Smart people saying smart things (9.8)

Smart people saying smart things (9.8) September 8, 2016

Josh Marshall, “Trump’s Blood Libel & Press Failure”

Watch Trump’s speeches, with the yelling, the reddened face, the demand for vengeance and you see there’s little to distinguish them from what we see at Aryan Nations or other white hate rallies that we all immediately recognize as reprehensible, wrong and frankly terrifying. This isn’t “rough” language or “hard-edged” rhetoric. It’s hate speech. Precisely what policy solution Trump is calling for is almost beside the point. Indeed, it wouldn’t be hate speech any less if Trump specified no policy solution at all.

This isn’t normal. It was normal in the Jim Crow South, as it was in Eastern Europe for centuries. It’s not normal in America in the 21st century. And yet it’s become normalized. It’s a mammoth failure of our political press. But it’s not just theirs, ours. It’s a collective failure that we’re all responsible for. By any reasonable standard, Donald Trump’s speech on Wednesday night should have ended the campaign, as should numerous other rallies where Trump has done more or less the same thing for months. There’s a reason why the worst of the worst, the organized and avowed racists, were thrilled and almost giddy watching the spectacle. But it has become normalized. We do not even see it for what it is. It’s like we’ve all been cast under a spell. That normalization will be with us long after this particular demagogue, Donald Trump, has left the stage. Call this what it is: it is hate speech, in its deepest and most dangerous form.

Sarah Kendzior, “Welcome to Donald Trump’s America”

What Trump is doing — and has been doing all along — is pivoting Americans toward his bigoted and paranoid worldview. He has made extremism mainstream to the point that David Duke now feels comfortable running for Senate. …

Trump’s fan base is almost uniformly white. It includes the militia and hate organizations described above. But many Trump fans are simply down-and-out white male workers. … The problem is that, while not always openly racist, these voters implicitly condone racism through their support for Trump, contributing to the mainstreaming of white supremacy. The appeal of Trump’s racialist version of the economic discontent argument is so great that it has extended to surprising audiences.

… As white men with disparate ideological perspectives unite under the Trump banner, many of them have come to espouse or condone his racist views, tainting their legitimate economic grievances with an ugly nativist edge.

Ijeoma Oluo, “How to Be Wrong”

If you have caused harm to somebody else, just say sorry. This can be the hardest part, because often we hate the thought of being “bad” more than being “wrong” and we like to pretend that all our mistakes, if we make them, are harmless — but we are human and humans hurt other humans. We all have words we’d like to take back, votes we’d like to change, actions we’d like to undo. We try our best not to hurt each other and sometimes we fail. But denying the hurt caused other people will only compound that pain. You can be wrong and learn, or you can stay wrong and then be wrong about how wrong you are.

William D. Lindsey, “When We Already Know That Every Zygote Is a Baby, Why Waste Time Looking at Scientific Evidence? A Footnote”

The point that needs to be clarified is whether we should grant the ontological status of a person to the conceptus, and why we should make that decision. Should we do so because the zygote has the potential to develop in time into a post-birth human being? That’s certainly a weighty consideration, but if we make such a declaration on the basis of the genetic potential of the zygote alone, then what are we to make of the fact that nature is designed by its Creator to abort most zygotes? Do we really have sound reason, as not a few “pro-lifers” maintain, to declare that anyone who procures the abortion of a just-fertilized zygote is guilty of the heinous crime of murder — when, in the natural course of things as nature itself is designed by the Creator, most zygotes will abort?

 


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