Ravelry, a Popular Knitting Site, Bans Pro-Trump Content
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I remember a time when politics was not discussed in polite company.
Isn't this policy inherently conservative, in that it ignores any desire for political change?
Does it mean that the abolitionists and suffragettes were not polite? Because they sometimes were not. It's part of how they got change.
If anything this is escalating the problem by silencing the opposition and further entrenching both sides.
Their policy is at https://www.ravelry.com/content/no-trump .
Their argument is "We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy."
So by "both sides" it seems like you mean the one side in favor of white supremacy, and the other side not in favor of white supremacy?
Why should a knitting site allow support for open white supremacy?
It really hurts any credibility someone may have granted you in a conversation when you ascribe to one side of a discussion a world view that is condemned by the vast majority of that side.
The linked-to document gives a pointer to its "citations/references", which is hosted on RPG.net. I then quoted those citations.
While many disagree with those arguments, that's quite different than saying they gave no arguments at all.
Our society is not homogenous enough to make a statement like "white supremacist society" substantial. However, there are three closely-related truths which are pretty obvious about our society:
* Our society is, itself, a fascist, classist, militaristic society.
* Pockets of people and parochial cultures in some specific regions are white supremacists.
This isn't definitional or axiomatic, but if you don't perceive these things as true in your day-to-day experience of our country, then you're not likely to feel that they're true. And that's fine! We don't have to agree. But it's useful to point out how and where we don't agree.
Before doing that, I'll note that you were the first to use the term 'society' in this thread. My previous statements were along the lines of 'support for open white supremacy'. I think "society" is a distraction because there's always the "not all" objection - not all white people in Virgiania in 1850s were in favor of slavery, even though it was a slave society.
So when I mean "society", I mean "the main cultural views as reinforced by the government and others with political, economic, and physical power".
Going back to my earlier questions, which I'll augment:
1) can the 1970s South Africa be described as a white supremacist society? I think it can. For obvious reasons.
2) can the 1850s US be described as a white supremacist society? I think it can, for obvious reasons.
3) can the 1950s US be described as a white supremacist society? I think it can. Jim Crow laws. Sundowner towns, Redlining, Mississippi Burning.
4) can the current US be described as a white supremacist society? I have come to the conclusion that viewing the dominate power structures in the US as being strongly influenced by white supremacy is a valid, though incomplete one.
If you reject that 'white-supremacist society' is a useful term, then perhaps you shouldn't have introduced it?
I can support woman's suffrage without being rightly defined as supporting white supremacy.
How do you distinguish between "taken as axiomatic" and "is the case"?
Eg, I can describe 1970s South Africa as being a white supremacist society, yes?
You certainly agree that at one point US laws were based on white supremacy, right? Eg, the Illinois Constitution of 1848, quoting https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Illinois_Constitution_of_1848 :
> The general assembly shall, at its first session under the amended constitution, pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free persons of color from immigrating to and settling in this state;and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this state for the purpose of setting them free.
That sounds pretty white-supremacy, yes?
If so, when did the US stop being a white supremacist society, and how?
I did say "can be", not "is always defined as such, in a logically-consistent way"! One point that should be quite obvious is that one can always say "that doesn't go far enough!" in a totally unfalsifiable way. (And yes, people have made such arguments, seemingly in all seriousness, even about such things as women's suffrage or civil-rights legislation!) It's a mistake to think that this sort of mindset is restricted by any kind of logic or rationality.
> How do you distinguish between "taken as axiomatic" and "is the case"? ... If so, when did the US stop being a white supremacist society, and how?
Again, the point is that the radical-progressive mindset is not interested in such questions. They are simply not seen as something that's inherently legitimate as a subject of inquiry. You are naïvely assuming that the appeal to notions such as "white supremacy" is intended to be meaningful - to say something, anything about the real world - when in fact it might as well be something that's said purely "for the lulz", for the sheer amusement of making one's political opponents uncomfortable. It's less about "debate" of any sort than it is about sheer intimidation and willful confusion.
Then don't reply, and jog on. You can easily ignore the concentration camps for brown people on your southern border too, the USA is big and the the border is likely far away from you.
I don't blame a knitting website for not wanting to have this discussion. People of all kinds of views can still discuss _kitting_ there.
The way the world works now, with media splits and filter bubbles, your statement is actually fairly accurate: "we aren't even living in the same reality and any further discussion is completely pointless."
That doesn't sound like a white supremacist/neo-nazi.
I feel that you're bringing up international politics in a discussion about US domestic politics is mostly meant to derail the conversation.
You realize that more factors are involved than just white supremacy, right?
BTW, the $38B 10-year military-assistance Memorandum of Understanding was signed on September 14, 2016 during the Obama administration, and "partly a response to the nuclear deal that the United States and other world powers finalized with Iran". https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/09/un... .
Meanwhile Netanyahu campaigns with Trump, names a town in the Golan after Trump... which violates the key characteristic of white supremacy: namely not liking Jews; ergo he is not a white supremacist
Several 19th century state constitutions prohibited black people from moving to them. This should be correctly understood as white supremacy. They did not prevent Jews from moving to them.
Hence those terms are distinct and have not merged for any serious discussion of the topic.
Again, foreign policy != domestic policy. Black slavers and free abolitionists opposed to each others' domestic policies, but some worked together for the foreign policy of having blacks return to Africa, in the American Colonization Society's colonization of Liberia.
Or you can see how a Christian Zionist like Pat Robertson can be both anti-Semitic and support the Jewish state.
Last I heard, "There is no budgeting, no planning, no location for a settlement, and there is no binding decision to implement the project" for that settlement, says Zvi Hauser at https://www.timesofisrael.com/no-plans-no-budget-trump-heigh... , who describes it as a publicity stunt.
Ergo, what you point out isn't really germane.
US domestic policy in the 1950s was explicitly based on white supremacy. Jim Crow laws were actively enforced. Yet the US supported the creation of the State of Israel.
"Golda Meir describes Nixon in her autobiography as the best friend Israel ever had in the presidency and does so in life and death terms." says http://www.jewishmag.com/167mag/kissinger-nixon-war-watergat... which goes on to say "But… Nixon, like many anti-Semites, had a deep admiration for Israel and Israelis".
Nixon's "Southern strategy", infamously, was designed to appeal to racism against African Americans.
So there's no inherent contradiction here.
It's fine to disagree with President Trump. It's fine to disagree with Democrats, too. Having an opinion is your right.
But to slander and lie, and try to influence people in this way is just wrong.
Let's be honest. President Trump has brought record low unemployment, rising wages, and justice reform to African Americans. His support among American Blacks has risen, not fallen. He is doing some good.
Yet there are people like this. They weaponize racism, ignoring it within any party but the one they demonize. They turn racism from something useless into something they can use. This is what is truly 'deplorable'.
No, I'm pretty sure it's putting kids into concentration camps that's deplorable. Nice try though.
> "Concentration camps are considered by experts as 'the mass detention of civilians without trial.'
Even without photos, we know there is mass detention of civilians without trial.
Do you deny that?
What term do you want to use? From the same link:
> We don't say 'prisons' because prisons are a part of the formal legal system," Lester Andrist, a sociologist who has studied indefinite detention, tweeted.
Or would you prefer "internment camp", like we used for Japanese Americans? From the same link:
> "I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again," the Takei tweeted. The Takei family was interned in Arkansas and California in the 1940s.
Or perhaps you want to reserve 'concentration camp' only for the Nazi death camps? From the same link:
> Federico Finchelstein, a historian at the New York-based New School, agreed that the progressive congresswoman is right to call the ICE facilities concentration camps.
> "As [a] historian of fascism & [the] Holocaust, I would also call these centers concentration camps," Finchelstein tweeted. "As a Jewish person who lost family in [the] Holocaust, I regret that some Republicans use memory of the Holocaust to defend racist policies of Trumpism."
From https://beta.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/20/concentrat... :
> A 1998 Ellis Island exhibit drew outcry from the Jewish community and others after the Japanese American National Museum titled it, “America’s Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese American Experience.” To the museum’s curators — and to many historians and leading Japanese American organizations today — “internment” or “relocation camps” were euphemisms for the reality of what Japanese Americans endured. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court justices, the museum noted, had both referred to the Japanese American camps as concentration camps.
> ... Ultimately, Jewish and Japanese American groups held meetings to reach an understanding, Schiffrin reported. The exhibit’s title stayed, but with one long footnote on the flier, making clear that it was not an attempt to directly compare the Japanese-American camps to Nazi camps.
Big difference. Concentration camps were murder centers. Internment camps were not.
See http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/haiku/camps.h... as an example of how in the 1990s there was already the complaint that it "seems strange that we are still debating the use of terms describing this event" when it was well-established that the Japanese were indeed in concentration camps in all but official name.
It also gives quotes, like Truman in 1961 saying "They were concentration camps. They called it relocation but they put them in concentration camps, and I was against it. We were in a period of emergency, but it was still the wrong thing to do."
The term "concentration camp" was also used in the Spanish-American and Boer Wars, for something other than "murder centers".
All evidence I've seen says that calling these facilities something other than "concentration camp" is a euphemism to hide the atrocities that we are committing YET AGAIN.
The kids are in a detention facility. Donald Trump didn't personally decide "fuck Mexicans" and rip kids out of their loving homes. He's protecting children from the people in an adult detention facility who have actively broken the law and took their families with them in the process.
Calling Trump a Nazi and calling these places concentration camps is a massive slap in the face to the millions of people who actually died from the war.
No, what's obscene is what we're doing to children. THAT is obscene.
Oh, wait, no, that's what their traffickers from Honduras and elsewhere are doing as they claim that those children belong to them when they reach the border so that they can receive higher priority treatment, whereupon they enter and recycle the kids back across the border.
So you're using the fact that these kids are the victims of human trafficking, to make them suffer even more? Do you even listen to what you're saying?
They're getting $775 per person per day. People are trying to donate goods and are getting turned back. It's not a resource issue.
> which is saying something coming from me considering how generally paranoid I am personally
You may be paranoid, but your paranoia is pointing in the wrong direction.
> There's no basis for it. None whatsoever.
We're in the middle of a discussion about thousands of children being abused and mistreated in government facilities. That right there is a basis for comparison. If you can't even see that, then you're willfully closing your eyes.
Would you compare the ICE holding centers to slave plantations as well? (Which is worse in your eyes-- a concentration camp or a slave plantation?)
Do tell, please.
"The Holocaust, you’re talking about a tragedy of biblical proportion and one of the greatest scourges in history. Six million Jews died during the Holocaust; there is no comparison to the Holocaust, period”
"To draw an equivalency suggests one does not understand what happened in the Holocaust."
These from NY Gov (Democrat) Andrew Cuomo