Approximately zero people that I've seen make this argument seem to realize that the issue is not whether some people decided to vote for Trump on this basis, but whether the net effect of this way of talking about racism, etc was negative for the Hillary campaign. For example, people who are angry or afraid of the other party are more likely to be politically engaged and thus vote - this is probably true of a lot of Democrats who believe that lots of Republicans are racist:



Generally speaking, as the Presidential election gets closer, right-leaning people's political identities become more activated by news stories about the election and so they get more than normally upset and frustrated about being considered or called a racist, which also seems to be happening more frequently (which it probably is, since people on the Democratic side are getting their political identities activated as well, often by a bunch of stories about how Republicans are like, super racist, and so there is a lot of chatter among Democrats about Republican racism). Thus, they end up voting for Trump, and they'll sincerely say that it was because of the left's PCness.

Of course though, they voted for Romney for the same reason (more accurately, some probably similar percentage of Republicanesque voters did). And for McCain, Bush, etc. So the interesting question is really whether being considered or called a racist, sexist, homophobe, etc. was more of an issue in this election than in previous ones. I've not seen anyone make this comparison so far. Even more difficult, all campaigns find some way to activate their voters. If they didn't use SJW boogeymen, they would use some other thing. So you also want to know how effective the replacement-level alternate GOP messaging would be in order to estimate the true impact of this way of talking.

To me, the Republican talk about SJWs & PC during the election was primarily a motivating tool for people to vote for Trump. That is, it was a way to tell voters, "boy, those Democrats sure do think you're a big racist, let me tell you a whole bunch of stories about Democrats calling good, upstanding citizens like you a racist. Aren't Democrats awful. I mean, Donald Trump has his problems, but at least he won't call you a racist."

That article was posted in January 2016. I'm not sure it is going to be able to tell me what cost Hillary the election.

I agree. You should be allowed to do all these things. This is because I think bad behavior should be shamed. If Wookie, et al acted badly, they should be shamed. You however don't think bad behavior should be shamed. Thus, when you see bad behavior, you call it out, talk about how the people who do it are really bad people for doing so, how you think they are causing horrible things to happen to the country but, crucially, you don't think this calling them out should cause them to feel any shame. A progressive on the other hand, when she sees bad behavior (eg racism), is also allowed to describe what that racist has done to her or others undeservedly, what racism does generally, and that the racist is lying about his racism. But since she thinks the racist should also feel shame for being racist, this is somehow unacceptable?

Huh?

Of course there are plenty of different reasons why people voted for Trump and Hillary and Romney, and Donald Duck. Here we discuss one of them. What in gods name does it matter when the article was written?

I'm ****ing defending myself and others from lies and smears, arguing a point about how some people shamed who feel unjustly accused might act a bit irrationally and fall for a huckster who tells their accusers all to stick it up their asses, and you keep saying I'm a fan of shaming people.

Okay. Let's discuss it. Please address my argument that there is no evidence that liberal/progressive use of shame had a negative impact on the Democrats' chance of winning the presidency. Here it is again.

1. Using shaming language about outgroups causes people in the ingroup to feel angry and afraid towards that outgroup.
2. Believing that Republicans are racists, sexists, homophobes, etc. makes Democrats (who are more likely to be minority, female, and LGBTQ) angry and afraid of Republicans.
3. People who are angry and afraid of the other party are more politically engaged.
4. People who are more politically engaged are more likely to vote.
5. Thus, using shaming language about Republicans being racists, sexists, or homophobes makes it more likely that Democrats will vote.

I granted that this shaming language also has the effect of causing some Republicans to vote as well. My contention is that there is no good reason to think that its effect was greater on Republicans than Democrats (more the opposite in my view since campaigns focus most of their efforts on getting supporters to polls rather than persuasion).

An article about an event that happened in November 2016 written in January 2016 is missing 10 months of crucial information. Also, no one knows except in very broad strokes (is there a war?, how is the economy?, is there an incumbent?) what fundamentals cause a particular party to win an election.

Are you upset that I'm making that assertion at all or that I'm not defending it? As I said, I'm not criticizing you for defending yourself and others from smears. Where I think you go wrong is in describing a disagreement about what counts as racism, sexism, and so on as a disagreement about how people should talk. I'm trying to demonstrate this by showing that you talk in the same way as what you are criticizing.

Okay, well we're talking about two related, but different things. Earlier, WN said he thought it was silly to think, as Trolly put it, "SJW's incivility made peeps vote for Trump" but I think it's an entirely likely motivating factor, something I've been arguing for the past year. And not just "incivility", but overbearing policing of language, bad assumptions about strangers "we know what you really mean," constant smears and attempts to shame, witch hunts like Justin Sacco, and all the reasons presented in that article.

It sounds like you're sort of admitting that yes, those things could motivate people, but you think Trump's lies and racist language should have had an equally or greater motivating effect on Hillary supporters. That's a much more complicated question, and worth exploring, though probably impossible to get a real consensus on. I would probably argue my side using artcles like this. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/1...?_r=0&referer=

I think the question "why Trump" is more interesting than "why not Hillary," which is part of why I've been crowing on about this for a long time. Why didn't republicans nominate someone sane, who seemed to actually have a chance to beat Hillary? It was like they just went mad and sabatoged themselves out of pure irrational anger, and I think much of it was a function of their being so frustrated with the overbearing PC, as the article outlines. All of this frustration wouldn't have gone away in the ten months leading to the election, if anything it amplified.

The fact he won the election is pretty irrelevant actually. This conversation should be no different had he gotten a few hundred thousand fewer votes in MI, PA, and WI. Why that baboon got anywhere near 60,000,000 votes in the same country who nominated Romney and McCain and elected Obama the previous two cycles is the important question.

Right. I'm not above occasionally trolling and name calling. I'll say it's almost exclusively in response, but I'm no saint. If you were to call me a racist right now, I might call you an idiot. If you were to take part in pestering, trolling, jumping in threads to remind people I denied the Holocaust (which is a lie) then I might refer to you as an insane douchebag in his mothers basement with cheeto stained underwear, or an SJW.

But calling out Wookie, Fly et al for their bad treatment, especially when in context of a discussion about why that treatment is harmful is not shaming. I'm not jumping into their conversations here to remind them I think they're horrible people, trying to organize a witch hunt to get Wookie demodded or P shut down. I'm responding to that activity with objections. There is a big difference.

Foldn,


I stopped defending you when you refused to defend yourself, after being pretzeled trying to defend BruceZ. You basically fell on your sword. It seems disingenuous to fault wookie and fly and the gang when you chose to let them believe.

And I believe those incidents have colored your thinking in this antiPCSJW crusade.

Once again, foldn wants the ability to target others and spout off all kinds of nonsense while remaining free from criticism himself.

None of that in the content threads please.

References to other posters methods in this thread are okay if the poster generally acknowledges that that is their method. Beyond that this is not about the posters or old arguments.

Chez gonna erase any mention of Senpai BruceZ's racist tantrum, who could have seen that coming.

This is a content thread?

.

No, you don't quite understand my argument. I do admit that the incivility and shaming behavior of some people on the left caused some people on the right to vote Republican who would not otherwise have voted. My claim is that the exact same incivility and shaming behavior of of those people on the left also caused some people (more people would be my guess) on the left to vote Democrat who wouldn't have otherwise done so. This doesn't have anything to do with whether or not the person being shamed or the brunt of incivility is actually racist or whatever nonsense Trump is actually saying.

Thus, if you want to condemn this kind of behavior by saying that it leads to Donald Trump being elected, you have to not only show that it caused some voters to vote for Trump who wouldn't have otherwise done so, you have to also show that there are more of these voters than of the voters it caused to vote for Hillary.

There is an even more difficult problem as well. Republicans will always try to find some thing to show that Democrats are bad - that's the nature of elections. So imagine that zero Democrats used shame or incivility about racism, etc. Does that mean all those people who voted for Trump because of this shame or incivility now won't? No. Because then there would be some other issue - maybe a BS one like about how Hillary is a criminal or Benghazi, or maybe a real one like how Democrats want to increase access to abortion or raise your taxes. How effective would these other messages be compared to the "Democrats are mean people who unfairly accuse others of being bigots" message? I don't know. It's not clear to me that they would be noticeably worse at all.

I'm confused by this. The Republicans nominated someone who we know had a chance to beat Hillary since he actually did so. Furthermore, his supporters at the time largely thought he had a chance of doing so as well. They were right. There is no need to explain why Republican voters voted for someone a bunch of pundits and GOP leaders thought was unelectable when he actually was electable. That's why we have primaries in the first place.

So what about the pundits and Republican leaders? In my opinion, those people were either not being honest or didn't understand what was going on in the Republican Party. The unusual thing about the Republican primary was not that Trump was popular or successful initially, it was that the Republican Party leadership had completely lost control of their party and so weren't able to block someone they considered unacceptable. Thus, someone completely outside of and somewhat opposed to the normal party leadership was nominated. That's pretty unusual. But I would say that the reason why they were wrong about Trump's electability (i.e. not understanding Republican voters) was the same reason their favored candidates also lost in the primary.

In the general election, people mostly just voted for Trump because he was a Republican running against a Democrat. Before the election, it looked like a pretty close election with a slight edge to the Democrats. The day before the election, 538 and prediction markets were saying the same things, fairly close election, with a slightly larger edge to the Democrats. No good reason to really be surprised that Trump won unless you were unskewing the polls.

The issue is not whether or not you are a saint. Presumably your critique of rude, shaming progressives goes beyond the fact that a few people in P forum were mean to you. You are claiming that in some way this progressive behavior contributed meaningfully to the election of Donald Trump. So I'm trying to identify what behavior you think this is. What I have so far is basically, they try to shame people by calling them racists or bigots (when you don't think those people actually are racists or bigots).

Now, I would normally say that the problem here is that you disagree with them about what it means to be a bigot or racist, not that there is anything wrong with shaming people about being a bigot or racist. After all, shame is woven into all social norms, as a motive force driving us away from being seen as bad or thinking about ourselves in unpleasant ways. So I would say that any attempt to enforce social norms is also an attempt to cause people to feel shame if they don't abide by those norms, I.e it is a form of shaming. But you don't think your criticism of these progressives is about their ideas, but their behavior.

Now, you also spend a lot of time enforcing norms by criticizing how progressives and liberals talk about bigotry. If you thought that shaming behavior was somehow inherently wrong, then you either disagree with me that norm enforcement involves shame, you disagree that you are trying to enforce norms, or you are engaging in the same behavior that you are criticizing, literally while criticizing it.

Maybe you think some ways of shaming others or enforcing norms are bad, but others aren't, and you are doing the acceptable ones? If so, what are these bad ways of enforcing norms?

This is a thread about censorship in the forum, I'm perfectly on topic discussing your policy on censoring posts about BruceZ. Please stop derailing the discussion.

Suire you can bring up the issue of censorship. Here or in a moderation thread if it's about the forum rules.

What you can't do is break the rules for a content thread. Save the personal attacks, trolling, old vendetta's etc for the threads please.

Yes, I'm aware of your misconceptions.

Not at all. Criticisms are welcome, and always forthcoming. Don't be silly. I'm allowed to respond and give my own.

Chez, feel free to keep the thread on topic, and mod as you see fit, but I don't consider these misconceptions to be personal attacks.

I haven't insulted or trolled anyone. Stop derailing this thread of I will issue a warning.

I'm sorry, OP, but not only is this chain of arguments getting way too long, I feel like I've answered all of this already in previous posts, and your questions indicate you didn't understand what I was trying to say.

I think this is sort of common, and it happens to me as well, especially when the discussion gets so long with so many different topics. I'll try reading through your posts again to see if I'm misunderstanding your questions, and if I can answer them more clearly.

Appreciated Foldn but content threads are not going to be allowed to degenerate into being about the posters. Plenty of other places for that.

Fair enough. I was being critical of Wookie and Fly, to illustrate my points. I'll try to keep things more general or outside of 2+2 drama.

Ty

Can you link to the post where you explain how a post like this:

doesn't count as shaming progressives that think Republican supporters of Trump are pretty racist, but the posts accusing HastenDan of racism before it do count as shaming?

See, I read your post and think something like: oh FoldnDark seems at least semi-respectable, he writes in complete sentences, doesn't curse much, and is taking the wry tone often used to signal being above the fray. This means he probably has above-average status on the forum. He is also pointing out a feature of how some progressives are talking about someone and mocking it. I don't enjoy or want to be mocked. It makes me feel worse about myself. I should try to not post in the way FoldnDark is mocking in order to avoid that feeling of shame I associate with being mocked. I should try to avoid calling people racists on the Internet so I won't be mocked by people like FoldnDark.

Do you think this is an unusual response to your post? Or are you unaware that some people have responses like this to posts like yours? What was your intention in making that post? To not affect other people's future behavior at all?

Fair enough. FWIW, I think of discussions like this as primarily a matter of me figuring out a way to state your position such that you'll feel it is fairly represented, so I expect there to be a lot of misunderstanding. When I say that your position seems inconsistent, I'm trying to signal where there is probably something wrong with how I understand your view and so most in need of clarification.

Yeah, I guess we're getting hung up on the shaming, how to define it. And you may have misread me early on, I haven't even been trying to argue shame never serves a legitimate function, anyway, just that it's often used in the wrong way, in silly situations when clearly reason would be better, is generally overused and is addictive. I described/linked to situations where mobs used shame in a pretty haphazard way and were wrong to, causing great damage, even ending jobs. But your idea of shaming, linking to a small joke of mine about how some people make everything racist, working in a very innocent photoshop that earned Ellen a twitter storm of shame for being racist, seems off to me.

Actually, no, I think they pretty much are the same. The Twitter storm around that picture was made up of a whole bunch of people mostly making small jokes and expressing disapproval of Ellen's photo.

I'm willing to also grant that social media shaming is a new phenomonen, one that can often go awry. But I took you to be making a criticism of the state of the left/progressive/liberal movement, not just a point about the danger of new media technologies. Am I wrong about this?

Maybe this will help explain things. Can you give me an example of someone who you think really was racist, but who you think was inappropriately shamed for being racist?

Again, there is a very easy explanation at hand here that you've said is incorrect: that you disagree with these progressives about what counts as bigotry and so you think they accuse a lot of people of being bigots that aren't. You have resisted this explanation because you want to say there is something wrong in the way they are acting and not just in their views about racism, but you have so far failed to identify what this is. Justine Sacco is a sympathetic victim because it was a big misunderstanding, so pick an unsympathetic victim to make your point.

Foldn is once again being awfully niggardly about conceding any points.