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posted by janrinok on Saturday November 19 2016, @04:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the statistics-or-lies? dept.

Scott Alexander gives a great breakdown of Trump and how the portrayal of him as being "openly white supremacist" is probably (likely) wrong.

I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he's "the candidate of the KKK" and "the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement" is made up. It's a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of other undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him. That it came to dominate the election cycle should be considered a horrifying indictment of our political discourse, in the same way that it would be a horrifying indictment of our political discourse if the entire Republican campaign had been based around the theory that Hillary Clinton was a secret Satanist. Yes, calling Romney a racist was crying wolf. But you are still crying wolf.

I avoided pushing this point any more since last October because I didn't want to look like I was supporting Trump, or accidentally convince anyone else to support Trump. But since we're past the point where that matters any more, I want to present my case.

He further states: "I realize that all of this is going to make me sound like a crazy person and put me completely at odds with every respectable thinker in the media, but luckily, being a crazy person at odds with every respectable thinker in the media has been a pretty good ticket to predictive accuracy lately, so whatever."

So do his claims hold up under scrutiny, is he manipulating the figures, or is he just a 'crazy person' ?


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  • (Score: 1) by Arik on Saturday November 19 2016, @08:24PM

    by Arik (4543) on Saturday November 19 2016, @08:24PM (#429598) Journal
    She didn't change her race, she was born human and the best I know she still is.

    Just because racists are wrong about multiple races existing, though, doesn't mean that race is not a word that conceives of, that necessarily implies a biological division, indeed that is precisely their error - they reify social divisions and conceive of them as racial rather than social.

    If there were such a division, you certainly couldn't cross it without changing your DNA, and whatever race you attribute to Channing, it clearly never changed, at most it could be said to have been misidentified either in the first case or the second. Those are different things.

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @08:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @08:32PM (#429604)

    > She didn't change her race, she was born human and the best I know she still is.

    Why should anyone take you seriously after that?

    You simply do not understand race. [nap.edu] You, like buzzard, think genetics determine race when in fact genes are only a small, superficial component of race and determinate of nothing in particular. Anyone who has actually studied race knows that to be true because racial distinctions are so arbitrary [vox.com] that they change on the timescale of decades.