A heap of broadly political links August 6, 2010
Posted by Erin Ptah in News Roundup.Tags: Anthony Weiner, California, Ireland, Nazis, racism, the gays, trauma
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A whole bunch of reasons to be angry about modern American racism, all of which are far more substantial than “taxes on tanning beds”. This post, you guys. You keep thinking he’s about to run out of examples, and then you scroll down, and…he hasn’t. Not even close.
PTSD-related domestic abuse associated with multiple tours in Afghanistan.
Speaking of responses to trauma, a big pop-culture craze in early-’60s Israel? Trashy Nazi porn novels. I was all ready to WTF, but ended up feeling a kind of giddy admiration for the huge variety of tools humans can and will latch onto in order to process trauma.
You know how the blogosphere will say things like “Jon Stewart Destroys Fox News” or “Rachel Maddow Eviscerates Guest” when the actual oh-so-dramatic takedown is in fact calm and relatively mild criticism? The title of this clip is “Anthony Weiner Rips Apart Republicans on 9/11 Health Bill”, and it has earned every word. (A more detailed explanation of why he was angry is given here.)
Ireland’s upper house passed a civil-union bill. The last line: “Ireland decriminalised homosexuality 17 years ago.” I remember seventeen years ago. How far we’ve come.
Prop 8 has gotten a federal smackdown. All together now: FINALLY. Of course, there are a couple more appeals to go….
In the meantime, have some photos of same-sex couples getting married. I cried. No lie. (Avoid the comments.)
My favorites, after the jump (right-click+view image to see them in full):
The Tim Wise article is poorly written garbage, the kind that pisses me off because of the dittoheads (Limbaugh reference! Ha!) who’ll jump up and down and say “Oh my god that’s so insightful!” No, it isn’t. All he did was your basic grocery list hack job and dress it up by assembling a lot of bullet points. It’s the Sean Hannity approach to argumentation on steroids.
Start with the main argument he introduces toward the end. His main sources for his primary argument about “Conservatives are only concerned about trivialities” are Media Matters, Huffington Post, and Daily Kos. So he’s citing three places that we already know are part of the idiot box complex and largely unreliable since they have a history of spinning things however they please. (Just like he’s doing.) He also gets his facts wrong on the Black Panther case, since we know there WERE voters who came forward saying they were intimidated. Had he listened to the lawyer handling that, he would have known that, rather than trusting unreliable sources. That supports the conclusion that he’s only citing news sources convenient to him, not ones that are factually accurate. FAIL.
A quick breakdown of the rest since I really don’t like wallowing through this more than I need to except to make sure people know that this is case study on how not to make a point (note that I’m relaxing my normally precise use of the word conservative to basically mean “right-leaning” – easier that way):
He lists a lot of “data showing” or “study indicates.” Okay. Let’s assume he’s expert enough to have read each of the studies himself and verified that the findings are trustworthy (a long shot). Let’s also assume the studies are free of bias stemming from the pursuit of sensationalism (also a long shot). It does nothing to support his point!
Okay, so there’s racism in the country. Conservatives have never said there isn’t any. And guess what, the Democrats didn’t make a big point out of many of these studies either, so I guess they’re just as bad! The only point to this huge laundry list is window dressing, mood setting, to put the reader into a state of mind of “OMG, the country has tons of racism!” He conveniently leaves out any study that might show different results (yes, such studies exist – I’m not bothering to get specific ones since it’s not worth the effort here). Basic manipulation of the reader.
Next, you have Tea Party stuff. Oh, yay. The old hackneyed line about how racists Tea Party folks are. Completely ignoring incidents such as how it was Tea Party opponents (SEIU) who beat up an African-American Tea Party member while calling him the N-word. What’s that? You didn’t hear of it? Oh, that’s because the only ones who talked about it were CONSERVATIVES.
The Tea Party leaders have already said, “Yes, there are some crazies here. But there aren’t many of them and the vast majority are not. Can we get back to the issues at hand?” His links here are all instances of “Focus on a microscopic case and make it general,” straight from the media distortion playbook. (See how Fox News treated Ron Paul in 2008 for another instance of how this kind of “not journalism” operates.) More manipulation of the reader, since he’s now insinuated an association “racism” with “Tea Party” and “Conservative” – WHEN NO SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TWO ACTUALLY EXISTS.
(There’s more, but at this point I’ve proved my point so I’m stopping before this gets as long as his piece.)
Summary: long article is long, but pointless, full of misinformation and downright stupidity. Tim Wise isn’t worth the time it takes to read him, just like so many other empty talking heads. The hour causes my words to fail in describing just how much I dislike him for polluting efforts to address racism in the country with this sort of white noise.
(It is, at least, a decent link collection to several studies that may be interesting to read at a later date.)
Reading the article, I didn’t pay as much attention to the political groups being cited as to the overall point: anyone who tries to claim there is a pervasive pattern of discrimination against white people in this country, and uses the proposed tax on tanning beds as an example, is ignoring the fact that there are far more such instances of discrimination against people who aren’t white.
If that was his point I would have less of an issue. But the way he dragged in attempts to smear the Tea Party and to make racism look like the domain of Conservatives really got my dander up. It was unnecessary and just plain awful.
He also missed that many of the examples of anti-white racism are typically used to demonstrate hypocrisy within those who claim to oppose racism, in that their focus is less that and more “using racial incidents to make over broad generalizations about their political opponents.” Generalizations like the ones Tim made here. The examples are given with observations that they are ignored by typical “anti-racists” and that those who do mention them are in turn smeared by the same people who should demonstrate the same level of outrage as with incidents of white-on-black discrimination. The point is to show how there are pundits who purport to be champions of anti-discrimination when they’re true goal is to create straw man arguments for the left. Again, just like the commentary Tim provides here.
In other words, this article SUPPORTS the arguments being made by those he’s trying to condemn as “trivial,” thus demonstrating that their points may not be so trivial after all. He’s his own counterargument; far from being an “anti-racist,” he’s a second rate hack trying to use that language to mask his own agenda. Again, fail.