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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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A bit of heat generated by Trump dubbing Nikki Haley "Nimbra", a butchering of her Indian birth name:

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4420434-trump-on-mocking-haleys-birth-name-its-just-something-that-came/

I'm not sure who the media controversy is aimed at. His base is absolutely going to love it, the normal Repubs have no choice but to vote for him, and his enemies can't hate him more than they already do.

I predict if her numbers continue to climb, he's gonna mention her daughter's married to a black guy. Way too tempting for a guy like Trump.

On that, a surprising number of the establishment Republicans have kids married to black people. Haley, McCain, Boehner, etc. What's with that?

  • -11

I predict if her numbers continue to climb, he's gonna mention her daughter's married to a black guy. Way too tempting for a guy like Trump.

I'll absolutely take the opposite on that bet. When has Trump ever implied this kind of animus toward black Americans?

I'll also take a bet on Nikki's numbers "continuing to rise" if one's available (she'll lose New Hampshire and have to concede).

When has Trump ever implied this kind of animus toward black Americans?

In 1973, in 1989, in 1992, and very often in between and since then?

I have to sometimes remind myself the most people didn't grow up in New York, and didn't have Trump as a looming political and cultural figure in their life for many decades before he showed up on The Apprentice or a ballot.

When you ask questions like that, it just strikes me as ignorance, of the type anyone who grew up with Trump in their local news on a regular basis would be baffled by. Yes, he has a long and well-documented history from before he started making campaign speeches. Yes, a legacy of racism, both structural and verbal, has been a part of that history since the very beginning.

  • -24

Between this and your cheap shots elsewhere, you’re generating more heat than light. Take a day to cool off.

As for @Dean and @Rambler: yes, we know. Please refrain from attacks based on reputation. If you think someone is acting in bad faith, report it.

Copy that.

The awareness is for the members, not the moderators. The moderators are aware of Darwin's years of bad faith polemics and cheap shots, just as they are aware he will continue to continue them again after repeat offense whatever double or triple warning it is after triple or quadruple digit reports by now.

It's other posters who need to be aware of Darwin's well-worn character to best avoid engaging and responding in ways that provoke moderator punishments against them, as has more than occasionally happened in the last. Darwin is one of the classic cases of evaporative cooling, where bad-faith actors who tend to get more people who engaged with them riled and moderated than they themselves do. Per the failure state, the best way to mitigate the heat by such people is to warn others to not engage, and why, so they do not engage and get emotional in the face of bad faith.

The most succinct warning is what was given: guesswho aka Darwin is a progressive who is here to wage the culture war, and the level of quality has been characteristic.

Those three links are two stories. One of them is about some people at a Trump company who discriminated against a black guy one time. The other is about a long-disputed case from the 1970s (!) in which Trump never admitted guilt, and claimed he was not the only party sued. A reporter from the Washington Post is brandished to offer his interpretation of events as a fact-check. By this logic, since Biden said some racist remarks in the 70s, I predict he'll say the N-word live on TV. Maybe while wearing a sombrero and kissing Nick Fuentes.

When you say things like that, it just strikes me as stupidity. I think you have to be seriously illiterate to read the room and think Trump is about to attack someone's daughter for marrying a black man. I think that's hilarious.

Guess who is Darwin from the old site.

This is one of those "you don't hate journalists enough, you think you do but you don't" moments for me honestly. I sometimes forget that I have to retroactively apply my hate for journalism into the past, and this is a good reminder. Journalism as a whole really never was much better, it was just harder to see how bad they were. This is regarding the 1992 article of course.

guesswho is a long-term progressive cultural warrior, and this level of evidence is extremely typical of him.

On most forums, if you're a bad actor waging the culture war, it's probably a decent strategy to post a bunch of links like this that are ridiculous non-sequiturs. Most people are too lazy to follow them and have the (usually reasonable) assumption that what's said in them is being accurately represented. Fortunately, I think The Motte is better than that. Looking forward to guesswho's inevitable (re-)permabanning. We need good leftist posters, but he's not one.

I believe the semi-official position once upon a time was 'better a bad leftist poster than no leftist poster,' or something along the lines as a balance-of-ideology argument.

Leftist affirmative action was explicit policy at some point. I don’t think it’s been discussed recently, and I can assure you it’s not defining our relationship with guesswho.