So the same words from two different people can be both bad and good?
Double standard?
It has to do with messaging. I don't understand, quite frankly, how people can be so blind toward function. For most of us, "Anglo-American" is something we
only hear from white supremacists, and it's kind of a weird, specialized thing, because it excludes other whites.
No, really. The term has little or no use to most people. To wit, I can't imagine a day, other than one in which a white supremacist invokes Anglo-American heritage, that I would take the time to point out specifically, by such a term, that, "Anglo-American heritage includes persecution sexual, ethnic, and religious; and, furthermore, the incompetent loss of a continent."
And, you know, I come from a region shot through with white supremacism and nationalism, and one of the reasons people don't bother with terms like "Anglo-American", for instance, is that if you live in Seattle, for instance, you live in a place where the Norwegian-American heritage is so thick that not only do we lead with Norwegian jokes instead of disparaging the Polish, successive Kings of Norway have turned up to hang out in
Ballard, of all places. Anglo-American? Ya, sure, you betcha ...
and?
The only reason a friend of mine ever gave a damn that she was Franco-American was that her birthday, by coincidence, is also Bastille Day, so nobody in her family ever lets her forget.
Anglo-American becomes important in a societal condition Americans presently prefer to consider yesteryear. Then again, when Irish-Americans, pale Italian-Americans, and light-skinned Jews all failed to be white enough, people are being pretty specific. We Americans have been through this, over and over, in our history.
The results affect our general presuppositions:
• The ordinary presumption is that we are encountering supremacism, and this would, in a philosophical consideration, be described as a the sum effect of both Ockham and LaPlace: Americans have been through this enough that we do not presume, but await the assertion of extraordinary context.
• A functionally extraordinary context would be otherwise evident;
see Arfa Brane at
#2↑, and then again at
#6↑; the one notes the differences, you
inquire about double-standards↑, and arfa brane offeres a more particular context: "If some professor of Law at Harvard said US law has an Anglo-American heritage, and also says something about the provenance of the word
sheriff (a contraction of
shire and
reeve, a reeve was a medieval sort-of magistrate), he's probably being academic."
▸ (Toward that point, the omission of function is evident in your explicit proposition: "So the same words from two different people can be both bad and good?" That the words can be bad or good in their application does not specifically depend on the notion of two different people; it depends on how they are used. The question of "Double standard" only arises if we presume without regard to function, e.g., focus on the difference 'twixt messengers without regard to message.)
As to the question of outrage, I have such luxury in my society that I can wait for a more direct offense. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is a terrible human being, and part of the reason we know this is that he constantly reminds us. At some point, burning ourselves up in outrage over any one of the Trump administration's myriad exempla of human awfulness is a bad investment of resources.
Of course, without the American luxury of not being African-American or Muslim, I might feel differently about a white supremacist appealing to white supremacist tropes from such rarified office as the Attorney General of the United States, but "outrage" can mean many things, and in any case, Mr. Sessions can go screw, all the same.
