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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

"Low-trust" "multicultural" "society" is race-war code language, isn't it? People that don't read a lot of reactionary stuff might try to engage directly with the words "low-trust" and spark a whole unproductive discussion about what it is we "trust" or "don't trust" about people, but that's not the purpose the words actually serve in that sentence, right? "Low-trust" is a way of saying "things were better when we were mostly white Europeans, with other cultures marginalized".

If that wasn't your intention, you'd probably want to know that putting the words "low-trust" and "multicultural" into assertions about American life constitutes a reactionary/neo-supremacist trope.

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>"Low-trust" "multicultural" "society" is race-war code language, isn't it?

Says you, they're just words. If you don't agree you can go ahead and disagree. I won't comment about your rhetoric other than to say it's functionally ad-hominem. Calling something a trope is a also a pretty easy way to hand-wave away anything you don't want to think about.

>and spark a whole unproductive discussion about what it is we "trust" or "don't trust" about people

I would say that trust has not improved, I would say that race relations have not improved (probably deteriorated). Even you can probably agree with that?

Mr. Rodgers prescriptions for life are lovely but impractical, and they haven't helped society at all I would say.

I won't comment about your rhetoric other than to say it's functionally ad-hominem.

Wait, how? It's specifically about your language, not you. If, hypothetically, he'd taken a little scroll through your older comments and happened to, purely hypothetically, run across some stuff about how slaves had room and board and the persistent racist oppression of white males and then jumped to a conclusion and called you a racist, that would be ad hominem.

But that's totally not what happened.

> I would say that race relations have not improved

The proportion of interracial marriages as a proportion of all marriages has been increasing since, such that 15.1% of all new marriages in the United States were interracial marriages by 2010 compared to a low single-digit percentage in the mid 20th century. Public approval of interracial marriage rose from around 5% in the 1950s to around 80% in the 2000s. The previous sentences are copy-pasted from Wikipedia.

Again, I would say that relations have not improved regardless of interracial marriages.

Public approval has increased likely in lockstep with how functionally illegal it is to not approve.

You're right, somehow I forgot about all those anonymous poll data leaks leading to mass round-ups by the armed liberal masses.

It's Rogers. R-o-g-e-r-s. His name was Fred Rogers.

I know what his name is and how to spell it I just reflexively spell it that way. Why don't you just write that you think I'm stupid rather than hide behind this trivial spelling error comment?

Making sweeping assertions without any proof (such as U.S. race relations have deteriorated) does sounds like pretty stupid behavior.

The only point I am making is that this person has attempted to take a thread about Mr. Rogers on a race-war tangent, and if they're going to do that, they should at least know how to spell his name. I have no idea whether they're intelligent or not; I just know that they're unserious about the topic of the thread.

> I would say that race relations have not improved (probably deteriorated).

Since Mr. Rogers Neighborhood first aired in 1968? No, race relations are much better now. It's true that they've deteriorated in some respects in the last handful of years, but mostly that's a result of a desperate rearguard action by White supremacists as institutionalized racism and it's automatic acceptance by the masses has been further eroded, and even if the federal government role today is in some respects worse than in 1968, the overall state of race relations is not.

> Mr. Rodgers prescriptions for life are lovely but impractical

In what concrete respect? You've been waving around a lot of generalizations (false ones, at that) about societal differences between now and the past to explain why they might have become impractical having been valid in the past, but you haven't actually explaining what the actual impracticality in any of them is (or even what specific prescriptions you are criticizing); while the inaccuracy of your generalizations is a problem, a bigger problem is your failure to establish, or even concretely define, the problem that supposedly has developed with Rogers’ approach that you are using them to explain.

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