• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Elizabeth Warren Ancestry Thread

Status
Not open for further replies.
theprestige said:
It's not like Obama was raised in the American South, a fourth generation heir of a legacy of slavery, segregation, and discrimination.

Obama knows as much about the African American experience as Elizabeth Warren knows about the Native American experience.
Click to expand...
What a load of *********. Go buy a clue.
Ziggurat said:
If Warren tries to catch a cab, do you think the cab driver is saying, "Oh, there's a native American"?
Click to expand...


No.
 
Silly Green Monkey said:
Six years it managed to make regular flights without those legs. But there was a solid argument for her not taking the test, and an argument for taking the test and laying everything to rest. Part of the argument against was that, exactly as with the birth certificate, taking the test would fail no matter the results. She got goaded into it, but she didn't randomly decide "hey no one's talked about this potential skeleton in my closet for a while, let's bring it out to dance!". She's not Trump. Had rightwing loons let it lie, she wouldn't have mentioned it again.

It really was more "I'll do it if it'll make you SHUT UP for once!" than "Pay attention to meeeee!" like those accustomed to Trump are assuming.
Click to expand...

I really don't agree that there was a solid argument for taking the test because the GOP was never going to let it rest. First rule in politics is to talk about what you want to talk about. Not what the opponent wants to talk about. Every article about her heritage, she loses, every article about her fighting the big banks and helping the middle class she wins.
 
I just think "Oh I'm not going to backup a statement I made because the other side isn't going to believe me anyway" is a very, very, very, very bad precedent to set in politics.

I don't want it to be the response to every request to backup something a politician says in a few years.
 
Belz... said:
I think that precedent was set in 509 BC.
Click to expand...

Yeah but now we've got people cheerleading for it as a positive.

It's shift from "You shouldn't have to" to "You are literally in the wrong if you even try to explain yourself to the other side..."
 
Exactly! How is it a good thing to allow any party to set traps for another, where the person targeted will lose whether they attempt to defend themselves or attempt to ignore the playground taunts and get on with what they were elected for? Our lawmakers really should act like adults (I realize they never have, but things can change). If I knew a way to avoid empowering the lobbyists who write laws for Congresscritters I'd boot everybody out after they've served a term. Maybe let the good ones stand again later, but no consecutive terms---no incumbent advantage.
 
Doesn't it seem a bit like the left helped set this trap for itself by doubling down on identitarianism & callout culture?
 
Last edited:
d4m10n said:
Doesn't it seem a bit like the left helped set this trap for itself by doubling down on identitarianism & callout culture?
Click to expand...
I don't think so. Callout culture has been a part of politics (digging for dirt, attack ads, etc.) since antiquity. I think it's a nonpartisan phenomenon.

I don't really see a trap here, just a conflict. Our attitude towards ethnicity and identity in this country is such that a privileged white person checking the box for "Native American" is kind of absurd. By doing so, Warren opened herself up to ridicule based on this perceived absurdity.

And it follows from our ideas about ethnicity and minority oppression, that claiming minority identity is supposed to be something important. But the biggest defense of Warren is that it's not important. So there's a conflict there.

I don't think this is a trap set by the left. I think that our society as a whole is conflicted about this. Dispute exists across the entire partisan spectrum in this country.

The trap wasn't set by the left. It was set by Warren, by the TBA, by Harvard. It was set by all of us, as a society, when we stopped bothering to think about what we want ethnic identity to mean, and why we think it's important.
 
Last edited:
d4m10n said:
Doesn't it seem a bit like the left helped set this trap for itself by doubling down on identitarianism & callout culture?
Click to expand...

That's all I've been saying for pages now.

Nobody, in any part of this discussion, gives a crap in the abstract if Elizabeth Warren claims to be 25% Velociraptor. What the Right cares about is hoisting the Democrats up the petard that they've spent the modern age carefully erected and what the Left cares about is getting Warren off the petard while still maintaining it because wow they love that particular petard for some reason.

This is a check written to cash in a towards a "gotcha" the next time someone in the vague, undefined "Left" goes on some stupid tangent about cultural appropriation or some other such nonsense.
 
d4m10n said:
theprestige said:
The trap wasn't set by the left. It was set by Warren, by the TBA, by Harvard.
Click to expand...

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/5/2/faculty-survey-part-2/

The faculty survey revealed that the vast majority of respondents identify as “liberal” or “very liberal,” and that a similarly large majority of FAS voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...


Two questions come to mind.

What, exactly, does “liberal” or “very liberal,” mean, either in this context, their own minds, or by comparison to other non-U.S. or non-partisan environments?

How relevant is this to someone who began teaching at Harvard over a quarter century ago, following yet another quarter century matriculating and teaching at far less prestigious public universities?
 
BobTheCoward said:
As Obama said addressing this very point...

"If I'm outside your building trying to catch a cab," he told Charlie Rose, "they're not saying, 'Oh, there's a mixed race guy.'"
Click to expand...

It's almost funny watching people (who almost always non-black) try to separate Obama, and only him, from other black people, by desperately searching for reasons why he isn't actually a black American.

"He's biracial." Then almost all of us are as well, but you never blathered about "biracial" before Obama was nearing the presidency.

"His father was an immigrant, he doesn't have slavery in his past." Well, first, you don't know that, and second, most of us that aren't hoteps fully accept immigrants, and their children.

"Why are you making it about race?" Read books, for Gawd's sake.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Nobody, in any part of this discussion, gives a crap in the abstract if Elizabeth Warren claims to be 25% Velociraptor. What the Right cares about is hoisting the Democrats up the petard that they've spent the modern age carefully erected and what the Left cares about is getting Warren off the petard while still maintaining it because wow they love that particular petard for some reason.
Click to expand...

That's not how a petard works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petard
 
I am still puzzled by why checking the box for a portion of her ancestry counts as Identifying As That. I checked all the boxes that applied, or I thought applied, until it started including tribal membership and it sounds like Warren stopped about the same time. I claim an ancestor on the Trail by family lore. I do not identify as Cherokee or Delaware and I never have. My ancestry by lore includes both. Or, it might have been some other tribe, Mom was told as a child that she looked like she had some Indian blood but her family had no idea what it was. My sister had heard we were "just below the amount we could claim" [membership] but I can't go digging around in our family tree because all the access to genealogy information has been sewn up by paid sites.

Ancestry is not identity. Claiming ancestry does not indicate identity one tiny bit.
 
JoeMorgue said:
I never sacrifice factual accuracy to stop torturing a metaphor way past the point Amnesty International is okay with it.
Click to expand...

Well Shakespeare hoist on a small bomb doesn't seem to make sense...unless hoist meant something different then.
 
d4m10n said:
Roughly the same as what I meant by "the left" earlier.
Click to expand...
The question you haven't answered is trying to determine what is meant by "the left" in your context.

For example, in most other countries, the Democrats would be considered generally as centrist to soft-right. In the USA they are literally being called socialists.

Elsewhere, Bernie would be considered soft-left. In the USA, he is so far left he is Marxism and Leninism distilled and personified.

Elsewhere, the GOP would be considered hard-right bordering on (or indeed frankly) theocratic fascists. In the USA, they are (claiming to be) moderate-right.

So what is "left" and "right" is mostly a matter of where you put your scale.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom