I'm a liberal and conservatives frustrate me. I recognize that not all conservatives are bad people and not all liberals are good people. I've read
The Righteous Mind and think it's insightful and explains a lot about why liberals and conservatives have so many issues. Personally, I don't give two shits about the Sacredness/Purity axis and I think that using Authority as one basis for your morality is actively harmful. I also recognize that most liberals seem to be consequentialists while most conservatives seem to be some other flavor (virtue ethics, deontologists, whatever), and the fact that we disagree on the foundational question of "how do we determine what is bad, good, better, best" makes it very difficult to actually work together. For the record, I think the conservative attitude is deeply, deeply flawed, although the fact that conservatives appear to be
disproportionately driven by their amgydala (the part of the brain that processes, among other things, fear) makes it easier to understand where they got that system.
With that said, let's come back to MfD. Were Keiko and Noburi being racist against clanless ninja? No. "Clanless" is not a race. Were they being classicist and/or bigoted? Absolutely. Does this make Keiko and Noburi inherently bad people? No. It makes them teenagers who have been victims of negative indoctrination and misinformation. If they learned that those facts they were quoting were invalid or inaccurate and they still clung to their conclusions then
that would make them bad people.
Is this attitude appropriate for their characters? Absolutely. They are teenage scions of important clans in a roughly feudal society that is incredibly stratified: noble clans > minor clans > clanless > > > > civilians. It would be out of character for them to
not have these attitudes.
So. Was I dogwhistling bigotry against clanless ninja when I had K&N quote these bigoted stats? No, I was outright stating bigotry...or, at least, as 'outright' as one can get without literally putting the words 'Noburi said, bigotedly' on the page.
Was I dogwhistling real-world racism by quoting these facts? I suppose one can come to that interpretation -- after all, the words that I put in K&N's mouth were derived from actual slanders leveled at disadvantaged groups (mostly African-Americans) in modern America. I would like to think that the framing made it clear how ridiculous these slanders are -- "clanless ninja" are, again, not a race, they are a socioeconomic group. If they lack literacy skills, or if they suffer more disciplinary actions, then one needs to find an actual explanation, since one cannot fall back on the Confederate attitude of "Well,
black people clanless ninja are lazy and dumb and criminal because DNA". Clanless are by definition not biologically related (any more than any other humans are). They do not share DNA beyond simply being human, so there cannot be a biological explanation for any trend found among clanless ninja. The only thing they have in common is that they are poor. This should suggest that either (a) the statistics are deceptive because of confounding variables or (b) the solution to this "crime wave" lies in improving the socioeconomic standards of clanless ninja. One might even go beyond that and extend the logic back to the real world and say "Huh...it's true that the statistics show young black men in America are incarcerated at a higher rate than other ethnic groups. Is it possible that, as with clanless ninja in MfD, there are confounding variables related to race in the real world, or that socioeconomics is the cause as opposed to Confederate slander?"
Now let's move on to the phrase "Facts don't care about your feelings". So far as I'm aware, the originator of this line is Ben Shapiro, a media darling of the far- and/or alt-right. I'm not going to mince words: I believe that Ben Shapiro is scum. He debates dishonestly and is very explicit about that fact, seeks victory instead of truth, has to my knowledge never displayed empathy or given the benefit of the doubt, and takes attitudes that actively retard human progress. He gish gallops, he ad hominems, and he mostly punches down by preferring to take on random college students at a Q&A instead of serious debaters in a formal setting.
The phrase is an effective soundbite. It immediately puts the victim (because, let's be honest, this is nothing but an attack intended to shut down debate) onto the defensive. It forces the victim to abandon the actual topic and prove that they are debating based on facts instead of feelings, giving Shapiro the tempo and control of the debate. It also leads beautifully into a gish gallop, making it impossible for the victim to debunk, in the available time, all of the nonsense that comes after this phrase. It makes my blood boil every time he trots that phrase out.
"Facts don't care about your feelings...or about confounding variables" is, I had thought, a pithy way of showing the flaws in this phrase. The "facts" that Shapiro likes to trot out are usually carefully-packaged bullshit with a sideorder of lies, perfectly polished into a funhouse mirror of distorted reality.
Apparently the aphorism is insufficiently pithy.
