First, let me apologize for the clickbait title. Generally, I hate clickbait titles, but there’s one exception – if a title is completely over the top outrageous, I tend to find it amusing rather than annoying. I’m hoping that my title falls into the amusing category. If not, I apologize to the ten people or so who will actually ever read one of my blog posts 🙂
As longtime readers of my blog know (or would know if, you know, I had any longtime readers), I’m all about interacting with other bloggers and trying to determine if their views are reasonable or not. Truthfully, I’ve encountered a lot of very reasonable (and nice!) bloggers on all sides of the political spectrum.
Sometimes, however, I run across views that really strike me as looney tunes.
Take, for example, this quote:
Trump proposes racist policies. That means policies which disproportionately affect one race over others. Someone who supports racist policies can safely be called racist.
Okay, let’ examine the reasoning here:
First of all, the blogger shows a valid attempt at logic.
Postulate 1: A racist policy is any policy which disproportionately affects one race over others.
Postulate 2: Someone who supports racist polices can safely be called racist.
Postulate 3: Trump supports policies that disproportionately affect one race over others.
Therefore, one can safely conclude that Trump is a racist. Ninja’d!
Okay, but hold up a second. That conclusion is only logical if each postulate is actually true.
I’ll give the blogger Postulates 2 and 3 for the sake of this discussion. Let’s take closer look at that first one, though.
My Postulate 1: If a racist policy is any policy which disproportionately affects one race over others, it stands to reason that a sexist policy is any policy which disproportionately affects one gender over another. Seems to me that this is kind of hard to argue against.
My Postulate 2: More men are charged, convicted, and punished for rape than women are. Hard to argue based on any reasonable examination of facts.
Therefore, since rape laws disproportionately affect men over women, rape laws are sexist.
Conclusion:
One can define “racist” and “sexist” any way one wants, but if one want the words to have any kind of meaning in the real world, the definition put forth by the blogger that I encountered isn’t very reasonable.
One Reasonable Person 
Hey at least tag me if you’re going to pick apart my logic.
Our exchange we had a few weeks ago made me think a lot about my beliefs, so I appreciate your passion for reasonable argument.
I’m mentioning you in a post that I’m going to publish in the next few days, so I hope you’ll read it.
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As a preventative, such laws are a necessary evils so long as presuming innocence before proven guilty holds true. A lot of the stigma is more a societal problem than a judicial problem.
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Given the content of the post, I’m unsure as to your argument. It seems like you’re saying:
Rape laws are sexist and, therefore, a bad thing. They are unfortunately, though, a necessary evil.
If that is your position … uh … Wow. Just wow.
Then that last part could be construed as saying that people accused of rape are victims of social stigma.
I think you really should consider re-reading your comment and editing it. It’s either very poorly worded or brings up a point of view that you probably wouldn’t want associated publicly with you as a published author.
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No, that perfectly sums up my position. Even when proven innocent of such a crime, people accused of rape can become victims of societal stigma via mass hysteria and have their lives ruined by it. I suggest you watch The Hunt, which is based on real events that happened in Europe and Scandinavia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_(2012_film)
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Your second statement, not the first.
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I like how you use the example here to expose the controversial assumption in definition. I would note that the disproportionate application of rape laws to men over women reveals a difference between men and women. Would a disproportionate response to minorities over majorities reveal a difference between minorities and whites? The underlying assumption is that there is no difference between white and black, so why are there different outcomes?
There must be some difference between these aggregates, and why there is a difference cannot be simply explained by discrimination. On that, I find Dr. Sowell’s arguments very persuasive:
http://www.tsowell.com/spracecu.html
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