[Tycho]

Compare these two statements:

"A defendant, who is running for office on a promise to get tough on Mexican immigration, questioned the neutrality of a judge from a Mexican immigrant family who is presiding over a private lawsuit against the individual."

"A politician, who is running for office on a promise to overturn carbon emissions legislation, called into question the credibility of climate scientist on the grounds that he was of Mexican descent."

Paul Ryan's comment applies to one of those statements, not the other. We don't need to discuss the overall merit of Trump's argument, I'm just saying it's not good evidence of Trump being racist.

(The liberal left is anything but fringe... as far as I can tell, American political discourse is dominated by liberal hysteria, with a few other oddities mixed in like hero worship of the police and military, and unswerving support for Israel. But I digress.)

[foldr]

I'd say that locating Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan on the liberal left is quite a heroic attempt to save that particular argument! If it is really your view that they are left wing liberals, I wonder if your definitions of other terms (e.g. racism) may be so idiosyncratic that a productive discussion is impossible.

As to your comparison between the two statements, it's important to understand first of all that neither of them makes any sense. So in fact it is important to discuss the merits of Trump's argument. As I said before, there are multiple aspects to Curiel's background which point in different directions as to his possible biases. Why is it that Trump chose to focus on unfounded speculations regarding the influence of his ethnicity? Because dogwhistle racism is part of his platform. What he's essentially saying is that the judge is not a "real" American and hence can't be trusted.

[Tycho]

The entire edifice of modern liberal politics seems to be built upon the very idea of conscious and unconscious bias on the part of people wielding some fraction of institutional power. Usually it's referred to with terms like 'white privilege' or 'patriarchy.' Calling this out as racist or sexist doesn't get much traction. On HN I even recall repeated discussions on whether white programmers can be trusted construct non-racist algorithms.

[foldr]

People wielding institutional power do have conscious and unconscious biases. It's not racist to point that out. But you do seem to have an unusual definition of the term, so I'm not quite sure what you have in mind there. Are you trying to suggest a comparison with what Trump is doing? If Trump has evidence that institutions controlled predominantly by people with Mexican ancestry are systematically discriminating against white Americans, then he should make it public.

The "racist algorithms" thing sounds made up.

[Tycho]

You seem to have contradicted yourself. You admit that people wielding institutional power (who would surely include judges) can make decisions affected by conscious or unconscious biases, and it's not racist to point this out. Case closed.

Here's one discussion of biased algorithms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9211436

[foldr]

It is not racist to point out institutional racial biases when there is evidence for their existence. It is racist to make baseless speculations about an individual person's biases simply because of their ethnicity. It's the difference between pointing out that black Americans are more likely to be involved in violent crime than white Americans (not racist) vs. assuming that a particular individual is going to commit a violent crime simply because they are black (racist).

The algorithm discussion is too vague to really engage with, but it's presumably possible that a person's biases could influence their choice of algorithm in certain instances. If we're talking about, say, an algorithm for matching profiles on okcupid, then certain biases of the programmer might "leak" into the design of the algorithm. You could argue semantics over whether the algorithm itself is really "biased", but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the discussion you linked to.