Duck … Duck … Goose?

Reality programming: it is what it is.

What a Grand Old Party indeed, holding to the timeless conservative principles that have guided them since the days of Lincoln and Grant. The right of TV stars to say whatever they want with impunity. Vigorous rejection of spectacles, pajamas, and hot chocolate. The eternal and immutable whiteness of Old Saint Nick. These are the principles to rouse the hearts of patriotic Americans and persuade those on the fence.

It is the proper response to manufactured outrage.

It’s doubtful that many Republican luminaries are actually interested in winning elections. In many ways, the GOP has become a sort of platform for ambitious ideologues to build a reputation, then move into full-time demagoguery through book deals, speaking tours and TV spots.

Sarah Palin is a classic example. She hasn’t actually had a titled job for years, but her celebrity status pays the bills handsomely. And Ted Cruz clearly sees party participation as the first steps into the same sort of career.

For those types, conservative electoral victory is disastrous because it reduces the market for outrage.

That’s my vote: publicity stunt from the getgo.
~

I think Steyn is trying to get fired by NR and saw the duck imbroglio as his opportunity.

The editing on Duck Dynasty is consistently the best on television there I said it

If one wanted to get on the wingnut welfare train, there’s probably an article to be written on how The Duck Show displays a lot of craft in the technical aspects – editing, lighting, uhm, sound design, why not – and the only reason the critics don’t recognize it is because the kale-chip-eating Subaru drivers on the coasts can’t get past gawking at the good honest volk on the screen

I think Sancho makes an interesting point. In a sense, the GOP has transformed itself into a party designed to capture the protest vote – in a two-party system. This is very odd.

@christian_h 15, “protest vote”. It is not odd at all, it is what our political system excels at, giving powerful minorities the ability to endlessly block reform (in part by manipulating the subaltern protest vote).

Plume, I don’t think that’s an accurate description of the reaction to Natalie Maines’ on-stage criticism of Bush. It’s true that there was an immediate impact on their career, including difficulty getting airplay on country music stations that had previously supported them. But Maines had made the remarks at a London warmup for their tour in support of the Home album. According to Wikipedia, “The tour grossed $60.5 million, making it the highest grossing country music tour up until that time (since superseded by several artists). It was also the 8th highest-grossing tour of any genre in 2003.”

The first album they released afterHomedebuted at number on both the pop and country music charts.

I’m also confused about the point you are making with regards to hypocrisy. The implication is that one should be either consistently supportive of the Dixie Chicks and Duck Dynasty, or consistently critical of both of them to avoid being hypocritical. Which side would you come down on?

Parse,

If you scroll down on the same Wiki article, you’ll see my description was accurate about the violent and irrational reaction to their comments. Google other sources for more details.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks

As for your confusion about the hypocrisy. There shouldn’t be any. Those who are defending this ignorant bigot — with a history of bigotry — on Duck Dynasty are doing so under the guise of “freedom of speech.” They did not come to the Dixie Chicks’ defense along those same lines. And the same people who say a business owner should be able to do whatever he or she wants with their company are not being consistent when it comes to A&E. Now, it’s all about “free speech” for the employee. But an employer who wants to direct (and withhold) how a worker spends their compensation (via health care insurance) is perfectly free to do so, apparently. In fact, in a bizarre turning of the tables, they claim the employer is practicing their “free speech rights” by doing so.

The content of what was said is all that mattered, not the ability or right to say it. The content, not who said it. To the backers of the nutcase on Duck Dynasty, his position as employee or employer is immaterial. They agree with what he said, so everything else — including their supposed principles — is quite elastic.

Now, me? I’ve never watched the show. Never will. But I did read his comments and they were disgusting. Do I think he has the “right” to say them? Yes. He doesn’t have the right to a TV show or an electronic megaphone. But he does have the right to go to any street corner in America and voice his racist and homophobic views until the cows come home.

I’m also not one who believes businesses should be able to fire people for things they say outside of work. And there should be a high standard for judging that statements made outside of work are harmful enough to the business to warrant termination. The onus for that should be on the employer. As in, they should have to make a strong case of cause and effect. I despise what the guy said. I think he’s an idiot, and anyone who defends what he said is an idiot. But firing him for saying it outside the confines of work — that worries me. Business interests already have far too much control over our lives as it is — far more than the government that works to perpetuate their power.

My issue is with the hypocrisy, not “rights.” The political right simply has a history of manufactured outrage without a shred of consistency or logic behind it. This is yet one more case.

Plume: weak effort. I’m sure you can troll harder than this. A popular television show firing someone for having done or said something that might tank ratings needs to be considered in the steely-eyed light of the ordinary worker’s right to say as he pleases without being punished by The Man? Weak. Sauce. -10. Get more misty eyed about how, while you decry the GOP, the firing of the Duck Dynasty Patriarch for saying that he never saw a black person mistreated in Jim Crow Louisiana, and that that black people were “happy” before civil rights–so much so that they were a-singing in the fields as they worked, and they weren’t singing the blues–firing him for that would just set a precedent under which Cinnabon workers would get fired after getting tagged on social media as part of an Occupy protest, and you’re too much of a purist to go there. Way too much of a purist. C’mon. I did better than you just now, and I think that’s total bullshit.

[Belle Waring:] Get more misty eyed about how, while you decry the GOP, the firing of the Duck Dynasty Patriarch for saying that he never saw a black person mistreated in Jim Crow Louisiana, and that that black people were “happy” before civil rights–so much so that they were a-singing in the fields as they worked, and they weren’t singing the blues …

Oh, for pete’s sake. Here is what he actually said:

I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.

It is obvious to anyone without an axe to grind that he never saw blacks being treated any differently than he was, and that they had a nobility that welfare and entitlements destroyed.

Now you may disagree with his assessment of the Great Society et al; although it is worth keeping in mind he is echoing Patrick Moynihan, among others. But you have absolutely no basis upon which to disagree with the factual elements of what he said; to do so amounts to, on precisely zero evidence, calling him a liar.

Very classy.

Hey Skipper@25
You can read it that way if you try hard enough but as a Southerner who is from what was a very Jim Crow part of North Carolina I can tell you that the Robertson speech is a very common example of the speech of justification and absolution. The “our coloreds lived alongside us and were treated just like us and happy to boot” is a self serving lie. One had to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to know the differences and the underlying fear and hate that governed relations.
Robertson’s Louisiana was no exceptional example so he has either engaged in the common version of rationalization and self-deception or is more likely willingly dissembling to advance and support a world view rife with cognitive dissonance.
Classy or not, I call bullshit on him and you in the bargain.

Hey Skipper, what point do you think Robertson was making by saying “I never, with my own eyes, saw a black person mistreated”?

Simple. Blacks with whom he worked as equals were treated no differently than he was. At the risk of repetition, the way in which they were treated as people and workers was, in his experience, no different than the way he was treated.

So the question you have to answer is this: upon what basis do you wish to declare him wrong?

Civil Rights-era legislation marked a turn for the worse for blacks. And Jim Crow was not really bad for blacks, contrary to what you might read in the history books. Right?

I defy you to find anything in what he said, implied, or hinted, that he thinks it was OK that blacks faced barriers on account of their skin color. You can’t do it, because it isn’t there. I have no idea what questions the interviewer asked, and you don’t either. Yet what you are presupposing is that if the interviewer had asked “Do you think Jim Crow laws were fair to blacks?” his answer would have been something along the lines of “yes”.

I can’t find a shred of evidence for that presupposition, yet you assert it as a given. Why?

The grotesque impositions of Jim Crow laws are an entirely different kettle of fish than the Great Society legislation that was intended to ameliorate them. It is entirely possible to strongly disapprove of both.

Also, he isn’t really making the Moynihan point. Robertson is, I take it, suggesting that welfare breeds resentment of whites, where before there was none. Moynihan never proposed that model, to say the least.

At the extreme risk of speaking for Robertson, my interpretation of the meaning underlying his words is that various welfare programs, no matter their intentions, in effect created a culture of dependency and grievance. And to extend my risk, that if asked the direct question, he would have said that Jim Crow laws were awful, and that the best response would have been to eliminate them and then do nothing else.

You are right, Moynihan never proposed that welfare, in and of itself, bred resentment of whites. But I’m suggesting that Robert’s clear opinion is that welfare created a culture of dependency, which is very much Moynihan’s model.

As for grievance, Lord knows blacks have plenty of reasons. You have precisely no evidence to conclude Robertson thinks otherwise.

Yet despite plenty of evidence that he held his class peers who happened to have different colored skins in high regard — the words he used say as much as clearly as one could hope — he became in the eyes of progressives a virulent racist.

But he is specifically blaming ‘entitlement’ and ‘welfare’ for the decline in happiness and the rise in racial animosity. ‘Entitlement’ and ‘welfare’, whatever they are, it sounds like they are orthogonal to racial segregation (Jim Crow). I can imagine both of them with segregation intact. Or an absence of all three.

@Belle Warring, #25:

Troll? What an absurd response to my posts.

I said his (Robertson’s) words were disgusting, racist, homophobic and I condemn them. We are on the same page regarding what he said. He’s an idiot, and anyone who defends what he says is an idiot.

But I also think it’s wrong to be fired from a job for something you say outside of work. As you mention, being fired for going to Occupy rallies — which I attended — is the equivalent for those of us on the left. And, yes, I’m waaaay to the left of center in my politics and philosophically. The radical democratic, egalitarian, ecosocialist left. The non-orthodox, non-doctrinaire Marxist left. Tell me exactly for whom do you think I’m “trolling,” please.

“Mao Cheng Ji: Your imagination is not at issue here.”

Should I read it as “your imagination is not at issue here”? Why does everyone else’s imagination belong (after all, there is no mentioning of Jim Crow in the quote), but mine doesn’t?

@33: Well, we can start with the facts of what life was like for blacks in the South in the pre-civil rights era. You know – lynchings; no right to vote; consigned to separate, and very inferior, public services – everything from water fountains to hospitals and schools.

I suppose that it’s possible that someone could have been utterly blind to these things at the time. It’s less likely that they could be utterly ignorant after the fact unless they were willfully so.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/phil-robertsons-america/282555/

Might possibly be educational.

Plume: but unlike most people, in a certain sense Phil Robertson is never “outside of work”. That’s the glory of “reality” television. The whole point of it is to present a slice of the ostensibly real, unscripted, uncensored life of “Phil Robertson”. It’s a bit like kayfabe in pro wrasslin’, where keeping up the illusion that the in-ring personalities are real was traditionally part and parcel of the business. (Contrast with, say, The Colbert Report, where “Steven Colbert” the TV character is plainly meant to be understood as a fiction, despite sharing his name with Steven Colbert the human being.)

@dn #47,

That is a good point. Again, I’ve never seen the show. But apparently it’s extremely popular. And since capitalism (via TV) is always with us, follows us everywhere — as Norman Mailer noted in Dissent back in the 50s — you may be right. There is no outside.

Still, I think the better way to answer disgusting speech is with the power of the better argument. Notice the reaction to the firing hasn’t resulted in a thoughtful conversation about race and class in America, but to circle the wagons around Robertson. Among those who did circle the wagons, no one learned a lesson, it would seem. Their false sense of victimization was confirmed. No one learned about the real history of slavery and oppression of blacks and other minorities in America. They just dug in to defend their tribe, their team (team Robertson).

Take away the firing and substitute that discussion, and perhaps people will learn. There is then no reason to circle the wagons and miss the entire point. There is no reason to concentrate solely on what is deemed an unfair action against Robertson, and to instead discuss how stupid, ignorant and racist (and homophobic) his comments were.

I’d also like to see a major discussion about class take place along with the one on race. Of course, the two things are intertwined. But class in the sense that it isn’t enough for blacks, women and minorities to achieve some kind of “equality” with the rest of the nation — though that is a necessary foundation. What we need is to start dealing with the massive inequality by reason of class and the economic system that creates economic apartheid:

Capitalism.

Reading a very good book on the secret history of primitive accumulation right now, entitled The Invention of Capitalism (Michael Perelman, author). Robertson told a fairy tale about the treatment of blacks in America. Adam Smith and other classical political economists told fairy tales about the advent of capitalism and its likely future. In both cases, the truth was violence, atrocity, massive coercion and destruction — which is ongoing.

Apartheid. Capitalism creates the economic kind. We need to do away with all forms.

Eric,

Well, working with what we have, with the system we have, I think we need to roll back those powers. Optimally, the means of production would and should be held by all of us, democratically controlled, with rules established to prevent the kind of willful terminations you speak of. There would be no such thing as “right to work” states any longer. Worker/Citizen owned, instead. But as long as we have economic apartheid, we’re going to have to do whatever we can to check those powers.

Of course, the dynamic in this case is bizarre. Robertson is a part of the upper class, at least economically speaking — a multi-millionaire. To me, if one has a workforce and makes their money through that workforce, they can’t possibly “earn” their millions. It’s mathematically impossible. So it’s likely that both Robertson and A&E are in the exploitation business.

I don’t feel sorry for either party in this mess.

Eric Titus
“@Plume
The fact is that employers can (and do) fire employees for non-work reasons, and don’t even need a proper justification. And I’m willing to bet that this Duck fiasco won’t change a thing on that front.”

And it’s a cold day in the Infernal Regions when the people on the right have the
slightest problem with this. Their only complaint in this case was that the guy being fired was a celebrity on their side. If he had been fired for supporting gay marriage, the rigth would be screaming ‘free market!’ at the top of their lungs.

Still, I think the better way to answer disgusting speech is with the power of the better argument.

This is an empirical claim and testable, remember.

@Skipper

“I can’t fathom why you think his quote, or any underlying meaning, has anything at all to do with Jim Crow or Civil Rights legislation. His comment specifically refers to entitlements and welfare onlyl; both are entirely separate from dismantling Jim Crow and Civil Rights legislation.”

You can’t reasonably mean this quote:

“I never, with my own eyes, saw a black person mistreated”

If you are, please relate it to welfare or entitlements. I’ll wait.

My father was a white sharecropper in north Alabama, and I did my own share of picking cotton by my mother’s side as a child. (Can anyone else here remember cotton-picking school vacation in the Fall?) And I can tell you absolutely that my dad’s socioeconomic status at the time didn’t allow identification with African-Americans in any way, shape, or form. There was only one horrible term used for African-Americans, and I’d wager the Duck Dynaster used it too. Robertson’s re-imaginations of yesteryear’s South make him demented, a liar, a fool, or all three.

Thank heavens we had to pick up and move, Grapes Wrathing style, to California when I was 10. Plunged into fully integrated and solid public schools. Saved me in more ways than I can count.

Plenty of people have never personally seen mistreatment of others. Hell–that’s the departure-gate for Holocaust-denial flights of fancy. There is no force of argument there for any supposed cogent point that Duckster wished to make. But at least OE you recall the two-week “cotton-pickin’ vacation” as we used to call it.

Hey Skippy–at least I can use my own name. Hiding behind pseudonyms is so comfortable when defending the indefensible. I pity you if you actually believe your nit-picking sputum. Why do you feel it necessary anyway to defend the thinnest veiled racism and loudest proclaimed homophobia?

Hey Skippy,
I am happy to call him a liar. I would stake my life on him growing up using the n word and on him witnessing African Americans being mistreated. He grew up in the SOUTH during JIM FUCKING CROW. How dumb do you think we are?

Here’s what I found unusual about this media flareup:

Everyone settled on the comments about ‘the gay’ and treated that as the ‘scandal’. I think that really misses the worse piece: his comments about ‘the blacks’.

Say what you want about gay rights, but the Duck Man is perfectly allowed to have his crappy feelings about gay people. It’s a free country.

But the comments about blacks in the south pre-civil rights were plainly hugely catastrophically wrong, and go to the heart of what the GOP is really about, way down south. It should have been AT LEAST as big an issue as the gay. I still can’t figure out why no one seemed to pick that up, out there in media land.

One more comment about my “personal experience.”

The last southern town I lived in as a kid had a sign posted on the town limits: “African-American: Don’t let the sun set on you here.” Except the sign did not use that term.

My mother worked at the Dairy Bar there, and one day a bus of African-Americans stopped for food. Her boss had her lock the door.

Of course, that’s just my experience.

[John Holbo:] Well, I guess in a way I’m just more charitable to him than you are, insofar as I am assuming he’s thinking things through at least a few steps.

You put thoughts in his head using words he didn’t say. That’s not charity, that is fantasizing. And it certainly isn’t charitable to level a real insult, a serious charge impugning his moral character — he somehow approved of Jim Crow laws — based upon such vanishingly thin tissue.

It is amazing, no appalling, that the collective conviction here is that he is a racist, despite not saying one thing, not even syllable, disparaging of any race.

He said he never saw a black person mistreated. This suggests he believes it didn’t happen or happened rarely, or in isolated areas or in exceptional circumstances or something.

Here is what He said he never saw a black person mistreated suggests: he never saw a black person mistreated. That. Period. Nothing more. The sentence structure and the words could hardly be more simple. To get from there to he believes it didn’t happen, etc … is pure fabrication, and puts him in the position of not being able to mean or think anything until your inventive parsing says he can.

Jim Crow is generally believed to have been a legal/social regime that led to the systematic mistreatment of blacks.

Yes, of course. But the word mistreatment can mean many things depending not only in context but whether it is used as a verb or a noun. He used it as a verb, you as a noun. Then you presume to judge him based your word choice, not his. Used as a verb, in the context of a sentence, he clearly means that he never saw blacks physically abused. Now try re-reading what he said using his words, his meanings, not yours.

Which makes your condescending lecture both misplaced and telling. Your failure to distinguish noun from verb, or between a grotesque legal regime and instances of physical cruelty, morphs into my ignorance of Jim Crow, or some evil desire to view what history books saw about that period as progressive propaganda.

So just as you put thoughts into Robertson’s head, you put them in mine.

Thanks, but all the same I’d rather you didn’t.

Skippy,
You are an apologist for a racist homophobe. You are a disgrace. Hang your head in shame.

You put thoughts in his head using words he didn’t say.

Your words are shaped by your thoughts and experiences. And we can work through that backwards: based on your words and your experiences we can work out what your thoughts are.

People don’t say everything they think. I’m thinking things about you right now that I’m not saying… but I think you can understand what I’m thinking even though I haven’t said it, and you wouldn’t be putting thoughts inside my head if you were to conclude the obvious natural conclusion.

Same principle lets us get inside [man]’s head and work out that he’s thinking things that he hasn’t put into words.

[MPAVictoria:] Skippy, You are an apologist for a racist homophobe. You are a disgrace. Hang your head in shame.

No, I’m appalled at progressives’ thoughtcrime reflex, the immediate delegitimizing of thoughts that don’t adhere to your worldview, to the point where you even disallow someone of his own experiences.

Your snarky listing of the glaringly apparent demonstrates this thoroughly. It is completely irrelevant to what he said, yet he is somehow guilty of thinking in the way you insist he is. The arrogance is palpable. The list of people here who insist the guy is lying about what he saw is nearly endless.

Generally, outside thoughtcrime world, that is, calling someone a liar comes with proof. Calling someone a racist comes with proof. They are, after all, serious charges.

Yet you trot out those virulent charges on nothing more than your say so: “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once.” = racism!

If that constitutes racism, then you have drained the concept of any meaning whatsoever.

And that is exactly how dumb I think you are.

Your calling him a homophobe puts the icing on the cake. In progressive thoughtcrime world, he is not allowed to dislike homosexuality, he isn’t allowed to have religious beliefs that condemn homosexuality (along with many other things, including my failure to accept Jesus Christ as my savior.).

The totalitarian impulse is strong in you, MPAVictoria.

[Colin Street:] People don’t say everything they think. I’m thinking things about you right now that I’m not saying… but I think you can understand what I’m thinking even though I haven’t said it, and you wouldn’t be putting thoughts inside my head if you were to conclude the obvious natural conclusion.

You must love being wrong.

Holbo at 3:01 am-
Well, I guess in a way I’m just more charitable to him than you are, insofar as I am assuming he’s thinking things through at least a few steps. I assume he’s aware of the implications of what he’s saying, on at least a very basic level. You are pointing out, in effect, that he might not be…
Hmmf.
Possibly, because far be it from me to make assumptions about other people’s thinkings just based on what they’re actually saying, but possibly Hey Skipper is really trying to assert, through his defense of Robertson, the basic humanity of the last demographic in the US it’s still okay to ridicule and insult in a public place. Besides Muslims, by those other guys. Or it was until yesterday or so.
“Hillbillies” “rednecks” “white trash”. It’s no accident those insults are turned into prideful assertions, just like “nigger” is, by those with a claim to them. What else can you do with that shit?
That affirmation of pride in who you are seems to be what Robertson and the providers of Robertson to us are working off. It was certainly core to the WBush election nonsense. The voicelessness of poor and lower-class whites, their absence from any kind of approving representation in the media, the lack of any programs or concerted efforts in the educational system to redeem anything about them at all, cultural or historical.
After a pretty solid 4 decades of black progress upward (key phrase coming!) in the mediated environment where most Americans now think they live – Condie Rice! Susan Rice! Obama! Michelle!, keeping in mind of course the massive detention statistics the poverty statistics the death-by-violence statistics and the just general constant bad news of being especially a young black male, simultaneous with p.c. idiots using the nauseatingly infantile construct ” the n-word” or just sidestepping any referrant completely out of sophisticated timidity, poor whites especially southern poor whites have seen near-vertical declines in any metrics of well-being except obesity.
Lynndie England’s mediated stoning and consequent psychological destruction, at the hands of people not much different in their online affect from some of the commenters here, was out of that same “we’re not sick they are” sickness.
“Hey, they deserve it, those racist homophobic assholes.”
It’s okay to be hateful to haters. Only, whoops, what if you hate on someone who isn’t a hater but you thought they were, then aren’t you…I mean… by those rules, isn’t it…
A lot of these people sound like they think slavery and its social consequences in the southern US were racist pure and simple, and the doings of uneducated mostly Scots-Irish proto-rednecks.
So now that we’ve driven racism into its isolated little low-rent caves there can’t be anymore slavery. How could there?
Too much adoption of the hyped-up polarity on offer. And the overtones of that go right to issues of survival, and people get scared.
People are scared, and that makes them even more vulnerable to these manufactured goadings. Of course Robertson’s playing that, but he may well be honest when he says he didn’t see any mistreatment of the blacks he worked beside. Which is a path toward his humanity. Even if he’s lying to himself about what it means, and what effects his saying it will have.
Hey Skipper is bridging that volatile chasm a little, his attackers are fine with it getting wider, as long as they’re looking like to be on the winning side.
Adding to what I said above, crack cocaine wasn’t injected into urban ghettos by poor whites or poor blacks either one, and the unconscionable rates of imprisonment for black male Americans is not a result of redneck bigotry. At all.

“Your calling him a homophobe puts the icing on the cake?
just curious what he would have to say before you would admit he is homophobic? Comparing them to people who have sex with animals apparently isn’t enough, so what would be?

So Skippykins. Duskster’s use of “saw” is incorrigible and cannot be subject to epistemic analysis and criticism? So as Tycho “saw” the sun actually rising over an unmoving earth, and Galileo “saw” the earth moving with respect to an immobile sun, neither is to be preferred as closer to being true? I have a feeling likewise Duckster’s world-view as you call it informs his “seeing”, and his world-view is more like Tycho’s, except for being morally abhorrent as well as just plain wrong. Slave-owners “saw” no abuse in whipping obedience into their “property”. Wanna defend them too on the basis of entitlement to “world-view”?

I’m done with your sophistry.

“Are we trying to fix this”
how is this ever going to be fixed if one side refuses to believe there is a problem?

Okay so it’s a binary, and he’s either a victim or a perp, in that view, which is yours, seemingly.
And there’s no room in that 2-D place for something like the actual mess we’re all in, the human complexity of it.
Victims become perps, and their victims become perps, and pretty soon it’s one big family reunion.
Plus the further dimensions of inherited wrong, either side of the binary, where the Indian Wars were great-great-grandpa’s bad, and my 2000 acres of hard-worked and barely hung on to cropland are mine, cause I’ve got the deed, clear and simple.
The real nightmare of what’s being rejected, whatever you call it, slavery, racism is so horrifying it isn’t brought, just glimpses of it, sanitized and declawed, any of which are still ghastly enough to close the door on further understanding,
The people who loved Robertson as a boy, the entire cultural social matrix of his raising, are what I’m pointing to as the nucleus of the reaction, not action, of pride asserted. That it’s being played, and the people jumping into the matrix of polarizing energies are being played, powerfully, in a tense moment, means resistance is important. How do you resist the goad toward polarized hate, or scorn or whatever? By finding something redeemable about the Other.
Expanding the context of him reporting his experiences from his perceived context to ours is a good way to get the real pathology visible, but locating Robertson’s utterances solely in the racist timeline elides the rest of what’s there, now.
It’s treating the whole problem like it’s just one of its own parts. As though the problem of racial incarceration disparity is just in the police, or in the courts.
This reminds me of all the flame-crap around evolution back in the oughts. Same disdain and superiority, same provable wrongness on the loser’s side, and the same willful ignorance of the actual lived reality from where the disdained on were speaking.
The difficulty for me, real me not character in thought problem analogy me, is I keep seeing everyone in these polarized shit-storms as pathetic and deserving of compassion.
Having a fix available and trying to fix something by comprehending it are really different things.

[MPAVictoria:] Skippy, so is denying blacks the right to live in white neighborhoods mistreatment? Is a black person hanging from his neck until dead mistreatment? I am curious just how racist you are.

I already can tell how snotty you are by your foolish questions. But they do cause me to be curious about how bad your reading comprehension is:

#33 The grotesque impositions of Jim Crow laws …

As for grievance, Lord knows blacks have plenty of reasons.

#56 Jim Crow laws obviously operated to keep blacks impoverished …

Mao Cheng Ji has it right. It is entirely possible to gladly see the back of institutionalized discrimination …

#71 … a grotesque legal regime …

Isn’t that clear enough for you?

John @76 “They say and do things, and you infer what they think on the basis of what they say.”

Yes, but the context matters. His context is: these days blacks blame whites, but back in the day blacks and ‘white trash’ used to work together on fields, side by side, and there was no animosity between them. I don’t know to what extent it’s true, but this is, apparently, how he remembers it. If it’s true, it’s interesting, btw. Reminds me of the movie called Matewan, but I’m not sure to what extent that one is true either.

Now, you choose to ignore his context and place this one phrase in the context of Jim Crow. And from that you infer what he thinks. For all I know you may be right, but the method seem a bit tendentious.

Uh oh, I think I might have broken something. Throwing in a tag to fix things, hopefully

And it gives progressives prior restraint on his speech, because what you ask of him is to not say anything on Certain Topics without effectively clearing it with progressives first.

I can see how that was irresistible, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Up until that point I thought there was a small chance that this guy might be for real.

Up until that point I thought there was a small chance that this guy might be for real.

You notice how there’s this continuous linking thread in all the posts about people are black boxes and we — that is to say, “Hey Skipper” — have no way of guessing what goes on inside other people’s heads?

He’s for real. This is how the world appears to him, because this is what he can do and he believes he’s normal. They’re always for real, and it’s always the same problem.

It seems to be a standard enough statement from a specific type of conservatism (as TNC wrote about among African Americans as well – without the ‘there was no mistreatment’, obvs)

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/05/-this-is-how-we-lost-to-the-white-man/306774/

It seems wrong and stupid to me, but I dont see why people cant be wrong and stupid without the outrage machine being turned into overdrive. I agree it’s not a free speech issue, but its (to my mind) just another example of the tiresome phenomenon of everything offensive becoming the object of a boycott/letter writing campaign/ten minutes of hyperventilating.
It’s like that time people became offended that Islamic Jihad (!!) engaged in an anti semitic protest; people expect an ex sharecropper from the Jim Crow South who gave up drinking after he kicked his family out of the family house in a drunken rage, found God and now stars in a reality TV show with no clear point on some marginal TV channel to be a figurehead for racial enlightenment?

“Maybe you want to say that it’s not such a big deal that he said something wrong.”

I want to say that I read his rant and I sort of get it; a part of it anyway: dunno about ‘everybody happy and singing ode to joy’. But the white trash and the poor blacks, I don’t see any reason for them to despise each other; not then, not now.

But that just what changes it from race hatred to some different kind of hatred. The things you wrote above ‘whites’ grievance against blacks’, ‘blacks’ grievance against whites’, it exposes it as bad framing.

The fact that some of the whites are, basically, in the same situation, working the same field, so they are not the issue. So, then, it’s not the black vs white, but something else.

But I see that the premise of ‘the white trash used to be getting along the blacks fine’ is being challenged now (surprisingly late in the thread), if only to the extent of “avoid them as much as possible”, which is unpleasant but perhaps still better than bitterness the what’s-his-name guy is complaining about.

I guess I’m just very bad at explaining.

But what about the story of the battle of Matewan, and similar events? Granted, it’s not the deep South. 1920s, West Virginia. I googled it and found this:

According to David Corbin in his classic study of the West Virginia miners, Life, Work and Rebellion in the Coal Fields:

Armed and organised, the striking miners unleashed their rage upon the Baldwin-Felts guards. They hid in the hills and sniped at individual guards, and squads of miners attacked companies of Baldwin-Felts men. In one instance, miners surrounded a camp of guards during the night, cleared away the underbrush, and silently waited till dawn. When the guards awoke and began preparing breakfast, the miners opened fire, killing 13 to 15 of them… The miners blew up the tipples of operating mines and the trains carrying coal that had been mined by scabs. They met trains that were bringing strikebreakers to the strike zone and forced the potential scabs to evacuate–an action that often pitted black strikers against black strikebreakers and immigrant strikers against immigrant strikebreakers. The solidarity of black and white, Protestant and Catholic, immigrant and native miners was unbreakable.

Is it all BS, commie lies? I don’t really know, I only watched the movie. Or maybe the conventional wisdom is not entirely true.

John, as simple as you think your argument to be, all you are left with, absent unfounded inference is that, based on his personal experience, life in general was no worse for black sharecroppers than white.

You ask why he would bring it up in the first place. Of course he has a reason, but just because you infer what it is doesn’t mean you know what it is, no matter how simple the argument.

I know I’m repeating myself here, but I infer — and hey if you can do it, why can’t I — that he is contrasting the the moral fibre of African Americans now vs. then, and he thinks in that regard, as counterintuitive is it may seem, African Americans were better off then, and that our welfare policies, intended to ameliorate our past sins instead made things worse by creating a culture of dependency which always brings with resentment.

That implication is obvious to me, requires reading absolutely nothing into his words that isn’t there, and doesn’t put me at risk of falsely accusing someone of something particularly nasty. (A reluctance that MCAVictoria obviously, among others, obviously doesn’t share).

As progressives, I understand you disagree with his conclusion. But regardless of the truth of what he said, none of it is racist.

Unless you are bound and determined it be.

“Even so, when a celebrity who is held up as a kind of cultural exemplar by the right fires his mouth off in an interview, a certain amount of push-back from the left is to be expected”

Yeah that’s fair enough, though I think if this is the rights idea of a cultural exemplar then the left are on an ever quickeing march to victory ! tbh

Hey Skipper @ #127
“based on his personal experience, life in general”
Don’t you see the problem with this? You can’t generalize from limited personal experience.

My initial response to reading Robertson’s comments was kind of “well, that wasn’t as bad as I thought,” but when I read it carefully and noticed the stuff about welfare and entitlements, then I realized he was specifically saying “I can generalize from this” which actually is objectionable.

John Holbo @ #90

Exactly – my point is that even calling moral confabulation (a nice term which, in this case, indicates perfect analysis wouldn’t be adaptive – it certainly seems to be working for Robertson right now!) a “revision” would seem to indicate to some that it’s intentional. I know you’re not saying that, but throughout this thread we’ve had people insist that calling something a non-truth implies lying – So.

Well unfortunately MPAV we’re stuck with defining “use” of racial slurs.
It’s still in there, in “n-word”, being used, just there’s no evidence in the transcript.
The algorithm won’t find it.
Given any symbolic descriptor (N) in any semiotic construct (U), we can determine its effectiveness as container of thought by how well it carries thought across the isolating divides that separate individual consciousnesses.
So from “nigger” we get, depending on the user, forms of cruel hierarchical identification, or assertions of rejection of those hierarchies.
Strom Thurmond v. NWA. What’s behind the word carried to the hearer.
From “the n-word” we get distance only. Still carrying thought, just a little farther away. It’s fine with me that you don’t want to use the word in normal conversation, I approve of that actually, not that that matters.
But if you want to bust somebody for being racist in their speech, you should be able, in my view, to say “He said ‘nigger’!” without squirming. And then proceed.
You say “F you” I say “Fuck you”. We both said the same thing, only yours required a little puzzle-solving before we got to it.
“Caca” which is actually baby-spanish for “shit”, “shoot” which is actually “shit” with its Sunday school dress on.
The people most likely to have avoided the use of the word “nigger” during the abysmal days of legally institutionalized racial discrimination were the people most directly responsible for the power hierarchies maintaining that peculiar condition. One of a few reasons it’s nauseating and infantile to pretend you’re doing anything about the suffering inherent in racial injustice by avoiding the word itself while using a euphemism that still expresses the word..
It’s the semantic version of having a mixed-race president. As if that’s tangible progress. Which it is, but…
Making people – not the noun’s people the users – feel better about themselves in regard to things that otherwise make them feel bad. That’s its euphemistic purpose.
It’s like that little hand-waving thing people used to do, at least in California, around smokers smoking. An empty signal of cultural superiority.

@Hey Skipper

“I lived in Democratic Kampuchea throughout the Pol Pot years, and I never saw a single person mistreated. Not one.”

“I was in the USSR the whole time Stalin was party leader, and I never knew of anyone who died of anything but natural causes. Not one.”

“I was a Girondist pamphleteer in Paris during 1793 and 1794, ducking conscription due to disagreements with the authorities, (so you know I’m not a Jacobin shill), while the French turned the war with Austria completely around. I never saw anybody get mistreated. Not one. Not even on the battlefield.”

You honestly think that these could be the words of anything but an apologist for a terror regime? Why else would they bother to say that they saw “not one” person mistreated, if not to say that the accusations of wrongdoing are not justified? I mean, jeeze, it’s not like mistreatment of people is such a rarity in the world.

Holbo-
Not logically, but psychologically this is natural (not inevitable). If you are telling yourself some story about how you didn’t do this thing you really did, because it’s too psychologically painful to admit
You’re ignoring my response to this, already delivered repeatedly. What Robertson’s delivering is an expression of a people’s grievance, not with the accusations of racism alone, but with the ensuant treatment of them, by those who feel no complicity, and identify exclusively with the victims.
In the case of Robertson, blacks under the detritus of slavery codified in Jim Crow. Which I don’t think you’re incorporating into your view. Can’t get at them racists of yore, so we’ll get their children. Unless they express remorse, to a certified panel of remorse experts.
–
and if there are people out there telling the story that you did this thing you have now convinced yourself you couldn’t possibly have done
Or, more aptly, done in the manner you’re accused of, for the reasons you’re accused of. With the contextual background that’s assumed in the narrative of accusation. And again, with the ensuant action that comes from, and gets justified by, those assumptions. Which again, I don’t think you’re interested in, because they make the story too complicated.
–
…your revisionism can’t stop short of inventing some story about how they are all lying. They’ve got it in for you. You are the victim here
Lying and believing at the same time they’re telling the truth. Because the truth is complex and won’t fit into a simple binary-produced package. And they do have it in for the target of their contempt, clearly.
You ignore the “victims become perps” because it deflates all that righteous disdain, it’s the same with most of the heinous things people get up about – the abused become abusers til the cycle’s broken.
Sadistic punishment can break the cycle sometimes, but it has to be so thoroughly incapacitating it becomes something else. Execution’ll do it too. But healing’s the one, the only way through that doesn’t stop at cathartic immediate gratification.
Watching someone suffer who’s harmed you is fun! Who cares what happens to him otherwise?
Which is pretty much the original perp mentality.
–
the victim of them casting themselves as the victims!
Or in this case the victim of their audience accepting the casting design, and more or less passively acting on it, or refusing to step in.
You don’t think there’s ever been legitimately grieving people, blinded by grief, who fucked up in their reaction to its perceived cause, and created further suffering, with all its attendant justifications for further suffering, and on into the dark…? Plus sympathetic supporters backing them up. Straying a little from Robertson’s utility as symbol, where the reaction, as Hey Skipper keeps insisting, is mostly from what he calls progressives, and my friend Jim calls liberals. I don’t call em anything.
I think there’s been some literature around the idea of legitimate grief as motivation leading to deepening shit.
–
This isn’t some logical binary. It’s just a natural dynamic
Getting tarred and feathered tends to make the tarree inarticulate for a while. A continuous threat of further t&f-ing helps sustain that, to the delight of those gratified by the visible suffering of the, in their minds and hearts, deserving.
Inarticulate testimony is still pretty much considered a sign of guilt.
The righteous responders to Robertson don’t just want him to shut up, they certainly don’t want him to get enlightened any further than they are, they want him to suffer, and it’s frustrating for them if he isn’t. So they vent.
Someday maybe there’ll be software that will give people access to the private lives of cultural villains, and that sick hunger for catharsis can satiate itself on their degradation.

Belmont you’re on a roll, and I am loving it, but you probably said it all up at comment 52.

Contempt is the signifier

As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible —William Blake

It’s about establishing a community that sneers. The sneering, the disguising of the contempt behind the skillset of analytic philosophy, the appreciative audience. Some people just like to sneer at inferiors.

Besides being perhaps the ugliest of expressions (but the complicity in sin builds communities), I have always considered it a horrible waste of time and a self-degradation.

Or, to put a finer point on it:

Get off the cross. We could use the wood.

The welfare state was an all too weak answer to the culture of dependency created by the triumph of capitalism.

I’d offer a slightly different take:

“White folks who got cheap homes and cheap educations out of the GI Bill? They earned it. Black folks who couldn’t get into segregated suburbs and segregated universities? Well, they got welfare later and it screwed ’em up.”

The idea that the economic advancement of white Americans in the post-WW2 years — the Papa Duck childhood years — wasn’t through a massive amount of government handouts is absurd. It’s hidden behind the fact that this welfare system handed out cheap homes and cheap degrees.

The idea that the economic advancement of white Americans in the post-WW2 years — the Papa Duck childhood years — wasn’t through a massive amount of government handouts is absurd. It’s hidden behind the fact that this welfare system handed out cheap homes and cheap degrees.

This is what makes talk about the descendants of poor whites as victims is absurd. Sure, victims can also be perpetrators, but not beneficiaries. Even taking into account whatever treatment is “ensuant” to accusations of racism, whites (including myself) are materially better off today because of past racial discrimination.

Admittedly, whites descended from yankees tend to be as ignorant of that reality as their southern counterparts.

Hey Skipper,

Presumably you’re beyond shame, but maybe it’d do you well to read this article, courtesy of TNC:

“The corpse of 16-year-old Freddie Moore, his face showing signs of a severe beating, hands bound, remained hanging for at least 24 hours from a metal girder on the old, hand-cranked swing bridge spanning Bayou Lafourche.

Hanged by the neck the night of Oct. 11, 1933, in a mob lynching, the black youth had been accused in the death of a neighbor, a white girl …

Arrested Oct. 10, 1933, in the slaying days earlier of Anna Mae LaRose, a 15-year-old girl who was his friend, Moore was pulled from the parish jail in Napoleonville the next night by an angry mob of 50 to 200 armed and unmasked people who had the prison keys.

Some accounts say the lynchers were unknown and from out of town, as far away as New Orleans, while others say the mob was known to authorities. A coroner’s jury, impaneled by then-parish Coroner Dr. T.B. Pugh, said Moore “met death by a mob of unknown persons,” according to news accounts.

After being hauled from the jail, Moore was brought to the field where LaRose’s body was found, according to an Oct. 14, 1933, account in the black-owned New Orleans newspaper, The Louisiana Weekly. With a rope around his neck and clothes stripped to his waist, the teen was then marched, while being beaten, from the murder scene to the bridge and subjected to a branding iron whenever he fell.

Hanging from his body, a sign offered the final indignity: “Niggers Let This Be An Example. Do-Not-Touch-In 24 Hr. Mean it.”

As white people reviewed the scene on the bridge and black residents were warned to stay away, Moore’s body remained within sight of a school and the venerable St. Philomena Catholic Church, its spire above the fray.”

So, when your friend says he ain’t never seen no negro ever done any wrong, please stop for a second and please, please try to consider that maybe, just maybe, he’s attempting to whitewash some of the United States’ most horrific people?

Otherwise, you come off as the type of person who, when MLK was shot, went “well, he was a black man who was doing things that upset people. Just an observation.” Statements, even ostensibly descriptive ones, are chosen for a reason, and you shouldn’t try to feed people bullshit and expect them to take you seriously.

Maybe it’s just me, but my impression from the start was that the media response to Deen and Robertson was very different. The Robertson backlash-to-the-backlash was much louder than the backlash. The final outcome was the most likely one from the start, and everyone knew it. Critics seemed to be more motivated by a sense of obligation (and, sure, ratings and page views, but the other side was getting more of both) than any thirst for (unattainable) vengeance. It’s like the response to Westboro Baptist Church–counter-protestors have no hope that WBC is going away, they just think that hate should be met with something other than silence–to let them know that the rest of us aren’t going away either.

Deen seems like a much better example of scalp-taking. Especially since Deen paid a higher price for a lesser sin–she stumbled into racism, while Robertson was intentionally looking to start trouble.

John Holbo at 5:10 am-

You used “the n-word”, otherwise thanks.

@Mao

“Would it be stupid to imply (or state directly) that you believe that some things were indeed better back in the day?”

In this context, yes. I mean, you could observe that climate change was less advanced and more reversible in 1960 than now, and that as African Americans suffer the same ill effects of climate change as do others, they must therefore have been better off than they are now, but frankly that would be asinine. Waxing nostalgic about blacks picking cotton and singing happy songs is racist nonsense, and I can’t see why you’re so determined to find a defense for it.

Shorter Skippy: I am not the bigot! YOU are the bigot!

TO THE SKIPPER:

At one point do you want to step out from the stance where you are inferring this and that about he Duck Man, and therefore you are not being ‘racist’, but merely are inferring things from this 3rd party. You insulate yourself from him. Sort of a version of “some people say (but not me)”.

So to clarify, what do you believe:

Have government programs destroyed the american family? Especially poor people’s?

Would a higher minimum wage help the poor?

Are gay people going to hell? Are they disease-carrying vermin (you know what I mean, carrying on like animals, and bestiality and all)?

Does the lack of ‘Moral Fiber’ in our poor people explain their circumstances?

Would poor people be better off if the went to church more often and were more godly?

I want to know what YOU believe, at some point. I think we are all clear about what the Duck Man believes.

I can’t believe you have read this whole thread and missed the point by about as much as waiting at the train station for your ship to sail.

Nah. I made a pretty simple point, re your ongoing strictures against “inferencing” [sic], and your subsequent claim about what you can get out of what Duckie said while “reading absolutely nothing into his words that isn’t there”. See, like me here: just quoting you straight is all. I’m still wondering how you’re abiding by that standard and still managing to shit out something about “moral fibre”.

Skipper, you keep saying my simple argument is really bad. What is bad about it, if I may ask? (I’m a philosopher, I can take it!)

I know you are a philosopher (coincidentally, I happened to be in Singapore a few weeks ago), so I am sure you can take it.

I don’t have time at the moment to construct my response fully, but it will follow from this, which is my heavy equipment operator definition:

An argument is a connected series of statements in order to establish a proposition.

I think your statements are not connected, are self-referential, assume facts not in evidence, and reject fact in evidence.

= = = HeySkipper @ 6:28 PM – …assume facts not in evidence… = = =

Eagerly awaiting the facts in evidence concerning “moral fibre”.

Cranky

I’ve watched the show a few times and had a few chuckles. It’s a funny show! And it was always obvious to me that there was something a bit more sinister beneath the surface.

What’s fascinating to me about this thread of comments is that the back-and-forth with Skipper (and to some degree, Ron) is like a microcosm of many white peoples’ failure to grasp the basic concepts of white privilege and structural/institutional racism. Skipper’s continued insistence that Phil’s comments can in no way be construed as racist is a textbook example. He (and I am rather sure he is a “he”) doesn’t want to acknowledge the cultural context of Phil’s remarks, or the impact of his childhood as a white kid in the Deep South.

All whites, even poor whites in Louisiana during Jim Crow, benefited from white privilege. Phil strongly implied that there was no difference between growing up black or white in Louisiana, which is a ludicrous implication. This is simply obvious. It is plainly what he meant, and it is at the very least ignorant and dismissive, if not an outright lie.

It’s probable he would also think Newt Gingrich’s remarks a couple years a go about telling the NAACP they should be demanding paychecks (i.e. jobs) instead of food stamps utterly non-racist also. Or Reagan’s famous “strapping young bucks buying T-bone steaks”.

I am sure Phil is fun to hang out, drink beer and hunt with. That in no way means he does not hold racist/denialist beliefs.

Why does Skipper feel such a strong need to defend an obviously ignorant or disingenuous statement such as Phil’s? He even seems to defend Phil’s manifest disgust with gay people as non-homophobic. Why do so many backflips and contortions in order to defend a multi-millionaire?

Also, to label condemnations of racism with the Orwellian term “thoughtcrime” seems a bit much, isn’t it? It’s not like Phil faced any really negative consequence other than strong condemnation. He’s just fine. And racist.

I think your statements are not connected, are self-referential, assume facts not in evidence, and reject fact in evidence.

+ If you accept an argument it’s because you can’t see any flaws in it.
+ if you reject an argument it’s because you can see flaws in it.
+ if an argument is false it has flaws
+ if an argument is true it does not have flaws.

But there’s a gap. “you can [or can’t] see flaws” is not the same thing as “it has [or does not have] flaws”. This is where mistakes creep in: people make the leap from “can’t see flaws” to “doesn’t have flaws” or from “can see flaws” to “does have flaws”… but sometimes people see things that aren’t there, or don’t see things that are there.

And you check the same thing again and you’ll see the same thing again. Whether what you see is what’s there or not.

… my point is, “what you think of an argument” is the same damn thing as “whether you think the argument’s true”.

[how, then, do you spot your own errors, given that if you could see your errors you wouldn’t have made them? with extreme care and a careful ear to what others tell you. If you move your head just right you’ll be able to see the faint glint where the error catches the sun at just the right angle. Otherwise they’re invisible.]

Shorter Roy: Was Jim Crow racist? Who can say? I am however extremely brave to raise the question.

Layman-
Waxing nostalgic about blacks picking cotton and singing happy songs is racist nonsense
Perspectives which begin by praising the happy, singing, cotton-picking Negros of one’s youth are not likely to be particularly good starting points
Kay? Doesn’t change anything at all. Relevance-wise. For me.
MPAV-
My mom was in the NAACP. My dad was a liberal from way back, and before that kind of a wobbly-sympathetic socialist.
I love both of them for their principles, and the way they put them in front of me without dogmatic force.
It’s probably why I keep trying to stick up for people I think are getting unfairly picked on. As opposed to fatuous smug fools pimping thoughtless dogma.
My own awareness of the horrors of inhuman mistreatment, in the world of today or in the past, aren’t really an issue here, but there’s no reasonable logical way to get to something that doesn’t exist in me from anything I wrote above.
Unless you’re already pretty much just making things up higgledy-piggledy, in order to make yourself feel better.

I think there tend to be good reasons for political correctness, bad reasons for incorrectness, with genuine funniness being one of the few good ones, but I know that a lot of black writers say desegregation harmed black communities. You can google it!

@178: And you’re bending over to ridiculous lengths to defend bad things, and grossly insulting a hell of a lot of people in the process. We’re supposed to take insult after insult from you – because we talked in a way that you didn’t like about someone not in the (virtual) room?

John: I’m on the road, and my travel hasn’t left me enough time to put together a full reply, but here is one way I believe your argument to be weak: you are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

Mr. Robertson is a devout Christian. Your implications — which amount to invented facts, completely ignore that.

One of Christianity’s main tenets is to love thy neighbor as thyself (NB: I am not a Christian).

Your argument, as presented so far, completely ignores that fact, yet to be complete your argument requires taking it into account, or explaining why not.

If I was in your philosophy class and was to try to pull such a thing on an exam, I wouldn’t expect to get a good grade.

“One of Christianity’s main tenets is to love thy neighbor as thyself (NB: I am not a Christian).”
obvious troll is obvious

What do you want, a cookie?

Roy hey Skippy just said the reason Robertson was telling the truth is that Christians love their neighbors. I simply can not make fun of him enough.

John: as it does for me. Actually the Feds now use that to judge insanity in US cases. And it has worked well in my 15 years of judging lawyers on malpractice. You would not believe how many. Eliminating the effect of reasonable doubt but balancing that against a skeptical assessment of preponderance is interesting but surprisingly effective in making findings as reported to the WI Supreme Court. You can pretty much know what the evidence supports, even if some doubts remain.

Devout Christian? Next time someone interviews Phil Robertson, please ask him whether he thinks his soul will pass through the eye of a needle.

John Holbo @202,

Isn’t Roy engaging in that moral critique of your critique? It works both ways. It’s a subtle form of suppression — at least the attempt to suppress. Similar to those who scream it’s racist to discuss race in America.

That bubbled up from the underbelly of America massively in the aftermath of the Martin/Zimmerman trial.

The mere discussion of America’s history of racism is called “racist” by likely racists in an attempt to silence critique of their pathologies.

We shouldn’t fall for it.

Well it was aimed at me I believe so maybe I am not impartial but it seemed to me that he was 100% serious.

I’m not sure what Hey Skipper is up to, but I’m a bit surprised that no one else seems to have noticed that his definition of an argument (“an argument is a connected series of statements in order to establish a proposition” [currently 169]) comes verbatim from the Monty Python argument sketch.

Maybe I’m reading too much fiction these days. And reacting emotionally first and intellectually second. My take on his use of the term “thought-crime” was as a means of rejection of knee-jerk, accusatory responses and the misreading of, first, Robertson’s position and intent, and secondly, his, H.S.’s, on the part of the alleged thought-criminals.
He was being attacked by commenters who seemed, to me, and assumedly to him, to be operating almost solely from dogma and cant and behaviorist models of ethical comportment. Plus hunger for negative catharsis.
I don’t think he’s using it as pure Orwellian exposition, nor as a handy cudgel, but more like a wake-up device.
And I’d like to say that in addition to getting to sharpen some disused typing and composition skills, the real serious point of me being over here and yelling at y’all over there is I think polarization is dooming us. Us little folk anyway.
It’s been zapping around like a downed power line for years now. And people keep grabbing it. Without gloves on. And it looks more and more like intentional sabotage than an act of nature to me. Keep them hate-fires burning, and let’s you and him fight.
People who should be finding common ground are publicly disdainful of each other, and privately dismissive of the humanity of their opponents in this faked-up moral brawl. Robertson brings some of that stiffened by a sense of unjust attack assertion into the light, and zzzap! Here it is again.
Sooo, when somebody steps up to say an ameliorating word for the current negative terminal, I’m encouraged.
And when he’s met with all the previously iterated too many times crap above for essentially saying don’t scapegoat the dude for something he didn’t say, I’m discouraged.
And prompted to enter the fray in that corner. While trying not to get pinned there. Because it isn’t my corner, exactly. It’s his.
Look how swiftly and facilely I kept getting pushed into the racists’ locker room.
Personally, I’d rather go out onto the field buck-naked than put on any of the uniforms on offer.
I’m not defending either Robertson or H.S.because I agree with their beliefs about race or sexual morality. In Robertson’s case because I don’t agree with him about homosexuality and because he didn’t say anything in GQ that I saw that made it certain how he sees race, specifically American black/white race relations.
And in H.S.’s case because he didn’t say anything about either of the flammable topics everybody’s throwing lit matches at, directly. All it was was he started off saying people are putting hate speech in Robertson’s mouth and then busting him for hate speech.
The rest is internet history.

@ Plume 200:

I like your comment about Christianity. I have often noted that Conservatives love Christianity in the following manner:

They love the Old Testament, with all of the blood and guts, and crime and punishment. And the good Lord from time time to time slaughters non-believers from above and provides guidance on who one is allowed to kill and for what reason.

Then they skip over the Jesus parts.

And on to revelations where the Bloodbath returns and our Good Lord begins slaughtering the non-believers from above.

————————–

But for some reason, no one seems to follow the dietary laws…

Re: It’s like the recent discussion of South Africa: the racial component is taken down, but things don’t change much:

Not really. It can at least be argued, in good faith, that South African Blacks were better off in the apartheid era. I think that argument is *wrong*, but in itself it’s neither risible nor racist. There are concrete ways in which Black people in SA are worse off today (their life expectancy is shorter, for one). In America, the case is very different. On just about every actual indicator, Black Americans *are* much better off today than in the Jim Crow south. Not only are they more free and able to participate in society, but they have also made major socioeconomic advances. In America, you actually can’t say what Phil Robertson said, about race, and have it be at all credible. It’s symptomatic either of severe ignorance, or racism.

Re: Jesus, of course, never talks about homosexuality, or abortion,

He never talks about nuclear war either, but it’s inferable from things he did say (specifically, the ‘thou shalt not kill’ bit), and so is his opinion about abortion. Such was certainly the opinion of his followers starting in the middle of the first century. Some of the earliest Christian texts we have do explicitly condemn abortion.

I confess to not knowing what he thought about homosexuality.

@Hector St. Clare 223,

Hmmm. Interesting argument. So, anything Jesus did NOT mention is fair game to label as an abomination?

That’s pretty weak. One would think that the single biggest obsession among right-wing Christians would have chapter and verse to support it.

Yet, Jesus never says word one about it.

As for abortion. Millions and millions of zygotes are lost each year due to “natural” abortions — miscarriages, etc. etc. If one takes it literally that the god of the Levant intervenes in our lives, he is the mother of all abortionists. And, if one takes the books of the bible literally, the mother of all murderers. He killed Lot’s wife for merely turning around to look at the genocide he had already committed on the cities of the plain. He ordered Joshua to kill every man, woman and child in Jericho for simply failing to bow down before his greatness. He slaughtered tens of thousands of Egyptians just to glorify himself, as he “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” so he would change his mind and NOT let the Jews go.

As in, he already had won. Pharaoh said go. But that wasn’t good enough for the ogre god of the Levant. He needed to teach the Egyptians — who were his creation as well, right? . . . . he needed to teach them a lesson they’d never forget.

In short, if you take a look at the bible, read it “literally,” see the mountains of blood, gore, the jealous, vindictive rage, the irrational, full-on insanity and lack of rationale for most of what its god does . . . . it’s incredible that anyone would have the gall to use it to justify their hatreds, bigotries and ignorance. It’s actually laughable, given the text.

OTOH, if you read the bible poetically, as allegory, myth, metaphor, you can garner beautiful things, wonderful things, the stuff of great art and literature. But take it literally, which fundamentalists do, and you’re in a trap of madness. As in, it’s completely mad to use it as a moral or ethical guide in the 21st century.

“There wasn’t anything racist about his observations, and there is nothing racist about thinking welfare policies have contributed to the breakdown of the black family.”

Meh.
There are surely sophisticated, well thought through arguments on the role welfare dependancy has played in family breakdown – so if Robertson offered an intelligent, qualified argument of course he could make that case without being racist. That doesnt seem to be what he has done though, afaict. (Ya dont think increased incarceration has played a role in family breakdown !!!!?)
I would assume he’s pretty racist, by any reasonable contemporary standard – but even leaving that aside he appears to be an idiot. Why should we treat rich, well educated (he has a masters degree afaik) idiots with kiddy gloves?
Good for him if he can get away with it, and I understand that roy b and all the other class warriors will never see a rich, white bigot they dont want to cover in bubble wrap. But I dont understand why everyone else should take his opinions or nostalgia seriously, or pat him on the back for managing to get stuck on the *first* track in a train of thought ?

@Ronan,

Well said.

There are a host of “degreed” idiots in this country. Ted Cruz strikes me as a good example. All the blessings of an elite education and he still doesn’t know how to think through the implications of ideology. IMO, no one would be a right-wing ideologue if they could do that.

@roy 230,

That was a lot of rhetorical fluffing just to say you think we shouldn’t discuss race in America. Methinks you need a good editor. Maxwell Perkins is dead, but there should be someone out there who can slice and dice to get down to a recognizable core.

It’s quite obvious that we still have a ton of work to do in digging through the history. Not just on race, but class, too. IMO, the latter is actually more important right now than the former, because it encompasses it and would be the very definition of inclusiveness.

We should start with a reevaluation of the shift to capitalism itself. Start with the secret history of primitive accumulation, show how and why Adam Smith and other classical political economists told fairy tales to help the rich, and then reverse engineer it.

When it comes down to it, “exploitation” is the real problem. And the most vulnerable are the most exploited. Blacks and other minorities, like First Nation peoples, were and still are the most vulnerable, and still the most exploited. But with capitalism being THE main weapon against the vulnerable, and the main system of exploitation, it makes sense to concentrate on its dismantling and replacement with systems that do NOT exploit — the vulnerable or anyone else.

Right there, you’ve solved a goodly bit of the race problem in America and removed the hammer from the hands of the exploiters. You’ve basically ended them as a class, period.

“We all would have been far better off if the Romans had picked a different religion to spread throughout their empire. Or, better yet, no religion at all.”

And well said Plume. We seem to be on the same wavelength.

I sometimes mention to Christians that the Roman Empire adopted the Christian Faith at the time of Constantine, and that failure to worship the Christian God after that time was often punished by death. And at that point, Christians were not a persecuted minority whose faith was spread across Europe by some act of God by the devoted. Their faith was pushed out to the reaches of the empire at the end of a roman sword.

If there were no Roman Empire, there would be no Christianity as we know it.

Needless to say, many Christians are not aware of any of this. They like the parts where the Romans fed them to the Lions, and that’s the part they’ll keep, thanks.

That was a lot of rhetorical fluffing just to say you think we shouldn’t discuss race in America.

Emphasis on the we. The other side is allowed to talk about race. Our side isn’t.

you know what I mean

I have the same problem with the phonetic spelling. I’m not sure (I’ve only read the 3 books I found in thrift stores), but I believe she used it only for the 1st 2 of her 4 novels and the 1st of her 2 anthropology books, then dropped it.

Re: Hmmm. Interesting argument. So, anything Jesus did NOT mention is fair game to label as an abomination?

Christians who believe that gay sex is a sin generally do so on the basis of natural law, on the basis of the Letters of Paul (which definitely mention certain homosexual practices) and the Letters of Jude (which may), and on the authority of church tradition. There’s a lot that Jesus didn’t specifically express opinions on, but fortunately we have other sources to inform our moral reason. (Again, I’m more or less agnostic about the moral status of homosexuality, per se, and I don’t consider it really my business to opine on it).

MVAV (et al):

You provide a perfect example of the dangers of promiscuously slanging people; you do it often enough, and you stop thinking about what the terms mean.

Already I have presented you with the irony of accusing someone of being a racist for arguing that someone else isn’t. To review:

racist |ˈrāsist|, noun, a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another.

Seems a pretty clear, straightforward, definition. So to call me a racist, a pretty serious charge, I must have said something to demonstrate that any particular race is superior to blacks.

And, what, precisely, would that be?

For that matter, what, precisely, and please, by all means do not stint on justifying your response, did Robertson say to that effect?

You then further indulge your reflex towards delegitimizing insults by accusing Robertson of being homophobic.

Again, to review:

homophobia |ˌhōməˈfōbēə|, noun, an extreme and irrational aversion to homosexuality and homosexual people.

Perhaps a little less clear and straightforward. After all, it implies there is a rational aversion to homosexuality and homosexuals.

Now how could that possibly be? Robertson would probably note that without promiscuous anal sex, the AIDS epidemic does not exist. (over 15,000 deaths in the US alone in 2010). Perhaps, just perhaps, you might understand that, from his point of view, that is problematic. Indeed, from his point of view all sexual promiscuity is problematic. You might want to argue that he is wrong, but I suspect doing so successfully would be difficult. Particularly in light of this NYT article: A Resisted Pill to Prevent HIV. Given the monetary cost to society, and hecatombs of lives lost, that many gay men still fail to take even the most basic steps to avoid getting and spreading AIDS should make you wonder — at least it does me — whether an aversion to the promiscuous anal sex side of homosexuality is at all irrational.

Moreover, you wholly ignore what he explicitly said: that judging gays is Gods job, not his, and that he no more hates gays than any other sinners whose conduct will also put themselves at eternal risk.

Before you dismiss that with another thoughtless slur, consider this.

I hate smoking. It makes rooms and cars stink, which is bad enough. But if I am in the presence of smokers, it makes my clothes and hair stink, as well. Given that so few people smoke these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if you share my opinions. Certainly, many people do if you don’t.

Now, by your logic, that makes me a, oh, I dunno, a smokerophobic. I hate smoking and smokers.

But the latter doesn’t follow the former, does it? After all, it is entirely possible to hate smoking, but not hate smokers in the least.

Yet somehow you insist that Robertson, having said he hates homosexuality, also hates homosexuals. You have done that without any evidence, and at the same time completely disregarding analogous situations.

Please explain what seems to me to be a blatant contradiction.

(for some reason my previous comment did not post, and my re-attempt got flagged as a duplicate.)

You can’t really look at the Duck Man without understanding the context of the comments, and the racial/social dog whistles that they send out to their fellow travelers.

This quote below is from December 19th. It is a press release from the League of the South:

“The League of the South, the premier Southern Nationalist organization, supports Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty in his Biblical condemnation of sodomy”

The League of the South is this very interesting southern secessionist group, who are dedicated to the idea that the South was in the right during the Civil War, and would like to secede and restore the Confederacy. One of the most interesting defenses of Slavery in the 1800’s was that it was frequently mentioned in the Bible and so was therefore OK.

Is the Skipper going to allow me to infer that the League is a racist organization? Or am I being unfair to them, and making unfair inferences?

(by the way, I like the Skipper, he’s very game for this stuff!)

And here are some fine books you can find on these Southern Subjects:

http://dixienet.org/rights/all.shtml

“A Southside View of Slavery” may even be one that the Duck Man has read!

Wow Skippy. Just wow.
You need counselling.

Browsing/reading this thread has been, um, quite an experience…

Two unrelated things:
1) It’s about slavery, not what came after, but I recently saw Twelve Years a Slave. Quite powerful.
I’ve never seen ‘Duck Dynasty,’ know almost nothing about it and nothing about Robertson, but that *anyone* said what he said, as quoted by Layman @218, whether couched in autobiographical terms or not, is pretty astonishing. The whole tone of his remark, the images conjured (“singing and happy”), it’s like something one would expect to hear 50/60/70 years ago (and before that). It has resonances that go well beyond (supposed) reminiscence, and you have to be tone-deaf not to hear them. As for the rest of what Robertson said, I haven’t even bothered to find it. As to whether the entire media shd have come down on him as it apparently did, I’m not sure (I refer to JH @153), but that’s a separate issue.

2) OT (if there is such a thing on this thread): re Plume’s remark @231 on the perfidy of Adam Smith (the actual one, not the CT commenter of that name) — a journal that arrived in my mailbox the other day carries a learned article about Smith being opposed to severe inequality and high profits. I must confess I’ve read rather little of Adam Smith himself, but fwiw…

@LFC 253,

I’m reading The Invention of Capitalism right now, by Michael Perelman. He just demolishes Smith. It’s a really important book, and a sadly neglected one. In it you’ll find a Smith who contradicts himself quite a bit, but shows that his true allegiance was to capitalists and the rich, and sought legal protections and market structures to assure their privileges. Primitive Accumulation being the tool to that end, with its kicking people off their lands who once could self-provision. Because that just wouldn’t do for capitalists or capitalism. If people can grow their own food, make their own clothes, build their own homes, etc. and produce their own commodities when needed, there are no workers in the factories or consumers for capitalist goods.

Dependency. Again, capitalism created mass dependency on its products and services, and was and still is dependent on the lack of independence among the masses. And it, unlike all previous economic systems, survives only so long as consumer demand (dependency) increases.

The more we can fend for ourselves, the less power capitalists have over our lives. The more we control our own energy, our own food, water, clothes, etc. etc. . . . the less power they have over our lives. It’s not the government that creates dependency. It’s the people who managed to destroy self-provisioning, with the aid of government, all to drive the so-called “peasants” from their lands and home production spheres.

Smith was one of the people pushing hardest for that change, for the end to self-provisioning.

@Plume
I don’t know the Perelman book; thanks for mentioning.
(I won’t get into the substance of your comment, at least now, b/c I’m shutting off the computer for the night.)

fwiw I’m not a big believer in racist vs. not racist. It’s really more do you try not to be.

It is a good thing that Hey Skipper has pointed out the average CTers love of “slanging,” I hear it’s the hip and extreme thing for kids to do, these days! It’s certainly a lot better than making some similar-sounding and unwarranted accusation of potential legal import.

Getting back to this after losing CT for a couple days, my argument against what Robertson is doing is simply that he’s generalized from from his own experience to things he cannot possibly generalize against. Hey Skipper’s contention that people are generalizing their own experiences onto him is just flagrantly failing to engage with the argument.

Let’s look at that rhetorical trick also.

If I say “I don’t see an orange in this room” and somebody else says “I do see an orange in this room,” does not the record of an observation in the one case carry more weight than the simple failure to observe? (Please put aside the very serious and profound question of whether the orange is really an orange.) Does the “reasonable person” test in a court of law not count if one person is Special? We’re not talking about just generalizing our experiences to Robertson’s; we’re talking about the impact his comments make. The privilege we afford Robertson in making account for his experiences does not translate into a privilege in defining the situation for other people (the “happy blacks”), let alone the right to define it against countless other observers.

I agree that failure to observe alone doesn’t suffice to condemn, but when you consider the full context of Robertson’s statements, we can imagine that he wants them to be respected as cultural and political observations. Basically my reaction, right along, has been that this guy is not so harmless in that he seems willing to be reasonable. It’s harmful in the way that “not keeping weapons from one who is unwell” is harmful, though here the problem is merely a bit of obliviousness mixed in with a poor choice of targets. More concerning is the way in which people are falling over themselves to try to put a fig leaf over this sorry episode.

[Collin Street:] On the other hand:
+ Robertson claims that he never saw
+ CTers, using statistics, say that this is sufficiently implausible as to not be credible [with the implication that Robertson is lying about his experiences]

From MVAV #74: Now let us note that 355 blacks were lynched in Louisiana between 1882 and 1968.

That is the closes thing I can remember to a relevant statistic. Why MVAV is citing a period the vast majority of which is before Robertson was born is a real mystery. The relevant number is nine. What do you suppose the odds are that Robertson would witness a lynching?

[John Holbo:]Also, it’s not right to say that Skipper is on the receiving end of the insult and leave it at that. If it really matters to you, then you should note that he has called everyone else stupid liars and thought police and such Orwellian stuff.

I called everyone else — or even anyone else — stupid liars? Please do one of two things: quote me saying that, so I can apologize. Or, failing that, I will happily accept your apology for attributing to me things I did not say, or even hint.

I will cop to the “thoughtcrime” accusation, because it goes to what I believe is the very dark side of progressives: your notions of how society should be organized are correct because you hold them. Therefore, all disagreement with progressive notions can be laid to three causes — ignorance, stupidity, or evil (all of which have been on prominent display here). Therefore, when faced with someone who does not agree, there is a very strong tendency to delegitimize the speaker as evil. There is a reason why, for a great many people who aren’t progressives, “Orwellian” is associated with progressives. (see #77; I should have used more temperate language in making my point; I regret that I didn’t.)

As a non-progressive, I am continually amazed at how often progressives labeled criticism of Pres. Obama’s policies as racist. Just as here, with Robertson. He used his experiences to conclude that progressive policies caused a great deal of damage. He cannot be right, since progressive policies are, by definition, right. Therefore he must be either ignorant, stupid, or evil (where evil in this case is being racist, despite not having said a single syllable that in any way demeans blacks, or suggests whites are superior.)

No one said that progressive policies are always right. Not even close. As a former progressive, who now IDs well to the left of that, I can speak with confidence to the lack of confidence in any categorical “rightness” among liberals and progs. In fact, one of the most frustrating aspects about the center-left is its inability to firmly, without embarrassment, actually cop to the rightness of its own policy ideas. Liberals and progressives, in general — obviously, exceptions exist — seem to Woody-Allen their own beliefs to a degree we just don’t see among conservatives. They do nuance, complexity, uncertainty and neuroses. Conservatives do manicheanism, authoritarianism and psychoses.

In short, where the Dems are “liberal” you will find all too much hand-wringing about their liberalism. They even run from the word. Oftentimes, to borrow the bible again for a moment, you will find a lot of Peter claiming he didn’t know Jesus.

Where the Republicans are “conservative” you will find all too much apocalyptic certainty in their own righteousness. A certainty in their own sense of the apocalyptic. You rarely see any “conservative” worrying him or herself to death about the word and they don’t run from it.

Their policy ideas are for shit. But they at least commit to them without apology.

As for Robertson and the welfare state. He, of course, can’t make the case that it has hurt blacks or made them “dependent” upon anything, nor can he make the case that they were somehow better off under Jim Crow. Which is why he never even tried. Conservatives tend to just make statements, without bothering to actually pull up the data to support it, or show cause and effect. That’s a part of that “certainty” thing for them. It’s enough to just make the comment, etc. etc.

“I will cop to the “thoughtcrime” accusation, because it goes to what I believe is the very dark side of progressives”

There is your answer John. He was serious.

And, yes, I know about Godwin’s law. But, sometimes, subtext just needs to become text.

@bt 272,

Another observation: I often read conservatives online complaining about people on the left wanting to “impose” their views on others. Which, apparently, conservatives never do. You see, when a conservative tries to make a case for something, it’s only for the neutral, perfect, naturalj norm, so they don’t have to cop to attempting that imposition. It’s just the way things are and should always be. They already start at the First Ground, so any deviation from their views is an attempt to impose from left field, from waaay out there. Conservatives just “referee” as you mention.

Capitalism and free markets? They don’t have to justify what is naturally right, right? Even though capitalism and those so-called free markets are rather late on the scene to be considered “natural law.” Even though humans lived communally for their first 200,000 years, it’s just “natural” that we aggressively compete with one another over scarce goods, commercially, and divide the world among the haves and the have nots.

Marriage? Since it’s always been between one man and one woman — forgetting, of course, the thousands of years where it was between one man and many women, who had zero choice in the matter — they don’t have to justify their definition. Anything but their definition is an assault of decency, morality, natural law, the perfect and neutral ground of grounds.

Of course, there is no such thing as that perfect starting point of pristine neutrality. Everything is a position, contingent, subject to change and is change itself. Conservatives might believe that any deviation from their ideas goes against their god’s will, but that isn’t supported by logic, common sense or history.

Oh, well.

“I called everyone else — or even anyone else — stupid liars? Please do one of two things: quote me saying that, so I can apologize. Or, failing that, I will happily accept your apology for attributing to me things I did not say, or even hint.”

Well, this isn’t very tough. Let’s just look at the first 5 or so sentences you wrote in this thread.

“It is the proper response to manufactured outrage.”

Implication – the outrage expressed is not genuine, but artificial. Read: in giving outrage, people are lying about their actual feelings and motivations.

“It is obvious to anyone without an axe to grind”

Implication – not seeing things how I see them means you’re either stupid or lying to advance your own position.

“But you have absolutely no basis upon which to disagree with the factual elements of what he said; to do so amounts to, on precisely zero evidence, calling him a liar.”

Implication: you’re lying about him lying.

Stupid liar indeed…

“It is the proper response to manufactured outrage.”

Implication – the outrage expressed is not genuine, but artificial. Read: in giving outrage, people are lying about their actual feelings and motivations.

There you go “inferencing” again. It’s just not done, you know.

Also, though, skipper-dude, here’s a thing that you wrote:

One of Christianity’s main tenets is to love thy neighbor as thyself (NB: I am not a Christian).

Your [Holbo’s] argument, as presented so far, completely ignores that fact, yet to be complete your argument requires taking it into account, or explaining why not.

Hardly a Biblical expert, me, but I seem to have heard that this tenet of Christianity existed prior to 1965 just as much as after it. So two questions:

(1) Why does it not apply to devout Christians that supported segregation in exactly the same way that it applies to Phil Robertson, who of course is horrified, horrified!, at the injustices of Jim Crow?

(2) If it does apply in the same way, what follows? (Or is this one of those cases where all that follows from A is A?)

Remember, part of the Ten Commandments says Do not covet thy neighbor’s slave. It was assumed then that slavery existed. The god of the bible doesn’t condemn it.

Christians in America tried to use the bible to support slavery and anti-slavery positions. We should be able to assume that at least some Christians on both sides of the issue thought of themselves as “devout.”

Again, the conflict itself negates the use of the term as shield. The diversity of interpretation as to what constitutes “devout Christian” also negates the use of the term as shield. It has so many interpretations as to become meaningless. There are so many conflicts, battles, wars over doctrine, riots over doctrine, interpretation, heresy, orthodoxy — and a multitude of changes through the centuries regarding what is heresy and what is orthodox — its use as shield is absurd.

Try again.

[bt:] So I think that Skipper has started to boil his arguement down, and to show a little bit of what he believes:

–>That Phil Robertson is a Christian and a Preacher. So he could not possible have any bad intentions. And since we have never met him, and don’t know him, we cannot possibly know anything, or draw any inferences from what he has said.

If you are going to boil my argument down, the least you could do is boil my argument down, instead of making something up out of whole cloth and attributing it to me.

Here is what I really said:

[HS, #185 to John Holbo about a weakness in his argument:] Mr. Robertson is a devout Christian. Your implications — which amount to invented facts, completely ignore that.

One of Christianity’s main tenets is to love thy neighbor as thyself (NB: I am not a Christian).

Your argument, as presented so far, completely ignores that fact, yet to be complete your argument requires taking it into account, or explaining why not.

[On re-reading, I see I fell prey to ambiguous reference. The fact that I am referring to is Robertson’s Christianity, not one of Christianity’s main tenets. However, I’m not sure how much that matters, since Dr. Holbo used inference to create facts, while neglecting to use any significant facts about the man; one of which is Christianity as the non-denominational Robertson practices it. Indeed, Robertson might be manifestly guilty of failing to love his neighbor, but that is how one would demonstrate the validity of the inference, not the other way around.]

I’d love to know how you get from my pointing out what I believe is a weakness in John Holbo’s argument to my insisting “… we cannot possibly know anything, or draw any inferences from what he has said.”

Similarly with Plume: You [HS] made the claim that Robertson’s being a “devout Christian” was enough, all by itself, to change opinion here.

Really? Where? Surely you will be able to quote me on that, right? Heck, it doesn’t have to be a claim, even a hint will do.

No wonder you are so willing to succumb to Godwin’s law, because — just as with collectivists did with calling for Robertson’s defenestration — the only thing that matters is what you want to hear.

[Git:] Well, this isn’t very tough. Let’s just look at the first 5 or so sentences you wrote in this thread …

Both A&E and the Cracker Barrel quickly and completely caved without getting so much as a hint of an apology, not even an ifpology (h/t Harry Shearer) from Mr. Robertson.

Which indicates to me that a great many people decided that there was nothing there, that becoming outraged about what Robertson said required deciding for him what he meant, and insisting that certain opinions simply cannot be voiced. So when I said “manufactured outrage” I mean that the self-appointed censors created their own outrage.

Pope Francis, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. Phil Robertson, unconscionable homophobe.

Discuss.

But you have absolutely no basis upon which to disagree with the factual elements of what he said; to do so amounts to, on precisely zero evidence, calling him a liar.”

Implication: you’re lying about him lying.

Here is a perfect example of why you (collectively) need to stop it with inferencing and implicating. The only thing you succeed in doing is placating your own biases. I very clearly, explicitly, and frequently, said the accusations are baseless, that is say, you have no available evidence other than your inferencing and implicating to call him a liar, yet that is exactly what many here have done.

That is the very definition of a baseless accusation. And try as I might, I can’t find anywhere in my dictionary where I can get from “baseless accusation” to liar.

Based on your comment, in which every sentence starts with “implication”, doing so is positively addictive.

Unfortunately, it robs me — as it did to Robertson — of the ability to possess any meaning you do not grant me. That is how you manufacture outrage.

[Layman:] I’ll try to make this as simple as I can.

You say criticism of Robertson (e.g. that he’s a racist) is irrational in light of your claim (or is it Robertson’s claim?) that he’s a devout Christian. In other words:

– Robertson says he’s a devout Christian
– Devout Christians can’t be racist
– Therefore Robertson can’t be racist

How about making it simpler for both of us and doing as I do with all of you here: quoting directly, and responding directly to your quote. Because, as I said above, I am certain I made no such claim.

Indeed, even a superficial reading should be sufficient to understand I have never made any claim about Robertson’s state of mind regarding race, only that the outraged, based upon that interview, and allowing words to have the meanings they were born with, have no grounds for their outrage. That’s it. Period. Not that such grounds do not exist, only that you do not have them.

I’m sensing a pattern here.

Robertson may indeed be one of “those” Christians, I really have no idea. But since you have no evidence of that, and if there was there would be no trouble finding it, then there is at least the possibility that absence of evidence is, indeed, evidence of absence.

[js:] Hardly a Biblical expert, me, but I seem to have heard that this tenet of Christianity existed prior to 1965 just as much as after it. So two questions:

(1) Why does it not apply to devout Christians that supported segregation in exactly the same way that it applies to Phil Robertson, who of course is horrified, horrified!, at the injustices of Jim Crow?

I’m sorry, did I miss the part of this thread where the subject became about … devout Christians that supported segregation … ?

And I don’t know what … in exactly the same way that it applies to Phil Robertson … even means.

Give ’em hell, Skipper!

Ah, so evidently accusing someone of making “baseless accusations” isn’t meant to communicate anything about a person’s intelligence or character. Who knew? So I guess if I were to say, “Hey Skipper is a prodigious fount of bullshit,” I wouldn’t actually be communicating anything about his willingness to engage in prevarication or willfully ignore, or at least unwillingly fail to comprehend, the obvious.

It is me, roy b.
Two comments awaiting moderation, one edited for possible spam filter objection, which didn’t get through either.
Otherwise…?

A dead horse, perhaps. Or just one end of it.

But I’ll try another angle here:

There is no evidence, in the present or the past, that demonstrates Christian superiority in moral or ethical matters, nor as human beings in general. There is no evidence that shows them superior to atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, Taoists, Buddhists, Wiccans, Pagans, Hindus, Jews, Jainists, Deists, etc. etc.

It
doesn’t
exist.

The evidence doesn’t exist to demonstrate moral or ethical superiority for Christians. Nowhere. Nada. Zilch.

So why do you think we should factor in Robertson’s faith when it comes to assessing his comments? Why? Please bring the data, for once.

Now Leroy is making the same mistake as Hey Skipper. How, exactly, does one person’s line of response to Hey Skipper prove all his unwarranted accusations towards progressives in general?

I’ll save you the response and note the answer here: It doesn’t.

Henry Rollins really nailed this topic in his column today. You can google it!

I have to say I have much enjoyed watching this particular species of sophistry tangle up otherwise much more seasoned comment-thread warriors.

When I was a kid, as my mom slalomed through the aisles at Sack N Save, I could rack up rounds against the older kids on the solitary Street Fighter cabinet at the front of the supermarket. Just keep pressing the same move. Slide-kick. Over and over again. You might handily outlast people who actually were trying to play the game.

Roy Belmont is Atticus Finch?

Hey, Skipper,

“Which indicates to me that a great many people decided that there was nothing there, that becoming outraged about what Robertson said required deciding for him what he meant, and insisting that certain opinions simply cannot be voiced.”

“Here is a perfect example of why you (collectively) need to stop it with inferencing and implicating.”

In the first instance you infer things not said about A&E’s decision to reinstate Robertson. In the second instance, you say we must all stop inferring things not said. Both quotes are from the same post, 281.

Which is it? Are no inferences permitted? Or are they permitted for you, but not for others? Or are inferences with which you agree permitted, but other inferences not permitted?

In 185 you wrote:

“Mr. Robertson is a devout Christian. Your implications — which amount to invented facts, completely ignore that.

One of Christianity’s main tenets is to love thy neighbor as thyself (NB: I am not a Christian).

Your argument, as presented so far, completely ignores that fact, yet to be complete your argument requires taking it into account, or explaining why not.”

Several people, including me, have responded to this to show you that you’re wrong. Far from ignoring Robertson’s espoused Christianity, we have (at least provisionally*) accepted that espousal as fact, taken it into account, and discussed how it factors in considering Robertson’s remarks. What we say is, given the history of, and our experience of, people who claim Christianity, Robertson’s alleged Christianity isn’t much of a counter to his actual words here.

The reasonable thing for you to do at this point us to acknowledge that your criticism has been addressed. You don’t have to agree with the conclusion, of course.

* It occurs to me BTW that if inferring can’t be permitted, I’ve seen no reason to believe Robertson is a devout Christian. You say he is, but how can you know? Aren’t you just inferring it?

“To qualify as lying, the censorous expressor of self-created outrage would have to be conscious of doing that creation, then conscious they were delivering something to others they’d only made up.”

That’s called lying to yourself. The outrage expressor or the accuser tells themselves that they have genuine reason for their outrage, or that their accusation has some factual basis. But they (according to HS and you) don’t have any such basis, nor did they make an an honest mistake. That’s the only way for a false statement to avoid being a lie, it must be an honest mistake. If the statement is the product of deception, even ideologically-motivated self-deception, it is a lie.

To put this more simply, our unconscious mind is perfectly capable of generating lies without conscious intervention.

Also note 77 “You must love being wrong.”–your defense doesn’t work there, in order to love being wrong you would have to know that you were wrong.

but there’s nothing in the statements themselves that is overtly racist.

No one said that his statements were “overtly racist”. That would be a baseless accusation on your part–at least according to Ctrl-F on my web browser.

(He is, obviously, overtly homophobic. .)

All people are saying is that it’s hard to come up with any innocent set of intentions that would result in Robertson making the juxtaposition of statements that he made.

You know, some of those black people who were always happy and fulfilled were gay.

[bt:] So once again, the Skipper has made clear. He believes in nothing that he will state. Only that we have made groundless conclusions after groundless conclusion. There is no point he will concede he has made, except to say that we are all wrong.

So, once again I shall reiterate the recommendation that you quote what I said, then respond to what I said, instead of your inventions. (NB: this parenthetical is not sarcastic. When composing comments, I find it far easier to use a text editor, and the autocorrect function for html tags; e.g., .bq becomes [blockquote], ..bq [/blockquote], etc. Another hint — turn off smart quotes, because they completely goon up embedded links.)

I never said you were wrong, only that what you read was wholly insufficient to justify your very serious accusations. He may, in fact, be a world class racist, but you have absolutely no information upon which to base that conclusion. Instead, since he embodies everything you hate — fundamentalist Christianity and a conservative point of view — you jumped to an insupportable conclusion which you justified by irrelevant statistics and denying the man his own experiences.

That is what’s wrong. Along with making, without any sense of irony, the same grotesque accusations about someone who is merely pointing out the profound shortfalls in your reasoning.

So my real thesis, not the one you cooked up, is that progressive outrage does not stand up to even superficial scrutiny. It might, with some additional facts, stand up. But until then you collectively are exposing, again without a hint of irony, your own intolerance.

Hey Skipper @281,

[Plume:] Please address this: Why should it matter if Robertson is a Christian or not, when it comes to assessing his statements? What is it about being a Christian, specifically, that leads you to think we need to factor that in when we talk about his comments? Be specific.

Dr. Holbo insisted his argument about Robertson being a racist was strong, and challenged me to identify weaknesses in it. I suggested that he was relying solely on inference to get to his conclusion, which essentially made his argument self-referential, because he had no facts at his disposal, even though there must be some available; it isn’t as if the man’s life is exactly a closed book.

Robertson’s Christianity, in particular, is both prominent and relevant to his life. Therefore, in order for Dr. Holbo to support is inferences (because fact free inference is just another way to say pure guesswork), about Robertson, certainly one place he could look to support his inferences is a prominent feature about the man: Robertson’s Christianity. Not the history of Christianity, not the failures of Christians, because with regard to whether Robertson deserved the avalanche of progressive indignation, only his Christianity matters.

So, no, I haven’t run away from it each time. I was quite specific that, to contradict charges of fantastical opprobrium, one place to look would be what else he has said and done. Certainly, since there is so much of it, you would be able to find all manner of things to support your accusations.

You know, something like this. Because, after all, that is exactly what you’d expect racists to do.

Also, what kind of “collectivist” are you referring to?

The collectivist I’m referring to is the kind that characterizes progressives: submission of the individual into groups, and the denial of individual choice where it contradicts progressive notions of reality. Such collectivism strongly tends towards ideological conformity, and marginalizing or eliminating dissenting views since they are, by progressive definition, either ignorant, stupid, or evil.

As responses on this thread have redundantly demonstrated.

[GiT, #285] Ah, so evidently accusing someone of making “baseless accusations” isn’t meant to communicate anything about a person’s intelligence or character. Who knew?

No, not evidently. A baseless accusation is precisely what it says: an accusation without foundation in fact. My accusation that progressives made a baseless accusation is either right, or wrong. As such, either conclusion is a matter of fact that stands on its own.

If you can find anywhere that I used that to indict intelligence or character, please, by all means, quote me so I can humbly apologize. Otherwise, you are condemning me for a conclusion to which you leapt on your own.

My theory is that progressives succumbed to confirmation bias.

[Plume:] A dead horse, perhaps. Or just one end of it.

But I’ll try another angle here:

There is no evidence, in the present or the past, that demonstrates Christian superiority in moral or ethical matters, nor as human beings in general. There is no evidence that shows them superior to atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, Taoists, Buddhists, Wiccans, Pagans, Hindus, Jews, Jainists, Deists, etc. etc.

Since I made no claim in that regard, I’m at a loss as to what your point is.

@286: The homophobic crap that he spewed about anal sex and AIDS is a pretty strong clue. But you’re too determined to embarrass yourself and defend the indefensible to notice the obvious.

I strongly suspect you are thoughtlessly using the term “homophobic”, and failed to take on board my argument why disliking certain aspects of homosexuality is not irrational (which means it is, by definition not homophobic); moreover, you are insisting that others must either conform, or at least stop voicing their opinion on the matter. Robertson must either learn to approve of anal sex, or at least shut up about his disapproval.

Pope Francis, Time Magazine Person of the Year. Phil Robertson, unconscionable homophobe. Discuss.

—

Given the outcome, it seems that progressives and GLAAD were outsmarted by a bunch of stupid, duck shooting, rednecks.

Therefore, in order for Dr. Holbo to support is inferences (because fact free inference is just another way to say pure guesswork), about Robertson, certainly one place he could look to support his inferences is a prominent feature about the man: Robertson’s Christianity.

My mind-reading is better than your mind-reading.

So the Skipper has finally, at last, at that last minute, stated his Thesis, in so many words:

We can know nothing about Phil Robertson at all. His words are sitting there, and we are not qualified to infer pretty much anything at all. He said it, and that’s that. No one is qualified to make any conclusion whatsoever. It is what it is, no more, no less. No one may judge this prince of God’s creatures.

And no one may express a different opinion of what’s right and wrong here, and thereby disagree with our victim, Mr. Phil Robertson.

I don’t hate the man. I hate what he stands for. There’s a familiar construction for you, Skipper.

Mao –

Matawan was a fictionalized movie by John Sayles. It was a good one, and there was a lot of history in it, but it was fictionalized. A little more in-depth research would be in order before citing it as an example.

But even taking the story in the movie as true, you are forgetting a bit about the racial dynamics. Remember how the white miners attacked the Black and Italian workers brought in by the mine operators? And initially refused to allow the Black miners to join the union until the IWW rep shamed them into putting aside racial difference for the cause of the union? That solidarity did not grow naturally from the soil of shared worker-dom, but had to be actively striven for as part of a political organizing effort.

But even the real Blair Mountain / Matawan story is irrelevant on several grounds. The social context of the Appalachian coal fields was extremely different from the cotton fields of Louisiana, where Jim Crow and racial violence was a deep social force. There may have been some successful efforts to forge multi-racial alliances, but deep racial animosity was more often the rule. Citing Matawan is like citing the general strike in Seattle – it has nothing to do with the rural working-class whites in the deep south.

@Hey Skipper 316,

You’re kidding, right? You think Mr. Holbo’s argument, or anyone else’s here, is based simply on “inference”?

No. It’s based upon what Robertson actually said. His words. And they are plentiful on the subjects in question.

Those are the “facts at hand.”

Your absurd idea that we need to find out if he practices or preaches “love thy neighbor” is obvious in its attempt to distract, deflect, misdirect and reroute the conservation into the totally irrelevant.

First, because discovery whether or not he preaches or practices “love thy neighbor” involves subjectivity to the nth degree, and that one can “love thy neighbor” and still despise gays, blacks, women and other minorities. It can and has been interpreted to mean the literal — and fundamentalists are famously literal — neighbor, the people, the tribe, the group you belong to. The tribe you ID with. Your tribe.

Assuming it means “everyone” is absurd, again, based upon present and past Christian experience. The original reference did not include “gentiles,” for example. It meant love thy (Jewish) neighbor.

Then, of course, we get into the meaning(s) of “love” . . . which can take nearly infinite form. Christians, especially right-wing Christians, often believe (so they tell us) that “love” means conversion. They show their “love” for the supposedly sinful gay person by attempting to transform them into heterosexuality. They believe they show their “love” for gay people by letting them know how sinful they are, etc. etc.

Bottom line: You’ve repeatedly spoken in vague generalities, without offering any substance, explanation, data, facts or evidence to support your rather desperate defense of Robertson, all the while demanding that we bring “facts” to the table instead of “inferences.” Sorry, but you are the one guilty of “inferring” — in this case, that Robertson’s potential to “love thy neighbor” is a mitigating factor and that we must go off on a wild goose chase looking for its presence or absence.

No sale. Stop repeating your silly premise as if it’s an explanation. It’s not. It’s just a silly premise.

Searching for Vampires at The North Star gives 8 articles and several hundred comments, but is not complete There is more on the front page.

Starts with Mark Fisher “Exiting the Vampire Castle” November 22

The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt.

It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.

The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.

My emphasis

“Firstly, Fisher accuses the British left, especially on Twitter, of a certain miserablism: “an atmosphere of snarky resentment”, in which the calling out of individuals is more important than establishing some popularity for left-wing ideas. ”

from Matthijs Krul, “Gothic Politics: A Reply to Mark Fisher”

And good god, at least the British Left is engaged in internal critique rather than bothering with the bottom-dwellers

If you can find anywhere that I used that to indict intelligence or character, please, by all means, quote me so I can humbly apologize.

“You and Belle Ware, among others, have baselessly accused him of lying, and witlessly accused him of racism.”

“And that is exactly how dumb I think you are.”

“You must love being wrong.”

“How about relieving us of our suspense, MVAV, which is it? Are you lazy, incompetent, credulous or a liar?”

How many more do you need?

Then note that the audio clip does not ever say “gay people” or any form of the term.

Good thing you stopped quoting right before the sentence that falsifies your claim:

“First they say, ‘There is no God. Get him out of your mind. Then they bow down to birds, animals and reptiles, and each other. And the first thing you see coming out of them is gross sexual immorality. They will dishonor their bodies with one another, degrade each other. Uh, is that going on in the United States of America? Look around. God’s not there. We have all the answers. Don’t hurt a little bird or an animal. And boy is there some immorality going on around here. Does it get worse?”

Women with women, men with men, they committed indecent acts with one another, and they received in themselves the due penalty for their perversions. They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil. That’s what you have 235 years, roughly, after your forefathers founded the country. So what are you gonna do Pennsylvania? Just run with them? You’re doing to die. Don’t forget that.

Tertullian’s Apologeticus makes the point that it is wrong to judge Christians (as a group) in ignorance of what they actually do. Hey Skipper attempts the argument (as far as I can see) that it’s wrong to judge somebody so long as they are a Christian, without knowledge of what they actually do, as if the label is more useful than direct knowledge. This seems two or three spins around what Tertullian actually said; only one of these arguments works.

Why does this matter? Tertullian, in the waning days of the second century, knew that Christians could only convince the Romans by breaking through common tales. So as in Tertullian’s time the caricature of baby-eating Christians was a disservice, today the caricature of the saintly Christian should not be taken in place of the actual evidence.

Sending a shout-out to John Holbo for some very patient and thoughtful attempts to engage with the other side, which were all ignored.

Another thing to keep in mind, when it comes to making the plea for Christianity as a shield, a reason to temper any criticism of a Christian:

Of all the major religions, it is the least focused on ethical conduct in this world, in the here and now, especially amongst the religious right. It has the least rigorous moral and ethical code for living in the here and now, bar none. Buddhist ethics and morality put Christianity to shame, for instance. Buddhism is all about the way one lives in this world, now, today, as opposed to Christianity, which focuses on the next life and one’s own personal “redemption.” Not the whole world’s — which is key to the ethics of Kabbalah, for instance. Just that single Christian’s. And what is the sole criterion for Christian entrance into the next world — at least according to Born-again Christians?

Acceptance of Jesus as your savior. Belief. Not right-conduct or “good deeds” or anything like the Buddhist Eightfold Path (or the precepts):

http://secularbuddhism.org/2013/05/03/what-is-the-eightfold-path/

Unlike Judaism, which involves “right-practice (like Buddhism),” Christianity diverged from that by putting “faith” first and foremost. This, of course, is not what Jesus taught, but what Paul and others taught after Jesus died, and you can see some of that evolution by reading through the four accepted gospels and noticing how the emphasis changed. Jesus was all about ethical conduct and “good deeds,” especially toward the poor. But modern day fundamentalist Christians insist that those things are not necessary. All that matters is “faith” and “belief” in Jesus as the one and only savior.

This is perhaps the logical outcome of the Pauline revolution and break with Judaism. To make Christianity far more appealing to converts, Paul and his followers radically de-emphasized adherence to Jewish law and morality and substituted “belief” and “faith” in Jesus in its stead. Now, one did not have to live according to strict regulations, but just had to “believe.”

Modern, right-wing Christianity, especially evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity, runs with this to the limits: That only faith in Jesus, that Jesus is lord, matters. So we get “Christian” singers using the metaphor of “Jesus, take the wheel” to drive home that idea. This makes Christianity the most “faith-based” faith, and the least concerned with ethics and morality, the least concerned with one’s personal responsibility for one’s actions now, today.

Of course, Christianity also has a long history of writing about and preaching ethical living. But the Christian Right has been quite successful in demonizing most of that as “socialist” or “communist” or “collectivist” or some such epithet. A Glenn Beck tells his flock to run away from any church that would put “social justice” on its walls, for instance.

To make a long story short, Robertson may be a Christian, but the Christian religion is the least ethical-centric of all the major religions, and fundamentalist Christians the least concerned with the study and practice of ethics among their fellow Christians.

It is not a shield. In fact, it’s more likely to be a flashing, neon sign, calling for further scrutiny.

If you can find anywhere that I used that to indict intelligence or character, please, by all means, quote me so I can humbly apologize.

Consumatopia followed with these cites:

You and Belle Ware, among others, have baselessly accused him of lying, and witlessly accused him of racism.

Since witlessly is an adverb, it isn’t an indictment of intelligence or character, anymore than “thoughtlessly” or “reflexively” would be.

However, I try to always type as if I was talking face-to-face. I failed in this case, because “witlessly” is clearly pejorative, whereas “thoughtlessly” or “reflexively” (esp. the latter) would have avoided being pejorative, while far more accurately conveying my argument.

You are right, I was wrong. I’ll do my best to let it happen again.

And that is exactly how dumb I think you are.

That was in response to MPAV, who precipitated my response with this: Exactly how dumb are you? Or how dumb do you think we are?

I was just answering MPAV’s question.

You must love being wrong.

Seriously? That was in response to Colin Street (#75) thinking things about me. He was right, based upon his tone he bet I had a pretty good idea what he was thinking. He was right, I could guess what he was thinking, but his thinking was wrong.

How about relieving us of our suspense, MVAV (sic), which is it? Are you lazy, incompetent, credulous or a liar?

MPAV (sorry, don’t know how I got MVAV stuck in my head) presented a quote that was materially and significantly altered from the original. It could be that MPAV didn’t take the time to check it, or was too willing to believe someone else, or doesn’t know how to clearly indicate where a direct quote has been changed, or willfully changed it hoping no one would notice.

Some explanations are innocent, others not so much. Nevertheless, making a significant change to a direct quote is a foul, and begs an explanation.

[HS:] Then note that the [Robertson] audio clip does not ever say “gay people” or any form of the term.

[Consumatopia:] Good thing you stopped quoting right before the sentence that falsifies your claim …

There is a paragraph break between Women with women … and They’re full of murder …

Accurately quoted, Women with women … clearly expands upon And boy is there some immorality going on around here … And They’re full of murder and hatred … refers to all those who … say “There is no God …”

Why did you alter the quote by removing the break? Doing so, which you must have been intentional, because it is in the transcript and a simple copy & paste would have preserved it, changes the reference of “they” completely. It even changes the meaning of the whole passage.

[Plume, #317:] You’re kidding, right? You think Mr. Holbo’s argument, or anyone else’s here, is based simply on “inference”?

See Dr. Holbo, #76.

The assertion that his GQ quote is prima facia evidence of racism requires stretching the word beyond recognition. There is nothing in what he said that denigrates blacks, or indicates any belief in white superiority.

Therefore, Robertson’s racism, absent any other evidence, has to be inferred, because the interview provided no other facts. If he had a pattern of conduct or speech that showed he is a racist, then the inference would have some factual basis. I suggested one way to find that factual basis — his practice of Christianity, since that is abundantly documented. I’m not inferring anything one way or the other, since I have no idea what his Christianity entails; for all I know, it could substantiate the racist inference. (That you keep insisting I’m using his Christianity evidence against charges of racism means you are reading what you want to see, not what I typed.)

Clearly there are other possible sources of facts, like the fact the family includes a mixed race adopted child. Which doesn’t seem to be particularly helpful to you.

Yet no one has adduced any evidence at all to back up the inferred charge of racism. Why is that?

Off the subject of having too much fun with HS, I am a bit surprised to see supposed radicals embrace the old “What’s the Matter with Kansas”/”We worship an awesome God in the blue states” narrative. People watching Duck Dynasty (on cable tv or broadband internet) and purchasing Duck Commander products are not your class allies. That narrative Phil is telling (welfare and entitlements as the main cause of black problems) is incompatible with any kind of class struggle that you would want to fight.

If there’s anything the Tea Party should have taught you, it’s that there’s nothing the matter with Kansas, at least if your plan is to end all of capitalism. In America, per capita gdp is about $51K, median white GDP is $55K. All else being equal, white Americans will tend to oppose or be indifferent to redistribution.

Their median is higher than the overall average. If most of them make more than average, how does downward redistribution benefit most of them?

Yeah, you can make some imperfect redistribution so that 51% and below get more money, 49% and below get less. OTOH, the plutocrats can just give that top couple (49-51) a bit more and ignore everyone below. You go for the 99%, Romney tries to go for the 53%.

The plutocrats can offer something the good guys can’t–a narrative of superiority. They can tell the median white that they’re richer than average because they’re better than poorer people. That’s the point of Robertson’s narrative. He–and the people rallying to him–are not ignoring the class war to fight a race war. To them, it’s the same war–the attacks they launch on both are interchangeable. (How often today are “white trash” in the fields “singing and happy”?)

Bottom line is that looking at income numbers alone its no surprise that whites vote Republican. Race issues make that a bit worse. Culture issues more broadly (especially the “war on women”) probably make it a bit better.

My god Skipper.

you are a tireless hair-splitter aren’t you?

Are you ever going to reveal your point in all of these meticulous postings? I’m rather impressed by the way. You argue exquisitely. But for no apparent purpose, beyond obfuscation.

Do YOU believe anything? Why do you defend Phil? Is it because you believe as he does?

Is Phil lying when he claims to have not seen (nor heard of, I will infer) mistreatment of Blacks during Jim Crow? Can you imagine how this could be possible? Does he not read papers, books, watch TV? Is he marvelously unaware of the world around him or is he lying, and playing to a racist audience? Sooner or later you need to draw some conclusions, Skipper.

This is not about ‘splitting participles’ or arguing about whether a camel can fit through the eye of a needle, though you seem well equipped to do so.

I mean, just cutting taxes for the middle classes while raising them for the upper would be a sort of benefit, and a popular one, I should think.

We can cut taxes for the middle and raise them for the upper.

They can cut taxes for the middle and cut welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, etc.

Aww wow. Yeah I would feel pretty bad if Skipper is actually suffering from some sort of disorder. It would make sense in a way though.

To clarify the poor wording above:

A fully democratized economy, meaning the people actually own the means of production together. Not political parties, not some new ruling class, not some representative system that makes it so “the people” have ownership in name only.

But the actual, concrete, existing ownership of the means of production by all citizens, together, communally. That’s the best possible way to ensure equality, true freedom, liberty and the chance for everyone to reach his or her potential on this earth.

Of course, working with the system we have, instead of the one some of us want, our best bet is a social democratic set up similar to the Scandinavian countries. But that should be a means to an end. The end being democratic control over the economy.

No, it doesn’t, and I’m the authority on what I meant.

Doesn’t matter what you meant, it matters what you repeatedly said. We’re the authority on that, because you have huge problems with thinking, language, or honesty.

You repeatedly indicted someone’s character or intelligence. When called on that, you invent nonsense rules like “Since witlessly is an adverb, it isn’t an indictment of intelligence or character”.

You deleted a para break without noting it.

Listen to yourself. I can’t delete a paragraph break from Phil Robertson’s spoken remarks! There are no paragraph breaks in the video!

Doing so makes a complete hash out of what Robertson said, because it requires ignoring the first paragraph.

Let me quote the sentences again:

Women with women, men with men, they committed indecent acts with one another, and they received in themselves the due penalty for their perversions.

They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil. That’s what you have 235 years, roughly, after your forefathers founded the country. So what are you gonna do Pennsylvania? Just run with them? You’re doing to die. Don’t forget that.

You can imagine paragraph breaks wherever you want, but there is no spoken text in between those passages, and “they” is referring to the same people throughout.

No, nothing other than the readily apparent, no matter how reluctant you are to take it on board.

It’s some weird kind of Relevant logic. It denies the use of weakening–you can refute an argument by a adding additional premises that the argument didn’t use. Obviously one can refute an argument by providing new evidence, but that’s not what you’re doing–under your logic, you don’t even have to explain how Phil Robertson’s Christianity or Willie Robertson’s adoption of a child changes the set of plausible guesses of Phil’s intentions.

Three hundred thirty some odd posts in, and no one has provided a shred of evidence that Robertson is a racist, besides a quote that says nothing racist.

We have the fact that in 344 posts no one has proposed a plausible non-racist motivation for Phil Robertson making the particular set of comments that he did.

When Robertson uses his personal history to illustrate his opinion that welfare and Great Society policies were not an unalloyed good, then racist.

But what would that personal history have anything to do with welfare or Great Society policies, unless his personal experience said something about the treatment of blacks more broadly? 344 posts, no one has given any answer to that, despite that being the first thing Holbo asked of you.

I’m not defending him, I’m accusing you.”

To do that, you would have to point out some I said or did that was wrong, which you have absolutely failed to do at any point in your remarks towards me. (Which is kind of weird–I make lots of mistakes, but you’re terrible at finding them.)

Hey, Skipper,

“His family has adopted children of other races, including one that is half African American.”

Now you can infer things about Robertson based on the actions of other people?

“You deleted a para break without noting it. Doing so makes a complete hash out of what Robertson said, because it requires ignoring the first paragraph.”

You can even infer Robertson’s meaning from the editorial choices of his transcriber?

You’re like some sensei of inference, aren’t you? That must be why you’re permitted to do it but no one else may.

[Consumotopia:] Listen to yourself. I can’t delete a paragraph break from Phil Robertson’s spoken remarks! There are no paragraph breaks in the video!

Bollocks. TheGailyGrind itself, certainly no friend of Robertson, provides the complete transcript of what is sending you to the fainting couch:

First they say, ‘There is no God. Get him out of your mind. Then they bow down to birds, animals and reptiles, and each other. And the first thing you see coming out of them is gross sexual immorality. They will dishonor their bodies with one another, degrade each other. Uh, is that going on in the United States of America? Look around. God’s not there… And boy is there some immorality going on around here. Does it get worse?

Women with women, men with men, they committed indecent acts with one another, and they received in themselves the due penalty for their perversions.

They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil. That’s what you have 235 years, roughly, after your forefathers founded the country. So what are you gonna do Pennsylvania? Just run with them? You’re doing to die. Don’t forget that.

There are three paras there, not two. The passage makes absolutely no sense when you take upon yourself to mash the two together. Not only does it make no sense in and of itself, it doesn’t begin to track what he said in the GQ interview, or numerous other times.

In general, when trying to decide between malice or incompetence, the latter is more often correct. However, when it comes to eliding an entire paragraph, as you did, or vandalizing someone else’s words, like MPAV, it is a real close call.

We have the fact that in 344 posts no one has proposed a plausible non-racist motivation for Phil Robertson making the particular set of comments that he did.

So you have gone from his remarks being racist, to being racistly motivated? If that is true, then you must know what his motivation is. Of course, you don’t, without resorting to your fevered imagination.

There is a clear, absolutely non-racist point to what Mr. Robertson said: Welfare has caused many things to be even worse for blacks now than under Jim Crow.

That is completely consistent with what he said, and doesn’t require super inferring powers. Whether he is right or wrong about cause or effect is beside the point. It is transparently clear that he was indicting welfare policies because of (to him) their consequences. Nowhere did he demean blacks, or suggest whites are somehow superior, without which you don’t get to racism.

At least without a great deal of determination.

And this is where you,bt , along with Consumotopia et al continue to miss the point. It isn’t whether he was lying or not when he said he never saw blacks mistreated (and if you were to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I doubt you would reach for “liar” as the first explanation). Rather, you are accusing him of racism because he thinks welfare has been a disaster. You are standing at the train station hoping to catch a ship.

That’s bad enough. But rather than counter speech you don’t like with speech of your own — although to do so might have put you at risk of actually addressing his point — progressives and GLAAD sought to silence and ostracize him, not only to remove his speech and his viewpoint, but as fair warning to anyone else thinking about criticizing progressive policies, or foolish enough to have and speak about their own religious beliefs.

The New McCarthyism: same as the old McCarthyism.

The irony is delicious.

Even better, though, is that progressives and GLAAD have used both barrels, one for each foot.

You, the self anointed intellectual elite, got yourselves completely outwitted by a duck hunting redneck.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, it is going to be a very long time before anyone takes your bleating about “racism” or “homophobia” for anything other than the totalitarian impulse it is.

@John Holbo 350

I agree. There is no persuading Hey Skipper that Robertson said anything racist or homophobic. But what should be open to the better argument is his stance here (I bolded some words for emphasis):

That’s bad enough. But rather than counter speech you don’t like with speech of your own — although to do so might have put you at risk of actually addressing his point — progressives and GLAAD sought to silence and ostracize him, not only to remove his speech and his viewpoint, but as fair warning to anyone else thinking about criticizing progressive policies, or foolish enough to have and speak about their own religious beliefs.

The New McCarthyism: same as the old McCarthyism.

The irony is delicious.

This is perhaps the heart of the problem. I don’t know if Skipper actually believes progressives are doing as he says, or if he’s just saying it so progressives become the subject, instead of Robertson. I suspect the latter. Because those of us criticizing Robertson’s words are doing exactly what Skipper says we should do. We are meeting ugly speech with more speech. We are engaging in “free speech” to meet Robertson’s “free speech.” We don’t have the power to silence him or ostracize him, and we know this.

(I’m guessing Skipper knows this too.)

We do not control the levers of power. The center-right does. Capitalists do. Conservatives do. They are the establishment. Progressives are on the outside looking in, and those of us to the left of progressive are even further away from the centers of power.

Me thinks he dost protest too much.

@bt 352,

Well put.

Basically, Skipper is using a lot of confusing verbiage to mask his passive-aggressive desire to “silence” us and our criticism. By attempting to turn the tables, he is trying his damndest to end criticism directed at Robertson and people who agree with him.

By whining endlessly about supposed meanies having the nerve to be critical of such speech, using more speech . . . . he hopes to make the generally neurotic left question itself and fold. We all have enough Woody Allen in us to make this happen.

This has been a tried and true method used by righties and it works all too often. It’s like the bully, beating the hell out of the guy on ground, crying out “You made me do this to you!!” The guy on the ground then undergoes deep contemplation, changes his stance and agrees with the bully. “My bad. I won’t do it again.”

The left is in general disarray and woefully ineffective for many reasons. But one of the biggest is its inability to get tough, steel itself for battle and tell the right to F off without apology or remorse.

Yes, the Pope is quite clearly homophobic. Its pretty much built into the governing institutions of the Catholic Church. That question, i assume, wasnt answered, b/c it didnt really mean anything. It was just a very poor attempt at a gotcha. And I really dont mean that snarkily skipper..

…and tell the right to F off…
The rhetorical ferocity of this phrase is stunning.
Metaphors, or is it analogies, are stacked up around my head like planes at a snow-bound airport.
Your assumptions about Hey Skipper’s politics may not be accurate, you know.
They sure aren’t about me. I’m so much farther to the left of most of you you can’t see me.
It’s the integrity of the discourse that matters, against the childish refusal to play fair in argument that undermines that integrity, that needs calling out.
The disheartening prospect that twits are all that’s available now for real social change, besides the sleeping fascists of the right, and their cartoonish front line.
There’s something healthy in Robertson’s image, something outside that linear binary choicelessness, along with a whole lot of Hollywood marketing muck.
Separating that out would have been fun.
But instead procedurals. Semantic pillow fights, and then loogie spitting contests.
I don’t care about Hey Skipper’s personal individual actual political posture.
His rhetorical integrity is superior to yours in virtually every iteration.
And I saw that as worth defending.
Still do, apparently.
From the snorting villagers in TKAM you guys have morphed, collectively, in my (metaphorical? analogous?) imagination, to the killer shrews in that eponymous film.
The myopic shallow confidence that you’re right, and that that justifies anything and everything you come up with no matter how vicious and stupid, the degradation of discourse to an idiot’s snarl, it’s so futuristic, so dystopian.
Holbo says “Hey, it’s the internet.”
But you know, maybe the internet’s a little more connected to reality than we thought.
Put down your torches and pitchforks and go look in a mirror.
It’s over, you lost.

@Hey Skipper,

GLAAD condemned Robertson’s remarks, understandably. How is that “totalitarian”? Is it because they were certain his remarks were wrong? Is certainty the key? Well, isn’t Robertson also quite certain that he’s correct in what he said? If you are consistent, you would then have to call Robertson totalitarian.

And how much moreso is it when someone tries to claim a god agrees with him, or that he is just echoing the memo handed down to him from on high?

Which seems more “totalitarian” to you? A small organization, made up of people long demonized and oppressed in America and elsewhere, which speaks out against hate speech? Or a very rich man, with his own TV show, who preaches hateful things about gay people, using the bible as his foundation? Christians being the vast majority in America, of course, while gays are a tiny minority.

So, in your mind, it is that tiny, oppressed, demonized minority that is “totalitarian” if it condemns certain speech, but a wealthy member of the majority religion who condemns an entire group of people is not. Do I have that right?

Again, glaad just condemned his speech. Robertson condemned an entire group’s very existence on this planet.

There is a clear, absolutely non-racist point to what Mr. Robertson said: Welfare has caused many things to be even worse for blacks now than under Jim Crow.

Doesn’t work–it can’t just be “many” things, but enough that things must be worse overall. Otherwise, why compare the amount of complaining or “singing the blues” he hears now with what he heard back then? Like Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote: “The belief that black people were at their best when they were being hunted down like dogs for the sin of insisting on citizenship is a persistent strain of thought in this country.”

I guess you could argue that Phil Robertson’s remarks on race were the result of irresponsible, callous ignorance rather than simply liking white people more than black people. But my definition of racist includes both of those. If you say hurtful, false things about a race when you ought to know better, I call that racist. You are being unfair to another race in a way that greater empathy and decency on your part would have prevented. That’s a form of discrimination.

Apologies for my last post, didn’t mean to step on Holbo’s toes. Preview function! ;-)

I would like to take another look at something roy belmont wrote way up above, comparing this to “let’s you and him fight”.

He was almost right. But what roy misses is that Phil Robertson isn’t “you” or “him” in this situation. Robertson, and perhaps A&E, are the ones who said “let’s you and him fight”. They’re cashing in big time on this. It’s not like Phil Robertson and any of us are in a common class. That dude is hella rich. He didn’t get tricked into attacking Great Society because he’s resentful of blame for Jim Crow. He wants other people to fight over Jim Crow because he hates the Great Society. Someone of his class has every reason to oppose Great Society, even if our country were racially homogeneous.

Furthermore, I don’t think roy understands the dynamics of a “let’s you and him fight” situation. If the other guy is up for a fight, then your choice is either to fight back, or to lay down and die (by throwing gays and blacks under the bus in pursuit of greater redistribution, FDR style, I guess). I can shout all I want “wait! there’s a pareto improvement where you quit trying to deny the horror of Jim Crow and tear down the welfare state, and I admit that my ancestors were racist too, your barbecue is a bajillion times better than mine and bluegrass is under-appreciated!” but I think you’ll find that once the fight starts that never works. And we didn’t start this one.

I guess belmont’s position (maybe HS’s) is that GLAAD should have kept it’s mouth shut. No one has any business telling insulted minorities that they’re obligated to bite their tongue for the good of social harmony, progress, or the goals of a political coalition. And besides, some people who favor gay equality probably agree with the Republicans on economic policy! It’s not an activist’s job to stand down on their issue when it’s convenient for your larger strategy.

And I think they achieved something important. Duck Dynasty was going to stay on the air no matter what. The question is, do we see homophobia as simple entertainment acceptable to all, or as a political contentious? I have a lot of conservative Facebook friends and family. Months ago some of them told me how great this show was. I never watch any reality TV, so I just shrugged, “yeah, that sounds kind of amusing, rich dudes with huge beards hunting ducks all the time. sounds like they’re living the dream”. Well, since this started, I haven’t seen any of them say anything about it. They might well still be watching it or watching it more. But they don’t talk about it in polite (read: mixed politics) company. And if “the [media]’s a little more connected to reality than we thought.”, that probably matters. How open we are willing to be with homophobic beliefs is going to effect the norms that gay people have to live under. If people are out there spewing the same bile that Robertson is about gays (without or without paragraph breaks–if you listen closely you can hear him whisper “¶”) and everyone finds that perfectly acceptable, gays have good reason to remain in the closet. That’s why, when someone publicly expresses the kind of sick filth Robertson coming out of Robertson’s mouth, intimidation is usually their goal. The least the rest of us can do is to point out–publicly–that their hate is both insane and evil. To remain silent is to let them completely isolate the targets of their hate. That’s the ultimate “it’s over, you lost” moment.

It is, of course, comical to hear roy talking about HS’s “rhetorical integrity”. I have no idea what politics either of them have. I do know that no one with any sense would take either of them at their word for anything.

Consumatopia:He was almost right. But what roy misses is that Phil Robertson isn’t “you” or “him” in this situation. Robertson, and perhaps A&E, are the ones who said “let’s you and him fight”. They’re cashing in big time on this.
–
Me at comment 24:
Phil Robertson’s presented as Nature’s Firstborn Son rising out of the swamp, but the swamp’s on TV. He’s Natty Bumpo for frightened angry plebes. They need a figurehead and they’re being supplied with one. On TV.
It isn’t reality television, it’s the replacement of reality by television. And evidently lots of Americans can no longer tell the difference.

People already heavily invested in fighting and despising each other will have big trouble uniting against a common enemy, should one appear.

Me at comment 52:
A real man, doing real man things, being used to accomplish unreal things. On TV.
Divert into a controllable construct the scary recognition that men who can feed themselves with minimal societal support are coming back into style, in some areas of the demos. It’s a polarizer.
–
MPAV-
Nothing human is alien to me.

cheers all

Happy birthday Zora, according to Google.

Promiscuous anal sex spreads AIDS.
So did blood transfusions, until the filtering protocols were established.
It’s not a universal condition. It’s promiscuity within the civilizational and social contexts of Judeo-Christian west.civ. nuclear families in atomized communities whose focusing moral compasses center on external to the community authority.
So that women are either bonded to one dominant male figure while they breed out, or they’re soloing in an uncaring organized jungle. This morphs eventually to the contemporary version, where independent women can career up, baby up, and get it all on their own. Sort of. But at the lower end of the money tree it’s not so easy.
Fatherless families in a social hierarchy that has no continuum past the Biblical cleavage of man and woman, singular, means if the woman has no financial status of her own, and she’s bearing and raising children, she’s struggling, and that tells on her young.
It began tribally for all of us, but it’s gone progressively(!) to a granular couple in a growth medium of full-strength society, with nothing organic in between. Fatherless children in tight nomadic communities probably didn’t suffer for it much. Don’t.
All it takes is one click up from the mom and dad family web, but our way goes right to the mass and its attendant isolation of the individual. With nothing in between to catch the children who get unmoored from the nuclear home.
Bigger families, not numerically so much as cross-generationally big, exist all over the place, but they tend not to have “fatherless” children either, even where bio-dad isn’t around. Because of that dynamic continuum, from the child through the parents seamlessly into the next level of integration, the extended family, the tribe, the clad, the small group community which is I believe the real basic unit of human living, and has been attacked atomized and virtually eliminated in order for the external authoritiy previously mentioned to assume its centrality in our modern lives.
The sexual pathologies of Judeo-Christianity are responsible for a lot of what the specific governance of Judeo-Christian sexual morality claims to remedy.
Sex spreads disease, therefore sex is bad. The only sex that won’t spread disease is virgin on virgin sex. Therefore virginity is good.
Creating a false and unnatural criterion of sexual good makes the rejection of it, and the consequent problems of no sexual governance after rejection of it, inevitable.
Just as beating people and keeping them from education makes them at least act child-like and simple, which then justifies the denial of equality and opportunity. And further beating and miseducation.
I think there’s room to talk about crack whores in the urban ghetto of today being no better off in any true measure than if they were slaves in ante-bellum anywhere. I’m not ready to accept an argument that trying to do something about prior mistreatment is invalid because of that, or that it was ever better than this just because it wasn’t like this.
This isn’t better just because it isn’t Jim Crow.
Jim Crow wasn’t better just because it wasn’t this.
There’s reputable research indicating syphilis and AIDS both increase libido in the afflicted. Like how the Guinea worm makes its host, by localized fever and nerve irritation, want to put their infected leg in water. So it can lay its eggs there
We’re in a world where a lot of what threatens us is invisible, and hard to understand because of that.
Which is why we should talk to each other, with respect.

Oh Roy, Roy, Roy. I would love to see you actually respond to a point as opposed to obfuscate. I guess it is beyond you.

“Wrong. He’s not “being supplied”–he’s a very wealthy person, he has a very popular show, he understands business, there is no evidence he doesn’t understand media”

To clarify: what I mean is that he’s not being supplied because he’s the supplier. He’s not a pawn in someone’s master plan to trick the rubes, he’s the one tricking the rubes. And not even that is entirely true–a large portion of his fan base, if not the majority, are also natural opponents of the poor. Your talk of a “common enemy” is completely off base.

“Rather, it seems to be the garden variety conservative postulate about handouts destroying the moral fabric, etc.”

The moral fabric of those no good, shiftless blacks who were oh so much better off (and happier!) when we wouldn’t let them vote, swim in our pools or marry our women.

Yep, no racism there.

First blockquote should have ended before “If you look at poor people…”, of course.

Ugh, ugh, ugh, sorry, but just to anticipate a probable misreading, I’m not saying that it’s somehow illegitimate to argue that we should get rid of entitlements and welfare (in the same immediate way that racism and homophobia are wrong). Just that if you then start talking about a “common enemy”, you had better be talking about al Qaeda or Daleks or something, because as far as domestic politics goes, the common enemy that I seek allies to fight against is those who want to get rid of entitlements and welfare.

If you believe, as Robertson does, that poor people were happy before welfare and entitlements, then they could have simply refused welfare and entitlements and avoided the Moynihan-type problems with incentives. The government put bad incentives there, they didn’t have to respond to them.

Note that this doesn’t apply to Moynihan’s position, or to what you just said, because both of those realize that there is some underlying inequity that pre-dates welfare and entitlements that requires government action to address. Both of those admit that poor people had grievances that required public redress, even if you claim that government offered the wrong redress. Robertson does not.

I like Chomsky, but of course he can be a bit of a clever bastard at times.

Consumatopia, you’re accusing someone of having a pretty sick state of mind – by connecting the dots from what he really said to where you want him to be. And sometimes in quite a weird way: ‘he says that welfare is to blame, but they could’ve refused free money, therefore he’s really saying that they are to blame’ (did I get that right?).

I don’t get it. Wouldn’t it be a fucking shame if everyone was afraid to say anything other than precise socially approved talking points, in fear of being accused, ruining their career, losing their job. Incidentally, at some point someone is bound to accuse you of anti-southern-whites bigotry, to which you’ll reply: ‘yeah, right, liberals are the REAL racists!’ But isn’t it the same thing you’re doing?

godoggo: “…either liars or dupes. I suppose it’s possible for the latter not to be Jew-haters…”

And what about the liars? You don’t see any possibility for any motivation other than Jew-hatred? What about Elie Wiesel’s Armenian genocide denial, from the Chomsky quote; is he an Armenian-hater? You need to use your imagination. Or do you feel that Jew-hatred is so natural it always has to be the most likely explanation?

And if you start reading this stuff it leads to ideas like there’s really no such thing as antisemitism, because Jews are just bad.

Just curious if Mao, Roy and Skippy find Jesse Helms’ famous Senate ad showing white male hand crumpling a rejection letter while the announcer explained that “racial quota” laws cause “them” to give a job to a less-qualified minority to be racist or not:

@390, I believe you that read what you say you read. You argue convincingly that some denialism is motivated by antisemitism. But no one claimed the contrary.

“What about Elie Wiesel’s Armenian genocide denial, from the Chomsky quote; is he an Armenian-hater?”

If you’re willing to perpetuate the denial of massacres because it’s politically convenient, you clearly don’t really give much of a shit about the people massacred, and your own supremacist attitudes about your particular “tribe” or whatever are being put on prominent display.

I don’t see much reason to really invest oneself in distinguishing depraved indifference from malicious intent when it comes to that sort of thing. Depraved indifference is a species of racism.

mao: it’s just that I know how seductive it all is, so that when I see someone nibbling at it a bit, to quote my gramma Goldie: “Sometimes I worr’ ’bout you, boy.”

I’ve no interest in defending Ellie Wiesel. I don’t know anything at all about the trial you mentioned, but I know he’s the #1 bete noire of people who talk about the holocaust industry and the like. That said, if you google holocaust any general-information site will include something about the million or so Roma that were murdered. And you’ll also find the sneaky, annoying neo-nazi stuff.

But we digress. Anybody else who wants the last word may have it.

Mao, let me try again. I’m making two points here:

1.) The simple one, very little dot connecting. Robertson is a racist because he’s generalizing from his experience to say black people were “happy” and “godly” ( “no one was singing the blues”, “‘These doggone white people’—not a word”) during Segregation than during today (otherwise what would his experience have to do with welfare and entitlements?) At best, someone who makes a statement like that is callously, irresponsibly ignorant.

2.) The simpler one, no dot connecting at all. Suppose, implausibly, that Phil isn’t a racist. Phil and I are still extremely unlikely to have the sort of “common enemy” that roy is talking about. If Phil is opposed to welfare and entitlements , we have no common domestic enemy.

That’s all. What counts as “blaming the victim” isn’t related to either of them–I simply put it that way because that’s the most obvious way to put it: you’re saying that it’s because of their own choices that poor people are poor (or unhappy/ungodly). Society is to blame only insofar as government encouraged their bad choices. Blaming the victim doesn’t mean that you are racist, conservative, or even wrong–some poor people obviously do indeed bear some responsibility for their own misfortune.

And sometimes in quite a weird way: ‘he says that welfare is to blame, but they could’ve refused free money, therefore he’s really saying that they are to blame’ (did I get that right?).

Not quite. He’s saying that entitlements and welfare are to blame, and that the only response justice requires is to get rid of those entitlements, that there is no underlying injustice to poverty other than intended consequence of government aid. To reiterate, Robertson is going a lot further than Moynihan did.

Wouldn’t it be a fucking shame if everyone was afraid to say anything other than precise socially approved talking points, in fear of being accused, ruining their career, losing their job.

It’s not actually any sort of shame if the figureheads of corporate brands watch what they say to maintain their image. Or at least any world where things were otherwise is unimaginable to me. It’s inevitable–the only way to stop that is to get rid of corporate brands. You’re inventing rules (that what a reality tv star says in interviews should have no effect on their ratings or ad revenue) that no one ever proposes except when its time to protect a right-winger who has denigrated someone.

(Interestingly enough are all the people–mostly Phil’s defenders!–objecting that A&E should have known that Phil was a homophobe before they gave him the job. I think that reflects a naive understanding of A&E’s motivation (they have every incentive to want controversy) but more than that seems like it would be even worse as a set of norms. It means that anyone who wants a career in media in the future would have to police themselves–that wannabes would have to stick to talking points even before they make enough money to afford someone to craft talking points for them.)

Incidentally, at some point someone is bound to accuse you of anti-southern-whites bigotry, to which you’ll reply: ‘yeah, right, liberals are the REAL racists!’ But isn’t it the same thing you’re doing?

Not at some point, now. roy belmont has accused us all of anti-southern-whites bigotry. But it’s not the same thing because he’s full of shit, as amply demonstrated above.

“Depraved indifference is a species of racism.”

It could also be a species of politics, or careerism, or any number of categories of things.

No, actually, you might take a racist action for political or careerist reasons, but that doesn’t make the action itself any less racist.

Another angle here:

Personally, I think it can be a healthy thing, in a way, that Robertson says what he says in public, as opposed to under some slimy rock, under cover of darkness. The more Americans — especially young Americans — hear such hate-filled rhetoric from a supposed “preacher,” the less inclined they’ll be to choose his version of Christianity. Or any religion whatsoever.

(This, in fact, has been happening quite dramatically in recent years. Yaaaaay!!!)

That’s a very good thing, indeed.

We should have outgrown the need for worshiping deities thousands of years ago. But, unfortunately, we haven’t. And when that worship is also tied to a reactionary, backward, bigoted, narrow-minded, prudish, unconscionably self-righteous version of religion (right-wing Christianity), it’s all the worse for wear. I’m hopeful that if people like Robertson continue expounding their ugly views long enough, out in the open, the day will come when we put down childish things, grow up and claim independence from all superstition. So I’m in favor of letting him and others like him hang themselves with their own rope.

Their ugly speech should be met with strong critique, and without apology. But silencing them — which no one here is suggesting, of course — just gives them more power, turns them into the martyrs they’ve always wanted to be. As is the case when you hear some KKK cretin speak, their own words condemn them. Their own words damn them, etc.

Actually this: “you might take a racist action for political or careerist reasons, but that doesn’t make the action itself any less racist” I definitely disagree with.

One may be denying a genocide because one is (for example) paid for it, and I don’t see anything racist about it whatsoever. Calling it racism just confuses things; it’s an obvious misuse of the word.

One may be denying a genocide because one is (for example) paid for it, and I don’t see anything racist about it whatsoever.

“I was only following orders” has a hallowed history.

Following orders can make you a criminal, but how can it make you a racist if you’re not?

But your 404 was explicitly talking about whether or not the actions could be described as racist. That was only an hour ago, Mao.

You guys are just playing in to Mao’s game. He does this in pretty much every thread.

Yes. You should always regret writing a response longer than Mao’s troll. Whispering: Because he’s a racist!

I was taught early on that defending someone’s right to speak should not be confused with defending what they’re saying. Many serious thinkers have addressed this distinction.

I don’t think people have a “right” to speak, or at least not an endless one. I don’t think anyone reasonable can think that: speech channels are rivalrous — only one person can speak at a time — and setting up a new one, while possible, requires access to a pre-existing one and thus has the same rivalry problem. Rivalrous goods need to be regulated.

Or, sometimes people are going to have to shut the fuck up and let others be heard. Even if they don’t want to. And we need to act to make sure that that happens, same as all the other regulations/processes we put in place to make rivalrous goods — property for example — useful.

“I was taught early on that defending someone’s right to speak should not be confused with defending what they’re saying. Many serious thinkers have addressed this distinction.”

Someone now has the right to a national tv show? Or, if you are talking about Skippy, someone has the right to post on another person’s blog?

Roy I have NO idea what you are trying to say.

Also just read this and thought of our earlier discussion regarding the n word.

“Rightwing morons always want to say it (why?) and it pisses them off when they can’t. Of course not knowing a damn thing about history is one of those privileges that we white folk can afford. The word identifies a class of person to whom the law is blind. For 90% of American history calling someone that word carried the literal, explicit message that you could hurt them any time you wanted. Protest and you might get beaten. Resist and get lynched (or get lynched just because). Fight back in any organized way, even symbolically by doing well on your own and making the neighbors look bad, and they will burn your neighborhood and kill everyone in it while police stand by in case any white homes catch fire. And that is after slavery. During slavery it just meant that even free folk could get a bag thrown over their head, sent down the river and that would be the last anyone hears of you.”

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/01/07/nice-face-youve-got-there/

“It could also be a species of politics, or careerism, or any number of categories of things.”

Well no, not really. The underlying argument here is that not being racist requires fulfilling a positive duty to avoid fomenting racist acts and outcomes. It’s a failure to render care. If you don’t want to be a racist, you need to demonstrate an effort to render care in how one considers and treats others.

“One may be denying a genocide because one is (for example) paid for it, and I don’t see anything racist about it whatsoever. Calling it racism just confuses things; it’s an obvious misuse of the word.”

Well no, it’s not a misuse. There’s a contest over scope and meaning at work. The stakes are whether or not saying, “I do racist things just because I don’t give a shit, not because of any explicit belief about the hierarchy of the races” is actually a defense against an accusation of racism. It’s a contest over whether “I can’t be racist; I don’t see race,” is a punchline or a legitimate defense.

So it’s a contest about complicity, culpability, positive vs negative duties, and inaction as a species of action.

[John Holbo:] I guess I just wonder why you don’t see apologies for Jim Crow as similarly linked with racism.

Since I don’t accept your premise, or any evidence for it, then I have no reason to read what Mr. Robertson said as an apology for Jim Crow.

Going only on what he said, as opposed to what you insist he meant (presuming he isn’t too stupid or ignorant to know) no mental strain, flights of imagination, or Derrida-esque deconstruction is required to take his intent as not an apology for Jim Crow (which he leaves completely unmentioned), but rather an indictment of welfare policies (which he explicitly mentioned) as the federal government applied them to African Americans.

Your reading is even more strained when a near-contemporaneous African American experience of share cropper life (qualified by the fact that “near” means a couple decades earlier, when discrimination could hardly have been any less awful than it was in the 1950s) evidences no more mistreatment than Mr. Robertson said he didn’t see.

I could be wrong — it has been six months since I read “Immortal Life” (a book that persuasively makes a case for the many ways in which Henrietta Lacks was mistreated), but if I’m not, then your primary reason for disregarding Mr. Robertson’s testimony of his own experience looks like springing a hole below the waterline.

Instead of reading what he said as you insist he meant it, try reading it the other way: narrowly, relying only upon the words on the page, without the burden of your pre-conceptions of what he must have seen if he wasn’t in denial / a rabid racist / an idiot / a liar. Everyone of those perfectly awful insults must be read in, which may say something about the reader.

[HS:] Promiscuous anal sex spreads AIDS.

[Roy Belmont:] So did blood transfusions, until the filtering protocols were established.

And telling members of high risk groups their blood isn’t welcome. (Full disclosure: I lived in England when BSE was making headlines. That makes me a member of a high risk group, still. Which blood blanks make perfectly clear, still.)

Also, please note that niggling little thing called “tense”. Procedural changes have long since stopped the passive spread of AIDS.

The active spread of AIDS is still quite effective.

It’s promiscuity within the civilizational and social contexts of Judeo-Christian west.civ. nuclear families in atomized communities whose focusing moral compasses center on external to the community authority.

Perhaps you could name a post-neolithic society where promiscuity has been a good thing.

(OT, but I am continually amazed how leftist prose is so often the literary equivalent to eating a dozen yards of rope. And even further amazed at how whole tracts addressing intimate human relations can be completely devoid humanity.)

With regard to whether Mr. Robertson is a racist, your critique of J-C civilization is not only beside the point, but it also substantiates my accusation of leftist totalitarianism. The reasons for his beliefs lie completely outside your critique; moreover, your critique is really nothing more than a recitation of your beliefs. The supposition that your beliefs trump his is totalitarian to the core.

[MPAV:] Oh Roy, Roy, Roy. I would love to see you actually respond to a point as opposed to obfuscate. I guess it is beyond you.

I’d love to see you take ownership of your vandalizing a direct quote.

[Consumatopia:] Phil Robertson is a common enemy of the poorer classes.

Of all the things that are off putting about progressives, perhaps the greatest is the self anointed presumption of heightened consciousness, while all those who don’t see it your way are too benighted, or stupid, to understand.

It is a conclusion based upon a vacuum where an argument, no, a great many arguments, should be.

(Also, I’m waiting for you to take ownership of your elision.)

Rather, it seems to be the garden variety conservative postulate about handouts destroying the moral fabric, etc.

[MPAV:] The moral fabric of those no good, shiftless blacks who were oh so much better off (and happier!) when we wouldn’t let them vote, swim in our pools or marry our women.

In case you ever have a problem explaining what a non sequitur is, you could hardly expect a better example than this.

Unless, of course, Ugh, I should clarify that I didn’t say anything about two competing interpretations, that is Mao’s misreading. What Phil Robertson said was racist. is ahead by a nose at the post.

He said nothing demeaning about blacks; he never suggested superiority of one race over another.

My son, a college student, has been reading some of this thread. He told me something he overheard when leaving the supermarket en route to his dorm:

Student 1: “Darnnit, I forgot the beer.”

Student 2: “Racist!”

If you believe, as Robertson does, that poor people were happy before welfare and entitlements …

That requires complete, and by now willful, ignorance of what Robertson believes. His faith specifies certain requirements for a worthy life, a life that creates happiness by the way it is lived, rather than being dependent upon outside circumstances over which one has little, or no, control.

So, for him, the things that matter most are those things one can control: faith, continence, living for one’s family and community rather than one’s self, aspiring to meet God’s standards for the proper way to treat other people.

Until you get that — even if you don’t agree with it — then your comments amount to nothing more than a dog criticizing logarithms.

[Plume:] We could go round and round about this. You claim, without providing a shred of evidence, that GLAAD and “progressives” have engaged in a “campaign of character assassination.”

What else should one call accusations of racism based on reading way too much Derrida, or demanding that others truckle to GLAAD’s demands?

Accusing Mr. Robertson of somehow justifying Jim Crow laws is leagues beyond the realm of normal discourse. Occam’s Razor is an outstanding reason to read what Mr. Robertson said with the fewest possible assumptions. Instead, you read into it whatever suits your narrative, and insist everyone else agree.

My evidence for character assassination is your complete lack of evidence to support your wildly creative reading of what he said.

Robertson assumes that what he says about gay people is true, that his hate-filled critique of them is based on his version of Christian morality, and he does so without argument.

His version of Christian morality is 1 Corinthians 7:2; Galatians 5:19-20; Jude 1:7; 2 Corinthians 12:21; Romans 13:13; 1 Corinthians 6:13, 18; 1 Thessalonians 4:3-5; and Matthew 5:32. Among others.

If you weren’t so willfully ignorant, you would have ascertained by now that Robertson, in his view, isn’t entitled to his version of Christian morality. He bases it all upon the Bible.

Of course, you are entitled to disbelieve, even hate, the Bible. But you are not entitled to insist he bow to you and your beliefs, or that he approve of anal sex.

[MPAV:] Just curious if Mao, Roy and Skippy find Jesse Helms’ famous Senate ad showing white male hand crumpling a rejection letter while the announcer explained that “racial quota” laws cause “them” to give a job to a less-qualified minority to be racist or not.

I’m just curious if you find decisions based solely upon race racist, or only the ones of which you do not approve.

And I’m still curious to learn whether you think vandalizing other’s words is OK.

[HS:] Unfortunately, in that regard I must claim total ignorance, because I don’t know of anyone who has made that claim.

[bt:] NOW I think I understand what Skipper is getting at. He is totally ignorant.

Yes, I have to admit I’m completely ignorant of a worthwhile hypothetical that has no basis in reality.

[Consumatopia:] I’m making two points here:

The simple one, very little dot connecting. Robertson is a racist because he’s generalizing from his experience to say black people were “happy” and “godly”

Would you please do me, at least, a favor and provide us with a definition of “racist”, even the least common usage, under which that falls? Otherwise, there is at least a whiff of Consumatopia making stuff up.

Not quite. He’s saying that entitlements and welfare are to blame, and that the only response justice requires is to get rid of those entitlements, that there is no underlying injustice to poverty other than intended consequence of government aid.

Never mind, you killed the suspense. You are making it all up.

“Going only on what he said, as opposed to what you insist he meant (presuming he isn’t too stupid or ignorant to know) no mental strain, flights of imagination, or Derrida-esque deconstruction is required to take his intent as not an apology for Jim Crow”

Ok, this is pretty simple:

“Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

Is the time period “pre-entitlement, pre-welfare” contained within the Jim Crow period? De facto end of Jim Crow is 1964. Great Society is 1965. So “pre-entitlement pre-welfare” and “Jim Crow” are more or less co-extensive.

So, Robertson is literally, explicitly, no inferences saying: During Jim Crow no black people were singing the blues; they were happy.

The language is ambiguous between no black people he saw were singing the blues and no black people, period, were singing the blues, because Robertson appears to just equivocate like that in his sermonizing.

So give it the constrained reading Hey Skipper demands: ‘No black people Robertson saw during Jim Crow were ‘singing the blues’ or not-happy.”

How is ‘I never saw any black people who weren’t happy during Jim Crow’ *not* an apology for Jim Crow? How is he *not* intending to communicate something about what it was like under Jim Crow?

Please avoid all mental strain, flights of imagination, or Derrida-esque deconstruction in concocting your answer.

I finally made it! What’s my prize?

Actually, I can’t resist:

Hey, Skipper @424:

First of all, for someone who is accusing others of ‘vandalizing other’s words’ based on where they put a paragraph break in a transcript of spoken words, your last comment was bizarrely badly formatted, so I’m not 100% certain these are your words, and not those of someone else, but I’ll assume they’re yours:

>i>”Of course, you are entitled to disbelieve, even hate, the Bible. But you are not entitled to insist he bow to you and your beliefs, or that he approve of anal sex.”

I can’t be bothered to go through the 200 comments I’ve read this morning to find exactly which 3 or 4 people specifically made comments along the lines of ‘of course he’s entitled to say what he wants’ but I can assure you I’ve read them. Everyone’s entitled to say what they want. The issue is whether celebrities are entitled to a) the avoidance of any criticism based on what they say, and b) no corporate pushback from their employers as a result of bad PR. It’s perfectly obvious that they are entitled to neither of these things. Just too bad, pal, get over it.

“Would you please do me, at least, a favor and provide us with a definition of “racist”, even the least common usage, under which that falls? Otherwise, there is at least a whiff of Consumatopia making stuff up.:

All of what you’re saying seems to be that what Robertson said doesn’t meet your definition of racism. If instead, I describe what he said not as ‘racist’ but as ‘completely ignorant, totally misleading and strongly suggestive of a lack of both perceptual awareness and the conditions of others outside his own small world’, would you be happier with that?

“But your 404 was explicitly talking about whether or not the actions could be described as racist.”

OK, this is fair. But even the actions: to call them racist, as explained by Git in 396, sounds like quite a stretch. These actions often seem quintessentially political.

Ronan(rf) @411 “I mean for fuck sake why does it matter?”

There seem to be a lot of confusion and misunderstanding surrounding this, and I just want to understand what people mean when they say these things; how they think about it.

Perhaps you could name a post-neolithic society where promiscuity has been a good thing
Why? Who cares about societies exclusively, neo-lithic or proto-Neanderthal?
Human beings have been enjoying each other sexually to the culmination of offspring for at least a half million years, or a couple million depending on where you draw the lines of human-ness. Very little of that enjoyment has been under the sanctioned tent of marriage.
So if you think of human existence through time as a good thing, a debatable assertion at best, well, we owe it all to promiscuity. Then.
The genetic data on nuclear family paternity seems to indicate promiscuity isn’t always a matter of public record. Seriously. Now.
What I think you’re really talking about is the public disavowal of sexual governance for the consumer ideal of constant personal gratification.
And my response to that is wait, this hypocritical institutional sexual morality has harmed generations so thoroughly we can’t separate our selves from the damage.
bold – That doesn’t mean I’m advocating hedonistic sexual anarchy. – unbold
–
Also, please note that niggling little thing called “tense”. Procedural changes have long since stopped the passive spread of AIDS.
The active spread of AIDS is still quite effective.
See here’s where I get the sense your exceptional logical ability blinds you to the parts that won’t fit neatly into compartments.
All that needs is one miracle anti-viral drug, and your whole anti-sodomy house of cards comes down. “Tense” indeed.
My view, not a leftist view at all, is that possibility’s already extant, here with us in other medical versions, just not as electrifying because mostly no sex. We don’t have to alter our behaviors, or our environment, to avoid polio, we have vaccines.
We undercut the personal immune system in ways that make lots of us dependent on external prosthetic immunity to survive.
My view, as described above, is we’re just at the edge of understanding how much of the world is invisible to us, and how little prepared we are for what’s there. Where we really are. Because we’ve been misled by anthropocentric nonsense for so long.
And this is all sideways from the real point I was making, that the moral pathology comes in to treat the damage it’s caused with clean hands, because that damage is a result of ungoverned and rebellious behavior, because the pathology gave the ungoverned rebels no way forward but submission to the pathology, or feral behavior. Then once that ferality doesn’t work out, here comes the gotchas. Again.
Also your seeming inability to respond to the fact, not theory, that some infectious diseases can alter the behavior of their hosts. Toxoplasmosis is a big one as well, though not an STD.
I realize that that knowledge completely undercuts the foundation of J-C moral judgment, and punishment – intention is all and everything – but it’s real true fact.
This goes into the forces at work on moral decision-making in the traumatized, in the malnourished, in the myriad pits of hindered living. How responsible for their decisions are those people whose pain you can’t even begin to imagine?
Making people take responsibility for their own choices and actions is a mantra of the immediate past, still very popular in public consumer “justice”, and it comes right out of Biblical right/wrong. But it isn’t enough, and it doesn’t work well enough.
I’m not belittling genuine faith or the real need for moral constraint in society, but there’s some eliding going on on both sides here.

“bold – That doesn’t mean I’m advocating hedonistic sexual anarchy. – unbold”

Oh don’t tease us Roy. I’m in the mood.

“You should always regret writing a response longer than Mao’s troll.”

Others mix sarcasm with some substance, but you, Substance, you only do sarcasm. It’s fine, as far as it goes, but complaining about trolling is a bit too much.

Would you please do me, at least, a favor and provide us with a definition of “racist”, even the least common usage, under which that falls? Otherwise, there is at least a whiff of Consumatopia making stuff up.

Maybe it would help if you had not cut off what I said in midsentence, leaving out a few modifying phrases? Bit rich you doing that after lecturing me for deleting an imaginary paragraph break from a video.

But even the actions: to call them racist, as explained by Git in 396, sounds like quite a stretch. These actions often seem quintessentially political.

Umm, people are arguing with someone who thinks that ‘A is a political action’ implies that ‘A is not racist’. This is hopeless.

Js just don’t engage with him and maybe he will go away?

Others mix sarcasm with some substance, but you, Substance, you only do sarcasm. It’s fine, as far as it goes, but complaining about trolling is a bit too much.

I’m not complaining, I’m admiring the art. I win!

“almost everyone you disagree with must be a racist. You connect the dots (common sense!) and demonstrate how. But not you, never you. If someone connects your dots in the same manner, that’s simply ridiculous, doesn’t deserve a reply. This is a fascinating phenomenon, I must say.”

I doubt anyone in this thread (other than Hey Skipper and yourself, bless your hearts) thinks they are “never” racist or sexist &etc. We all likely manage to do a pretty good job not obfuscating Jim Crow or talking about how disgusting we think butts are, though.

The skipper is a very resourceful writer, and I’m not kidding here, it is impressive.

Here is a quote from the Skipper, letting us know that we need to do the following with Phil’s words:

“Instead of reading what he said as you insist he meant it, try reading it the other way: narrowly, relying only upon the words on the page, without the burden of your pre-conceptions of what he must have seen if he wasn’t in denial / a rabid racist / an idiot / a liar.”

This may be the defining statement (I know I keep doing this, but since Skipper won’t, I must). In order to not offend the Skipper, we must accept what Phil has said as being true. We must ignore anything we might know about History or Politics. To disagree with Phil is not allowed.

It all right there, we must accept Phil and what he believes, or we are mean, foolish, intolerant and nasty. So many words, such a simple premise!

Mao says: All right, I’m bored with this.

My hole, you post for precisely this kind of attention.

Which this internet age sort of helps with, because who cares if you enjoy these discarded electrons? You’re a blowfly of the internets: loud, colourful, disgusting, bbut just an insect. A foul one.

heh.

Although that was actually kind of an obnoxious comment. No, really.

I’m not aware of many people actually suffering bodily harm from impersonating Glenn Reynolds, godoggo, but I don’t think it’s a highly-demanded tribute act.

Mao says: All right, I’m bored with this.

My hole, you post for precisely this kind of attention.

I think for once he knew he’d entirely lost. Worth cherishing, for it may never happen again.

[John Holbo:] “No, the truly notable claim he makes is that African-Americans were happy and without grievance before welfare, despite all the reasons you might think they weren’t.”

He doesn’t make that claim, you made it for him. Which is why I threw down the Derrida card. You deconstructed Robertson’s comments in such a way as to include more than just what the text said.

Here it is again, so no one has to go on memory:

“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

His claims are, or should be, clear: 1. The lives of black sharecroppers differed in no significant way from their white counterparts. 2. There was no racial animosity between white and black sharecroppers. 3. Welfare and the consequent culture of dependency caused the descendants of black sharecroppers to suffer widespread sociological pathologies that the descendants of white sharecroppers did not. 4. African Americans then had dignity they no longer possess because welfare has created a culture of dependency.

Perhaps I should re-phrase “His claims are, or should be, clear”, and add “… to me (and probably to all the people that caused A&E to retreat so ignominously)”. There must be something in what he said that contradicts at least one of what I think his claims to be. If there isn’t — and really, I’m all eyes here — then there is no basis to prefer your reading over mine. Except of course, that I prefer mine, and you, yours.

But if there is nothing other than that, then progressives’ denunciations of him as a racist rest only upon their own desire to declare him and his ilk as racists. James Taranto has a great term for this: Oikophobia.

“No, the truly notable claim he makes is that African-Americans were happy and without grievance before welfare, despite all the reasons you might think they weren’t.”

Here is where I think you go off the rails. To me, Mr. Robertson is saying that, at the time, sharecroppers are sharecroppers, no matter the color of their skin, and that whatever grievances black sharecroppers might have had, they weren’t any different than white sharecroppers. Indeed, your view of happiness must be completely materialistic. No wonder you don’t understand what he is saying: he is speaking of spiritual happiness, his notion of a life well lived; he isn’t talking about baubles, or race.

He can’t be held guilty for your failure to understand his values.

“That is to say: obviously he isn’t saying that welfare, later, caused them to have been retroactively happy earlier. The arrow of time doesn’t work that way.”

Welfare later didn’t make them happy earlier; your invoking the “arrow of time” proves you are imposing upon his words your meaning, not his. To him, welfare created a culture of dependency that robbed them of the human dignity they possessed before welfare. In Robertson’s view, his black counterparts lived in intact families, fathers didn’t abandon their children, there wasn’t generational unemployment, the criminality among the black sharecroppers was no different than their white counterparts. In his view, the lives of most African Americans are worse now in fundamentally important ways than before welfare.

There is nothing racist about that observation, even if he is wrong. He does not denigrate blacks. He does not elevate whites. He does not attribute contemporary social pathologies to blacks, but rather to the consequences of welfare.

And given the statistical parade of horribles, on what basis do you wish to contest the point?

[Git:] “So give it the constrained reading Hey Skipper demands: ‘No black people Robertson saw during Jim Crow were ‘singing the blues’ or not-happy.”

I’ll reiterate, in case I wasn’t sufficiently clear before. The blacks Robertson knew lived lives no different than his. Sharecroppers are sharecroppers.

Or perhaps you can show me where in the quote he says otherwise.

[Steve Williams:] “First of all, for someone who is accusing others of ‘vandalizing other’s words’ based on where they put a paragraph break in a transcript of spoken words, your last comment was bizarrely badly formatted, so I’m not 100% certain these are your words, and not those of someone else, but I’ll assume they’re yours:”

Yes, indeed it was very badly formatted. Since there is no preview function here, I have taken to previewing my comments in blogger before posting them. Everything looked fine, then somehow all the blockquote tags vanished when I posted. (BTW, if you are using the Mac text editor in Mavericks, it will insist on smart-quoting trailing quote marks, no matter what you specify in preferences. That screws all kinds of things up.)

Just in case, this time around I have added quote marks in addition to blockquoting.

“Everyone’s entitled to say what they want. The issue is whether celebrities are entitled to a) the avoidance of any criticism based on what they say, and b) no corporate pushback from their employers as a result of bad PR. It’s perfectly obvious that they are entitled to neither of these things. Just too bad, pal, get over it.”

But that isn’t what happened, is it? Progressives and GLAAD did not stop at criticism; rather, they were very much like a mob caricature: Nice network you have here. Too bad if something was to happen to it. I linked to GLAAD’s statement above, BTW.

“All of what you’re saying seems to be that what Robertson said doesn’t meet your definition of racism.”

What I am saying is that nothing Robertson said qualifies as racism, no matter which dictionary you choose. Of course, I could be wrong. If so, provide the definition, and show what Robertson said to put him within it.

[roy belmont:] “All that needs is one miracle anti-viral drug, and your whole anti-sodomy house of cards comes down.”

Does that miracle anti-viral drug make the dead undead? Does that drug require Mr. Robertson to like sodomy? Does it require him to repudiate his religion? Does it suddenly make promiscuity peachy keen?

[Steve Williams:] I can’t understand this either, and I can’t understand what Robertson was hoping to achieve with the claim “nobody was singing the blues”.

Perhaps he was speaking metaphorically; even ignorant, lying, racist oiks can manage it sometimes. Perhaps he was using “nobody was singing …” to mean something along the lines of “they didn’t spend a lot of time complaining about their lot in life.”

[MPAV:] Skipper I reject your claim that I vandalized Robertson’s words. Other people can evaluate for themselves who to believe.

I provided the actual quote. You replaced words without annotation or explanation, and eliminated two essential paragraphs. Again, without explanation or annotation. Vandalism is the politest word I could think of.

They don’t need to believe me, only their eyes.

[Plume:] Basically, your entire argument boils down to this: You can’t stand that progressives (and glaad) have been critical of Robertson and are morally certain in their criticism.

How about doing me a favor and stop boiling down my argument, because when you do, you add a lot of straw.

Here is what I can’t stand: Progressives pilloried Robertson without cause. It wasn’t just criticizing what he said, but rather making an extremely serious accusation based upon your own imaginings, then demanding that his views conform to yours. I linked to GLAAD’s statement above. Their intolerance could not be clearer, nor could their totalitarian reflex — the only true Christianity is the one that meets their approval. GLAAD is certainly entitled to criticize everything he says. What they are not entitled to do is insist he truckle to them.

Yes, it is his version of Christian Morality, as there are tens of millions of people who see the texts otherwise.

Wonderful. Point missed. Of course it is his “version” (shared completely by Catholicism, BTW). How is it that GLAAD gets to ram their version down his spiritual throat?

I am not arguing for Robertson’s interpretation of the Bible, only that he be allowed to have it.

Mao @ 448

I’m getting a strong vibe that you endorse all those things.

You and George W. Bush. You trust your gut.

Mao, you’re not here for understanding, you’re here to be obnoxious. Your ennui is palpable.

I thought you were bored with us Mao?

Either Skipper’s latest is a deliberate attempt to be ironic or it’s a real kick in the face to Roy’s claim that we’re dealing with someone of “rhetorical integrity” here.

I take it the implicit argument is that, by the standards of all us “progressives,” all it takes to support an interpretation of Phil’s words is that it not be inconsistent with the plain text. And so Skipper is giving us a reading that is not inconsistent with the plain text, but obviously imputes a whole plethora of things that aren’t there.

Because, at face, this asserted standard (there’s no discriminating between interpretations that aren’t straight out contradicted by the plain text reading of a statement) is false. And Skipper’s interpretation (3 and 4, specifically) have no textual basis.

(A funny note, to. Skipper’s offered interpretation is actually racist. It claims white and black sharecroppers, though identically situated during Jim Crow, were differently impacted by the Great Society. Since the only distinct thing between the two is the color of their skin, well, guess what’s being asserted as the key causal factor: Race! But not racist man, just racial realist HBD, dudes.)

So in the stunning reversal, one says, ‘but wait, Phil hasn’t said what you say he said” and then, the leftist has no clothes and one says, “Exactly! Don’t you see my point! You’re saying he said things he hasn’t said either!”

So let’s dispense with the ploy and just get to the more or less simple points of agreement: the Robinson quote does claim the following things

“1. The lives of black sharecroppers differed in no significant way from their white counterparts.”

“2. There was no racial animosity between white and black sharecroppers.”

“Mr. Robertson is saying that, at the time, sharecroppers are sharecroppers, no matter the color of their skin, and that whatever grievances black sharecroppers might have had, they weren’t any different than white sharecroppers.”

Sure, we can all reasonably infer Robertson claims these things (though some of these require reasonable inference, not plain text).

And most of us think this is a mis-representation of the experiences of Black sharecroppers (regardless of what you think Rebecca Skloot’s book demonstrates about said experience), and that something pernicious is going on if one clings on to such an anecdotal, biased picture of the experience of others in order to draw conclusions about welfare policy, peddling what amount to, at least, prevarications, if not outright lies.

And lying or prevaricating about the experiences of black people in order to make empirical claims about how they’ve been affected by public policy seems pretty racist, to some.

Shorter Mao: Everyone else has commented enough.

See, John writes: “If it’s true that the worst off blacks lived lives of dignity that were no worse than their white counterparts then the idea that Jim Crow was a serious problem must be a myth.”

And I’m saying that it seems quite plausible that the magnitude of Jim Crow manifests in its effect on the middle-class blacks, not the worst-off blacks. And if so, then the idea that Jim Crow was a serious problem doesn’t have to be a myth. A flaw in his logic.

So whites were just as bad off as blacks in the day. Except for that lynching business. And don’t look at our white women. In any case, to continue my pursuit of this white whale:

Here I go again, yes / no questions for Hey Skipper:

-Do you believe the blacks in the south were better off during Crow? If yes, you agree with Phil. If not, you disagree with Phil.

-Do you thing that the Gays are going to Hell? If yes, you agree with Phil. In not, you disagree with Phil.

-Do you believe that if black people were more godly, they would not have so many problems? If yes, you agree with Phil. If not, you disagree with Phil.

-Do you think it is censorship to disagree with the statements of a public figure? If yes, you are with Sarah Palin. If not, you disagree with Sarah Palin. I changed it up there.

As I allowed previously, Skipper is allowed to take the 5th, and to let us know that he does not have any opinions on these subjects, or is unsure.

I’m not sure if I have called Phil a racist or a homophobe in any of my posts, but really what’s the point of calling names? Perhaps THAT is why Skipper finds this all so offensive, and we are being mean. I just think that Phil is w r o n g. Am I allowed to do that? Let me take out my little pocket copy of the Constitution and check.

No, he said if ‘If it’s true that the worst off blacks lived lives of dignity that *were no worse* than their white counterparts then the idea that Jim Crow was a serious problem must be a myth’ .. and they were worse. All evidence points that way. It’s not a question of how ‘happy’ they were, it’s a question of comparing conditions people lived under.

I know, John says “were no worse”, but that is already an inference, a paraphrase from the comments. The original quote has ‘happy’ and that is what caused the outrage. It also has “never saw a black person mistreated”, so, by inference, they could be mistreated, and that already sounds like being worse off than those who could mistreat you if they wanted to (the whites).

Na, the major point of dispute was ‘mistreatment’. The happiness was a consequence of not being mistreated .. ‘I never saw them mistreated, and they were happy ‘ He’s arguing against documented cases of systematic exclusion and violence, on the basis of his ‘memories’ of the time. He’s wrong and at best an idiot.
The emphasis on happiness is just something you’ve added to muddy the waters.

I’ve learned new things today, thank you.

“In Georgia’s cities, segregation developed as a solution to the problems posed by modernization and urbanization. However, rural Georgia remained a largely premodern society, making many features of segregation unnecessary or even problematic. As historian Mark Schultz demonstrates, rural race relations were typically marked by personal intimacy and a “culture of localism.” Similar patterns of deference prevailed in rural race relations, but local governments in rural Georgia were more likely to depend on custom, rather than law, to maintain white supremacy.”
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/segregation

I thought that rural segregation was spatial, but apparently not, at least in Georgia:

“Mark Schultz’s book, The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow, offers a detailed look at how white supremacy worked in the rural rather than the urban South. Focusing on the cotton belt county of Hancock, Georgia, Schulz conducted extensive oral history work, which he interpreted in the context of more conventional archival studies. He concludes that, although white supremacy was as prevalent in the rural South as it was in the cities, it was constructed and functioned completely differently. Rather than being based on spatial segregation, rural white supremacy was grounded in personalism–the white control of blacks through an intricate mesh of economic, political, and social dominance woven from personal interactions.

The Rural Face of White Supremacy falls into three sections. The first, and longest, addresses social interactions between whites and blacks in rural Hancock County. Schultz explains that, unlike in urban areas, the rural South remained unsegregated in many ways. Blacks and whites were neighbors, co-workers, sexual partners, and even, in some instances, friends. They used the same doctors and attended each other’s churches. Even the economic division was ragged: some blacks owned land and some whites were sharecroppers.”
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11067
Read the whole thing.

Hey Skipper 461,

Wonderful. Point missed. Of course it is his “version” (shared completely by Catholicism, BTW). How is it that GLAAD gets to ram their version down his spiritual throat?

Wrong. Tens of millions of Catholics disagree with his version. Which is natural, given what I mentioned already. Within the bible itself, you have thousands of internal contradictions. Which is also natural, given the umpteen number of authors, the far more numerous copyists who replicated errors and engaged in their own edits; the umpteen mistranslations into the Greek, which were then copied and miscopied again; and the fact that the NT disagrees with the OT, and the same internal contradictions exist in the OT, etc. etc.

I am not arguing for Robertson’s interpretation of the Bible, only that he be allowed to have it.

No one is even remotely saying he can’t have his own interpretation of the bible. We are saying he can’t ram that down the throats of others, which he does each time he preaches.

Again, I and pretty much the entire left argues for a multitude of interpretations. Fundamentalist Christians argue for one — their own. Christianity itself argues, of course, for one and only one god, theirs, and anyone who disagrees with that dies horribly and is tormented in the Christian hell forever when the End of Days hits. Talk about “totalitarian.”

P.S. It is ironic that Christians break the first of the ten commandments by worshiping Jesus. The Jews had no history or tradition of a man-god or a god-man and their “messiah” was fully human only. That concept is alien to them but quite natural to Pagan Rome, Greece and Egypt. More irony. Jews don’t except Jesus as a god in part because it would break that first commandment. But that’s another story. In both cases, with the Jews and the Christians, they say theirs is the one and only god. Sounds “totalitarian” to me, if we must use the word at all here.

Re: Wrong. Tens of millions of Catholics disagree with his version

Catholicism agrees with Phil Robertson that anal sex is immoral. (I’m sympathetic to that argument, though I don’t know if I agree with it). They are not in agreement that gay people are ‘idolaters’, ‘haters of God’, etc..

As for various copies of the biblical text disagreeing with each other, you can get around that by saying that *one* version is the most authoritative or reliable, and giving your reasons why. For example, I’d say that the Received Text (used by Erasmus, and by the King James translators) is the most authoritative version of the New Testament, and the Septuagint the most reliable version of the Old.

Re: We are saying he can’t ram that down the throats of others, which he does each time he preaches

That’s silly. By that logic, anyone who tries to convince anyone of anything is ‘ramming it down their throat’. I think it’s certainly *possible* to interpret the Bible in different ways, but I think some interpretations are more true and correct than others, and it’s my obligation to try to convince others of what I think is the truth. For their own good, among other things.

Re: It is ironic that Christians break the first of the ten commandments by worshiping Jesus. The Jews had no history or tradition of a man-god or a god-man and their “messiah” was fully human only.

My position would be that the Jews don’t properly understand the meaning of the first commandment, and that monotheism in the sense that the Jews believe it, is false. (A more refined monotheism, which treats the One Godhead as a community of three distinct Divine Persons, is of course true. Swinburne describes pretty well my view of the trinity, i.e. ‘Social Trinitarianism’, and he doesn’t shy away from saying flat-out that Jewish monotheism is *false*.)

Ed Herdman 488,

Hey Skipper writes very long posts that can be boiled down to this:

He doesn’t think anyone should criticize Robertson because he agrees with what Robertson says. It’s that simple. So all the elaborate rhetoric, all the sophistry, which he long ago lost control of, is in the service of that one thing. He doesn’t want anyone to be critical of Robertson’s words, because he agrees with them. His strategy is to deflect attention from Robertson to those who criticize him, and he’s scrambling and desperate to find something that sticks. Like “totalitarian.” Which is beyond absurd, as Robertson is the one with the intolerant language, the “my way or the highway to hell” stance, using the ultimate in “totalitarian” thought control:

Recourse to a supposedly “higher authority.”

Nothing says “shut up and clap louder” than to assert that one speaks for “god.”

Gad! I now have to defend the virtues and benefits of anal sex, in a public forum.
I mean the defending’s taking place in a…aaaghhhh
Shoot!
No, wait! Don’t !
“Cram it down their throats, so to speak”!!
–
Does that miracle anti-viral drug make the dead undead?
I would like anyone who reads this to know that as I type these words I am resisting with all my might a discursive tangent involving zombies and swamps and raggedy pants with strategic holes in them.
No of course it doesn’t.
What it does, like the understandings around pork and shellfish, is make clearer the sensible practice of avoidance clear as hygienic orderliness, not displeasing to invisible spirits, not angering the mighty overlord, but dangerous to the scientifically illiterate who had no microscopes.
Pointing out, as is my wont, that the presence of microbial pathogens can be viewed by the open-minded as virtually indistinguishable from the presence of spiritual agency. Both invisible both dangerously unknown.
We advance. We learn.
The rigidity(!) of dogma is replaced by a more relaxed knowing. Though again as is my wont, I’d like to say that the pendulumous swang-return that taught us kids to scorn old ways and traditional knowledges as “superstition” did a lot of harm too. Babies, bathwaters…
Anal sex isn’t “natural”. And nor are automobiles, tooth fillings, or sonograms.
Guys with moustaches lipstick rouge and tight leather hotpants are not going to feed a hungry tribe by procuring wild game, but so what? We have factory farms teeming with undead animals to gorge ourselves upon.
The real issue is back to that idiot’s diversion Survivor, the game show of life/death-metaphor action drama.
Eating is important! Shelter is important! No breeding on TV! Because sex! Is dirty!
Reproduction is central to the ongoing race.
An elevation of that centrality is healthy I think, and needs preservation and defense, but turning that centrality into dogma is only situationally valid, and gets outgrown, or should, where the downside is people getting stoned to death, or marginalized to death, or, the paranoid as heck but very real possibility of biological weapons-grade extermination of a marginalized group being acceptable, because they’re creepy, and evolutionary dead-ends.

@Mao:

–>http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/classroom/lynching_table_year.html ,
in the decade between 1950 and 1959 there 8 lynchings in the whole of the US. Of 6 blacks and 2 whites.

Is it safe for me to assume that you agree with Phil That life was better for Black People in the south, before they had rights equal to White People? Do you also agree that if Black People were more godly they would have fewer problems?

@486
Meh
Again you’re muddying the waters. This doesnt really say anything. If you want to make an argument why not make one?

Re: It can’t be the one true version when millions see things differently.

Uh, people disagree about scientific and historical questions too, which clearly do have true answers, even if we don’t know (yet) for sure what the true answer is. Either Jesus Christ is God, or he isn’t. Both can’t be true. Either Sexual Act X is immoral, or it isn’t, or it’s immoral in some situations but not others, but if one of those three options is true then the other two must be false. Most religious people think their beliefs are the One True Version, or at least the best approximation thereof. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t hold them. That it is more difficult to know if, e.g. Jesus Christ is God than it is to know the melting point of mercury, doesn’t negate the fact that both questions, in principle, have true and false answers.

Re: What could be more totalitarian than holding oneself up as the voice of the one true version of Christianity?

I don’t see what’s ‘totalitarian’ about it (and really, I question how meaningful the word is anyway).

Re: That’s akin to saying Tolkien was wrong about the happenings and rationale in his Lord of the Rings. That he didn’t know what he was talking about regarding his own child.

Except Christians don’t believe that Jews ‘created’ the Old Testament, at least not all of it: we believe that it was revealed to them by a supernatural power. I’m more interested in what *God* meant by “Thou shalt have no other gods beside me” and “The Lord thy God is one”, than I am in what the Jews meant, and I don’t think the Jewish understanding of “The Lord thy God is one” is correct (to put it mildly).

Of course they can be prejudiced as hell in other ways.

Hector writes: Either Jesus Christ is God, or he isn’t.

Yes, that kind of nails it. This one guy in Palestine 2000 years ago was the Messiah, the Son of God, born of a virgin, in accordance with the prophets.

Or not.

It’s, like, 50-50.

Pascal’s wager is at very long odds, yes.

Perhaps he should have gone for something simpler than a box trifecta.

@ 491
Huh?

Herdman-
Excuse me?
On a thread where Phil Robertson’s been quoted and requoted, and re-requoted, linked to, and possibly even channeled through the gifts of spirit-mediums (-media?), and right there in most all of them iterations of his very own speech, creating the nucleus from which the charge against him of homophobic utterance exploded, is the very elements of all that you might find “Causing shock or horror; gruesome/ Marked by sensationalism etc”…
and I’m, me, bringing the lurid?
Bringing the “things aren’t sposed to go in there” anatomically descriptive kind of thing?
Me? No. I am not.
MPAVictoria-
You need to pay attention better.

JH “If rural African-Americans weren’t fleeing the South because of Jim Crow or anything like that – because it wasn’t a major problem except in cities – then why were they fleeing at all? Just better job opportunities up north? But that hardly seems sufficient. There wasn’t a comparable white Great Migration out of the South, after all. (I’m sure there must be an innocent explanation for all of this! I’m sure you are the guy to provide it!)”

I don’t know how innocent this is, but if rural population in general was migrating into the cities, and moving to a southern city was problematic because of the segregation, then it would probably make sense to move to a northern city, since you are uprooting yourself anyway.

I don’t know to what extend this was the cause, but it’s a possible explanation.

I think I read somewhere that everyday low-level racist attitudes were (and probably still are) worse in the north than in the south. And if that’s true, then the Jim Crow laws would have to be a major factor for you to prefer Chicago to Atlanta.

DNF! DNF DNF God! Don’t break into the old abandoned shack! Don’t split up! Turn on the lights instead of using a single, dim flashlight with old batteries that will fail at a crucial moment! Don’t make out in the creepy upstairs bedroom! Great jumping junipers, people, GET OUT OF THE THREAD ALIVE AND SLOWLY BACK AWAY!

Ed “Also, is this the same Mao of the defense of Palestinians?”

I don’t defend Palestinians. I don’t even know what it means, to defend Palestinians. It’s very similar to what dsquared said recently: one gets annoyed by seemingly rational people defending (massively) an anachronistic occurrence of settler colonialism and painting it as a respectable (sometimes even admirable) situation, presenting armed to the teeth colonialists as righteous victims, and so on. One feels an urge to protest.

And it’s something similar here: one is annoyed by what one perceives as dogmatic ritual denunciations. This is what is going on here, for the most part. If you said something like: ‘I have no idea if the guy is racist or not, but it certainly sounds like he’s exaggerating black sharecroppers’ happiness, when making his point’, it’d be over.

“That would indeed be racist, if I said, or thought, that the only difference was skin color. I don’t think it is, and neither does Robertson. I think government welfare policies as directed towards blacks actively undermined black family structure.”

Well then, please present some evidence that Great Society welfare was targeted towards black share croppers in a way that it was not targeted toward white share croppers. They all selected on income (or urban/rural, for some programs), not race. Go ahead and point us to the provisions of these acts which were racially targeted.

Not much in the way of racial targeting going on other than affirmative action and busing.

In any case it’s good to see that you’re not even trying to defend the ridiculous notion that your “interpretation” and arguments have any textual basis in the Robertson quote. Just your own, incoherent version of the Moynihan Report.

You do realize the Moynihan Report, fingering the flaws of black family structure as the cause of black poverty, came out in 1965, right? Doesn’t really fit with the whole, ‘war on poverty caused the ideal Jim Crow era black family to disintegrate’ line. ‘The decline of black family structure in the Jim Crow era proves that post-Jim Crow welfare policy ruined black family structure’. The arrow of time is a tricky thing.

“And it’s something similar here: one is annoyed by what one perceives as dogmatic ritual denunciations. This is what is going on here, for the most part. If you said something like: ‘I have no idea if the guy is racist or not, but it certainly sounds like he’s exaggerating black sharecroppers’ happiness, when making his point’, it’d be over.”

Skipper was the fifth comment on this. No one said anything, really, before Skipper jumped in here all self righteously spewing stupidity. Its actually rarely the ‘anti racists’ (or for a more accurate description, those who hold a conventional, supportable view of history) who get worked up about this stuff, it’s the other group, the ones who just have these ridiculous, completely wrong opinions that they feel everyone else should hear and agree with.

roys 491 is pretty funny though, if anyone missed it
the money quote, as they say

“Anal sex isn’t “natural”. And nor are automobiles, tooth fillings, or sonograms.
Guys with moustaches lipstick rouge and tight leather hotpants are not going to feed a hungry tribe by procuring wild game, but so what? We have factory farms teeming with undead animals to gorge ourselves upon”

“Anal sex isn’t “natural””

This isn’t even true! People have been having anal sex for about as long as there has been people. It is just as natural as any other sexual act.

“No one has the right to a tv show Skippy.”

It’s an odd world Skipper lives in. You’re entitled to a TV show, and you’re also entitled that no one “insist” on anything to you. Free speech ends somewhere before insistence. Perhaps at “strongly suggesting”. And apparently somewhere there’s a movement to literally prevent Robertson from holding particular beliefs. I guess the pink mafia are using their mind rays to control Phil’s thoughts.