Am I "jewish?" According to the Law of Return I'm jewish, regardless of the fact that my grandmother disavowed her faith. Her husband's family were DAR. I have a great uncle that traced the other side of the family clear back to Old 300 so by any reasonable definition, I'm the most White Anglo Saxon Protestant American I know. Yet by Hitler's standards me and Sammy Davis Jr would both be lampshade fodder.

[...]People forget that 20 years later the Supreme Court actually did come up with a definition of pornography [...]That, of course, led to predictable amounts of margin-sniping [...]Which, of course, leads to people arguing about what "community" is and eventually having whole sections of laws struck down because fuckin' hell, it's a violation of first amendment rights.

Often in rhetorical discourse, here or anywhere else, I eventually reach a point where all I can think of is semantic satiation- that phenomenon where if you say a certain word enough times, it loses all meaning. That's the problem with applying Socratic dialogue to any situation that isn't an ancient Greek drinking party. It doesn't really get you anywhere but your navel. "What is racism? But what is race? What is prejudice? What is ill intent? What is bad about being afraid of a bad thing? What is a bad thing? What is thing?"

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it here; it's one of the reasons (besides true-blue human connection) I didn't ghost this account ages ago. But when applied to real life- say, legal theory or whether or not one should feel bad about denigrating Muslims, or whether or not one should feel bad about denigrating those who denigrate Muslims- such discourse too frequently turns into a sort of real-world moral Gerrymandering. I can't be racist, because I have mixed race grandchildren, and I won't engage in this one clearly proscribed activity that has been narrowly defined as racist. I can't be racist, because although I gormlessly equate Islam with Jihad and Sharia, those are objectively bad things and everybody should fear them. Maybe I've said some racist things in the past, and yesterday, and right now, but that doesn't make me racist, it just makes me terminally misinformed. Or maybe they're not racist things at all; after all, what is racism?

If treated cavalierly, the Socratic method can metastasize into moral relativism like that; most people out and about probably couldn't discern an appreciable difference between the two.

Again, none of this is to discourage the type of discussion engaged in above. It's just a caveat. Words and ideas have power. It's our duty in a free society to examine our words and ideas.

It's a privilege to do it here with people who are a) super smart and b) don't necessarily agree with one another. As we move back down the gradient, however, from the rhetorical to the practical, it's kind of on everyone to make sure we all know the difference. Otherwise, an idea that's bandied about only in academic circles might slip into a news cycle, and then condensed to a hamfisted tweet by a ham-fingered head of state, and then get repeated until we're no longer sure whether nativism is something to be avoided. Or it could slip into the canon of fringe elements, and then get repeated and further distorted on 8chan, and then somebody decides that Mexicans pose a great enough danger to our country that they need to be exterminated, Walmart by Walmart.

When the dust has settled, bad things are bad, and they should be addressed as such. I'm not calling Roseanna and Amy racists to change their mind; they're a sunk cost. I'm calling them racist to reinforce a very useful societal norm, and to make sure that racism stays unacceptable, and that successive generations don't forget what everybody has already been through, and to fight the troubling resurgence of white nationalism.

edit as an aside, that patch is incredible.