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Comment by pingou | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting, but thankfully they only had 395 tweets so I wonder if you can get something really meaningful with a set of data so small. Looks like there's some correlation with Rommey's voting states though.

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After reviewing their list of "Top 10 Floating Sheep Maps" that appears in the sidebar, it's a reasonable assumption that this is a site with a certain world view. The readers who agree with that world view (say, /r/politics) won't particularly care about the statistical sample size as long as the results reinforce their beliefs.

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.

Nonsense.

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.

To paraphrase XKCD, I would say that the word doesn't imply racism, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively, etc.

From wiki: "Racism is usually defined as views, practices and actions reflecting the belief that humanity is divided into distinct biological groups called races and that members of a certain race share certain attributes which make that group as a whole less desirable, more desirable, inferior or superior"

A frustrated exclamation of a horribly degrading word to express their anger != A view that African Americans are inferior.

It certainly doesn't show class and I'd bet you'd surely find a higher proportion of racists among those who tweeted that word, but calling them all racists? Wrong.

The n-word is not necessarily racist, if used in the right context. But given the context of most of these tweets it is absolutely used in racist tones, ie. "niggers in the whitehouse!"

Under which circumstances is it not racist?

Hip-hop lyrics where African Americans use it to describe each other?

Under the circumstance that you discuss the history and etymology of the word like adults and not a bunch of idiots on xbox live.

it was a very biased 'study'. from the article, it appears that this person specifically targeted people that were anti-Obama, forgetting entirely all the racists tweets that threatened riot and death if Romney won.

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