Website pop quiz.

[theweaselking]

This is an "immigrants are brown and scary" website's list of places you can vote for anti-scary-brown-person candidates.

Pop quiz: Is their putting the word "RACE" in all-caps, underlined, a different colour, and making it what you have to click to get more information dog-whistling? Or just Freudian?

Comments

[shemale.livejournal.com]

tracking this post

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised there aren't more comments yet. It's been an hour.

[jerril]

Just got here.

My first instinct is to suspect dog-whistling, especially how much they use it in the headers, but American media seems to use the word "Race" a lot in this context anyways.

So I'm leaning about 55/45 towards conscious dogwhistling...

[cantkeepsilent.livejournal.com]

Smells to me like a project done by someone who just learned HTML but not website design. I think that the RACE thing is 1/4 Freudian and 3/4 features of hyperlinks. If these guys were smart enough for double-entendres, they would have been smart enough to endorse the anti-immigration incumbent instead of the fringe candidate who actually returned the questionnaire in the New Hampshire Senate race.

And am I the only one who gets sad when you look through a wingnut report card and find that your Congresscritter only got a D instead of an F?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

For dogwhistling, though, you want to be able to CLAIM that it's just a feature of hyperlinks, and just a feature of what they call elections, and not something you deliberately did.

[jerril]

The question is really: Why pick the word "race" for the hyperlink?

[thadrin.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed the US doesn't have a system like we do over here in Sweden: the state has the right of Veto over names of children. Those names would NEVER have gotten approval. Noone cares, because I don't think even the local Nazis are that stupid or - amazingly - cruel.

That said...in working at a hospital I have encountered individuals delighting in the names "Yoda" and "Obi wan Kenobi". Sensible SW-centric names such as "Ben" or "Luke" clearly not enough.

[cantkeepsilent.livejournal.com]

Wrong post. :P

And we do, after a fashion. The county clerk has the right to refuse a birth certificate application if she thinks that a name offends local sensibilities, which can be overturned by a court order. (This is what happened to Dweezil Zappa, who didn't formally acquire his desired name until he was five and could personally convince a judge that the name was not against his wishes.) The ratio of white supremacists to Adolfs in the United States remains quite low, so I assume the system normally works. Of course, in Appalachia, it's anyone's guess whether the name Adolf Hitler offends local sensibilities....

[cantkeepsilent.livejournal.com]

We do call them "congressional races", so it's only partially awkward. I would have suggested that the name of the seat itself be the hyperlink, but that probably would have come after the suggestion that you shouldn't use so many text colors that your endorsement sheet looks like it was written by a ten year-old girl. Given the quality of the rest of the site, I'm willing to apply Hanlon's Razor to the RACE card, but that's just me.

[cantkeepsilent.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I'd claim that the main part of dogwhistle politics is making the statement in a highly public arena. A candidate making a coded comment in a stump speech or a televised debate is significant, a term in a backwater website for an insignificant organization that you'd only have visited before the election if a partisan had pointed you there is not so much IMO.

But I concede that it certainly might have been a deliberate inclusion because it is what passes for a clever double entendre in the Idiot-American community.

[elffin.livejournal.com]

In the US, whether the name offends local sensibilities doesn't matter; People are free to be as stupid and damaging to their children's well-being and sanity through poor name choice as they care to be.

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

I zipped down to Illinois's section, and was terribly, terribly not shocked to see Jim Oberweis in there. He made himself notable before through his "Mexicans are sneaking in!" ads two years ago, and although he got himself a less stupid campaign manager this time, memories linger. This makes the third time that he's failed to buy win an election.

I'm surprised not to see Marty Ozinga though; a man whose opponent's negative ads were unique for being completely accurate.