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Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election

floatingsheep.org

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Re: Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election

#21

Post by jhowell »

crusso wrote: post #10

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-twitter-... What is any less hateful about them? "I'll personally f*****g kill Romney if he try's some dumb nazi s**t f**k that (sic)," I looked through floatingsheep's other recent blogs and they didn't cover that one. The problem I have with the lack of objectiv…

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.

Re: Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election

#22

Post by cglace »

trebor wrote: post #18
rpm4321 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 quit…

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.

Or the people that are being called uncle toms for voting for Romney.

Re: Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election

#23

Post by wbracken »

revscat wrote: post #19
crusso wrote: post #10

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-twitter-... What is any less hateful about them? "I'll personally f*****g kill Romney if he try's some dumb nazi s**t f**k that (sic)," I looked through floatingsheep's other recent blogs and they didn't cover that one. The problem I have with the lack of objectiv…

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.

Here are quite a few examples...

http://twitchy.com/2012/11/06/death-threats-against-mitt-rom...

Re: Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election

#24

Post by chez17 »

crusso wrote: post #10

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-twitter-... What is any less hateful about them? "I'll personally f*****g kill Romney if he try's some dumb nazi s**t f**k that (sic)," I looked through floatingsheep's other recent blogs and they didn't cover that one. The problem I have with the lack of objectiv…

>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'?

Re: Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election

#25

Post by astine »

trebor wrote: post #18
rpm4321 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 quit…

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.

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.

Re: Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election

#26

Post by mmuro »

Ugh. Being from Alabama, this is just sad. But, I guess unsurprising given the majority demographic here.

I really hope this election can help move this area of the country forward because this kind of attitude has never helped the South.

The only thing I can say is that you reference the county-by-county voting and know that there are lots of blue/purple counties throughout this region.

Re: Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election

#28

Post by rpm4321 »

revscat wrote: post #19
crusso wrote: post #10

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-twitter-... What is any less hateful about them? "I'll personally f*****g kill Romney if he try's some dumb nazi s**t f**k that (sic)," I looked through floatingsheep's other recent blogs and they didn't cover that one. The problem I have with the lack of objectiv…

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.

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.

Re: Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election

#29

Post by gyardley »

troels wrote: post #3

This could have been interesting, but with a sample size of 395, I'm afraid the numbers are very unreliable.

With a sample size of 395, given the intensity of feeling around general elections, all this really does is show that America is staggeringly not racist.

Re: Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election

#30

Post by moron »

omnisci wrote: post #9
fnayr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's correlated with the red states; when the person they didn't want to see win won, they said anything they could to degrade him. Certainly the n word is the easiest and most offensive word to throw out, but that doesn't necessarily imply racism. Though I'm not defending their use of that extremely offensive word, it's highly disingenuous to equate it to racism.

Can of worms = opened. The "n word" does imply racism. I'm not going to write a book about it, but I'll just put that out there for you to think about.

What if I see someone using the word and include their tweet in mine, to tell them what a racist idiot they are? Then my tweet would be counted racist simply because it contains the word. This is not a thought exercise, I watched it happen (the tweeting, not the counting).
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