Ocasio-Cortez, a poor [wo]man’s Bernie

[LiveCoug]

tough to defend the indefensible, but it would be fun to watch him try.

White guys are fair game because: privelage

Hispanic women are never fair game because: racism

Something like that maybe?

[frank ryan]

frank, i'm curious how you differentiate between criticism of dumb trump and criticism of dumb AOC.

when folks criticize dumb trump it is simply because he is dumb.

however, when folks criticize AOC it is because they are racist and misogynistic - you know, because she is hispanic and a woman, it must be.

I don’t think everyone who criticizes AOC is racist.

[frank ryan]

White guys are fair game because: privelage

Hispanic women are never fair game because: racism

Something like that maybe?

I don’t think every one who criticizes her is racist, but I do think racism is playing a role in the amount of criticism she receives.

[swampfrog]

Yeah, I don’t agree racism is declining. Acts of extremism by racists are not declining. Organizations that track hate groups are reporting they are increasing, and it is more open online.

There have been more racist and anti-semetic candidates lately within the Republican Party.

As to MAGA hat-wearers, that’s not the same as racism.

Can you cite data supporting that viewpoint? I'd like to read it and compare against other sources. Increased visibility of racist people or acts is not a valid barometer of actual societal population trends. There are myriad reasons why the visibility of racist acts has increased in the last decade.

Racism can be viewed as a subset of "other-ism", we are biologically programmed by evolution to see the world as Us versus Them. We trust and cooperate with Us. It just so happens that it's tied to the disgust mechanisms in our brains. Robert Sapolsky has several interesting talks on this.

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/art...litical_divide

If you get to the point where citing ‘thems’ causes your followers to activate neurons in the insular cortex—the part of the brain that responds to viscerally disgusting things—you’ve finished most of your to-do list for your genocide...

...in a very primate kind of way. The easiest symbols that we grab on to in deciding if someone is an “us” or a “them” are visceral ones. Being disgusted by someone’s personal behavior—the way “they” do stuff—is a much easier entrée to hating them than disagreeing with their views on the trade deficit.

Primates are hard-wired for us/them dichotomies. Our brains detect them in less than 100 milliseconds. Our views about things are driven by implicit (unconscious) processes. It’s depressing as hell. A hormone like oxytocin makes you nicer to “us” and crappier to “them.” What hormones are good at is magnifying things that are already there. That tells you that “us and them” is a fundamental fault line in our brains.

That’s depressing, but the key thing about us is that we all belong to multiple tribes. Even if we are predisposed into dividing the world into “us” and “them,” it’s incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who is an “us” and who is a “them” at any given moment.

In that sense, response to a MAGA hat wearer is the same as a racist response. The response system is exactly the same, disgust is triggered in the insular cortex. If you feel superior to a MAGA hat wearer you are indeed falling prone to the same mechanisms of Us versus Them that is triggered by skin color.

Data on actual racism decreasing cited below.

https://www.economist.com/democracy-...ing-in-america

Long-term trends, meanwhile, suggest a decline in both professed racist views and racist acts. On a range of survey measures including reported discomfort about living next to someone of a different race, or opposition to inter-racial marriage, Americans appear far less racist than in the past. Only 4% of Americans supported inter-racial marriage in 1958. By 1997 that was 50%; today it is 87%. Inter-racial marriages climbed from 7 to 15 percent of all marriages between 1980 and 2010. And racially and ethnically motivated hate crimes reported to the FBI fell 48% between 1994 and 2015. Because local law enforcement agencies aren’t required to report hate crimes to the FBI and because they can only report to Washington if the crime has been reported to them in the first place, the FBI statistics are a considerable underestimate of the problem. But the trend is still revealing.

https://qz.com/983016/the-data-are-i...an-old-people/

In the 1960s, almost half of white respondents in the US suggestedthey would move if a black family moved in next door. But the proportion of Americans reporting to the World Values Survey that they were uncomfortable living next to someone of a different race fell from 8% in the 1980s to 6% today. Again, in 1958, only 4% of Americans approved of interracial marriage according to Gallup polling. Support only crossed the 50% threshold in 1997. It has now reached 87%. Although people can lie to surveyors about their beliefs, the polling matches up with behavioral change: in 1980, less than 7% of marriages were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity in the United States. That climbed to 15% by 2010. There were 6,336 racially or ethnically motivated hate crimes reported by the FBI in 1994—that dropped to 3,310 in 2015.

Also:

https://quillette.com/2018/05/14/the-racism-treadmill/

[frank ryan]

Frank has been avoiding my question about this because he doesn't want to admit that he is a racist and misogynistic and Trump is a Hispanic woman.

Ooooh, you got me. I didn’t respond because you were being smarmy and insincere.

[frank ryan]

Can you cite data supporting that viewpoint? I'd like to read it and compare against other sources. Increased visibility of racist people or acts is not a valid barometer of actual societal population trends. There are myriad reasons why the visibility of racist acts has increased in the last decade.

Racism can be viewed as a subset of "other-ism", we are biologically programmed by evolution to see the world as Us versus Them. We trust and cooperate with Us. It just so happens that it's tied to the disgust mechanisms in our brains. Robert Sapolsky has several interesting talks on this.

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/art...litical_divide



In that sense, response to a MAGA hat wearer is the same as a racist response. The response system is exactly the same, disgust is triggered in the insular cortex. If you feel superior to a MAGA hat wearer you are indeed falling prone to the same mechanisms of Us versus Them that is triggered by skin color.

Data on actual racism decreasing cited below.

https://www.economist.com/democracy-...ing-in-america



https://qz.com/983016/the-data-are-i...an-old-people/



Also:

https://quillette.com/2018/05/14/the-racism-treadmill/

Feeling superior to a MAGA hat wearer is not the same as racism. Nor is feeling superior to a social justice warrior or liberal.
Strange point you are trying to make.

You have "White Nationalists" like Gorka and Miller (among others) in Trump's cabinet. If you see increased visibility and online activity as a sign racism is on the rise I think you're being naive.



I’ll post some links for you when I get a minute.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-h...-and-extremism

Rabidly racist and antisemitic web forums like Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer drew huge numbers up until the Charlottesville rally, when the finally outraged tech world began to take down their platforms. In the summer of 2016, Daily Stormer averaged about 140,000 unique page views a month. By the eve of the Charlottesville rally in August 2017, that number had reached nearly 750,000. Similarly, the oldest hate site, Stormfront, gained nearly 30,000 new registered users in the first eight months of 2017, bringing its total to over 326,000.

This excitement translated into growth among the white supremacist groups most closely aligned with the new president. In 2017, completely new groups sprouted up: Patriot Front, the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights, Identity Dixie and others. Groups that latched onto Trump flourished. Identity Evropa went from one chapter in 2016 to 15 in 2017; The Right Stuff expanded from four chapters to 21 and spawned Identity Dixie; and Vanguard America grew from 12 to 25. New voices, like Mike Enoch, became players in the movement.

In 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) found that the number of hate groups rose to 954 from 917 the prior year, up 4 percent. Within the white supremacist movement, neo-Nazi groups saw the greatest growth — soaring by 22 percent from 99 to 121. Anti-Muslim groups also rose for a third straight year. After tripling from 2015 to 2016, they grew by another 13 percent, from 101 chapters to 114 in 2017. Anti-immigrant groups also leapt, from 14 to 22 in 2017.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.48aaa1ff751e

Hate crimes in the nation’s 10 largest cities increased by 12 percent last year, reaching the highest level in more than a decade, according to a report released Monday by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino.

The center analyzed hate-crime data reported by law enforcement agencies in 38 cities and counties across the country, including the 10 largest cities. Seven out of those 10 big cities saw an increase in hate crimes, with the largest jump in San Jose, Calif., where 44 hate crimes were reported; a 132 percent increase from 2016.

Hate crime rates in the country’s largest cities have increased for the past four years; all against the backdrop of an overall crime rate that has been declining since the early 1990s.

“Clearly these kinds of sustained increases over time in different jurisdictions says that we’ve entered a new place: We are an extraordinarily fragmented society across inter-group lines,” said Brian Levin, a professor of criminal justice and the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

Crimes motivated by race or ethnicity bias are consistently the most common type of reported hate crime, and African Americans are the most targeted group, representing 23 percent of all hate crimes reported in major cities in 2017. Jews are consistently the most targeted religious group, and represented 19 percent of all hate crimes reported in major cities in 2017.

[smokymountainrain]

I don’t think everyone who criticizes AOC is racist.

but if they are specifically targeting her dumb comments, don't you think it would be fair to leave racism out of the equation? okay, if you want to claim racism in regard to criticism of her in general, have at it, but if she's being dumb, lets just leave at that. dumb is dumb whether it is trump or AOC.

[swampfrog]

Feeling superior to a MAGA hat wearer is not the same as racism. Nor is feeling superior to a social justice warrior or liberal.
Strange point you are trying to make.

I’ll post some links for you when I get a minute.

When you attribute a group identity (race or political affiliation) and then judge someone by that identity, you classify them as Us or Them. Racism is built on the same biological constructs as all other Us versus Them dichotomies. It's not that special. That is how primates (and many other members of the animal kingdom) see the world.

If you're simply stating that racism is different that political affiliation because one is a physical trait and the other a state of mind, then sure they are not the same. However, human reaction to the Us versus Them is the same. Our tolerance for political differences is decreasing. We are lashing out against the "other" in the same ways. And we see it manifested in the same ways, take inter-party marriage for example:

https://www.voanews.com/a/mixed-poli...e/3705468.html

When it comes to Americans who identify strongly as Democrat or Republican, the divide is even wider. In 1958, “33 percent of Democrats wanted their daughters to marry a Democrat, and 25 percent of Republicans wanted their daughters to marry a Republican,” Vavreck writes. “But by 2016, 60 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans felt that way.”

[BigPiney]

I agree with frank. Online racism is way worse now than it was when I was a kid.

true

[smokymountainrain]

true

lets face it, when pelado was a kid and when you were a kid are two very different things. doesn't make his statement any less true, but i wanted to point that out.

[Jeff Lebowski]

lets face it, when pelado was a kid and when you were a kid are two very different things. doesn't make his statement any less true, but i wanted to point that out.

Good to see that you got the joke!

[Eddie]

Ooooh, you got me. I didn’t respond because you were being smarmy and insincere.

I just figured you didn't respond because you aren't very good at admitting when you're wrong.

[swampfrog]

You have "White Nationalists" like Gorka and Miller (among others) in Trump's cabinet. If you see increased visibility and online activity as a sign racism is on the rise I think you're being naive.

I asked for definition clarification originally for exactly this reason, white or black nationalism is not in itself a certain marker for racism. There are benefits to ethnically homogeneous societies that are not based in belief of superiority. Diversity is not an all good proposition.

Are there no possible other reasons for increased visibility and online activity? None? You have an administration which is at least perceived as more tolerant of such beliefs. Does that mean the number of people who espouse these ideas is increasing or simply existing ones are more eager (emboldened) to demonstrate their affiliation publicly? Are they successfully recruiting at a rate greater than population growth?

I find this similar to the missing child milk carton phenomena. Increased exposure to the general populace of the existence of missing children increased the perception that kidnappings were on the rise when the actual data shows a net decrease.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.06b9ee7ba63d

I'm in agreement that the amount of racist manifestations could have increased since the Trump presidency. What I don't agree with is this represents an increase in racism in the country. Here I'm defining racism as the percentage of the population who espouse that one race is superior to others--not acts of racism. I still contest that that number is decreasing and continues to decrease as measured by valid statistical polling methodology.

I’ll post some links for you when I get a minute.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-h...-and-extremism

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.48aaa1ff751e

These are all measurements of agency self-reported hate crimes (hate crime reporting is optional), there is no normalization of what constitutes "hate" or reporting methodology. The growth in these numbers could easily be explainable by increased political pressure (or maybe even simply awareness) to classify more crimes as "hate" crimes, or even official changes to statutes that define "hate crime". In order to find any real trends here it would require holding the definition of "hate crime" static across agencies, which cannot be done.

I would much rather rely on the data gathered by unbiased polling of the populace about racist beliefs which I already cited and show decreasing racism in America.

[frank ryan]

F

I asked for definition clarification originally for exactly this reason, white or black nationalism is not in itself a certain marker for racism. There are benefits to ethnically homogeneous societies that are not based in belief of superiority. Diversity is not an all good proposition.

Are there no possible other reasons for increased visibility and online activity? None? You have an administration which is at least perceived as more tolerant of such beliefs. Does that mean the number of people who espouse these ideas is increasing or simply existing ones are more eager (emboldened) to demonstrate their affiliation publicly? Are they successfully recruiting at a rate greater than population growth?

I find this similar to the missing child milk carton phenomena. Increased exposure to the general populace of the existence of missing children increased the perception that kidnappings were on the rise when the actual data shows a net decrease.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.06b9ee7ba63d

I'm in agreement that the amount of racist manifestations could have increased since the Trump presidency. What I don't agree with is this represents an increase in racism in the country. Here I'm defining racism as the percentage of the population who espouse that one race is superior to others--not acts of racism. I still contest that that number is decreasing and continues to decrease as measured by valid statistical polling methodology.



These are all measurements of agency self-reported hate crimes (hate crime reporting is optional), there is no normalization of what constitutes "hate" or reporting methodology. The growth in these numbers could easily be explainable by increased political pressure (or maybe even simply awareness) to classify more crimes as "hate" crimes, or even official changes to statutes that define "hate crime". In order to find any real trends here it would require holding the definition of "hate crime" static across agencies, which cannot be done.

I would much rather rely on the data gathered by unbiased polling of the populace about racist beliefs which I already cited and show decreasing racism in America.

If you don’t see race-based nationalism as a marker for racism, I’m not sure we will find any common ground. White Nationalism (or Black Nationalism) is euphemistic speak for racist.
People deny racism to a pollster but does not mean all those people are not racist. Some of them are a likely lying, and more are unaware of their racism.

[BlueK]

I asked for definition clarification originally for exactly this reason, white or black nationalism is not in itself a certain marker for racism. There are benefits to ethnically homogeneous societies that are not based in belief of superiority. Diversity is not an all good proposition.

Are there no possible other reasons for increased visibility and online activity? None? You have an administration which is at least perceived as more tolerant of such beliefs. Does that mean the number of people who espouse these ideas is increasing or simply existing ones are more eager (emboldened) to demonstrate their affiliation publicly? Are they successfully recruiting at a rate greater than population growth?

I find this similar to the missing child milk carton phenomena. Increased exposure to the general populace of the existence of missing children increased the perception that kidnappings were on the rise when the actual data shows a net decrease.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.06b9ee7ba63d

I'm in agreement that the amount of racist manifestations could have increased since the Trump presidency. What I don't agree with is this represents an increase in racism in the country. Here I'm defining racism as the percentage of the population who espouse that one race is superior to others--not acts of racism. I still contest that that number is decreasing and continues to decrease as measured by valid statistical polling methodology.



These are all measurements of agency self-reported hate crimes (hate crime reporting is optional), there is no normalization of what constitutes "hate" or reporting methodology. The growth in these numbers could easily be explainable by increased political pressure (or maybe even simply awareness) to classify more crimes as "hate" crimes, or even official changes to statutes that define "hate crime". In order to find any real trends here it would require holding the definition of "hate crime" static across agencies, which cannot be done.

I would much rather rely on the data gathered by unbiased polling of the populace about racist beliefs which I already cited and show decreasing racism in America.

I don't think American society is necessarily more racist. I do think many of those who have those beliefs have suddenly felt vindicated and more comfortable expressing them outwardly, sometimes through hate crimes, than before Trump was elected.