Will slur cost GOP hopeful the White House?
POSTED BY: FellowTraveler
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 13, 2006 17:38
VIEWED: 7583
PAGE 5 of 6
dreamtrove,
Like I mentioned in my earlier post, it's kind of hard to explain if you've never heard someone use the phrase Jew York City in a derogatory manner. So I put this down as an inability on my part to communicate. If you don't accept that there are people out there who use this term as a slur do a quick google and see the nature of the websites that pop up.
I think you're jumping the shark with your response and painting with the broad brush. There is a subset of those who use the word liberal as a slur who are also using it as a racist slur. That is my claim. Not that everyone who uses the word liberal as a slur is also using it as a racist slur. A subset.
I'm wondering if we might be repeating what happened in our discussion about Social Security where we are starting from different places. So, to help clarify your position, what do you consider racism?
And, even though it isn't really relevant, the number of Americans who self-identify as liberals has hovered around twenty percent for quite a long time. Not fifty percent.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SoupCatcher:
And, even though it isn't really relevant, the number of Americans who self-identify as liberals has hovered around twenty percent for quite a long time. Not fifty percent.
I thought this would be a good time to post a link to
http://www.politicalcompass.org/
I thought it was very interesting and informative. It uses a few basic questions to assign one a spot on a 'politcal compass' that incorporates not only the traditional (and increasingly meaningless) left/right economics-based spectrum, but also adds a libertarian/authoritarian social issues dimension. Instead of two 'wings,' there are four 'corners'- the right/totalitarian Bush/Hitler/Auraptor corner, the right/libertarian Dreamtrove corner, the left/libertarian Ghandi/Mandela/most people corner, and the left totalitarian Stalin/Castro corner. I don't personally know of anyone in this corner. It's still cartoonish and inaccurate, but its a bit better than red vs. blue.
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Rue,
They certainly aren't conservatives.
I'm not saying liberals are Nazis.
Nazis are a type of socialist, which generally speaking is a type of liberal. They were the left wing ticket in the election the lost to hindenburg who was on the right wing ticket, backed by the 'junkers' who were free market conservatives.
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soup,
I've never heard anyone say "jumping the shark" either. I live outside of new york city, and I've never heard it.
I think you're reaching when you say anti-liberal is really anti-jew, and I think that maybe you didn't intend it this way, or maybe you picked it up from somewhere else, but what it amounts to is silencing all political debate with namecalling.
The reality is that hollywood, which is run by an elite, is overbearingly liberal. So much so that I find it hard to watch much of their tripe. When it's not Joss Whedon, most of my cinema comes from overseas. It's not an anti-semitic thing at all. I'm a big fan of jerry bruckheimer, jon stewart, even spielberg to a point, and undoubtedly countless other jews who don't come to mind. It's not the jewishness about hollywood that irks me, it's the arrogant, self-indulgent, overbearingly smug liberalism.
Quote:
And, even though it isn't really relevant, the number of Americans who self-identify as liberals has hovered around twenty percent for quite a long time. Not fifty percent.
I don't buy it. When Lila Lipscum identfied herself as a "conservative democrat" I think she was part of a really niche group which has joe lieberman and about 20 other people in it. I think democrats are liberals, if they had to choose between the two, it would be liberal. All those people like greens, socialists and whatnot, they undoubtedly identify themselves as liberals too.
Finally, jews are particularly liberal. it's a pretty conservative faith overall. there's a jewish community near here, they're pretty conservative. My jewish neighbors are pretty conservative. I don't think your equation works either way. I think maybe you're just being paranoid.
I suppose in a similar situation, there are probably people who think 'conservative' means christian. I'm certainly not a christian. I think christians, active christians, are still a minority among conservatives.
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I'm pleased to be in the company of Ghandi, Mandela, and the Dalai Lama.
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DT,
The Nazis were reactionaries.
The Nazis used the word 'socialist' in their name, as did the Russian Communists. Please don't mistake them as being the same!
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I cannot believe this is happening... I started reading this thread thinking "he's toast, of course - everyone will say so", but I now realize I was probably wrong - I really hadn't thought the whole scenario through. It is very sad to me that bullying of this type endears any politician to any group of people. To my mind, it is definitely bullying.
I think the Daily Show did some very bruising coverage of this event.
"Why're you arguin' what's already been decided?"
Mal to Jayne, "Jaynestown"
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I would never be please to be in the political company of mandela, though personally I here he's quite a likeable guy. he was a leader of a pretty radical terrorist group that is now terrorizing africa. I don't think he's anywhere near the dalai lama, politically speaking. He mellowed somewhat with age. I think ghandi meant well, and the results were not as terrible as they could have been. Still, india has been not without problems for some time.
As for the nazis, not a chance. They were not reactionaries. Reactionaries need two things in order to be reactionaries:
1. They need to be snapping back to a socio-political state of the past.
2. They need to be reacting *to* something.
Osama bin laden is a reactionary. He's longing to return islam to a mohammaden social era, and he's reacting to rapid westernization of the ME in the 80s, and the associated territory encroachment.
The Nazis were creating something new (and dreadful, but definitely new) a dreamt up utopia (to them, dystopia to the rest of us) which had never existed before. They were creating a new socialist state with an industrial mechanical society which ran everything like a well oiled machine (the oil was jews) They were reacting to nothing (aside from the depression) but it was not that the social order had gone too far in its radical change and they felt the need to snap back. They were most certainly the radical change which was being enacted.
Nazis were radicals, and socialists (it's in their name) I'm always stunned that the idea didn't simply die with them, never to be seen again.
Yet socialism, and indeed, national socialism, are alive and well today. Anyone catch Evo Morales' speech where he said "I'm a nationalist and a socialist"? It's not an accident that the bolivarian socialists are getting strong campaign backing from german immigrants (these ones are not jews)
Quote:
The Nazis used the word 'socialist' in their name, as did the Russian Communists. Please don't mistake them as being the same!
They were much more the same then they were different. The nazis far more than just "used the name." They were socialists in every respect. Sure, the part where "some of the populous gets radically exterminated" may not have been in marx' book, (but it sure shows up in a lot of socialist regimes). But both were top-down societies which believed in absolute govt. control, silencing all dissent as disruptive, and potentially harmful to the stability of the state. Both engage in massive ethnic purges of the population (the russians exterminated more ethnic polish slavs in the ukraine than the germans killed jews) Both relied on a heavy national pride and worship of 'the good of the state' as the ultimate goal of every citizen, and both were agressively expansionist military superpowers. Neither believed in a free market economy, or in guaranteed individual liberties, both strove to run completely mono-ethnic societies. Both invaded poland, and embarked on extermination of the local population once there.
Nazi Germany's crash and burn style has left a different legacy than it would have, if it had survived. If you think about it, a society founded on massive genocide can outlive that stigma. Afterall, look at the United States. You and I most likely live on land which once was home to indians who our ancestors mercilessly slaughtered in one of the world's bloodiest race wars. And think, at the time we entered world war two, that indian war was not even as old a memory as the holocaust is today. People would probably be dealing with Nazi germany today without the jews even crossing their minds. It wouldn't be pleasant, but much the way we dealt with the soviets for years without thinking of 15 million ukrainians or 13 million "whites" (not an ethnic association, but a political one) or countless victims of WWII.
The winners write the history books, and so we all learned that to some extent, the soviets saved us from the horrible wrong-headed ideology of the germans. But if we had been on the other side, say, if russia ha
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dreamtrove,
Once again, I think you're missing my point. The operative word is subset. I'm not saying that you are in this subset.
You can call it paranoia or you can call it being thin-skinned or having a lack of humor. But I disagree. Where I think we disagree is I'm guessing you only think of racism as an overt action - a lynching, or a cross burning or something of that nature - whereas I think of racism as any word or decision influenced by prejudicial stereotypes about members of another ethnic group. When a realtor doesn't show certain houses to a couple who is African-American, that is racism to me. When a young man of dark skin is automatically assumed to be foreign-born, that is racism to me. When someone uses code words to mask what they really want to say, that is racism to me. It is this last instance that I am referring to when I say that a subset of those who use liberal as a slur are also using it as a racist slur.
I happen to see racism as very prevalent in this country. I'm guessing you do not. I could be wrong. And I also see that bigots have gotten a lot smarter about the language they use. Maybe it's because I grew up in a pretty diverse neighborhood and have a pretty generic olive like complexion so I can pass as a number of different ethnic groups. I'm not sure. All I know is that I heard a lot of racist crap growing up. The filipinos ragged on the blacks. The blacks ragged on the latinos. Everyone ragged on the Armenians. And the whites ragged on everyone.
In regards to self-identification and polling, here is what I am referring to with the twenty-percent liberal remark: http://www.umich.edu/~nes/nesguide/toptable/tab3_1.htm
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"(mandela) was a leader of a pretty radical terrorist group that is now terrorizing africa."
I could not get past this. I have NO idea what planet you live on. If you truly believe this, then I have nothing more to discuss with you.
goodbye
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