Post Brexit Racism was the same, you best knuckle down and expect a good 6 months of emboldened racists.
Not sure the HRC supporters did much to allow prison inmates to vote either, or have they?
I hate to say it… but I think pwk might have a point here.
It’s far from exclusively the point, but the extremists really rubbed the working class the wrong way.
“Guy wants to be called a girl now? Well, okay, that’s fine I guess, whatever. Oh now they want to be called ze? That seems a bit silly.”
“BIGOT!”
Really poor word choices mean things. I’ve harped about how terrible “white privilege” is as a term. Poor white people sure as hell don’t feel privileged. “Black Lives Matter” seriously needed the word “Too” at the end of it to cut off the racists.
Language choices mean things. Insulting people because they don’t understand something doesn’t lead to them wanting to learn about it or suddenly accepting it. That might work in academia with similarly-minded people, but in the normal world, that isn’t how you do things. Microaggressions? What?
I’ll be honest, I’ve been those people. I’m willing to listen and try to accommodate, but it took me a long time to get there and some people being understanding. If you told me I was innately racist because I was white (technically probably true to an extent, but that’s irrelevant), I’d probably not give a shit what you had to say. If you mocked me as being backwards and stupid because I went to Church on Sundays, I’d probably not give a shit what you had to say.
I don’t by any means think this was a primary decider for most people, but to pretend it wasn’t in anyway a factor is naive. Consider that it is also seen as being pushed by the party that used to protect them and had taken them for granted and I can definitely see a backlash of “Microaggressions? I’ll show you macroaggressions, you arrogant pricks.”
Yeah, I think that’s about right. Bullshit on the left got pushed way too far, and resulted in a backlash. Making up bullshit to complain about resulted in people being able to toss everything, even legitimate complaints, into a basket of bullshit they could reject and ignore, and label it “political correctness”.
Doubtful to me. Not enough people care for or against to change the vote. Nobody is going to be motivated to vote because of neutral pronouns or micro aggressions.
These are pet issues for you, no one else cares, and frankly none of you would have changed your vote on the basis of these things either.
Other than seeing news stories posted in this thread I have never had any of these issues pushed or even noticed by me in real life. Never seen a trigger warning. Never seen a safe space. I probably did encounter them somewhere but never even noticed. Just not a factor at all.
As far as I’m concerned all these issues just exist for people to get their injection of daily outrage every day on some random site.
My liberal critics rolled their eyes when I complained about political correctness. I hope they see things a little more clearly now. The left sorted everyone into identity groups and then told the people in the poorly-educated-white-male identity group that that’s the only bad one. It mocked the members of this group mercilessly. It punished them for not being woke enough. It called them racists. It said their video games were sexist. It deployed Lena Dunham to tell them how horrible they were. Lena Dunham!
I warned that political-correctness-run-amok and liberal overreach would lead to a counter-revolution if unchecked. That counter-revolution just happened.
There is a cost to depriving people of the freedom (in both the legal and social senses) to speak their mind. The presidency just went to the guy whose main qualification, according to his supporters, is that he isn’t afraid to speak his.
I expect progressives will just double down on hating straight white people though. Hopefully the Democrats are smarter and figure out how to be the party of all the working class, rather than the party of oppressed non-white minority groups.
Only they aren’t pet issues to me. They are to people I’ve known. [quote=“Quaro, post:2628, topic:76625”]
As far as I’m concerned all these issues just exist for people to get their injection of daily outrage every day on some random site.
[/quote]
It’s called Fox News. O’Reilly and Hannity loved (and still love) going off on elitist liberals and their bullshit.
Then their watchers spread it via emails and social media to everyone they know.
If I called you a stupid racist sister-fucker every day for a decade and then asked for your vote would you give it to me?
What if I didn’t even ask for it and just assumed you were going to give it to me?
And when it comes to their concerns? “Don’t worry, they’ll die soon or demographics will change enough that they wont matter.”
When normal people (i.e. basically everyone) talk about political correctness, they are talking about whether or not it is ok to use racial slurs.
What people are talking about in this thread (including gamergate) does not even impinge on their consciousness.
Child marriage. non-arrest of Muslim rapists, non-arrest of non-white criminals and other refugee related shenanigans in Sweden and Europe are wildly popular on right media. These are all issues stemming from cultural relativism. Non-arrest of rapists, especially tied in to rape of white women is continually trending, so yes you are right, it is tied into racism, but the excuse they use stems from the left. They are just as angry at the white left for defending it as they are for non-whites committing it.
How many times have I seen them passing round tweets of Sally Kohn and others? This clickbait from left media socjus demagogues isnt just clickbait for left to provide income for the websites and to spread their word, its also ends up propaganda for the right, and its this propaganda that helped drive Trumps rise.
Plug into Trump socmedia and see what they talk about. Cultural relativism really is an issue. They might not call it that but they hate it. “Religion of peace” has been a warcry for them for years.If you dont want to read Trump socmedia go and read what they are crowing about in the comments on the Guardian, thousands and thousands of Trump voters going on about identity politics by name, or by talking about political correctness, which is essentially academic identity politics dumbed down to an easily readable Fox headline.
Gamergate might be sitting in the White House soon and still you ignore them. Know your enemy!
http://i.imgur.com/mbrD9SM.jpg
One of the parody accounts I follow nailed it.
From talking to actual trump voters in person folks not heavily connected to the internet- those things did come up.
THe other big issue was economic anxiety.
I think the Gamergate crowd will turn on Trump once net neutrality is overturned. Most of them wanted Bernie instead.
I’m in a pretty liberal sphere, but the only people I ever hear talking about safe spaces are conservatives. Maybe it’s because many of my peers just assume that it’s a closed issue that doesn’t need to be discussed. Nevertheless, in my experience, it’s not so much the left calling them racist as the right telling them the left is calling them racist. A fine distinction, sure, but it does make a different w/r/t how you address it.
Anyways, that’s not really what I came in here to say.
I think pwk is absolutely right in that the election of Trump was the result of the creation of a “white identity” voting bloc. And yes, the current culture of identity politics did lead to this. But, saying that minorities are responsible for this seems like a strange kind of victim blaming.
You say that the answer to this is to not look at people as black, or gay, or whatever, and just to consider them as “people”. “If white people felt like they were all just ‘people’ together, this animosity would go away”.
The problem with this is that minorities in the US have never been afforded that luxury. Black people have never been considered “just people”. Society has always seen them as black people first, and people second. Women have always been seen as women first, and people second. (A while ago, pwk posted an article from a woman complaining that she was just a woman, not a “cis” woman, and that it was the fault of trans people to try to create such barriers, the same argument applies there).
Just because you weren’t aware of identity doesn’t mean you didn’t have one. It just means you didn’t recognize it.
I don’t really have a takeaway here. Yes, the identification of white identity plays a role in our current political climate. But you can’t solve that by just saying “oh, let’s just abolish these identity groups”, because society still recognizes them whether you want to talk about them or not. It was doing it for hundreds of years before we started talking about it, and it will continue to do it for the foreseeable future (If you want to argue that we’re in post-racial society…well, I disagree.).
The creation of a white ethnic identity didn’t create the animosity.
As minority voices continued to get a voice in our culture, it was inevitable that people who didn’t previously recognize these identity blocs be exposed to them. And so I think some type of reaction was inevitable. It wasn’t inevitable that it be merged with economic disaffection from globalization, and so this specific reaction wasn’t inevitable. But something was.
And you have to remember that the worst of your group is often going to be identified as the entire thing.
Think of the worst extremes of PC culture. Now imagine that being all someone knows about it.
Yeah, I don’t know what to do about that though. By definition, lunatic fringe gonna lunatic fringe, especially when a lot of that fringe is young people who aren’t interested in strategic placement (not a millennial thing, BTW, just a general college-age people thing).
I remember very vividly that the first time that I encountered this idea was in college shortly after 9/11, during the Bush presidency. There were protests (I forget specifically what about), and some reporters asked the protestors: “This protest is alienating more people than it’s converting. Have you thought about changing your tactics?”, and the response was, basically: “Nope, don’t care. It’s not about what other people are hearing, it’s about what I want to say.”
I recognize that I’m lucky to have the distance from various issues to be able to consider the strategic level and not to be personally, viscerally reactive. But at the same time…
You may have a good point here. Tangentially, almost no one I know talks about or would even understand what is meant by white genocide, and yet white nationalists are pretty sure it’s happening.
This. Between all the “trigger words”, “white privelidge”, “safe space” and the University of Missouri stuff that was basically total bull anyway, lots of people just decided they were the target for everything that was wrong, and they were “mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore”.
So what you’re saying is white people were triggered and felt their safe spaces were violated?
They couldn’t find their “Listening tables” and so did the only thing they could do. They voted against the person who represented the people who had been verbally assaulting them.
But let’s stereotype shall we. It seems to be the pattern.
Let’s face it, if you were in a group that was being blamed for all the evils in the world (whites, baby boomers) wouldn’t you eventually vote your own interests as you saw them?
Hmmm.
I don’t really know how to respond. If that’s the way they feel (and to an extent, I think you are right, it is), then I have to respect that.
I could argue about how, exactly, these concepts were materially hurting them. But it doesn’t really matter, because they feel the way they feel, and we have to start from where we are.
I think a lot of this is just standard “kids these days” reactions to the concepts of a new generation, but more heightened because of various other reasons. Economic, but also cultural, because culture just moves so quickly these days that it is easier to feel “left behind”.
I think there is also some small element of the propaganda war going on here. A lot of it is reacting to the way the phrases sound rather than the concepts they stand for.
I totally agree. Best example…white privilege. I understand what it means, I agree it exists to a large extent, but I also think the term itself makes it offensive to anyone who hears it and doesn’t take the time to try to understand it.