Calling Fellow Bloggers Racists

12 Comments

1. 

   marduk on December 28, 2017 at 9:59 am

   Is your reading comprehension really so poor?

   Or is this yet another example of retreating to your little tribal circle-jerk in the diaries to misrepresent and lie about arguments on the front page?

   • 

     janicket on December 28, 2017 at 11:52 am

     It’s a dessert topping AND a floor polish!

2. 

   Don Durito on December 28, 2017 at 11:57 am

   From the FAQ regarding less acceptable diaries, courtesy of soj:

   Personal Attacks – if you really feel offended by someone, send them an email! Nobody really wants to read hateful screed about another user here – we’re all here to be friends (or at least colleagues).

   I don’t intend to be pedantic, but I really want to believe you are still better than this. Seems to me if you have something to hash out, why not either hash it out in that particular thread, or if email is available, go that route? Call-out diaries are just a bummer, and I doubt do anything more than to further cause those you are trying to shame into digging their heels further. Really, try another approach, please.

   • 

     Marie3 on December 28, 2017 at 1:03 pm

     So, I’m just supposed to tolerate being called a Trump supporting, Putin-Russia lover by those like you that view rational criticism of Clinton (both of them) as code for being a Trumpster, regardless of the frequency of my equally, at a minimum, criticism of Trump?  You and the Trumpsters have picked your poison and can’t seem to fathom that some people choose not to imbibe either.

     • 

       marduk on December 28, 2017 at 1:29 pm

       Of course if you feel you’re one of the posters being unfairly criticized for campaigning for Trump you could respond to the criticism in the context it was made.

       Or you could start a separate diary and just blatantly lie about the criticism, hoping nobody will track down the original conversation.

     • 

       Don Durito on December 28, 2017 at 2:17 pm

       Your comment really does not address the point I was making. Essentially, there is (or at least is supposed to be) a norm against call-out diaries. The FAQ is quite clear about that. Booman would most likely take one look at this diary and say something to the effect of “knock it off” for a reason. If an argument cannot be handled in the thread of origin, there probably aren’t a lot of great options. Probably the best is to realize that communication with one another is simply not going to happen on that topic and leave it at that (note – I do get that Oui is frustrated and I am not about to dismiss his reaction to what he is reading as it is at minimum a valid experience for him). I’ll once more repeat that these call-out efforts are more likely than not to backfire. At minimum, I fail to see how this sort of diary will win converts to the diarist’s cause. The more likely result is that the person who wanted to call attention to being offended ends up being perceived of as the offender. I would certainly not want that for anyone, regardless of whether or not I have crossed swords with them in the past. I’ll just leave it at that.

3. 

   Marie3 on December 28, 2017 at 1:10 pm

   Long (and good) read: LRB, Jackson Lears: What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking

   As I doubt those that would benefit most from reading it will bother to do so, will cite the final point:

   Democratic insurgents are also developing a populist critique of the imperial hubris that has sponsored multiple failed crusades, extorted disproportionate sacrifice from the working class and provoked support for Trump, who presented himself (however misleadingly) as an opponent of open-ended interventionism. On foreign policy, the insurgents face an even more entrenched opposition than on domestic policy: a bipartisan consensus aflame with outrage at the threat to democracy supposedly posed by Russian hacking. Still, they may have found a tactical way forward, by focusing on the unequal burden borne by the poor and working class in the promotion and maintenance of American empire.

   This approach animates Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page document whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. `The Democratic Party’s claims of fighting for “working families” have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people,’ Autopsy announces. But what sets this apart from most progressive critiques is the cogent connection it makes between domestic class politics and foreign policy. For those in the Rust Belt, military service has often seemed the only escape from the shambles created by neoliberal policies; yet the price of escape has been high. As Autopsy notes, `the wisdom of continual war’ – what Clinton calls `global leadership’ –

   as far clearer to the party’s standard bearer [in 2016] than it was to people in the US communities bearing the brunt of combat deaths, injuries and psychological traumas. After a decade and a half of non-stop warfare, research data from voting patterns suggest that the Clinton campaign’s hawkish stance was a political detriment in working-class communities hard-hit by American casualties from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

   Francis Shen of the University of Minnesota and Douglas Kriner of Boston University analysed election results in three key states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – and found that `even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.’ Clinton’s record of uncritical commitment to military intervention allowed Trump to have it both ways, playing to jingoist resentment while posing as an opponent of protracted and pointless war. Kriner and Shen conclude that Democrats may want to `re-examine their foreign policy posture if they hope to erase Trump’s electoral gains among constituencies exhausted and alienated by 15 years of war’. If the insurgent movements within the Democratic Party begin to formulate an intelligent foreign policy critique, a re-examination may finally occur. And the world may come into sharper focus as a place where American power, like American virtue, is limited. For this Democrat, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished. It’s a long shot, but there is something happening out there.

   • 

     centerfielddj on December 28, 2017 at 3:18 pm

     I’m completely down with ending nonstop war and military imperialism. That’s why I supported Sanders in the primary, and that’s why I supported Clinton in the general. I made my decision in the general election despite Hillary’s very bad position on establishing a Syrian no-fly zone and some (not all!) of her past record. I made my decision on this issue in the general election because Trump was an obvious liar on his Iraq position and he campaigned as a hotheaded eliminationist who wanted to torture family members of suspects and massively jack up DoD spending.

     If discussing this subject in good faith had been important to you, you could have spent any time at all from August to November 2016 pointing out the many areas where Clinton’s record, campaign positions and temperament were vastly superior to Trump’s. If you can provide posts which show you doing that during those crucial months, I’ll be surprised. My memory is that you slagged Clinton nonstop and resisted discussing Trump’s rank unfitness and immorality.

     From the essay you linked, this is shoddy argumentation:

     “…even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.’ Clinton’s record of uncritical commitment to military intervention allowed Trump to have it both ways, playing to jingoist resentment while posing as an opponent of protracted and pointless war.”

     The second sentence draws a conclusion which is not supported by the first sentence. At all. My reading of the full essay fails to substantiate this explanatory claim of the second sentence. In fact, Jill Stein’s utter failure to make much electoral hay with a purer anti-interventionist argument strongly suggests that there were other causes for the electoral behavior cited.

     My reading of the full essay showed this problem with substantiation throughout. Note the bad faith takes here, for instance:

     “The chatter surrounding the hack would never have acquired such urgency were it not for the accompanying assumption: Russia is a uniquely dangerous adversary, with which we should avoid all contact. Without that belief, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s meetings with Russians in September 2016 would become routine discussions between a senator and foreign officials. Flynn’s post-election conversations with the Russian ambassador would appear unremarkable. Trump’s cronies’ attempts to do business in Russia would become merely sleazy. Donald Trump Jr’s meeting at Trump Tower with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya would be transformed from a melodrama of shady intrigue to a comedy of errors – with the candidate’s son expecting to receive information to use against Clinton but discovering Veselnitskaya only wanted to talk about repealing sanctions and restarting the flow of Russian orphans to the United States. And Putin himself would become just another autocrat, with whom democracies could engage without endorsing.”

     The paragraph begins with an outright lie re. “…the accompanying assumption…” and goes downhill from there. The credulity with which the writer treats the Trump Tower meeting is particularly bad. Note how the writer seems for some reason to want to evade the fact that Manafort and Kushner were also in a meeting which had been advertised as “…part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” The writer is also oddly incurious about why Trump Jr. originally lied about the original purpose of this meeting.

     • 

       seabe on December 28, 2017 at 5:36 pm

       It’s got lots of other goodies like Rand Paul being good on civil liberties, and Jim Webb being anti-militarist.

       • 

         centerfielddj on December 29, 2017 at 1:07 pm

         There’s a post on Lawyers, Guns and Money which takes on the section of the Lears essay you highlight here.

         The first commenter responding to Lemieux’s post made his own good points, as follows:

         “Hillary is a warmonger!” [exaggeration, but there’s a kernel of truth here…]
         …
         “We shouda nominated Jim Webb!” [oh fuck you]

         ETA: Webb and Paul get to have “troubling idiosyncrasies.” Hillary, apparently, does not. Hmm.

         ETA the second: Nominating a white woman with a full resume – is “identity politics” and a “tragedy.” If I actually gave a shit, I’d try to look up what he was saying in 2008…”

   • 

     marduk on December 29, 2017 at 10:22 am

     HAHAHAHAHA

     • 

       centerfielddj on December 29, 2017 at 1:08 pm

       Thanks for linking to this, marduk.