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It's obvious, isn't it? If you didn't vote for Biden, you ain't Black. It's fair to say Justice Thomas did not vote for Biden.

It's perfectly consistent with this worldview to celebrate Black History Month by taking down a documentary about a conservative Black man in favor of lots of other documentaries about leftist white men, who are, after all, the chosen role models of the modern (leftist) Black man (according to themselves, not to me!).

If you disagree with this point of view, don't downvote me; after all, I don't promote it! Instead question why it's the prevailing one in your bubble.

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I see why this is inflammatory but

>'If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black'

is an actual Joe Biden quote and is reasonable to bring up. It has bearings on exposing the relationship between the democratic party and it's perceived relationship with people of color and the idea that there is an effort to censor people who don't adhere to this narrative which is the topic of this article.

"If you don't love the Eagles, then you ain't from Philly" could be meant as "If you don't love the Eagles, I will argue that you weren't born and raised in Philadelphia and shouldn't be allowed to claim you were". However, it's also possible to read it as "Virtually everyone I know who cares about sports and who lives in Philadelphia enthusiastically cheers the Eagles", and without the context of politics and the culture war, the first reading seems really weird.

So, consider that Biden might have just said a hyperbolic thing in the moment without intending to imply that 5-10% of a voting demographic should be canceled.

Yes you could ignore what he actually said and try to construct a narrative that doesn't sound bad. But, isn't that a lot more complicated than just listening to what he actually said?

To be more direct, myself and many other people aren't going to play that game. The only people that would are people who have a narrative in mind in advance and are going to find a way to justify it post hoc.

It is more complicated, but that's how communication works; most people do not mean anything close to the literal wording they use -- "Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded".

If you refuse to "play that game", then you get to be offended a lot more often, but you will also have to draw a distinction between how you understand communication from in-group and out-group, which seems to me to be even more complicated. :)

> you will also have to draw a distinction between how you understand communication from in-group and out-group

Holy projection, Batman!

What you are saying is that in order to fully understand what Biden means when he says "you ain't black if you don't vote for me", we have to search for a meaning for this that puts Biden in the best possible light while still maintaining a modicum of plausibility.

Meanwhile, to take an example of understanding communication from the out-group, when Trump says "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard" what he really meant was "let's go burn the Capitol down and murder everyone we can find, and also overthrow the government lol!1!1!!1!!!!". And we know that's what he meant because we have to search for the worst possible meaning of his words, and throw that modicum of plausibility right out the window. Then blame Trump for breaking the window.

But to you this is the less "complicated" way of understanding communication from the in-group and the out-group?

All anm89 is proposing is to just listen to what both men said. The same. For both of them. But this is what you're calling too complicated?

Please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Frankly I think you replied to the wrong comment here, probably because you disagree with my views and not the other commenters' views. I did not turn the conversation primarily to interpreting Biden's remarks. That was tangential to my original on-topic (but downvoted and flagged because wrongthink) comment.

I am no doubt guilty of responding with undue incredulity to some hard-to-understand claims in the ensuing off-topic thread. But if you feel that the thread has descended into flamewar, you should look at who turned the conversation to flamewar topics, and it was not me.

How about in the future I endeavor not to continue flamewar topics, and you endeavor not to blame the whole thread on the first non-leftist commenter in the thread, eh? Seems fair.

You started the flamewar upthread.

It always feels like the mods are against you. I don't even know what your views are—that's not the filter through which I read comments like this. There's too much quantity to work through and it's not energy-efficient to do that.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I would appreciate if you could indicate which comment you feel started the flamewar. I'm sure this is where we disagree.

And it's rather naive to believe you don't read all comments through the filter of your own worldview.

I meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26290015

Yes, everyone reads everything through the filter of their own worldview. That's a different sense of 'filter'. What I mean is that I'm looking for markers of guidelines breakage. Is it possible to scan comments primarily for that? Sure it is, especially if one has done it many thousands of times.

It's common for people to reach for the moderator's 'worldview' as an explanation for why they got moderated, but usually the explanation is far simpler and easier to see. In this case you broke the site guidelines by taking the the thread into ideological battle. Please don't.

> What you are saying is that in order to fully understand what Biden means when he says "you ain't black if you don't vote for me", we have to search for a meaning for this that puts Biden in the best possible light while still maintaining a modicum of plausibility.

Your post is kind of a case of exactly what I mean, for sure, given that I don't at all agree with what you claim I am saying!

But I would note that you reworded the "quote" from Biden to make it more clearly what you believe he meant, when the actual quote is right there a few comments up.

"Inflammatory" is just another synonym for "disagrees with prevailing sentiment". I won't stop posting what I believe to be the truth because people super-duper disagree with it, as opposed to just okay-disagreeing with it, like discussions on HN about what brand of socialism we need to instate after the violent revolution. (This is hyperbole.)

Deleted because the top comment just keeps editing their message to the point where it’s substantively different than when i posted just a few moments ago.

You have got to be kidding me. Not everyone publicly states who they voted for, esp if they are a supreme court justice. There are some things that don't need a source to be stated, just read his wikipedia, you don't even need to connect the dots.

Unless I'm much mistaken comments on HN show whether they've been edited more than a few seconds after they're first posted. I believe I edited that comment to clarify something a few seconds after I posted it, in an effort to prevent people from taking my words out of context to incite rage and then blame me for that. But I'm sure whatever your comment was it was really well thought out in the short time you had available, and that it didn't do any of those things.

Hmm... actually, come to think of it, what HN does is prevent editing a comment more than a few seconds after it's made. So... I suppose the theory is that I'm conspiring with the mods or something?

You're mistaken. I've edited comments a significant time after they were replied to. See the edit note on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26187343

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