This is something I’ve been sitting on for awhile, due to finals and wanting to reboot the blog. It’s carry-over from a post I did at God is for Suckers called “Tolerating Ourselves to Death”, on the short film /Finta/. Reading that first is a good place to start. This drew a series of angry responses from Larry Hamelin of The Barefoot Bum, starting with one which declared Chris Hallquist proves that sometimes an atheist is someone with just one fewer stupid idea than a theist.

I initially left a brief comment, but it’s worth responding to at length because his posts are such a wonderful showcase of partisan hackery–a phenomenon characterized by not only by adherence to the party line, but even more so by going completely loony in the face of any deviation (or rather, any deviation that does not involve taking whatever the party says to a much greater extreme than its leaders).

First, the ludicrous charge that I’m a Republican. This appears to be based on nothing the fact that I defended something with a vague, tenuous relation to what Republicans have been saying, because Larry, being a partisan hack, can’t conceive of anyone being anything but a partisan hack. I’m not a perfectly loyal Democrat, so I must be a Republican. FYI: I voted straight-ticked Democrat in the 2006 election. Except for the presidency and maybe some minor local positions, I’ll be voting democrat again in 2008. I’ve defended McCain on a few points and voted for him in the primary, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned the primary vote online and by the time I wrote the post on /Finta/, I had already announced I was back to voting for Jon Stewart in the general election (I’m serious about this–if enough people did it, it would be an embarrassment to the major parties and they’d have to get their act together.)

Now to the silly main charge of racism. Oddly, it isn’t really clear who this is supposed to be directed at. In “Fitna, Islam, and Racism”, he admits to not knowing whether Geert Wilders, creator of the film, is really a racist. In “The enemy of my enemy”, admits that “neoconservatives” (whatever those are) aren’t necessarily racist. On the other hand, in the original post he claims that the Republican party is “an explicitly racist political party.”

In spite of all the things Republicans have screwed up over the past eight years, the claim that they’re explicitly racist is a lie, Larry knows it, and I doubt he expects anyone to be fooled. This is what it means to tell a truly Orwellian lie–it is not about actually fooling anyone, but showing off that you think you can distort the truth with impunity. How do I know he knows it’s a lie? This, from “Defining Racism”:

Open racism — even the mildest — isn’t generally condoned in the US. Even if you really are racist in a substantive sense, even if you consider black people or brown people or Jewish people to be typically inferior, lazy, greedy or whatnot, you can’t just come out and say it.

“Explicit” means you’re coming out and saying it–if people aren’t coming out and saying it, then explicit racism can’t be terribly common. But if one of the two dominate American political parties were explicitly racist, explicit racism would be terribly common. Therefore (by modus tollens, for those keeping track at home) neither of our two dominate American political parties are explicitly racist.

His proposal how to redefine racism are ludicrous and dishonest:

One can define racism too far “up”: You can’t be called a racist unless you’re seen to be whipping a chained-up black man while chanting “nigger nigger nigger”. Nixon’s Southern Strategy? States’ rights, not racism. Welfare queens and strapping young bucks? Entitlements, not racism. Willy Horton? Crime, not racism. The Confederate flag? Heritage and history, not racism. Immigration? Border security, not racism.

If we try to interpret this as a logical argument at all, and not just mindless ranting, it’s a false dilemma: our choices aren’t between saying “You can’t be called a racist unless you’re seen to be whipping a chained-up black man while chanting ‘nigger nigger nigger’ and saying that opposing immigration is racist. That just doesn’t exhaust the options. And opposing immigration isn’t necessarily racist, it just isn’t. There are all kinds of reasons for doing so: labor protectionism, vaguer economic worries, worries about cultural assimilation (Geert Wilder’s worry), and so on. The attempt to redefine racism clearly isn’t motivated by any desire to make the debate clearer and more rational, it’s an attempt to smuggle in by linguistic trick the claim “if slavery, the Klan, and Jim Crow were bad, then immigration must also be bad.” It’s reminiscent of the games Soviet agents use to play with the meaning of Trotskyite, which Orwell described in /Homage to Catalonia/. (In that case, the jump was from “non-Soviet socialist” to “closet fascist.” I’d think that Orwell was making it up if not for seeing people like Larry do basically the same thing).

I could address the other silliness in detail (like the claim that not talking about Christianity’s flaws is evidence of racism rather than, oh, not worrying so much about a group isn’t producing many terrorists nowadays, or being blinded by familiarity.) But it’s a Friday night, I’ve got better things to do than spend more time on this nonsense.