Quote:
Originally Posted by einbert
Watching these writers including one New York Times writer in particular twist themselves into knots on Twitter and elsewhere trying to pretend like there is absolutely no context to the speech is really incredible. It's reminiscent of the Zimmerman trial, when certain conservative posters would take certain weird details completely out of context and run with them for pages and pages, spinning these interesting tales that make perfect sense as long as you have absolutely no context as to what actually happened.
Huge amounts of modern ******* apologetics of right wing racist rhetoric is essentially this fallacy. I remember it took a turn as the McWhorter Fallacy in 2006 when George Allen called an Indian guy filming him a "maccaca" and told him "Welcome to America" and tons of right-wing asshats assured everyone liberals were making a big deal out of nothing because Allen was just being polite and maccaca COULD BE just a random string of sounds Allen just made up on the spot.
Back in the days when ACists were everywhere on the forum, I liked it best when it was known as the Raised by Wolves Act or the Feral Child Fallacy. Because we have to assume only liberals know anything about racism and anyone accused of being racist may have in fact been raised by wolves and has no idea why any of their words have any meaning at all. Why, perhaps Ron Paul doesn't even REALIZE basketball has anything to do with young black guys? He's so old and into economics, he probably just said black people riot over basketball because he knows young men of all ages really like roundball sports, he could have meant anything, stop calling him racist.
Watch for it. It's everywhere, even when race isn't even relevant. Like when Trump fired Comey and his defenders tried to argue Trump might not even know what obstruction of justice is, so he can hardly be guilty of it. He's just an impulsive dude with no filter, but he does no
wrong.
The fallacy is the same in all cases: the apologists demand you assume everyone you call a racist or trying to break the law is actually a bumbling idiot, raised by wolves in the forest and so knows nothing of history or context, who is pure at heart and just does inadvertently racist/criminal things by pure happenstance. No one but liberals really consider the context of what they do, it's really liberals fault for assuming too much, such genuinely salt of the earth people like Sarah Palin meekly just make allusions to Trump's BOMBSHELL use of 14 words with no real clue as what 14 words even are or how many words Trump used or what racism is, they're too nice and colorblind to focus on that.