that it will prevent us from making that case against somebody who is racist but does a better job of covering it up.

what the fuck are we going to call the ACTUAL KKK LEADER?

We call him an actual KKK leader.

People seldom call David Duke "racist" and just leave it at that. If they do, it's because Duke's name has become so well-known that most people don't need to be told who he is.

Rather, Duke is identified as "a white supremacist and former leader of the Ku Klux Klan," a description that does a far better job of conveying to the audience what Duke is than generically calling him a racist.

If a politician openly says that black people are inferior to white people or that all Latinos are criminals, then the public wouldn't need to be told that he's a racist. (If they do, then something is seriously wrong.)

Erick Erickson has been called "a huge sexist." But no matter how much the word "sexist" might have lost its meaning because it's been overused, we can always just call Erickson "that guy who said that, by nature, men are supposed to dominate women," or "the nutcase who told Megyn Kelly that women are scientifically inferior to men."

Calling opponents of same-sex marriage "homophobic" hasn't stopped us from condemning Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. That's because they are so openly bigoted that all we need to do is show the pictures of their demonstrations and repeat the words they've actually said to make the point.

So, yes, we call him "that guy who said that black people are inferior to white people" or play the clip of him saying that all Latinos are criminals.

Hitler didn't put out goofy propaganda of himself eating a bagel and talking about how much he loved the Jews.

He also didn't openly tell the German people that he intended to exterminate the entire Jewish population. Because even most anti-Semites would have been horrified by that. Hitler needed to move in small steps, like creating a national registry for Jewish people, let the public get used to that, and then move on to the next one.


(Now, at this point, somebody is bound to come in and say, "Is that what liberals are doing with same-sex marriage? Let people get used to gay couples getting married, and then move on to polygamy, then incest, pedophilia, bestiality ... ?" Which, I'm willing to bet, was also an argument used against interracial marriage.

You know what? Fine, if somebody really believes that, let them make their case. I would hope that most people could be trusted to understand the inherent difference between allowing two consenting adults who love each other to have their union recognized by the state, and allowing an adult to marry a child who isn't old enough to understand what's going on. Or the difference between accepting a gay couple getting married and marking an entire segment of the population as suspect and needing to be monitored and viewed with suspicion.)


Anyway, back on topic ...

It is a very fine line that we walk here.

We don't want to call people "racist" frivolously, because that would rob us of our ability to make the charge stick when we really need to.

But we also don't want to wait until somebody actually goes around advocating a return to the days of slavery or segregation because, by then, it'll be too late.

When society reaches the point where a politician who does that would actually be taken seriously by the voters, then we will have already passed the point where warning the people is going to matter.

What we need to do is watch for the warning signs that a genuinely racist politician is seeking power, and call them out. Because, as Seth Meyers put it :

"Even racists know that you have to pretend not to be racist in public."

The difficulty is this :

If we call somebody out for showing signs of being racist, and we fail to make the charge stick, or it turns out we're wrong and the person isn't racist after all, it will make it harder the next time, when we see somebody who we are more certain is racist but also keeps it hidden enough for the public not to realize it's true ...

... but if we avoid making the charge until we're sure that somebody is racist and we have enough evidence to make the charge stick, then we run the risk of letting a genuinely racist politician obtain the power that we don't want him to have.

[s_stabeler]

I actually have an answer to the slippery slope argument about gay marriage: in all of those cases, if there is consent- true, informed consent- then I don't necessarily care. With incest, provided something can be done about the risk of genetic mutations, the only other issue si surrounding the possibility of abuse of a position of power ( a parent trying to force their kids to have sex with them, or an older sibling trying to make their younger siblings have sex with them) which is already covered by other laws For polygamy, if everyone involved is aware of the polygamous relationship, I don't care, and don't think it should be criminal regardless. Grounds for divorce if the polygamous relationship is concealed from one member of it, yes, but not actually criminal. ( I would also modify divorce laws to make it clear that in a divorce involving a polygamous relationship, one member of the marriage can divorce from the marriage without ending the marriage(s) between the remaining members) As for beastality, the issue si more consent than anything. If you can establish that an animal is giving informed consent- which is currently impossible- then I again don't actually care. (for instance, Superman, since he is not homo sapiens sapiens, is technically an animal. When he has sex with Lois Lane, it's not beastality, since he clearly understands what sex is, and is freely consenting to have sex.)

As for pedophilia, it's similar to beastality- informed consent is impossible, so emphgasising that you must get freely-given, informed, consent covers it. ( and to be honest, making it be more about if the kid is truly informed when consenting would help the issue of "relationship between two kids and forgot to wait until both were of the age of consent" issue that occasionally comes up with statutory rape cases.)

[Gravekeeper]

And you're missing the point of the article.

I am responding to an assertion of the article where the author outlines all the apparent "good" messages Trump has tried to relay to minorities and LGBT when discussing the term "openly racist". When he neglects to get into the other side of Trump's message and how Trump typically issues said "good" messages reflexively after he does something shitty to the group in question.

His entire campaign was essentially one long, horribly played game of "I can't be racist, I have a black friend" with every group outside of white people.

The concern about crying wolf is not "Is he a bad candidate?" It's "What if someone worse comes along?" It's in response to the rhetorical power lost from constantly calling every Republican politician who comes along a fascist, until now we get someone who has some very heavy authoritarian-nationalist and racist tendencies, THEN what do we call him?

There is certainly a problem with hyperbole in the media. On all sides, across all spectrums. ( How many times has the GOP essentially called Obama a dictator for example ). It does take away some power from the worlds. But this *is* the GOP at large. Its been sliding ever further down this path for years on end. Hyperbole is a problem. But at the same time if you had asked everyone a few years back if the GOP could possibly put forward anyone even *worse* than their current crop of members you would have been met with disbelief.

The GOP lives and breaths the politics of fear and hyperbole. I see this less as a problem of what to call them and more of a problem of them turning politics into a game of chicken. Where every time you call them something they call your bet and raise you something even worse.

The idea that we should "save" our worst words in case they do something even worse the next time around is a sincerely sad commentary on the state of affairs as is. Nevermind an honestly kind of disturbing thought onto itself.

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

The idea that we should "save" our worst words in case they do something even worse the next time around is a sincerely sad commentary on the state of affairs as is. Nevermind an honestly kind of disturbing thought onto itself.

Not really. It's interpersonal relationships 101. Most people do not tell their friends every time they get irked by something they've done. Why? Not everything needs redress and not everything rises to the level of needing to be talked about.

Politics is just interpersonal relationships on a massive scale. A lot of the same things still apply. If I call your group names half the time, there's a point I can expect you to stop caring or return in kind.

It's the difference between a child's understanding of human interactions and an adult really. Children need concrete logic because their brains deal in hard facts. Adults have to reconcile lots of contraditory info and actually has to filter based on utility in making decisions.

X is racist because he believes Y where Y is something with obvious racial component doesn't require a filter. It hits a very specific type of person and it makes sense. It doesn't generate false positives.

A is racist because he believes B where B has a cross-sectional systemic component but is otherwise neutral does. It picks up too many false positives and creates the impression that too many are being called names. It pisses people off over a fuzzily subjective interpretation. It also creates the impression there is no difference between X and A which doubly pisses off A specifically and friends of A.

A would probably be better called ignorant of the topic. Yea, it will piss them off but you can fix what you don't know and there isn't that much of a value judgement. Look at Sessions - you don't fix the charge of racist. He was called it decades ago.

[Hyena Dandy]

I am responding to an assertion of the article where the author outlines all the apparent "good" messages Trump has tried to relay to minorities and LGBT when discussing the term "openly racist". When he neglects to get into the other side of Trump's message and how Trump typically issues said "good" messages reflexively after he does something shitty to the group in question.

His entire campaign was essentially one long, horribly played game of "I can't be racist, I have a black friend" with every group outside of white people.

That is the difference between "Racist" and "OPENLY racist." If you say "I can't be racist, I respect black/LGBT people" then you aren't OPEN about it.

... but if we avoid making the charge until we're sure that somebody is racist and we have enough evidence to make the charge stick, then we run the risk of letting a genuinely racist politician obtain the power that we don't want him to have.

We kept making the charge too many times and too freely, and now that there is someone it could stick to, we can't make it anymore. That's the crying wolf problem. And now we have to come up with a new one, and use a phrase which means "He admits to being racist," when, as both you and Gravekeeper pointed out, he didn't ADMIT to it.

We lose our credibility, and it makes opposition ineffective.

The danger in calling people racist for trivial things is not that we won't be able to use the charge against somebody who actually is openly racist. It's that it will prevent us from making that case against somebody who is racist but does a better job of covering it up.

At that point we might as well call Clinton an open white supremacist and say that she's just doing a REALLY REALLY good job covering it up, 'cause there's no evidence of it. It's better to engage on what we can prove than what we can't, because that is the only way we can ensure we will be taken seriously when we actually have to mobilize to change something.

When EVERYTHING is declared racist, then we can lead to only two conclusions. Either "These people cannot be trusted on what is or is not racist," or "Racist isn't that bad of a thing to be."

Do we want to stop people like Trump from getting into office, or don't we?

We create a reputation for constantly proclaiming everything in the strictest, most aggressive and insane terms, and as a result, we just get ignored. There's no CREDIBILITY. When every Republican politician who comes along is an unprecedented threat to the nation, then we get one like Trump who actually DOES have aspects of being a serious problem, we have no credibility. We get people like Trump elected because we are an ineffective, panicky opposition.

Meanwhile, if instead of that, we'd said "This policy has serious issues and places undue burden on people of color," then when we come around to someone who seems like he genuinely doesn't respect people of color, and is just trying to hide that, we have to claim he admitted it. Which makes us come off as the sort of people whose commentary can't be trusted.

[Canarr]

As for pedophilia, it's similar to beastality- informed consent is impossible, so emphgasising that you must get freely-given, informed, consent covers it. ( and to be honest, making it be more about if the kid is truly informed when consenting would help the issue of "relationship between two kids and forgot to wait until both were of the age of consent" issue that occasionally comes up with statutory rape cases.)

Sad little anecdote: when the Green party formed in Germany in the '80s, they tried to bolster their ranks by bringing in a lot of small interest groups - gays and lesbians, who had a lot more problems back then, for instance - and doing that, they also got some... unsavoury types. Like people who wanted to legalize sex with children. Not teenagers, children.

Apparently, for a short time, the Green party didn't see much difference between adults wanting a same-sex partner, and adults wanting to have sex with children. Fortunately, they came to their senses fairly soon, and got rid of those elements; but they never quite lost the stink of that.

[Gravekeeper]

That is the difference between "Racist" and "OPENLY racist." If you say "I can't be racist, I respect black/LGBT people" then you aren't OPEN about it.

You are arguing semantics over a turn of phrase and ignoring the point that led into said phrase. You know, the-

"Trump's message and how Trump typically issues said "good" messages reflexively after he does something shitty to the group in question."

-part.

And if you seriously need help finding examples of Trump being openly racist I'm not exactly sure what to tell you. Or where you've been the last several months. >.>

We kept making the charge too many times and too freely, and now that there is someone it could stick to, we can't make it anymore. That's the crying wolf problem.

And I maintain that Trump is such an flagrant, screeching example of every one of these terms stuck to him that "crying wolf" is not a valid defense as to why people voted for him. You could perhaps make this argument about, say, Romney ( though I don't remember him being bandied around in the media as a racist asshole 24/7 ), but Trump?

We're not talking about someone who has made any effort whatsoever to hide his terrible qualities. Whether he is a racist, sexist, asshole, etc are all matters of fact. We're not looking at a GOP dog whistler here that is maintaining any sort of plausible deniability. We're looking at an asshole that does or says something horrible then tries to make up for it by tweeting out a picture of him eating a taco bowl.

I don't think it was much question as to whether or not Trump is or is not an asshole, sexist, racist, whatever and what he was called a result. So much as what people told themselves to justify why that was not a problem in the first place. See evangelicals bending backwards over their own morality to explain why they were voting for a serial adulterer.

And this is where I have a problem with this entire affair ( all of it, not this topic specifically ). People who justified the absolutely unconscionable list of flaws Trump has to vote for him. They should not be allowed to shift the responsibility of their vote onto anyone else for "making" them vote that way. The "Left" did not make them vote for Trump. What people called Trump did not make them vote for Trump.

Yes, the media all around shares some responsibility for the state of discourse and failing America at large to chase ratings over journalism. But people likewise share some responsibility for holing themselves up in their own echo chambers and not having the intellectual curiosity or common sense to venture beyond it.

Its your right to vote like a fucking moron, but don't try to say anyone else made you do it. And I don't want to hear you ( the figurative you ) being shocked or surprised when everything everyone told you would happen ends up happening.

[wolfie]

So, yes, we call him "that guy who said that black people are inferior to white people" or play the clip of him saying that all Latinos are criminals.

I'm sure that his opponents would make heavy use of that clip in Louisiana, and in areas with a sizeable Italian population. Technically, "Latino" refers to people whose family came from countries with a Latin-based language (would include French and Italian) - so why do people use the term exclusively to refer to Hispanics?

With incest, provided something can be done about the risk of genetic mutations, the only other issue si surrounding the possibility of abuse of a position of power

Also, would the law make distinctions between a conventional brother/sister pairing, a "Peter and Cindy Brady" pairing (genetically unrelated, but raised as brother and sister), and a "Luke and Leia" pairing (brother and sister separated as infants, then meeting again as adults)?

[Lachrymose]

I'm sure that his opponents would make heavy use of that clip in Louisiana, and in areas with a sizeable Italian population. Technically, "Latino" refers to people whose family came from countries with a Latin-based language (would include French and Italian) - so why do people use the term exclusively to refer to Hispanics?

Just a correction here. Latino refers to someone with roots in Latin America, i.e. Central America and most of South America.