I'm not sure which way you're going with that comment. Ravelry seems to be saying "we are polite company, keep your politics off our knitting site, thx". If anything, it's de-politicisation.
Did I miss something? The linked article looks to me to say that Pro-Trump views are not allowed to be expressed. Not that politics has no place in their community.
If anything this is escalating the problem by silencing the opposition and further entrenching both sides.
Their argument is "We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy."
So by "both sides" it seems like you mean the one side in favor of white supremacy, and the other side not in favor of white supremacy?
Why should a knitting site allow support for open white supremacy?
That's a bit of a mental leap. I'm no fan of the guy at all but saying that support for Trump == support for white supremacy simply isn't true. If their issue is with white supremacy why not ban that specifically?
They apparently have banned open discussion of white supremacy, and listed support for the Trump administration as a specific example. I'm sure they'll come up with more, if needed.
I disagree with your "simply isn't true." At best, it's "complicatedly isn't true." But I think it's really true. He's a white supremacist, surrounded by white supremacists, product of a country and culture based on white supremacy.
Rather than write up a description, I'll vouch for:
2) https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/trump-e... from early 2019 describes more connections, including "his attempts to expel undocumented immigrants who pose no threat to public safety, and their American family members; his elevation of an ostentatious partisan to the Supreme Court; his implementation of a policy of child abuse as a deterrent to illegal immigration; his abandonment of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria; his Justice Department’s green-lighting of police abuses; his attempts to weaken the political power of minorities targeted by his policies; and other acts of state violence and disapproval against religious and ethnic minorities too numerous to name. ... all of them follow the underlying logic ... that extremism in pursuit of white power is no vice, and defending the rights of those who threaten that power is no virtue." (Similar points made at https://newrepublic.com/article/144390/trumps-white-supremac... )
Here's a question - what would Trump and the Trump administration need to do for you to think it supports white supremacy?
Why do we have children in concentration camps, repeating the tragedies of the Japanese concentration camps of the 1940s and the Native American concentration camps?
That's not a mental leap. Thats just how far things have moved politically.
White surpremacy is seen as 'extreme' and Trump is seen as 'center'. Truth it, in the US white surpremacy is not a fringe perspective. That's just the reality.
The polarisation is because the political divide isn't about tax rates or nuanced trade-off between common good and personal liberty. The political divide is about human rights and rule of law. It's the type of divide that is not resolved by voting, but by civil war or threat of such. The end result is not an election but a constitution
If your view is that the 60+ million Americans that voted for Trump are, in fact, really voting for white supremacy then we aren't even living in the same reality and any further discussion is completely pointless.
It really hurts any credibility someone may have granted you in a conversation when you ascribe to one side of a discussion a world view that is condemned by the vast majority of that side.
Well, yes, I am saying that the millions of Americans who thought that Obama was a Kenyan-born secret Muslim (something our current president strongly supported), who support the artificial "Lost Cause" interpretation of the Civil War ("you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides"), etc. support white supremacy.
I mean, there's still a lot of people alive today who remember - and supported - the social policies of the Jim Crow era.
Funny about all the support for cheaply constructed statues in support of the traitors of the Civil War, justified by 'preserving our heritage', and yet "People keep shooting sign marking where Emmett Till died ... people in the community have widely interpreted the act as evidence of persistent racism and avoidance of Till's brutal killing and its legacy" - https://www.al.com/news/2018/08/people_keep_shooting_sign_ma... .
When they say "Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy" as if it were an undisputed fact, and without any argument at all, it really shows how they're incapable of considering an alternative worldview. To an ideologically enslaved mind it literally cannot be denied.
"Undisputed" is a needlessly strong statement, don't you think?
I mean, do you agree that the Earth is not flat, and not younger than 20,000 years old? Yet there are many Flat-Earthers and Young Earth Creationists who dispute those facts.
So, if I said "minimum surface distances between different cities on the Earth can be approximated using spherical trigonometry", would you then complain that I was stating that like an undisputed fact, and therefore incapable of considering an alternative worldview for the shape of the Earth?
In which case, I am indeed ideologically enslaved to a non-flat model of the Earth.
Aren't you?
And, why do you say they don't make any arguments? They wrote:
> Much of this policy was first written by a roleplaying game site, not unlike Ravelry but for RPGs, named RPG.net. We thank them for their thoughtful work. For citations/references, see this post on RPG.net: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/new-ban-do-not-post-...
That in turn lists these "Policy Citations" arguments:
> 8. When confronted with the fact that his rhetoric may be encouraging domestic terrorism, he has indicated he should maybe encourage it more, and has implied the press has it coming. [ https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tone-down-bomb-threats... ]
I have no problem with stating undisputed facts. The point is the claim about Trump is portrayed as undisputed, when it clearly is disputed. So if someone said "It is undeniable that the Earth is flat and anyone who supports the idea of spherical Earth is evil" then yes I'd say that person is stuck in a mindset and unwilling to consider alternatives.
Those arguments you copied are for different claims and were made by a different person.
They are not saying it's undisputed. That's your interpretation.
I claim "It is undeniable that the Earth is not flat and anyone who supports the idea of spherical Earth is ignorant of the facts."
Am I stuck in a mindset and unwilling to consider alternatives?
The arguments I copied were those used by the authors of the new policy to justify their claims. That they were made by a different person is not relevant. I can point to Eratosthenes to defend my anti-flat-Earth stance, without having to write out his arguments myself.
This. The radical progressive's worldview is that our society is itself a white supremacist society - this is taken as axiomatic and a matter of definition, not as something that could be meaningfully argued about, or even be said to depend on anything concrete about the real world! Thus, by definition, any support for existing social structures (including support for President Trump!) can be rightly defined as "support for white supremacy". It's a way of thinking that's lifted straight off of, e.g. religious fundamentalism and, perhaps most significantly, the nihilist politics of the late 19th and early 20th century that ultimately led to fascism, naziism, soviet communism etc. etc.
> The general assembly shall, at its first session under the amended constitution, pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free persons of color from immigrating to and settling in this state;and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this state for the purpose of setting them free.
That sounds pretty white-supremacy, yes?
If so, when did the US stop being a white supremacist society, and how?
> ...without being rightly defined as supporting white supremacy.
I did say "can be", not "is always defined as such, in a logically-consistent way"! One point that should be quite obvious is that one can always say "that doesn't go far enough!" in a totally unfalsifiable way. (And yes, people have made such arguments, seemingly in all seriousness, even about such things as women's suffrage or civil-rights legislation!) It's a mistake to think that this sort of mindset is restricted by any kind of logic or rationality.
> How do you distinguish between "taken as axiomatic" and "is the case"? ... If so, when did the US stop being a white supremacist society, and how?
Again, the point is that the radical-progressive mindset is not interested in such questions. They are simply not seen as something that's inherently legitimate as a subject of inquiry. You are naïvely assuming that the appeal to notions such as "white supremacy" is intended to be meaningful - to say something, anything about the real world - when in fact it might as well be something that's said purely "for the lulz", for the sheer amusement of making one's political opponents uncomfortable. It's less about "debate" of any sort than it is about sheer intimidation and willful confusion.
Our society is not homogenous enough to make a statement like "white supremacist society" substantial. However, there are three closely-related truths which are pretty obvious about our society:
* Our society is, itself, a fascist, classist, militaristic society.
* Pockets of people and parochial cultures in some specific regions are white supremacists.
This isn't definitional or axiomatic, but if you don't perceive these things as true in your day-to-day experience of our country, then you're not likely to feel that they're true. And that's fine! We don't have to agree. But it's useful to point out how and where we don't agree.
It's not that I don't perceive many things that might be described with some truth-of-the-matter as "fascist, classist, militaristic". What I might object to is the use of such terms as "fascist", "classist", "militaristic" as thought-terminating cliches deprived of any real content, which is astoundingly common. And the meme of "the white-supremacist society" is not significantly different in any real sense - though it does seem more likely to prompt attitudes such as Ravelry's, as reported in the OP.
Rather than switch to a meta-conversation about "memes", could you address the more concrete questions I asked earlier? That is, I wanted to know if you think that "white supremacy and "supporting white supremacy" were meaningful terms at all.
Before doing that, I'll note that you were the first to use the term 'society' in this thread. My previous statements were along the lines of 'support for open white supremacy'. I think "society" is a distraction because there's always the "not all" objection - not all white people in Virgiania in 1850s were in favor of slavery, even though it was a slave society.
So when I mean "society", I mean "the main cultural views as reinforced by the government and others with political, economic, and physical power".
Going back to my earlier questions, which I'll augment:
1) can the 1970s South Africa be described as a white supremacist society? I think it can. For obvious reasons.
2) can the 1850s US be described as a white supremacist society? I think it can, for obvious reasons.
3) can the 1950s US be described as a white supremacist society? I think it can. Jim Crow laws. Sundowner towns, Redlining, Mississippi Burning.
4) can the current US be described as a white supremacist society? I have come to the conclusion that viewing the dominate power structures in the US as being strongly influenced by white supremacy is a valid, though incomplete one.
If you reject that 'white-supremacist society' is a useful term, then perhaps you shouldn't have introduced it?
> If your view is that the 60+ million Americans that voted for Trump are, in fact, really voting for white supremacy then we aren't even living in the same reality and any further discussion is completely pointless.
Then don't reply, and jog on. You can easily ignore the concentration camps for brown people on your southern border too, the USA is big and the the border is likely far away from you.
I don't blame a knitting website for not wanting to have this discussion. People of all kinds of views can still discuss _kitting_ there.
The way the world works now, with media splits and filter bubbles, your statement is actually fairly accurate: "we aren't even living in the same reality and any further discussion is completely pointless."
Trump's "white supremacist" policies: Move US Embassy to Jerusalem, acknowledge Israeli control over the Golan Heights, sign an aid package to give Israel $38B, inch towards war with Iran.
That doesn't sound like a white supremacist/neo-nazi.
"Neo-nazi" is irrelevant. There's no reason to include it. The US history of white supremacy is far older than Nazism or even fascism.
I feel that you're bringing up international politics in a discussion about US domestic politics is mostly meant to derail the conversation.
You realize that more factors are involved than just white supremacy, right?
BTW, the $38B 10-year military-assistance Memorandum of Understanding was signed on September 14, 2016 during the Obama administration, and "partly a response to the nuclear deal that the United States and other world powers finalized with Iran". https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/09/un... .
Its not irrelevant, because the terms white supremacist and neo-nazi have merged.
Meanwhile Netanyahu campaigns with Trump, names a town in the Golan after Trump... which violates the key characteristic of white supremacy: namely not liking Jews; ergo he is not a white supremacist
Nonsense. White supremacy is the broader term. It's meaningful to characterize the (early) American Federation of Labor policies as being rooted in white supremacy. It's not meaningful to characterize them as neo-Nazis.
Several 19th century state constitutions prohibited black people from moving to them. This should be correctly understood as white supremacy. They did not prevent Jews from moving to them.
Hence those terms are distinct and have not merged for any serious discussion of the topic.
Again, foreign policy != domestic policy. Black slavers and free abolitionists opposed to each others' domestic policies, but some worked together for the foreign policy of having blacks return to Africa, in the American Colonization Society's colonization of Liberia.
Or you can see how a Christian Zionist like Pat Robertson can be both anti-Semitic and support the Jewish state.
Last I heard, "There is no budgeting, no planning, no location for a settlement, and there is no binding decision to implement the project" for that settlement, says Zvi Hauser at https://www.timesofisrael.com/no-plans-no-budget-trump-heigh... , who describes it as a publicity stunt.
US domestic policy in the 1950s was explicitly based on white supremacy. Jim Crow laws were actively enforced. Yet the US supported the creation of the State of Israel.
"Golda Meir describes Nixon in her autobiography as the best friend Israel ever had in the presidency and does so in life and death terms." says http://www.jewishmag.com/167mag/kissinger-nixon-war-watergat... which goes on to say "But… Nixon, like many anti-Semites, had a deep admiration for Israel and Israelis".
Nixon's "Southern strategy", infamously, was designed to appeal to racism against African Americans.
It's fine to disagree with President Trump. It's fine to disagree with Democrats, too. Having an opinion is your right.
But to slander and lie, and try to influence people in this way is just wrong.
Let's be honest. President Trump has brought record low unemployment, rising wages, and justice reform to African Americans. His support among American Blacks has risen, not fallen. He is doing some good.
Yet there are people like this. They weaponize racism, ignoring it within any party but the one they demonize. They turn racism from something useless into something they can use. This is what is truly 'deplorable'.
Seeing the word concentration tramp unironically being used in a current world is obscene. Where did that even come from? That cropped fake photo on twitter?
> "Concentration camps are considered by experts as 'the mass detention of civilians without trial.'
Even without photos, we know there is mass detention of civilians without trial.
Do you deny that?
What term do you want to use? From the same link:
> We don't say 'prisons' because prisons are a part of the formal legal system," Lester Andrist, a sociologist who has studied indefinite detention, tweeted.
Or would you prefer "internment camp", like we used for Japanese Americans? From the same link:
> "I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again," the Takei tweeted. The Takei family was interned in Arkansas and California in the 1940s.
Or perhaps you want to reserve 'concentration camp' only for the Nazi death camps? From the same link:
> Federico Finchelstein, a historian at the New York-based New School, agreed that the progressive congresswoman is right to call the ICE facilities concentration camps.
> "As [a] historian of fascism & [the] Holocaust, I would also call these centers concentration camps," Finchelstein tweeted. "As a Jewish person who lost family in [the] Holocaust, I regret that some Republicans use memory of the Holocaust to defend racist policies of Trumpism."
> A 1998 Ellis Island exhibit drew outcry from the Jewish community and others after the Japanese American National Museum titled it, “America’s Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese American Experience.” To the museum’s curators — and to many historians and leading Japanese American organizations today — “internment” or “relocation camps” were euphemisms for the reality of what Japanese Americans endured. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court justices, the museum noted, had both referred to the Japanese American camps as concentration camps.
> ... Ultimately, Jewish and Japanese American groups held meetings to reach an understanding, Schiffrin reported. The exhibit’s title stayed, but with one long footnote on the flier, making clear that it was not an attempt to directly compare the Japanese-American camps to Nazi camps.
Oregonian here. Yes, she was talking about WW2 concentration camps. It's disgusting that you've forgotten that, during WW2, we ran concentration camps too, for Japanese-Americans and others who we failed to trust in spite of their citizenship. Read the parent comment again. George Takei was in one of these camps!
FDR, Eisenhower, and many other high-ranking government officials at the time referred to the Japanese 'internment camps' also as 'concentration camps'.
See http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/haiku/camps.h... as an example of how in the 1990s there was already the complaint that it "seems strange that we are still debating the use of terms describing this event" when it was well-established that the Japanese were indeed in concentration camps in all but official name.
It also gives quotes, like Truman in 1961 saying "They were concentration camps. They called it relocation but they put them in concentration camps, and I was against it. We were in a period of emergency, but it was still the wrong thing to do."
The term "concentration camp" was also used in the Spanish-American and Boer Wars, for something other than "murder centers".
All evidence I've seen says that calling these facilities something other than "concentration camp" is a euphemism to hide the atrocities that we are committing YET AGAIN.
There's tons of Jewish people, including a Holocaust survivor and former victim of a real concentration camp, telling AOC to quit her bullshit.
The kids are in a detention facility. Donald Trump didn't personally decide "fuck Mexicans" and rip kids out of their loving homes. He's protecting children from the people in an adult detention facility who have actively broken the law and took their families with them in the process.
Calling Trump a Nazi and calling these places concentration camps is a massive slap in the face to the millions of people who actually died from the war.
So if there are Jewish people who agree with her, and Jewish people who do not ... what does that mean?
If there are Japanese people, who lived in "detention facilities" during WWII who agree with her definition ... what does that mean?
If Ben Ferencz, who prosecuted Nazis in Nuremberg, 'describes these policies of separating children from their parents and putting those children in cages as “crimes against humanity.”' (quoting https://www.politicususa.com/2019/06/20/opinion-a-concentrat... ) ... what does that mean?
Maybe it means we need to stop what we're doing to those tens of thousands of children.
'Cause, you know, that's not doing anyone any good.
And as for "actively broken the law" - last I checked, crossing the border illegally was a misdemeanor offense. Is this really just? Because I think it's much closer to an administration policy of "fuck the immigrants" than anything else.
Forcing them to cross deserts while sick with no food or water?
Oh, wait, no, that's what their traffickers from Honduras and elsewhere are doing as they claim that those children belong to them when they reach the border so that they can receive higher priority treatment, whereupon they enter and recycle the kids back across the border.
> Oh, wait, no, that's what their traffickers from Honduras and elsewhere
So you're using the fact that these kids are the victims of human trafficking, to make them suffer even more? Do you even listen to what you're saying?
I'm saying that they're better off in Border Patrol facilities than being repeatedly trafficked across the desert, recycled over and over again to create fake family after fake family for criminals to get into the united states.
It might help us provide a more humane experience for them while in these facilities if we didn't have politically motivated Democrats demagoguing and grandstanding, trying to play off our emotions for election points, whilst denying funding for these facilities.
But NOPE! I guess we can't fund these facilities, because the progressive wing of the party has collectively fallen into the delusion that we're in pre-WW2 Germany and Trump is a Nazi, just because they don't like the guy. It's the most ridiculous paranoia I've come across, which is saying something coming from me considering how generally paranoid I am personally. There's no basis for it. None whatsoever.
They're getting $775 per person per day. People are trying to donate goods and are getting turned back. It's not a resource issue.
> which is saying something coming from me considering how generally paranoid I am personally
You may be paranoid, but your paranoia is pointing in the wrong direction.
> There's no basis for it. None whatsoever.
We're in the middle of a discussion about thousands of children being abused and mistreated in government facilities. That right there is a basis for comparison. If you can't even see that, then you're willfully closing your eyes.
Can you provide a source for that $775 figure? In May alone there were 144,000 illegal immigrants processed by the CBP. That's over $100,000,000 just for one month, which makes me skeptical of that figure off $775 / person being available.
"The Holocaust, you’re talking about a tragedy of biblical proportion and one of the greatest scourges in history. Six million Jews died during the Holocaust; there is no comparison to the Holocaust, period”
"To draw an equivalency suggests one does not understand what happened in the Holocaust."
I remember HN getting up in arms about free speech when porn was banned from some sites, and a few years earlier when rape fantasy was banned from another (sorry, poor memory so I don’t remember more details). But banning pro-Trump is fine. Where are the SJWs now? Trump is an idiot, but this reveals some true bias in this (HN) community. It’s disappointing.
Pardon? Usually the complaint is about SJWs who point out that a site should be free to set their own policies and decide to ban porn, rape fantasies, and white supremacist beliefs.
They then get chastised for being "politically correct" and wanting to "censor".
Opposing that SJW belief are the free speech absolutists who insist that no site should set policies restricting comment practices. Which appears to be the policy you think should happen.
OK, let's test this. This site banning pro-abortion would be OK? My point is the left is fine banning the right on moral grounds, but if the right bans the left then it's bigotry, free speech suppression, and a different set of morals. Of course the inverse is also true (right gladly bans the left). It's all hypocrisy - that's what I'm calling out.
Yes. Completely okay. That's completely in line with my opinion that the organizers of a site have the freedom to associate with whomever they wish - and reject whom they don't wish.
Why's that a problem?
And, most assuredly, I am on the left.
Edit: and an example comment of mine from 2 years ago where I assert that the right to reject people/speech from a private group is just as important as the right to free speech https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15420491 .
61 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadI remember a time when politics was not discussed in polite company.
If anything this is escalating the problem by silencing the opposition and further entrenching both sides.
Their policy is at https://www.ravelry.com/content/no-trump .
Their argument is "We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy."
So by "both sides" it seems like you mean the one side in favor of white supremacy, and the other side not in favor of white supremacy?
Why should a knitting site allow support for open white supremacy?
I disagree with your "simply isn't true." At best, it's "complicatedly isn't true." But I think it's really true. He's a white supremacist, surrounded by white supremacists, product of a country and culture based on white supremacy.
Rather than write up a description, I'll vouch for:
1) https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/08/donald-trumps-ti... from 2017 listing some of his and his administration's connections to the broad category of white supremacy, including his birtherism.
2) https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/trump-e... from early 2019 describes more connections, including "his attempts to expel undocumented immigrants who pose no threat to public safety, and their American family members; his elevation of an ostentatious partisan to the Supreme Court; his implementation of a policy of child abuse as a deterrent to illegal immigration; his abandonment of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria; his Justice Department’s green-lighting of police abuses; his attempts to weaken the political power of minorities targeted by his policies; and other acts of state violence and disapproval against religious and ethnic minorities too numerous to name. ... all of them follow the underlying logic ... that extremism in pursuit of white power is no vice, and defending the rights of those who threaten that power is no virtue." (Similar points made at https://newrepublic.com/article/144390/trumps-white-supremac... )
Here's a question - what would Trump and the Trump administration need to do for you to think it supports white supremacy?
Why do we have children in concentration camps, repeating the tragedies of the Japanese concentration camps of the 1940s and the Native American concentration camps?
White surpremacy is seen as 'extreme' and Trump is seen as 'center'. Truth it, in the US white surpremacy is not a fringe perspective. That's just the reality.
The polarisation is because the political divide isn't about tax rates or nuanced trade-off between common good and personal liberty. The political divide is about human rights and rule of law. It's the type of divide that is not resolved by voting, but by civil war or threat of such. The end result is not an election but a constitution
It really hurts any credibility someone may have granted you in a conversation when you ascribe to one side of a discussion a world view that is condemned by the vast majority of that side.
I mean, there's still a lot of people alive today who remember - and supported - the social policies of the Jim Crow era.
Funny about all the support for cheaply constructed statues in support of the traitors of the Civil War, justified by 'preserving our heritage', and yet "People keep shooting sign marking where Emmett Till died ... people in the community have widely interpreted the act as evidence of persistent racism and avoidance of Till's brutal killing and its legacy" - https://www.al.com/news/2018/08/people_keep_shooting_sign_ma... .
I mean, do you agree that the Earth is not flat, and not younger than 20,000 years old? Yet there are many Flat-Earthers and Young Earth Creationists who dispute those facts.
So, if I said "minimum surface distances between different cities on the Earth can be approximated using spherical trigonometry", would you then complain that I was stating that like an undisputed fact, and therefore incapable of considering an alternative worldview for the shape of the Earth?
In which case, I am indeed ideologically enslaved to a non-flat model of the Earth.
Aren't you?
And, why do you say they don't make any arguments? They wrote:
> Much of this policy was first written by a roleplaying game site, not unlike Ravelry but for RPGs, named RPG.net. We thank them for their thoughtful work. For citations/references, see this post on RPG.net: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/new-ban-do-not-post-...
That in turn lists these "Policy Citations" arguments:
> 1. Racism and rhetorical alliance with white supremacist groups. This is a fairly thorough collection of citations in itself, not just a single tweet. https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1054669092764966912?s=...
> 2. Hostility to transgender persons. [ https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/trump-says-transgend...]
> 3. Attempting to ban transgender service members from the military [ https://www.sfchronicle.com/lgbt/article/Trump-ban-on-transg...]
> 4. He is personally hostile to both individual reporters and the very idea of a free press. [ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/09/trump-enemy-of-... ]
> 5. He mocks the disabled. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX9reO3QnUA ]
> 6. He mocked a sexual assault victim, to applause from his supporters. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m00qAeFHaQ ]
> 7. For the record, “Globalists” is almost always code for “Jews,” particularly if it’s in concert with anything about Soros. [ https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/413356-trump-say... ]
> 8. When confronted with the fact that his rhetoric may be encouraging domestic terrorism, he has indicated he should maybe encourage it more, and has implied the press has it coming. [ https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tone-down-bomb-threats... ]
> 9. He is attempting to stoke fear and violence in other arenas, as well. [ https://www.independent....
3. These people have an astronomic suicide risk. Not exactly fit for military
5. https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5myu6x/let_me_c...
7. Criticism of a Jewish person is not anti-semitism. Criticism of Soros is very rational.
This is one of the most insane threads I've ever seen on HN.
Those arguments you copied are for different claims and were made by a different person.
I claim "It is undeniable that the Earth is not flat and anyone who supports the idea of spherical Earth is ignorant of the facts."
Am I stuck in a mindset and unwilling to consider alternatives?
The arguments I copied were those used by the authors of the new policy to justify their claims. That they were made by a different person is not relevant. I can point to Eratosthenes to defend my anti-flat-Earth stance, without having to write out his arguments myself.
I can support woman's suffrage without being rightly defined as supporting white supremacy.
How do you distinguish between "taken as axiomatic" and "is the case"?
Eg, I can describe 1970s South Africa as being a white supremacist society, yes?
You certainly agree that at one point US laws were based on white supremacy, right? Eg, the Illinois Constitution of 1848, quoting https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Illinois_Constitution_of_1848 :
> The general assembly shall, at its first session under the amended constitution, pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free persons of color from immigrating to and settling in this state;and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this state for the purpose of setting them free.
That sounds pretty white-supremacy, yes?
If so, when did the US stop being a white supremacist society, and how?
I did say "can be", not "is always defined as such, in a logically-consistent way"! One point that should be quite obvious is that one can always say "that doesn't go far enough!" in a totally unfalsifiable way. (And yes, people have made such arguments, seemingly in all seriousness, even about such things as women's suffrage or civil-rights legislation!) It's a mistake to think that this sort of mindset is restricted by any kind of logic or rationality.
> How do you distinguish between "taken as axiomatic" and "is the case"? ... If so, when did the US stop being a white supremacist society, and how?
Again, the point is that the radical-progressive mindset is not interested in such questions. They are simply not seen as something that's inherently legitimate as a subject of inquiry. You are naïvely assuming that the appeal to notions such as "white supremacy" is intended to be meaningful - to say something, anything about the real world - when in fact it might as well be something that's said purely "for the lulz", for the sheer amusement of making one's political opponents uncomfortable. It's less about "debate" of any sort than it is about sheer intimidation and willful confusion.
Our society is not homogenous enough to make a statement like "white supremacist society" substantial. However, there are three closely-related truths which are pretty obvious about our society:
* Our society is, itself, a fascist, classist, militaristic society.
* Pockets of people and parochial cultures in some specific regions are white supremacists.
This isn't definitional or axiomatic, but if you don't perceive these things as true in your day-to-day experience of our country, then you're not likely to feel that they're true. And that's fine! We don't have to agree. But it's useful to point out how and where we don't agree.
Before doing that, I'll note that you were the first to use the term 'society' in this thread. My previous statements were along the lines of 'support for open white supremacy'. I think "society" is a distraction because there's always the "not all" objection - not all white people in Virgiania in 1850s were in favor of slavery, even though it was a slave society.
So when I mean "society", I mean "the main cultural views as reinforced by the government and others with political, economic, and physical power".
Going back to my earlier questions, which I'll augment:
1) can the 1970s South Africa be described as a white supremacist society? I think it can. For obvious reasons.
2) can the 1850s US be described as a white supremacist society? I think it can, for obvious reasons.
3) can the 1950s US be described as a white supremacist society? I think it can. Jim Crow laws. Sundowner towns, Redlining, Mississippi Burning.
4) can the current US be described as a white supremacist society? I have come to the conclusion that viewing the dominate power structures in the US as being strongly influenced by white supremacy is a valid, though incomplete one.
If you reject that 'white-supremacist society' is a useful term, then perhaps you shouldn't have introduced it?
The linked-to document gives a pointer to its "citations/references", which is hosted on RPG.net. I then quoted those citations.
While many disagree with those arguments, that's quite different than saying they gave no arguments at all.
Then don't reply, and jog on. You can easily ignore the concentration camps for brown people on your southern border too, the USA is big and the the border is likely far away from you.
I don't blame a knitting website for not wanting to have this discussion. People of all kinds of views can still discuss _kitting_ there.
The way the world works now, with media splits and filter bubbles, your statement is actually fairly accurate: "we aren't even living in the same reality and any further discussion is completely pointless."
That doesn't sound like a white supremacist/neo-nazi.
I feel that you're bringing up international politics in a discussion about US domestic politics is mostly meant to derail the conversation.
You realize that more factors are involved than just white supremacy, right?
BTW, the $38B 10-year military-assistance Memorandum of Understanding was signed on September 14, 2016 during the Obama administration, and "partly a response to the nuclear deal that the United States and other world powers finalized with Iran". https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/09/un... .
Meanwhile Netanyahu campaigns with Trump, names a town in the Golan after Trump... which violates the key characteristic of white supremacy: namely not liking Jews; ergo he is not a white supremacist
Several 19th century state constitutions prohibited black people from moving to them. This should be correctly understood as white supremacy. They did not prevent Jews from moving to them.
Hence those terms are distinct and have not merged for any serious discussion of the topic.
Again, foreign policy != domestic policy. Black slavers and free abolitionists opposed to each others' domestic policies, but some worked together for the foreign policy of having blacks return to Africa, in the American Colonization Society's colonization of Liberia.
Or you can see how a Christian Zionist like Pat Robertson can be both anti-Semitic and support the Jewish state.
Last I heard, "There is no budgeting, no planning, no location for a settlement, and there is no binding decision to implement the project" for that settlement, says Zvi Hauser at https://www.timesofisrael.com/no-plans-no-budget-trump-heigh... , who describes it as a publicity stunt.
Ergo, what you point out isn't really germane.
US domestic policy in the 1950s was explicitly based on white supremacy. Jim Crow laws were actively enforced. Yet the US supported the creation of the State of Israel.
"Golda Meir describes Nixon in her autobiography as the best friend Israel ever had in the presidency and does so in life and death terms." says http://www.jewishmag.com/167mag/kissinger-nixon-war-watergat... which goes on to say "But… Nixon, like many anti-Semites, had a deep admiration for Israel and Israelis".
Nixon's "Southern strategy", infamously, was designed to appeal to racism against African Americans.
So there's no inherent contradiction here.
Isn't this policy inherently conservative, in that it ignores any desire for political change?
Does it mean that the abolitionists and suffragettes were not polite? Because they sometimes were not. It's part of how they got change.
It's fine to disagree with President Trump. It's fine to disagree with Democrats, too. Having an opinion is your right.
But to slander and lie, and try to influence people in this way is just wrong.
Let's be honest. President Trump has brought record low unemployment, rising wages, and justice reform to African Americans. His support among American Blacks has risen, not fallen. He is doing some good.
Yet there are people like this. They weaponize racism, ignoring it within any party but the one they demonize. They turn racism from something useless into something they can use. This is what is truly 'deplorable'.
No, I'm pretty sure it's putting kids into concentration camps that's deplorable. Nice try though.
> "Concentration camps are considered by experts as 'the mass detention of civilians without trial.'
Even without photos, we know there is mass detention of civilians without trial.
Do you deny that?
What term do you want to use? From the same link:
> We don't say 'prisons' because prisons are a part of the formal legal system," Lester Andrist, a sociologist who has studied indefinite detention, tweeted.
Or would you prefer "internment camp", like we used for Japanese Americans? From the same link:
> "I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again," the Takei tweeted. The Takei family was interned in Arkansas and California in the 1940s.
Or perhaps you want to reserve 'concentration camp' only for the Nazi death camps? From the same link:
> Federico Finchelstein, a historian at the New York-based New School, agreed that the progressive congresswoman is right to call the ICE facilities concentration camps.
> "As [a] historian of fascism & [the] Holocaust, I would also call these centers concentration camps," Finchelstein tweeted. "As a Jewish person who lost family in [the] Holocaust, I regret that some Republicans use memory of the Holocaust to defend racist policies of Trumpism."
From https://beta.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/20/concentrat... :
> A 1998 Ellis Island exhibit drew outcry from the Jewish community and others after the Japanese American National Museum titled it, “America’s Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese American Experience.” To the museum’s curators — and to many historians and leading Japanese American organizations today — “internment” or “relocation camps” were euphemisms for the reality of what Japanese Americans endured. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court justices, the museum noted, had both referred to the Japanese American camps as concentration camps.
> ... Ultimately, Jewish and Japanese American groups held meetings to reach an understanding, Schiffrin reported. The exhibit’s title stayed, but with one long footnote on the flier, making clear that it was not an attempt to directly compare the Japanese-American camps to Nazi camps.
Big difference. Concentration camps were murder centers. Internment camps were not.
See http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/haiku/camps.h... as an example of how in the 1990s there was already the complaint that it "seems strange that we are still debating the use of terms describing this event" when it was well-established that the Japanese were indeed in concentration camps in all but official name.
It also gives quotes, like Truman in 1961 saying "They were concentration camps. They called it relocation but they put them in concentration camps, and I was against it. We were in a period of emergency, but it was still the wrong thing to do."
The term "concentration camp" was also used in the Spanish-American and Boer Wars, for something other than "murder centers".
All evidence I've seen says that calling these facilities something other than "concentration camp" is a euphemism to hide the atrocities that we are committing YET AGAIN.
The kids are in a detention facility. Donald Trump didn't personally decide "fuck Mexicans" and rip kids out of their loving homes. He's protecting children from the people in an adult detention facility who have actively broken the law and took their families with them in the process.
Calling Trump a Nazi and calling these places concentration camps is a massive slap in the face to the millions of people who actually died from the war.
If there are Japanese people, who lived in "detention facilities" during WWII who agree with her definition ... what does that mean?
If Ben Ferencz, who prosecuted Nazis in Nuremberg, 'describes these policies of separating children from their parents and putting those children in cages as “crimes against humanity.”' (quoting https://www.politicususa.com/2019/06/20/opinion-a-concentrat... ) ... what does that mean?
Maybe it means we need to stop what we're doing to those tens of thousands of children.
'Cause, you know, that's not doing anyone any good.
And as for "actively broken the law" - last I checked, crossing the border illegally was a misdemeanor offense. Is this really just? Because I think it's much closer to an administration policy of "fuck the immigrants" than anything else.
No, what's obscene is what we're doing to children. THAT is obscene.
Oh, wait, no, that's what their traffickers from Honduras and elsewhere are doing as they claim that those children belong to them when they reach the border so that they can receive higher priority treatment, whereupon they enter and recycle the kids back across the border.
So you're using the fact that these kids are the victims of human trafficking, to make them suffer even more? Do you even listen to what you're saying?
It might help us provide a more humane experience for them while in these facilities if we didn't have politically motivated Democrats demagoguing and grandstanding, trying to play off our emotions for election points, whilst denying funding for these facilities.
But NOPE! I guess we can't fund these facilities, because the progressive wing of the party has collectively fallen into the delusion that we're in pre-WW2 Germany and Trump is a Nazi, just because they don't like the guy. It's the most ridiculous paranoia I've come across, which is saying something coming from me considering how generally paranoid I am personally. There's no basis for it. None whatsoever.
They're getting $775 per person per day. People are trying to donate goods and are getting turned back. It's not a resource issue.
> which is saying something coming from me considering how generally paranoid I am personally
You may be paranoid, but your paranoia is pointing in the wrong direction.
> There's no basis for it. None whatsoever.
We're in the middle of a discussion about thousands of children being abused and mistreated in government facilities. That right there is a basis for comparison. If you can't even see that, then you're willfully closing your eyes.
Would you compare the ICE holding centers to slave plantations as well? (Which is worse in your eyes-- a concentration camp or a slave plantation?)
Do tell, please.
"The Holocaust, you’re talking about a tragedy of biblical proportion and one of the greatest scourges in history. Six million Jews died during the Holocaust; there is no comparison to the Holocaust, period”
"To draw an equivalency suggests one does not understand what happened in the Holocaust."
These from NY Gov (Democrat) Andrew Cuomo
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Pardon? Usually the complaint is about SJWs who point out that a site should be free to set their own policies and decide to ban porn, rape fantasies, and white supremacist beliefs.
They then get chastised for being "politically correct" and wanting to "censor".
Opposing that SJW belief are the free speech absolutists who insist that no site should set policies restricting comment practices. Which appears to be the policy you think should happen.
Why's that a problem?
And, most assuredly, I am on the left.
Edit: and an example comment of mine from 2 years ago where I assert that the right to reject people/speech from a private group is just as important as the right to free speech https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15420491 .