The thing to understand about this argument is that it is unfalsifiable nonsense. Anything he says that is wrong is him joking, you just can’t tell because he pretends so well! No, dude. He is wrong a lot and like a 5yo, when he realizes he cannot actually defend or explain something he did he falls back on “it was just a joke!”
Of course he's wrong a lot. The point isn't that Y is right, it's that X and Y are both wrong but you can't admit to that if you're a hypocrite.
And the "anything he says that is wrong is him joking" is the idea, because it works both ways. If someone says something which is actually wrong, you can make a convincing argument for why if you're willing to be logically consistent yourself.
But there are also things which are politically offensive yet true, and having a reputation for this kind of trolling is what allows someone to say those things out loud. Because then you make the same claim: "Maybe I'm trolling you, if I am just provide the counterargument."
Which you can't do if the counterargument requires you to admit that X is wrong and you refuse to do that, but you also can't do if there is no counterargument because Y is true.
It doesn't matter whether "is he trolling this time" is falsifiable. What matters is if you can disprove his claim. If you can, go for it. If not, what does that say?
No, it’s not just that he is wrong a lot. It’s that when he is wrong he (and his fans) refuse to actually admit that he is making false claims and poor arguments, and pretends “I was joking!” is some kind of clever escape, and not a sign that nothing he says is worth engaging with. I don’t bother to disprove it when a five year old says “you stink” either, because they also couldn’t care less about the truth and logic of their statement.
Adams was looking at a poll that said 47% of black people disagreed with the statement "It’s okay to be white.". If that poll was reliable then that would be a profoundly concerning statistic and evidence of some pretty strong racism on the part of the community surveyed.
The level of "rich white boomer racism" (which is a bit racially charged in itself, but sure we can go with that) really hinges on how credible he found the poll. It was Rassmussen and also a pollster stirring up trouble so realistically he should have just dismissed it as a likely lie by not-reporting-the-real-context of the question being asked (I personally suspect dodgy framing). Adams should have picked up on that since it is his area, but the argument would have been reasonable if he was silly enough to believe the poll.
> Adams should have picked up on that since it is his area, but the argument would have been reasonable if he was silly enough to believe the poll.
This is still in the same format as the above. His claim is that if 47% of black people disagree with the statement "it's okay to be white" then said white people should stay away from them. That's Y. Whether the poll is accurate isn't even the point -- and purposely choosing a poll with an artificially large number could be part of the troll.
X is the belief "it's not okay to be white." Which presumably doesn't actually have a 47% prevalence, but it's also not zero. What he's implying is that if a large proportion of black people actually believed this, his statement would be a completely plausible response from a significant proportion of white people. Which is a bad outcome. So believing X is bad, and increasing the prevalence of the belief X is bad, because if X then Y.
> Adams was looking at a poll that said 47% of black people disagreed with the statement "It’s okay to be white.".
The thing about Black culture in America is that it is a product of very strong selective pressures to be aware of messages that carry meanings beyond what is on the surface, and, well, that one has a history:
If the black community is going to be persuaded by 4chan that "it is ok to be white" is a racist message that just suggests a mis-step by the leadership in the black community. The longer they tilt at the windmill the more silly they'll look.
If somehow that poll is picking up a real opinion then Adams has a point. That sort of racism has no place in modern society, it is acceptable to have any skin colour. And it is acceptable to assert that any skin colour is ok to have.
Which, coincidentally, is exactly the debate dynamic that Adams was likely trying to set up. The slogan is just too inoffensive and reasonable to complain about. The people trying to get worked up about it are just going to look bad.
> If the black community is going to be persuaded by 4chan that "it is ok to be white" is a racist message that just suggests a mis-step by the leadership in
If you read the link, you would know that it was white supremacist phrase before the 4chan thing that saw a massive upswing in actual white supremacist use not following the isolated use of the supposed bait effort during and since the 4chan thing.
Whether the trolling effort was ignorant of and accidentally tapping into and energizing the preexisting racist usage or a knowing effort to leverage and provide cover for it is something that we’ll probably never know, but what we know for sure is that it is not the origin.
If the white supremacists are advocating agreeable and common sense positions then well done to them. They've successfully made a good point. If they claim that the sky is blue or water is wet they will be on similarly safe ground.
Being a white supremacist doesn't mean they are automatically wrong about everything. In this case reality and slogan have, by happy chance, coincided.
> “The point of IOTBW,” explained one Twitter user, “is to bait shitlibs into showing their ass to normies. The beauty is in the simplicity.”
I think the Twitter user in the article has a more accurate position on this. If the black community were fooled by this into thinking that there is something wrong with the slogan, that is on them. I still don't believe they were, it is more likely that the poll was inaccurate.
The African Americans I've known are very in tune to race issues. And the poll question comes off as a racist dog whistle, like an extreme form of "all lives matter". So I wouldn't put a lot of faith the the poll results, certainly not enough to publicly advise avoiding an entire group of people based on their skin color.
