Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
If you make common cause with a bunch of racists, it is fair to call you a racist unless you work pretty hard to distance yourself from and undo the effects of their racism. Just saying, I'm not a racist doesn't do the trick.
I agree that there is a problem with the felony-murder rule if you think that you signed up to commit tax fraud and then you find out that your co-conspirators are also knocking over a liquor store and -- whoops -- they killed a guy with a gun you didn't know they had.
But where a significant portion of the group is committed to violence, and you hint to them that you support them and keep putting them in roles where they get to act out -- you know they are going into the liquor store with a gun -- you don't get to say, well, I didn't mean for anyone to get shot. That's pretty much what you signed up for -- there's no playing innocent because you let someone else do the dirty work.
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I'm totally comfortable with stating that a Trump voter who's doing so for tax reasons aids and abets racism. I don't see any way around that.
I'm not comfortable calling him a racist, however. He might not be one. He might just be a greedy, soulless sort.
The real problem is bluntly and broadly using impact as the metric. Direct impact I think is a fine metric. If you vote for a local sheriff because you like his platform of jailing all the illegals in gulags, you're a bigot. If you're a contractor working on Keystone XL and you vote for Trump to aid your bottom line, you're a rational economic actor.
Adder desires to use impact too broadly. That's when we walk into Absurdistan (thanks, Taleb). Because if impact in its most blunt sense is the measuring stick, a butterfly in China might be bigoted.
Now, of course, Adder knows better. He'll say a reasonableness standard is implied, and I think that's fair. But whose standard is that? When does the impact become too tenuous? How in the hell do you make that finding?
And if we struggle with that issue, what about the average voter, idiot that he is? On the right and the left, our polarized warring factions are offering some godawfully stupid arguments. Should we let academics decide where impact is too tenuous to assert bigotry? Nope. These people have navel gazed themselves into imbecility on these subjects. Should we hand it over to legislators? Fuck no. They're often dumber than the average voter, and half the time only interested in job preservation. Maybe we should give it to lawyers... They write laws, right? Well, we clearly can't think clearly on it.
Maybe we'll just use
NY Times v. Sullivan: We know direct impact when we see it.
I don't have the answer. But I know it's not Adder's.
