
Ravelry, a Popular Knitting Site, Bans Pro-Trump Content - mcenedella
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/style/ravelry-knitting-ban-trump.html
======
0815test
See also:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20259012](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20259012)

~~~
Ar-Curunir
Lol what an absolute cesspool of centrist comments.

~~~
dang
Maybe so, but would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker
News?

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RickJWagner
Shameful.

It's fine to disagree with President Trump. It's fine to disagree with
Democrats, too. Having an opinion is your right.

But to slander and lie, and try to influence people in this way is just wrong.

Let's be honest. President Trump has brought record low unemployment, rising
wages, and justice reform to African Americans. His support among American
Blacks has risen, not fallen. He is doing some good.

Yet there are people like this. They weaponize racism, ignoring it within any
party but the one they demonize. They turn racism from something useless into
something they can use. This is what is truly 'deplorable'.

~~~
mcphage
> They turn racism from something useless into something they can use. This is
> what is truly 'deplorable'.

No, I'm pretty sure it's putting kids into concentration camps that's
deplorable. Nice try though.

~~~
s9w
Seeing the word concentration tramp unironically being used in a current world
is obscene. Where did that even come from? That cropped fake photo on twitter?

~~~
eesmith
[https://www.newsweek.com/concentration-camps-alexandria-
ocas...](https://www.newsweek.com/concentration-camps-alexandria-ocasio-
cortez-trump-border-1444843)

> "Concentration camps are considered by experts as 'the mass detention of
> civilians without trial.'

Even without photos, we know there is mass detention of civilians without
trial.

Do you deny that?

What term do you want to use? From the same link:

> We don't say 'prisons' because prisons are a part of the formal legal
> system," Lester Andrist, a sociologist who has studied indefinite detention,
> tweeted.

Or would you prefer "internment camp", like we used for Japanese Americans?
From the same link:

> "I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America.
> And yes, we are operating such camps again," the Takei tweeted. The Takei
> family was interned in Arkansas and California in the 1940s.

Or perhaps you want to reserve 'concentration camp' only for the Nazi death
camps? From the same link:

> Federico Finchelstein, a historian at the New York-based New School, agreed
> that the progressive congresswoman is right to call the ICE facilities
> concentration camps.

> "As [a] historian of fascism & [the] Holocaust, I would also call these
> centers concentration camps," Finchelstein tweeted. "As a Jewish person who
> lost family in [the] Holocaust, I regret that some Republicans use memory of
> the Holocaust to defend racist policies of Trumpism."

From
[https://beta.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/20/concentrat...](https://beta.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/20/concentration-
camps-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-japanese-americans/?outputType=amp) :

> A 1998 Ellis Island exhibit drew outcry from the Jewish community and others
> after the Japanese American National Museum titled it, “America’s
> Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese American Experience.” To the
> museum’s curators — and to many historians and leading Japanese American
> organizations today — “internment” or “relocation camps” were euphemisms for
> the reality of what Japanese Americans endured. President Franklin D.
> Roosevelt and Supreme Court justices, the museum noted, had both referred to
> the Japanese American camps as concentration camps.

> ... Ultimately, Jewish and Japanese American groups held meetings to reach
> an understanding, Schiffrin reported. The exhibit’s title stayed, but with
> one long footnote on the flier, making clear that it was not an attempt to
> directly compare the Japanese-American camps to Nazi camps.

~~~
s9w
AOC said "never again" in her concentration camp remarks, CLEARLY making the
connection to WW2 concentration camps.

~~~
boapnuaput
Oregonian here. Yes, she _was_ talking about WW2 concentration camps. It's
disgusting that you've forgotten that, during WW2, _we_ ran concentration
camps too, for Japanese-Americans and others who we failed to trust in spite
of their citizenship. Read the parent comment again. George Takei was _in_ one
of these camps!

~~~
RickJWagner
No, those were not concentration camps. They were _internment_ camps.

Big difference. Concentration camps were murder centers. Internment camps were
not.

~~~
eesmith
FDR, Eisenhower, and many other high-ranking government officials at the time
referred to the Japanese 'internment camps' also as 'concentration camps'.

See
[http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/haiku/camps.h...](http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/haiku/camps.htm)
as an example of how in the 1990s there was already the complaint that it
"seems strange that we are still debating the use of terms describing this
event" when it was well-established that the Japanese were indeed in
concentration camps in all but official name.

It also gives quotes, like Truman in 1961 saying "They were concentration
camps. They called it relocation but they put them in concentration camps, and
I was against it. We were in a period of emergency, but it was still the wrong
thing to do."

The term "concentration camp" was also used in the Spanish-American and Boer
Wars, for something other than "murder centers".

All evidence I've seen says that calling these facilities something other than
"concentration camp" is a euphemism to hide the atrocities that we are
committing YET AGAIN.

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DougN7
I remember HN getting up in arms about free speech when porn was banned from
some sites, and a few years earlier when rape fantasy was banned from another
(sorry, poor memory so I don’t remember more details). But banning pro-Trump
is fine. Where are the SJWs now? Trump is an idiot, but this reveals some true
bias in this (HN) community. It’s disappointing.

------
wil999
Another example of the politicisation of everything....

I remember a time when politics was not discussed in polite company.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
I'm not sure which way you're going with that comment. Ravelry seems to be
saying "we are polite company, keep your politics off our knitting site, thx".
If anything, it's de-politicisation.

~~~
InvaderFizz
Did I miss something? The linked article looks to me to say that Pro-Trump
views are not allowed to be expressed. Not that politics has no place in their
community.

If anything this is escalating the problem by silencing the opposition and
further entrenching both sides.

~~~
eesmith
Escalating what problem?

Their policy is at [https://www.ravelry.com/content/no-
trump](https://www.ravelry.com/content/no-trump) .

Their argument is "We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also
allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is
undeniably support for white supremacy."

So by "both sides" it seems like you mean the one side in favor of white
supremacy, and the other side not in favor of white supremacy?

Why should a knitting site allow support for open white supremacy?

~~~
InvaderFizz
If your view is that the 60+ million Americans that voted for Trump are, in
fact, really voting for white supremacy then we aren't even living in the same
reality and any further discussion is completely pointless.

It really hurts any credibility someone may have granted you in a conversation
when you ascribe to one side of a discussion a world view that is condemned by
the vast majority of that side.

~~~
aantthony
When they say "Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for
white supremacy" as if it were an undisputed fact, and without any argument at
all, it really shows how they're incapable of considering an alternative
worldview. To an ideologically enslaved mind it literally cannot be denied.

~~~
0815test
This. The radical progressive's worldview is that our society is _itself_ a
white supremacist society - this is taken as _axiomatic_ and a matter of
_definition_ , not as something that could be meaningfully argued about, or
even be said to depend on anything concrete about the real world! Thus, by
definition, _any_ support for existing social structures (including support
for President Trump!) can be rightly defined as "support for white supremacy".
It's a way of thinking that's lifted straight off of, e.g. religious
fundamentalism and, perhaps most significantly, the nihilist politics of the
late 19th and early 20th century that ultimately led to fascism, naziism,
soviet communism etc. etc.

~~~
boapnuaput
Hi! I'm further left than most progressives.

Our society is not homogenous enough to make a statement like "white
supremacist society" substantial. However, there are three closely-related
truths which _are_ pretty obvious about our society:

* Our society is, itself, a fascist, classist, militaristic society.

* Pockets of people and parochial cultures in some specific regions are white supremacists.

This isn't definitional or axiomatic, but if you don't perceive these things
as true in your day-to-day experience of our country, then you're not likely
to feel that they're true. And that's fine! We don't have to agree. But it's
useful to point out how and where we don't agree.

~~~
0815test
It's not that I don't perceive many things that might be described with some
truth-of-the-matter as "fascist, classist, militaristic". What I might object
to is the use of such terms as "fascist", "classist", "militaristic" as
thought-terminating cliches deprived of any real content, which is
astoundingly common. And the meme of "the white-supremacist society" is not
significantly different in any real sense - though it does seem more likely to
prompt attitudes such as Ravelry's, as reported in the OP.

~~~
eesmith
Rather than switch to a meta-conversation about "memes", could you address the
more concrete questions I asked earlier? That is, I wanted to know if you
think that "white supremacy and "supporting white supremacy" were meaningful
terms at all.

Before doing that, I'll note that you were the first to use the term 'society'
in this thread. My previous statements were along the lines of 'support for
open white supremacy'. I think "society" is a distraction because there's
always the "not all" objection - not all white people in Virgiania in 1850s
were in favor of slavery, even though it was a slave society.

So when I mean "society", I mean "the main cultural views as reinforced by the
government and others with political, economic, and physical power".

Going back to my earlier questions, which I'll augment:

1) can the 1970s South Africa be described as a white supremacist society? I
think it can. For obvious reasons.

2) can the 1850s US be described as a white supremacist society? I think it
can, for obvious reasons.

3) can the 1950s US be described as a white supremacist society? I think it
can. Jim Crow laws. Sundowner towns, Redlining, Mississippi Burning.

4) can the current US be described as a white supremacist society? I have come
to the conclusion that viewing the dominate power structures in the US as
being strongly influenced by white supremacy is a valid, though incomplete
one.

If you reject that 'white-supremacist society' is a useful term, then perhaps
you shouldn't have introduced it?

