Originally Posted by rhaikh
What a worthless, low effort retort.

Scale matters, and history matters. To move past the racist history of the Republican party, they need to show something resembling remorse. What they've done instead, consistently since Nixon, is double down on the Southern strategy's play of stopping just on the other side of cutting out the Actual Racism from their dog whistle policies. They vote for a racist president, they happily take collection from certified racists, they present policies which measurably and surgically serve to disenfranchise minorities, they downplay the prevalence of racism - and the punchline is they get injured when we call it for what it is.

All the students involved in Evergreen should take a 10 hour lecture on freedom of speech and academic freedom.

All members of the Republican party should dissolve or acknowledge everything they've done to empower racism.


Low effort retorts are a natural response to low effort posts. You are the one who made the comparison of Evergreen to Southern Strategy, as if the two things somehow bore comparison, or the presence of one excused or somehow mitigated the other. Also, scale matters when examining the magnitude of effects of a particular incident - however scale is irrelevant when evaluating the moral implications of the same. If suddenly, only ten robberies occurred in a year, would it thereby become a moral act? Or perhaps less immoral than it previously had been, when thousands of robberies occurred in a year? I think not.

The problem with Evergreen is what it represents, and the fact that similar thoughts and sympathies currently infect the self-identifying left. Thus, when comparing, it should be a given that moral quality is the issue and not magnitude.

Your attitude towards people who hijack race for their own political gain and social power-grasping is obviously skewed in favor of those you feel a more general sense of comradery with. In this, at least, you are not dissimilar to the political bloc you are attempting to pillory. In fact, your typical responses to bad-faith actors closer to your own social-political sphere are "yeah they did X, but So-and-so did Y" which is rather similar, in my view, to how a certain Trump supporter around here responded to criticism of Trump with tales of what Hillary or Obama did. As is the presence of one had anything to do with the other. One coin, two sides. I find it particularly unimpressive because I also believe much of the GOP platform in recent years is garbage. However, instead of thinking that GOP garbage mitigates the garbage coming out of the new left, I instead feel somewhat depressed at the overwhelming amount of overall garbage.


As for talking about showing remorse, one has to wonder what good that would do? It seems to be an admission on your part that the goal going forward is not a re-alignment of policy, but rather, moralistic posturing.

For who could be free when every other man's humour might domineer over him? - John Locke (2nd Treatise, sect 57)