This happens quite often - pointing out someone may have inadvertently spoken from a position of blindness gets you more outrage from the ego blow than the actual offense itself. You can pretty much triple that shit for anyone right leaning.
The good news is that society has accepted that racism is a bad thing.
The bad news is that the main consequence of this is that it’s unacceptable to accuse anyone of racism if they have any social capital. It’s also unacceptable to shout racial slurs and such, but if someone is sufficiently rich, talented or well-connected, even that can be explained away as consistent with them not being racist.
It’s something you see online a lot online, and that is people dismissing opinions or viewpoints as racist offhand without considering them, and I’m glad people are pushing back.
Debate the point, not the person.
Well, these things can easily be weaponised as we’ve seen in the UK and US, but even here - I remember when Jordan Shanks was called racist, for mocking Bruz - they’re both Southern European decendants!!? Though Shanks is half Scottish.
I don’t know who either of those people are, sorry.
Jordan Shanks exposes political corruption of deputy premier John “Bruz” Barilaro while renting his second “working farm” house. Priceless, absolutely hilarious. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dC_8IY6WlHU
Shanks was sued for this. Barilaro resigned playing the victim. Eventually disgraced when it was found he was trying to land a plum job in New York that he created for himself. Shanks was talking about it before any mainstream media outlet but is vilified by them, naturally. Shanks’ house was firebombed. His producer was arrested by cops busting into his home. Business as Usual down under.
You mean friendly jordies? I did hear about that, yes.
It’s pretty gross. Made even grosser in the context of the Voice, where one of the things the No campaign has been doing is attempting to label the Yes campaign as the real racists. What utter bollocks.
Shit has become so unhinged. This is my first referendum so I’m sure how it compares. But the rhetoric just feels so vicious. The no campaign say the voice is divisive but it’s their campaign that’s divisive. They’re importing some of vilest culture war tactics from the US.
Gay marriage referendum didn’t get as vicious as this and that’s saying a lot.
The conservatives have been getting worse over the past say, 10 years, Trump kind of accelerated things and that style of “who cares what the truth is” was exported from the US.
The right wing in general was always going to end up being like this though.
Straight out of the US conservative playbook. An embarrassing look in Australia, and shows in the most obvious way that they are not acting in good faith.
Similarly, expect the networks and avenues of communication being built to be rolled into other areas as well. Trans rights, same sex marriage etc. will all be targets anew. Wouldn’t entirely be surprised if we started to see a push back against gun laws either.
We’ve had hints of this in the past but this is by far the most direct coupling between the US reactionary right and Australia’s.
I’m not sure same sex marriage will be much more than a fringe issue in Australia, for a long time at least. That plebiscite was a pretty strong indication of sentiment, and i think it’ll only have grown stronger in favour, in the years since.
A few years back i heard a polling researcher say one of the strengths of the same sex marriage question was there’s a high proprtion of family’s who have a personal connection with someone who is non-binary, (is that the universal term in this context?). They thought that personal connection had a large effect on the type of response.
Connecting that, though, to the Voice question. Considering a population of ~3% and less interspersed throughout the population, and it seems that could be a weakness for the Yes side.
Murdoch created the “American” playbook :)
Murdochs a hack, always has been. The games they play have been played by others for centuries. Look up Yellow Journalism and Hearst
Calling someone a racist is a pretty serious accusation, and a direct attack on that person. Are we really surprised someone will bristle at the accusation? Or dislike the fact someone is dismissing their views outright based on such a generalisation?
I don’t think anyone is surprised at the fake outrage. It’s textbook right wing politics to claim the moral high ground after rightfully being called out. If you think this is just some lazy dismissal on the part of Langton though, you are clearly very uninformed about who she is and her life’s work.
fake outrage.
See, you’re doing it yourself. You don’t get to decide if their outrage is genuine or not.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to debate here. Manufactured/fake outrage has been a key right wing tactic for years now, you would have to be extremely ignorant about modern politics to be unaware of this.
We are not talking about the feelings of innocent individuals - that is a smokescreen created by the right to engage their base. Again, this is textbook modern right wing politics. They redirect everything into a personal attack on their voting base, even when the statement they are reacting to was clearly directed at a system or institution. Look at these quotes:
Langton’s original quote:
"Every time the no case raises one of their arguments, if you start pulling it apart you get down to base racism – I’m sorry to say it but that’s where it lands – or just sheer stupidity.”
Ley’s response to the quote:
Marcia Langton, a member of the referendum working group appointed by the minister, has accused no voters of opposing the referendum because of base racism or sheer stupidity.
The Australian’s original response:
“No voters branded ‘racist, stupid’ by prominent voice campaigner Marcia Langton”.
They are changing the comments from an attack on the campaign, which is run by political organisations, into direct attacks on individual voters. The Australian retracted its headline and ran corrections in later articles because it knew that directly lying about this put it at legal risk. This is not “genuine” outrage. It is calculated, manufactured, fake outrage generated by conservative politicians and media to confuse and agitate the general public.
Even looking at the original post, it sounds a lot like she’s calling voters racist and stupid. If you say the arguments being made are racist and stupid, there is a clear implication the people are also racist and stupid.
No there isn’t. You even said this yourself earlier:
First you claim arguments can and should be separated from the people making them, and now you claim the opposite. You’re completely full of shit.
The point is that she implied everyone who disagrees with her is racist and stupid. That’s what we’re debating.
You’ve only attempted to make one point in this thread and you just contradicted yourself on it. So congratulations on “debating” yourself, I guess.
They decided to fake their own outrage when they decided to pretend the accusation is more inappropriate than the behavior that drove the accusation.
As an participant in the national dialogue it is absolutely my responsibility to identify when people are not being honest in conversation and to respond to that and not to their superficial presentation.
I don’t decide if they’re genuine or not I decide if I believe they are genuine or not. I don’t have to presume they are acting in good faith or with honest intentions. They have not earned that benefit of the doubt.
Outrage at the accusation of racism would require an understanding that racism is abhorrent. From the likes of Dutton, many of the figureheads of the reactionary No campaign, and from the commentators amplifying this supposed outrage from The Australian’s pages we have years - often decades - of behaviour and speech which suggests they do not possess that understanding.
You’re not just accusing them though, are you? You’re accusing everyone who disagrees with you a racist.
Turn on the YouTube subtitles for extra hilarity. 30 years later and technology still can’t understand a raw Australian accent.
It’s the same back in the fatherland, Blighty.
It would be appreciated if you didn’t refer to the UK as the “fatherland” in the context of Australia. It might be seen as a bit backwards and disregarding of the long history of this land, before British settlement
I used it intentionally mockingly just to be clear.
Cool, thanks for the clarification
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Marcia Langton, one of the key architects of the voice to parliament proposal, found herself at the centre of a fracas midweek when comments she’d made last Sunday during a public forum at Edith Cowan University appeared on the Australian newspaper’s website shortly before question time on Tuesday.
The Coalition had resolved to use the final parliamentary sitting week before the referendum to go full demolition on the voice, and the deputy Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, opened the batting in question time.
This whole stink bomb turned on whether or not Langton harboured views about the prevalence of racism in her own country, and whether her observations about this phenomenon amounted to a provable thought crime.
Examples of institutionalised racism include but are not limited to: the lie that there was no one here when the British arrived; the documented atrocities of frontier massacres; the policies of forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families – practices that have contributed to a prevalence of intergenerational trauma, a studied phenomenon in survivors of the stolen generations.
As the Olympian and former Labor senator Nova Peris argued this week, a constitutionally recognised advisory body will allow the lived experiences of First Nations people to be seen.
Langton was perfectly within her rights to posit that some Australians who are resolved to vote no on 14 October will do so because they harbour racist views, or are being influenced by a toxic sludge of negative messaging.
The original article contains 1,476 words, the summary contains 243 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
We have all been raised in racist societies. We all have little racist worms in our brains. We owe it to ourselves to fight our internal racism as well as helping each other recognise when we are being bigots.
Arguing what you said isn’t racist is itself racist 99% of the time. If you think maybe what you said really wasn’t racist ask why it is racist don’t try to defend racism.
If someone starts giving excuses or justifications for why what they said wasn’t racist just say “The only correct response when someone tells you something you said was Racist is ‘Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. I will try to watch out for that in the future. Thank you for helping me fight racism’”
If they keep arguing you just say “I guess you don’t wan’t to fight racism. You know what that makes you?”
