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[Trekkin]

I don't see any plagarism with the general broad strokes idea she has.

The more blatant plagiarism is in the pamphlet she's putting her name on, which is literally a carbon copy of a 2014 one but for a tiny list of cosmetic changes and differences in wording. And her picture and introduction, I suppose.

[Shazbot]

black male voters, leaving local ballot plantation owners worried about their crops.

hey look, racist statement implying black people have no autonomy and are merely 'crops' to be tended, AND an allusion to plantation slavery.

noice.rosen

Yes. I am accusing the machine politicians of inner-city wards of having that mentality. Making that accusation does not mean that I have that mentality. So I hope that's clear for you now.

[Reelya]

It's easy to hate when you demonize the other side as non-human "machine politicians" who only see their own constituents as crops to harvest. Why wouldn't we apply this logic equally to the Republicans however? The Republicans ignore Red states during the general election, because they know they have them in the bag, and concentrate 100% of effort on swing states. So equal evidence that the GOP doesn't actually give a fig about their own supporters - states that are heavily pro-Republican basically get the finger because the GOP can safely ignore them.

The GOP only campaigns on the promise of "getting" people. e.g "get" the Mexicans and their children, which appeals to pure hatred. There's no promise to actually do anything that helps their on constituents in any of that. Nor are their own constituents helped when they pass tax breaks that only apply to the top income-bracket. The GOP sees it's own constituents as mindless chattels to be turned against the "other" with blind hatred, all so the GOP can feather the nest of only their richest backers.

Compare that to politicians who campaign to win black votes. They don't normally campaign on "getting" white people, but on actually passing policies that help black people. This is the core difference. The GOP appeal to poor whites is merely "we promise to fuck over everyone that's not you" rather than actually having any actual policies that help poor white people. This is completely different to how Democrats speak to black voters.

[Trekkin]

So I hope that's clear for you now.

It would be clearer had you not previously attributed racial disparities in crime rates to Tinder driving up unemployment by making it harder to slut-shame women, frankly.

[Kagus]

And yeah, that usage of African-American has always struck me as a bit odd... Like all black people are somehow from Africa and all Africans are black people.

Shorthand for sub-saharan Africans.

However, compare the term "Asian" then go look up the conceptual region known as "Asia" and you'll see it includes many places we wouldn't normally call the people "Asians". It's the same with "African". "African" and "Asian" as racial definitions don't line up 100% with the geographical definitions: they're the same word but they have different meanings in relation to different areas of study, different contexts. That's just how language works. Different fields of study develop their own internal rules for what the terminology means. So demographers and anthropologists developed their own definitions of "Asian" and "African" which are internally-consistent, and geographers developed their own definitions which are internally consistent, but don't have any real connection to how the terms are used in other fields. e.g. when geographers argue about whether a particular country should be defined as being in Asia or not, they don't go and talk to anthropologists to ensure that their definition lines up with the definitions of racial groupings, which also uses the word "Asian". Same words, completely different semantics.

Sub-Saharan, so, like, South Africa? I actually know a Boer, and she's damn near paler than I am.

Even taking into account the differences between geographic and anthropological meanings of the term, I still find it strange that someone who was born in the states to parents who were born in the states, and indeed whose ancestry hasn't even been to Africa for several generations, is somehow an "African".

It's not even the genetic component, as American black people are notably different from African black people... Basically the only thing linking them is a dark skin color, which itself can also be found in places that are significantly not-Africa. And, also, kinda weird to lump people into an otherwise incorrect definition just because of skin... I thought that was kind of the thing we're supposed to avoid.

Like, sure, there's a common ancestry in Africa, but that kinda goes for everybody. Once you put enough generations between then and now, it doesn't make much sense to me to consider that as your personal identity. I mean, I could say that I'm Dutch-American because I've got some clogs in my ancestry about 5-6 generations back or so, but I don't know the first thing about the Netherlands and have never been there. And that's not even a continent, that's just one country.


But then again I also kinda think it's stupid that there's a trend for black Americans trying to get in touch with their roots where they convert to Islam... Because apparently Africa only really started being a source of identity after the Arabs came in and started proselytizing.


Meh, don't mind me... I just woke up and I don't know shit.

[Reelya]

What? Sub-Saharan Africa is a specific area defined (by the UN) as every nation in Africa south of the Sahara, which is in North Africa. BTW if you google "Black Africa" it has the same definition as "Sub-Saharan Africa" does. In fact, it's clear that "Sub-Saharan Africa" was coined deliberately to be use as a socially acceptable replacement for the term "Black Africa".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-Saharan_Africa



The point being, the indigenous population of that region are what we call "African people".

The cognitive dissonance stems from trying to hold onto the idea that words always have a single definition that is consistent across all possible contexts and in all possible scenarios. They don't. Demographers mean black people when they say someone is of "African descent", and law enforcement mean black people when they say someone is of "African Appearance". Pointing out e.g. that "African Appearance" could theoretically mean that someone looks like an Arab since Egypt is in Africa is entirely missing the point: the person saying "African Appearance" clearly means black, and pretending that we don't know that is just ... being a dickhead. It's just ignoring what people actually mean, which is not ambiguous, and trying to make out that it's ambiguous by bringing in other - irrelevant - meanings of the same word.

e.g. when people talk about African people they're talking about peoples of black African descent, but when Geographers talk about Africa the continent they're referring to an abstract division of land. Sure, there's overlap between these ideas but they're not the same idea. It's just a quirk of history that we use the term "African" to refer to both ideas. It's similar to how e.g. "Japanese" can refer to people of Japanese ethnicity, or anyone who is a citizen of Japan. But these are actually unrelated concepts: ethnically Japanese people aren't required to live in Japan, and non-Japanese people don't magically become ethnically Japanese merely by getting Japanese citizenship.

[Max™]

For some reason Oliver North is going to be the next NRA president, a position for which he is eminently qualified because something something selling weapons to Iran something something Fox "News" something something destruction of evidence?

[Lord Shonus]

As (probably) the most pro-gun person on the forum, I feel obliged to comment on this.

What the hell were they smoking when they reached that decision?

[Starver]

Barrels?

[smjjames]

As (probably) the most pro-gun person on the forum, I feel obliged to comment on this.

What the hell were they smoking when they reached that decision?

An ode to the military-industrial machine? I get how the whole selling weapons illegally to Iran would come accross as cool to them, but I'm not sure they'd want to get into the business of selling weapons abroad.

[Kagus]

I think you're all missing the point that any such accusations are clearly just fake news.

He's a red-blooded American, y'know!

[Frumple]

An ode to the military-industrial machine? I get how the whole selling weapons illegally to Iran would come accross as cool to them, but I'm not sure they'd want to get into the business of selling weapons abroad.

... selling weapons abroad is some fairly sizeable chunk of their business, smj. They definitely want to get into that, and probably the more the better.

[smjjames]

An ode to the military-industrial machine? I get how the whole selling weapons illegally to Iran would come accross as cool to them, but I'm not sure they'd want to get into the business of selling weapons abroad.

... selling weapons abroad is some fairly sizeable chunk of their business, smj. They definitely want to get into that, and probably the more the better.

Shows what I know, lol. And it makes sense in that light.

[nenjin]

Lol, Oliver North? I guess he is in line with the NRA’s “guns for fucking everyone, fuck it” stance.

[Trekkin]

It's a bit like putting a drug smuggler in charge of a pharma lobbying group, but it's also a way to goad liberals, and the NRA doesn't so much sell guns directly as sell a Weltanschauung in which having many, many guns is the only way to be happy and free and so forth, so in that sense North is a sensible choice.