PostHeaderIcon Crying Wolf

It will probably take a few more than ten minutes of your time to do it right; but as Scott Adams suggests:

Seriously. Stop what you are doing. Give this ten minutes. It’s more important that almost anything you were going to do today.

Then save the link for later sharing. Show it to all of your friends who think Trump is a racist monster. This ends it.

The only people who will think Trump is a racist going forward are people who haven’t read this article. If you find someone like that, send them the link. This piece is a brilliant service to the country. Breathtaking.   [Well-deserved emphasis mine.]

…if you have not yet read the article “You Are Still Crying Wolf” by Scott Alexander, you will want to go do so. Now! Yes, it is brilliant and breathtaking. I wish this was all I had to do to motivate my readers to follow a link I recommend; but the stats show that few of you ever bother to even click on them. Half the time, that is why I pull quotes from them… not so much to comment on them, as to increase the chance that you will actually read important passages, and/or be enticed to go read it. This one has far too many important points to quote. E.g. it more or less begins with:

I have a different perspective. Back in October 2015, I wrote that the media narrative of Trump as “the white power candidate” and “the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era” were being fabricated out of thin air. I said that “the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data”, and predicted that:

“If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.”

Well, guess what? The votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him.

…and ends with:

Stop turning everything into identity politics. The only thing the media has been able to do for the last five years is shout “IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS!” at everyone, and then when the right wing finally says “Um, i…den-tity….poli-tics?” you freak out and figure that the only way they could have possibly learned that phrase is from the KKK. You know, a week before Election Day, Lena Dunham, who gave a speech at the Democratic Convention this year, produced and tweeted a video called How Are You Feeling About The Extinction Of White Men? which featured giant feet stepping on cartoon white males in a very-definitely-endorsed-by-the-author way. I am sure you are very well-educated and understand that this is a completely harmless letting-off of steam with no racial overtones; whereas when a Republican says he opposes the corrupt establishment, this is an anti-Semitic dog whistle which proves that his entire life philosophy is based on nothing but hatred and bigotry. But I worry that the non-college-degree-having white working class is not as well-educated as you, and is too ignorant to grasp this simple and obvious point. And maybe they starts thinking of America’s ongoing tribal/partisan conflict through a race-based lens, which is surely an unpredictable testament to their own bad character and not the exact thing you’ve been encouraging every second of every day since the turn of the millennium.

Stop calling Trump voters racist. A metaphor: we have freedom of speech not because all speech is good, but because the temptation to ban speech is so great that, unless given a blanket prohibition, it would slide into universal censorship of any unpopular opinion. Likewise, I would recommend you stop calling Trump voters racist – not because none of them are, but because as soon as you give yourself that opportunity, it’s a slippery slope down to “anyone who disagrees with me on anything does so entirely out of raw seething hatred, and my entire outgroup is secret members of the KKK and so I am justified in considering them worthless human trash”. I’m not saying you’re teetering on the edge of that slope. I’m saying you’re way at the bottom, covered by dozens of feet of fallen rocks and snow. Also, I hear that accusing people of racism constantly for no reason is the best way to get them to vote for your candidate next time around. Assuming there is a next time.

Stop centering criticism of Donald Trump around this sort of stuff, and switch to literally anything else. Here is an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, whose philosophy of governance basically boils down to “I’m going to win and not lose, details to be added later”, and all you can do is repeat again and again that he seems popular among weird Internet teenagers who post frog memes. In the middle of an emotionally incontinent reality TV show host getting his hand on the nuclear button, your chief complaint is that in the middle of a few dozen denunciations of the KKK, he once delayed denouncing the KKK for almost an entire 24 hours before going back to denouncing it again. When a guy who says outright that he won’t respect elections unless he wins them does, somehow, win an election, the headlines are how he once said he didn’t like globalists which means he must be anti-Semitic.

Stop attempting suicide. Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. Stop terrifying children. Stop giving racism free advertising. Stop trying to convince people that Americans hate them. Stop. Stop. Stop.

In between, he mentions:

Why am I harping on this?

I work in mental health. So far I have had two patients express Trump-related suicidal ideation. One of them ended up in the emergency room, although luckily both of them are now safe and well. I have heard secondhand of several more.

Like Snopes, I am not sure if the reports of eight transgender people committing suicide due to the election results are true or false. But if they’re true, it seems really relevant that Trump denounced North Carolina’s anti-transgender bathroom law, and proudly proclaimed he would let Caitlyn Jenner use whatever bathroom she wanted in Trump Tower, making him by far the most pro-transgender Republican president in history.

I notice news articles like Vox: Donald Trump’s Win Tells People Of Color They Aren’t Welcome In America. Or Salon’s If Trump Wins, Say Goodbye To Your Black Friends. MSN: Women Fear For Their Lives After Trump Victory.

Vox writes about the five-year-old child who asks “Is Donald Trump a bad person? Because I heard that if he becomes president, all the black and brown people have to leave and we’re going to become slaves.” The Star writes about a therapist called in for emergency counseling to help Muslim kids who think Trump is going to kill them. I have patients who are afraid to leave their homes.

… while thoroughly lambasting the media with a lot of wisdom, logic, common sense, quotes, statistics, and graphs, which comprise a masterpiece that would be a real shame to miss. Please take the time to read it. â—„Daveâ–º

Leave a Reply

Political Spectrum
Political Circle

Think Up/Down not Left/Right

Archives
Blogroll
Internal Links