Friday Cephalopod: Force of arms » « The problem with games

Predictability

Donald Trump has reacted to Elizabeth Warren’s speech. How, you might wonder? Guess.

If your bet was placed on “demeaning nickname, ethnic slur, and fact-free insult”, you’re a winner! Unfortunately, everyone bet that way, so this was basically an even odds gamble, and you just get your money back.

I was tempted to put a nickel on “substantive, intellectual response” because the odds on that meant I’d be a millionaire now, but decided it would just be throwing away five cents.

Warren replies.

Friday Cephalopod: Force of arms » « The problem with games

Comments

  5. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    Does Drumph really type these dundertweets? I bet it’s some underling barely out of highschool [typos as evidence], hoping to win his favor to be appointed Special Assistant to the Cabinet, or underSecretary to the official Secretaries. I just can’t see Drumph actually working a keyboard to fire off these tweets, he just dictates them to a stenographer (his slurred voice leading to the typos), or transcribed by a betaSiri.
    pointless speculation.

  6. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    A thin-skinned bully acting to type? Couldn’t do a better job of showing Warren she is absolutely correct in her description. Trump will be his own worst enemy.

  7. Saad says

    “demeaning nickname, ethnic slur, and fact-free insult”

    The Trump winning formula.

  10. says

    @4 qwints

    Not quite a fact free insult, Elizabeth Warren has been criticized by Cherokee and other Native American writers for falsely claiming Cherokee ancestry, and we shouldn’t dismiss that.

    It may in fact be more true than not. If this is true: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/05/elizabeth-warren-is-part-native-american

    Now the Herald has some actual substance on the candidate’s claims: Warren’s great-great-great grandmother on her mother’s side was Cherokee, making Warren—provided the genealogist didn’t miss anything—1/32 Native American if her great-great-great grandmother was full-blooded (that’s unclear). Warren has said that both of her mother’s parents had American Indian blood, in which case the fraction would obviously be a little bit bigger. (It’s plausible that some of Warren’s relatives would have masked their Cherokee heritage, given the legally prescribed second-class citizenship bestowed upon American Indians for much of the 20th century.) Per newspaper clippings released by her campaign, other members of Warren’s family, including a first cousin, have embraced their Cherokee roots and are active in American Indian causes in Oklahoma, where she grew up.

  11. says

    Qwints:

    Not quite a fact free insult, Elizabeth Warren has been criticized by Cherokee and other Native American writers for falsely claiming Cherokee ancestry, and we shouldn’t dismiss that.

    That’s true, but it doesn’t fucking excuse the insult, which is multi-layered, and deeply upsetting to many NDNs. You might have kept up with indigenous coverage of this issue past 2012. More indigenous people are not much giving a shit about Warren’s claim, they are much more concerned with Trump, his ongoing racism, utter disrespect for Indigenous people and Indigenous issues, and his constant use of using Pocahontas as a slur.

    Trump’s very use of Pocahontas’ name is disrespectful. The story of Pocahontas is heart-wrenching. Toward the end of her life she left her people, went to England, contracted a disease and died at a very young age. When I think of that story – and the hundreds of sad and disturbing stories of how Native people have suffered throughout history, I can’t imagine making a mockery of their names or their lives. In my culture, we have deep respect for our relatives who have gone before us. It would be an utter disgrace to carry on as Donald Trump has about a Native woman whose life was cut short in a terrible way.

    Ignorance is not an excuse. Any presidential candidate should be held to a high standard and being a billionaire doesn’t excuse you. As Americans we are all responsible for learning our collective history and being respectful toward one another.

    Senator Warren may not live up to many people’s idea of what an Indian is supposed to look like; however, that is a moot point. No one else has to fill her shoes.

  12. says

    Qwints:

    Not quite a fact free insult, Elizabeth Warren has been criticized by Cherokee and other Native American writers for falsely claiming Cherokee ancestry, and we shouldn’t dismiss that.

    Also, who is “we”? White people?

  13. petesh says

    Just curious, but where does Trump get off with his “least productive” stuff? Ignoring that idiocy, as she has, is definitely her best move, but Enquiring Minds Want to Know.

    Personally, I hope the summit between HRC and EW results in their agreeing EW will not run as Veep (which might be inhibiting) but will continue her laugh-a-minute scornfest. But they sure would make a formidable pair.

  14. says

    Um, I think the “fact-free insult” was calling her “one of the least productive US Senators.” Pocahontas was the ethnic slur, and “Goofy Elizabeth Warren” was the demeaning nickname.

  15. qwints says

    @GrumpySanta, the Mother Jones article was based on a claim that was later withdrawn. Long story short, she’s like a lot of other white Americans who have family stories about a Native American ancestor, but who have no connection to any Native American tribe in living memory. I can’t speak for the Native American perspective, and I think it’s important that non-Native American liberals don’t dismiss the issue at the same time we’re correctly dismissing its racist use by the right. We need to read Native American voices on the issue.

    The scam seems to lie in the fact that the amount of Cherokee blood Warren has coursing through her veins has been quantified as a mere 1/32nd. This constitutes “cheating” in many people’s minds because anyone who has only 1/32 Indian blood couldn’t possibly be a real Cherokee; they are obviously just a ruthless schemer using a flawed system to fuel their own twisted ambition. “CherokeeGate” has thus not only opened the old arguments against affirmative action, it has re-opened the even older debates about what makes a real Indian. As with most cases of Indians in the news, the loudest voices in this controversy have been patently misguided and often racist.

    Elizabeth Warren and the Politics of Being Indian

    Many American families claim Native ancestry, but have not done the research to back it up, which doesn’t mean they aren’t Native, of course, but for a person in Warren’s position, Indians in the world of academia say it would have been desirable and appropriate for her to learn more about her roots before checking any boxes. “It’s what we ask of our candidates,” says Warrior, a citizen of the Osage Nation, who notes that his program has published an official statement entitled Identity and Academic Integrity. “Too often, we realize, American Indian studies as a field of academic inquiry has failed to live up to its potential at least in part because of the presence of scholars who misrepresent themselves and their ties to the Native world,” the statement reads in part.

    Elizabeth Warren Finally Teaches a Lesson on Native Identity

  18. says

    @ qwints

    If 1/32 is cheating, explain this: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/appeal-filed-in-native-american-child-custody-case-lexi-choctaw/

    LOS ANGELES — A California family appealed Tuesday to the state’s highest court in their fight to keep a six-year-old foster child who was removed from their home after a lower court said her slight Native American heritage requires that she live with relatives in Utah.

    The family’s lawyer, Lori Alvino McGill, filed the request for the California Supreme Court to hear the appeal. McGill also requested that custody of the child named Lexi be returned to Rusty and Summer Page until the appeal is decided.

    The Pages have fought efforts under the federal Indian Child Welfare Act to place Lexi with relatives of her father, who is Native American. The Pages argued that Lexi has lived with them since the age of two and knows no other life.

    However, a court found that the Page family had not proven the child would suffer emotional harm by the transfer.

    The Pages have three children and want to adopt Lexi, who is 1/64th Choctaw on her birth father’s side…

  19. qwints says

    @GrumpySanta, I think you’re misreading that author. She’s disparaging the idea that blood quantum is cheating. I see I messed up the link: “Elizabeth Warren and the Politics of Being Indian”. This author makes a similar point “‘Real’ Indians, the Vanishing Native Myth, and the Blood Quantum Question (“When [non-Native
    people] demand to know how much “Indian blood” someone has, whether you realize it or not you are presuming the untruth of their identity claims, which is why the question can be so offensive.”

    @danielhenschel, you’re probably right so I’ll drop it now. As Caine pointed out, obviously the use of Pocahontas is a slur.

  20. cartomancer says

    Silly PZ – the betting is not on what Trump is going to say; it’s on which order the demeaning nickname the ethnic slur and the fact-free insult are going to be in.

  21. petesh says

    Trump is consolidating his base (and base is the mot juste). But I keep expecting to hear that he has suddenly discovered he has a previously unknown medical condition (faceplantaritis) and is reluctantly compelled to stop chasing a job that, let’s face it, pays less than half a million a year, though it does come with excellent benefits.

  22. Ryan Cunningham says

    An amazing way to goad the guy that I’ve seen making the rounds on Twitter would be to keep the rumor going that Romney is actually richer than Trump. Think about how that would play out when Trump inevitably threw a fit about it. “You think THAT out of touch guy is rich? Please. I’M the real out of touch rich guy!”

  23. says

    if she hasn’t already, hills may well start measuring those drapes now. the gop will never have enough extinguishers to put out trump’s daily dumpster fires all the way to november.

  24. ck, the Irate Lump says

    aarrgghh wrote:

    if she hasn’t already, hills may well start measuring those drapes now.

    Plenty of serious, “respectable” Republicans underestimated Trump and he ended up being their party’s nominee. Trump proved that things like qualifications, experience, and rational policy are merely “nice-to-haves” in a Presidential candidate. The Republicans don’t have to put out Trump’s fires, because they haven’t been actually hurting the candidate.

  27. Ragutis says

    cycleninja

    10 June 2016 at 11:14 am

    If we’re throwing around taunting names, how about Trumplethinskin (stolen from Ed Brayton’s Facebook feed).

    That is brilliant. Ed needs to make some t-shirts.

    I heard an interesting opinion on the Trump candidacy. As everybody not wearing one of those stupid red hats should have noticed, even when giving supposed policy talks, half the speech is boasting. When he’s reading off a teleprompter, he still can’t resist going off on self-aggrandizing tangents at random intervals. His braggadocio cannot be restrained.* He is by far the most important thing in his world and his name is a close 2nd (and 3rd, and 4th, ad infinitum). Anyway, the opinion was that as much as his narcissism wants him to win, as much as he covets the title, he has shown no interest in the actual job. So, the theory goes, if he starts getting too far behind in the polls, or starts feeling that his brand is taking too much of a hit, he might just cut his losses and let Alex Jones blame it all on The Bohemian Grove, The Bilderberg Group, or Lizard Space People (whatever the dart lands on). He feels no allegiance to the Republicans and doesn’t fear the Dems, so why not just quit in a huff about the “Establishment” and “rigged system”? Shout a bit on Fox and talk radio. *cough* Rehire *cough* the investigators he sent to find Obama’s birth certificate. Threaten a few lawsuits. And then just go back to grifting, gold-plating and golf.

    On a lighter note, today’s Bizarro made me chuckle: http://bizarro.com/comics/june-10-2016/

    *Imagine being in charge of Trump’s teleprompter: “Scroll. Scroll. Pause. Scroll. *sigh* Pause. Scroll. Scroll. SHIT! Rewind. *grumble* Scroll. Pause. Scroll. SHIT!”

  28. Bob Foster says

    I am not going to defend Warrens’ claims to Indian ancestry, but I would like to point out that that it does not mean much if a person can’t find an Indian ancestor on the Rolls . One needs to look at the rationale and the criteria that were applied to those seeking admission to the Indian tribes in Oklahoma around 1900 to understand what was going on. The basic rationale was the allotment of land to tribal citizens. The tribal lands were being broken up and acreage was awarded to enrolled citizens based on the number of people in a family. The idea was to make them small landowners in the image of their white counterparts. Once this guiding principle was established specific criteria on eligibility had to be established. The primary one was residency. A person had to prove that they had resided within the borders of the particular Indian nation within a set time frame. This could vary from tribe to tribe. It was usually the period from the end of the Civil War to about 1900. This is where it gets tricky. Individual Indians were generally illiterate. They did not keep written records. Marriages were rather informal unions by American standards. For example, a white man might marry an Indian woman in 1865 and have a dozen children. There would be no official record of births in Oklahoma until well after statehood. Some of his offspring might stay within the boundaries of the Nation, but others, especially young men, might go where there was work, say in Texas or Arkansas or Missouri. There they might marry and raise families of their own. Then they would hear about the enrollment process and the lands being offered and return to apply. Guess what happened? They would be denied citizenship because they had been non-residents. To compound matters for modern researchers the census records in the states they had moved to would probably list them as White. So, from our vantage point, you have a white family coming into the Cherokee Nation from Texas in 1895 and applying for citizenship based on a purported Indian mother or grandmother. Is this what happened to Warren’s ancestors? I don’t know, but I am aware of it happening to others.

  29. ck, the Irate Lump says

    Honestly, the question of Warren’s ancestry is rather immaterial to the question of if what Trump said was racist or not. What he said would be no more acceptable if his target had been someone who was 100% Cherokee or claimed no Cherokee ancestry at all. Meanwhile, we’re letting Trump get away with his racist slur because we’re helping legitimize it by debating Warren’s ancestry.

    Let’s keep the Warren ancestry debate for the next time Warren brings it up, rather than every time Trump brings it up.