Racist dog whistles

By -
These days the progressive left talks continually about "racist dog whistles" being sounded by... well, any figure they don't like.

Here's the thing about dog whistles though: only dogs can hear them! And that is the idea behind the "racist dog whistle" meme: this is secret, coded language that only racists can understand. But...

That means the progressives pointing out these "dog whistles" would have to be... racists! Or else they couldn't hear the whistle, they wouldn't understand the code.

Of course, what the charge really amounts to is, "I don't like that person's preferred policies, and while I can't point to anything explicitly racist that he said, I can instead smear him by claiming he's speaking in a secret racist code."

Comments

  1. Lord11:42 AM

    But they can. They can note how the dogs react, and do.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Prateek2:54 PM

    Gene, this is the troubling possibility I have had to consider about modern progressives.

    How would they understand the language, the notions, the ideas, and most importantly the dog whistles of far right wing racists if they were not already deeply immersed in it? After all, folks at the ADL and SPLC are watching these racists on social media 24/7, digging to find something to pin on them.

    If they managed to get the same hints as other racists are supposed to when they hear these dog whistles, then it must mean they have some empathy for the ideas and thinking of racists. Note, I don't say agreement. So I wonder if on a certain level, they are troubled by such racist ideas because on some level they can understand why someone would think that way.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more