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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Every snappy slogan eventually becomes a slogan “widely known” for being a dog whistle for extremist opinions. You can’t express any nuanced opinion without eventually being lumped together with crazy extremists.

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When was this ever a nuanced position? It’s not like there’s any sizable group of people questioning whether it’s okay to be white — the focus for centuries has been on gaining access to the lifestyle and respect white people have, and dealing with the aftermath of discrimination. Statistically nobody is asking for new discrimination, just an end to the old system.

This is not an uncommon tactic, I’ve noticed. For example, fundamentalist Christians often like to pretend they’re oppressed because it’s an effective recruiting and retention strategy even though it makes no literal sense when you look around the country and see how much power they have. Any time I see someone in a dominant group painting themselves as a victim, I know to ask what bill of goods they’re trying to sell me.

Then how do you explain the opinion poll results?

This entire discussion has justified the rejection of the poll results, imo. The question is so meaningless/biased/irrelevant that it's not possible to "explain" the results - they might as well be random and attempts to draw conclusions from them are quite likely only done with racist motivation.

It’s a loaded poll which can’t distinguish between people who are genuinely racist and people who are not racist but recognize the phrasing as one preferred by white supremacists. We can’t draw any meaningful conclusions without better data, which could most easily be obtained by not using a white supremacist prompt.

It’s also worth thinking about why the Republican Party’s favorite polling company is pulling material from 4chan and consider whether whoever is behind that might have had other questions in the poll which primed the cannier portion of the people being polled to be suspicious.

Nuanced opinions are very rarely expressed with snappy slogans.

Every proponent of an opinion with a snappy slogan will gladly explain how their opinion is very nuanced. Take, for instance, “defund the police”. It can be explained as a reasonable nuanced opinion, and not the literal interpretation. The same can be applied to most every slogan.

You really like using words such as "every" where they have no reason to be used. Why are you making these kind of in-equivocal statements when they are clearly baseless and are just an expression of your political feeling. Good, express your political feelings. Telling people how everyone in a group of people does xyz is the exact problem you are complaining about.

> Telling people how everyone in a group of people does xyz is the exact problem you are complaining about.

No, in this case it is actually the opposite. The problem I am complaining about is people ascribing negative aspects (extreme opinions) to people uttering snappy slogans. What I did was ascribe a positive aspects to these same people, namely that they can all describe their opinion as being nuanced. (Obviously the words “every” and “all” do not literally mean “every” and “all” in the mathematical sense, but that’s just how language works.)

I'm sorry, but you don't think "every" means "every" but instead actually means "some"?

That’s how language works, yes. Otherwise, every sentence with the word “everybody” in it would be false.

No, that is not how language works and you are a poor communicator. This is the definition of the word "every":

eve·ry | ˈev(ə)rē | determiner (preceding a singular noun) used to refer to all the individual members of a set without exception: the hotel assures every guest of personal attention | [with possessive determiner] : the children hung on his every word.

>Otherwise, every sentence with the word “everybody” in it would be false.

No. "Everybody over there" is not false if it refers to everybody over there for example. If you use everybody to refer to some people, then that is your poor word choice.

I have no dog in the fight above but you're getting downvoted for explaining that orwellian language is bad. Pretty surreal.

see: generalization

> You can’t express any nuanced opinion without eventually being lumped together with crazy extremists.

How is that even remotely true? Even just in the context of race...

There are plenty of nuanced opinions that aren't associated with crazy extremists - by definition, crazy extremists tend to lack nuance. However some statements, like "a man is not a woman" and "it's OK to be white" do not represent nuanced opinions, but are purposely vague restatements of extremist positions. It's a game right-wing trolls like to play, pretending that context doesn't exist and the "wokes" or whomever are disagreeing with the general statement rather than the extremist position it represents. Then they express faux shock and outrage at how "you can't even say it's OK to be white anymore."

What you describe could also be applied to the slogan “Black lives matter”; the argument is valid both ways.

Except the people who interpreted the slogan "Black Lives Matter" to mean "White lives must not matter" or somesuch were never doing so in good faith - that slogan was not the anti-white dog whistle it was claimed to be.

Yes; I mean, you’re making my point for me: A person saying “Black Lives Matter” will be lumped together with extremists.

By you. Probably not by most people.

Certainly not by me. But a lot of other people will, is what I’m saying.

’I’m not!’ Walsh shouted futilely. ‘I’m not a Purist and I’m not a Naturalist! You hear me?’

Nobody heard him.

— The Chromium Fence, Philip K. Dick (1955) <https://web.archive.org/web/20150419173332/http://american-b...>

Yeah, one could do that if they want to be completely unreasonable.

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