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Racism is deplorable, but weren't the threats to kill Romney if he won the election equally deplorable? http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-supporters-on-twi

• rpm4321 14y ago
  Agreed. It reminds me a bit of the fallacy of criminalizing "hate speech", which you are seeing in Europe lately. It actually gives the bigots a bit of a legitimate grievance, in that their freedom of speech is being eroded. Besides, personally, if someone is eager to inform me about what an idiot they are, I see no advantage in legally preventing them. I think the cult of political correctness has actually been quite damaging to race relations.
  • trebor 14y ago
    What about the people that voted for Obama—just because he's black? Isn't that racist too? What about the people who voted for Obama out of fear of being labeled racist? Isn't that blackmail? I've no idea how widespread those cases are, but I do wonder.
    • cglace 14y ago
      Or the people that are being called uncle toms for voting for Romney.
      • gadders 14y ago
        What is sad as well is that that epithet is often aimed at Republican or right-leaning politicians of colour such as Condie Rice, Herman Cain, Colin Powell etc.
    • astine 14y ago
      In the former case, yes that's racist but there were probably fewer of them this election than the last. Also, there were probably fewer of them than voted against him because he's black. WRT the latter, you don't have to reveal who you voted for so I doubt many did so out of fear (except maybe at those polling stations in Philly manned by the Black Panthers.) Peer pressure is a problem in elections, but it works in both directions.
    • theorique 14y ago
      95% of Black voters cast their ballot for Obama.
      • arrrg 14y ago
        Because he's black? And I suppose white voters voted for Romney because he's white.
      • saalweachter 14y ago
        Walter Mondale got 90% of the black vote in '84. Do you know something about him I don't?
        • arrrg 14y ago
          Bill Clinton got "surprisingly low" percentages in the lower eighties. Black people vote for Democrats because Republicans fucked them in the past. But no, white people vote for Romney because of the issues, black people vote for Obama because they are racist, Of course!
          • wallawe 14y ago
            95% of whites don't vote for Romney. Not even close.
            • saalweachter 14y ago
              In 2000 Gore won 42% of the white vote and 90% of the black vote. In 2012, Obama won 39% of the white vote and 93% of the black vote. So at most, Obama got an extra 3% of the black vote on account of his race, and lost at most 3% of the white vote. So on the face of it, a wash. Of course, the white electorate is over five times larger than the black electorate, so that's really -2.2%, +0.4%. Even if Obama had performed at Bill Clinton's historically low 83% of the black vote, his popular vote total would have been only 1.3% lower. This may have been enough to make him lose the popular vote, but it would not have been enough to make him lose the electoral college (Mitt Romney would have needed to win the popular vote by 3% to have won the electoral college).
    • arrrg 14y ago
      What about the people who voted for Romney because he is white? What kind of question is that even? Suddenly when it's a black guy THAT'S the issue. How brain dead. Wanting your kid to have positive black role models is not racist, no. That's a not very sophisticated but very valid and certainly not racist reason for voting for Obama that's entirely based on race.
      • matwood 14y ago
        What about the people who voted for Romney because he is white? Those people are also racists, and frequently called racists. The double standard is issue here. White guy votes for a white guy because he's white means he's a racists. Black guy votes for a black guy because he's black means he's supporting change. Worse yet, is that since I think Obama has done a horrible job and wouldn't vote for him, his supporters call me a racist. Sad state of affairs really.
        • deleted 14y ago
          [deleted]
        • arrrg 14y ago
          Those two things are not equivalent. That's not a symmetrical situation. But I like your straw man. Also, I named a situation when voting for Obama because he is black is ok and not racist.
          • matwood 14y ago
            Also, I named a situation when voting for Obama because he is black is ok and not racist. Making a decision based on race is racist. To think otherwise is to continue to perpetuate racism and remain part of the problem.
            • arrrg 14y ago
              I said it yesterday and I will say it again today: If you insist on playing semantic games and defining racism so weirdly I will happily admit to loving being racist in that way. You mistake is to assume symmetry where there is none.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
• revscat 14y ago
  It is deplorable, but I am not sure how this is not a red herring. It's not even a statistical sample: it's a single case. If you have counter evidence which shows a different geographic makeup, or otherwise addresses the claims made by the OP, then please share.
  • wbracken 14y ago
    Here are quite a few examples... http://twitchy.com/2012/11/06/death-threats-against-mitt-romney-explode-in-final-hours-of-campaign/ http://twitchy.com/2012/11/06/death-threats-against-mitt-rom...
    • revscat 14y ago
      That doesn't address the OP, though. Nor are they racist in nature.
      • tjic 14y ago
        > Nor are they racist in nature. I think that's exactly the point: why limit the analysis to racist speech (when the idiocy hurled on one side will be racist) and not equally bad - or worse - speech (when that other type of speech is on the other side). It's sort of like tracking all the cases of food poisoning from pizza and ignoring the food poisoning from fish. "Hey, I've got data that says that people get poisoned from other foods too." "Shut up. That other food isn't pizza!"
  • rpm4321 14y ago
    I'm reluctant to link to them because they were all Drudge Report style aggregators of the type that are frowned upon by HN. Anyone curious can just Google "Romney win riots" and see for themselves. We're talking hundreds or thousands of tweets of this nature. To be honest, I'm not really bothered by either because it really just amounts to verbal graffiti. I don't think any of those tweeting were future black panther revolutionaries, any more than I think the ones featured in this post were future James Earl Rays. They're all just lacking empathy, common sense, and inhibition on Twitter.
• jhowell 14y ago
  Is that racism such as calling a person a monkey or a n*er, or is that violent speech absent of racial slurs? One could make a violent statement, a racist statement and a violent, racist statement.
• chez17 14y ago
  >What is any less hateful about them? Has anyone suggested otherwise? Seriously, has anyone made the argument that a death threat is ok? This is the typical response of "look the other side does it to!". On top of it, the tweet you linked to has nothing to do with racism, just stupid partisanship. If you're so concerned about that, write your own blog post. >The problem I have with the lack of objectivity on racism is that it's actually counter-productive to solving the problem. You brought up a tweet that has literally nothing to do with racism, how does that counteract your claims of 'lack of objectivity'?
  • DigitalJack 14y ago
    Nobody calls a death threat "hate speech." That is implicitly suggesting that the people who use the term "hate speech" don't consider it hateful. Now if you queried someone directly, they would of course say it's hateful (I would think). So what that ends up suggesting is the term "hate speech" is really just a short-hand for racially derogatory statements. AKA racist comments. People have decided the term racist and racism are too detached and not emotionally impactful, so now we have "hate speech" which is more forceful. It does, unfortunately, seem to imply that somehow threatening someone with death is less hateful than racism. Now, the post you were replying to seems to be a reaction to the post which uses racist tweets and hate tweets interchangably. That apparently stuck in his craw, so to speak, because there were plenty of other very hateful tweets going on during this election that had nothing to do with racism, yet they are excluded from a post discussing "hate tweets."
    • rauljara 14y ago
      >People have decided the term racist and racism are too detached and not emotionally impactful, so now we have "hate speech" which is more forceful. This isn't why the term hate speech came about. The term hate speech came about in order to have a word applies not only to racism, but also to sexism, anti-semitism, homophobic language, etc. It is an umbrella term that refers to speech that is directed towards people solely based on the (usually immutable) group to which they belong. It is not a synonym for hateful speech. Hateful is its own term. E.g. "I going to kill white people because I hate them so much" == hate speech (and also hateful). "I'm going to kill that guy because I hate him so much" == hateful (but not hate speech). For the record, I come down firmly on the side that both are wrong. But bringing up one when the conversation was originally about the other tends to lead to derailment.
• pessimizer 14y ago
  If you're not looking at this through our team vs. their team glasses, you might notice that the study didn't discover that racism was deplorable. It makes speculations about where racists among the twitter demographic in the US live, by taking advantage of an event which was bound to bring them out in force. Caring about threats to Romney's life doesn't even make sense in that context. Caring about threats to Obama's life doesn't even make sense in that context, unless they called him a monkey nigger while doing it. Please stop dividing the world into things that are for or against your football team. >Raising the alarm about one type of racism while turning a blind eye to other types of irrational hate smacks of hypocrisy. Are you seriously trying to say that paying attention to anti-black discrimination as a subject separate from anti-Kurd discrimination is hypocritical? I bet you wouldn't be saying that if the OP was about the distribution of anti-Kurd tweets.
• JulianMorrison 14y ago
  The difference between threats and hate speech is that hate speech is intended to oppress an already marginalized group, as a group. That is, there are two criminal acts (1) threatening the individual (2) oppressing the group, happening as a result of one act of speech. This justifies a special treatment for it in law, differing from mere threats.