professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
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User ID: 1157
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
I'm genuinely not sure why the "punch Nazis" stuff would snag so many more would-be-murderers than those.
Maybe because Nazis actually existed, zombies don't, and we firebombed cities to put them down? There's real, actual history of how to react to them, virtually everyone agrees they were evil and there's a lot of guilt-by-association power if you can make it stick?
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
No, we don't want each other dead.
Callous indifference continues to be an underrated descriptor complicating perception and reality of how much one side hates the other.
Only a small fraction want each other dead. Of those that do, only a tiny fraction would do anything to achieve those deaths. But there's a much larger fraction who are at best indifferent to deaths among The Other. Fine, to some extent that's signaling (of an extremely sick culture), but that still matters!
It's basically all signaling, a person who says "Look at me support super controversial in-group aligned thing" signals how dedicated they are without ever actually having to do shit.
The catch to this attitude being that ignoring how much someone hates you can have, relatively rarely but importantly non-zero times, quite disastrous results. I think there is very little to be lost following the adage "if someone says they hate you, believe them," and potentially a lot to be lost by ignoring clear signals of danger.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
no kings march
At least locally this has been an almost entirely boomer thing. Not sure how that generalizes.
Yes, lockdowns provoked most of the violent delights of 2020, but there may be other factors re: age, race, culture, motivation.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
if literally writing "catch this fascist" on a bullet intended to kill a prominent public speaker is still not considered "enough" to have political implications by a large majority of people, what is?
If Ken Martin pre-paid for a billboard to be put up that says "I shot Trump because I am a Democrat" after he does indeed go and do that, successfully, I think most people would accept the statement without adding so many epicycles of excuse. If Joe Biden did it they'd just blame the dementia and it wouldn't really count.
Not sure for anyone else. If Ezra Klein snaps somebody would find some one occasion where he said a less than maximally progressive thing and that would be enough to sow confusion and doubt.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2d ago
I didn’t worry about a mob getting my house, quiet. But I (quite irritatingly for tax reasons) live at the far edge of sprawling city limits, and I hated getting texts from the mayor’s emergency alert regarding ‘citywide’ curfews (aimed at the greater downtown) that the threats were real and while not that close, closer than I’ve ever experienced. Watching enjoyable shops and restaurants be wrecked, likewise. Watching the ones that posted “minority-owned” signs in their windows and on Instagram being laughed at for thinking it made a difference (the mockers were right; it made no difference), likewise.
Minneapolis is 4 or 5 times further away than Washington but had far more direct impact on my life.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2d ago
A whole world of social strategies waiting to be named! Thank you, this is also an interesting one.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2d ago
Writ large, I'd consider that an example of Mostly Peaceful and Well Intentioned propaganda and PR campaigns which successfully won supermajority support among the American people.
Yeah, fair. I certainly don't agree with all the downstream effects despite my [redacted], but mostly? Yeah.
I would 100% go with Walz or Shapiro or Newsom over Stacey Adams. Are you arguing that there were better-qualified non-white/non-cishet-male candidates that were passed over because Walz is white?
Setting the bar pretty low with Adams! No, I'm saying there were candidates passed over because Walz was (thought to be) a generically inoffensive white nobody. Old, non-Group, didn't show up Harris in any way. White wasn't the only requirement, but it was the one he and the campaign leaned into the most in a way that pissed off non-Dems.
Buttigieg had pre-existing name recognition, but gay counts as a Group and apparently is so unpopular with black people it's a statistical oddity. Amy Klobuchar, Tulsi Gabbard? Maybe Harris didn't want one of the people that did better than her in the primaries. Shapiro, purple state governor that's young enough to have a future, might show up Harris, and Jewish poses an issue to elements of both sides apparently. Bernie, way more name recognition, old, ~white, but definitely shows up Harris when public speaking and again the Jewish problem (ooo that feels unpleasant to type). Charlie Crist could've been an interesting dark horse pick as a former Republican that fulfilled the old and mostly-white requirements.
And that's with like 5 minutes thought of really prominent people. Surely the DNC has a list of potential state politicians since they pulled Walz out of a hat; some of them are undoubtedly less white, less old, less goofy?
What, exactly, were the consequences for the profession for all that shit, and why was the public too stupid to know better?
Lobotomies and thalidomide eventually got banned, so maybe I should give it a few more years to see if GoF gets banned again? Feels too polarized and no one's even asking the question.
The consequences of the Tuskegee experiments were that 50 years later black people still have much lower trust in doctors and vaccines, nobody seems to have an idea of how to fix that, and sometimes that leads the big brains at Harvard and UPenn to really crazy places.
the point is that you're weird relative to the population norm
Guilty as charged. Go weirdos!
Somewhere along the line I lost interest in people bashing Fauci and other causes I care about
Yeah, that's how I feel in liberal-progressive spaces that don't think 2020 was mass insanity and prefer criminals over their victims, and why I've gotten chased out of them. To be clear I did phrase things much more gently back when I was trying, but here among disagreeable acquaintances it's not really the point.
They haven't lost the public trust, they've lost the trust of Republicans.
The trans issue has reduced trust in a fair number of family-minded Dems, but not in the blanket way to turn against vaccines in the stupid way a subset of Republicans did. Hopefully it doesn't take 50+ years to fix the damage that experimental mandates did.
There's bound to be a really interesting anthropological study involved in recent polarization dynamics, but nobody willing to would produce something unbiased enough to be worth reading.
the chasm between the way you see things and the way they do is...significant.
And I could've written the question in a less-steamed manner. Mea culpa.
what you call anti-white racism
The indifference angle is about as far as I am willing to go to bridge the gap. I recognize that it's not entirely hate in the way that a Grand Red Dragon of the Klan hated black people. The underdog factor is... whatever it is, but after 2020 I don't buy it as sufficient explanation unless we're being uncharitable enough to tag on the soft bigotry of low expectations. It gets pretty exhausting putting up the epicycles to explain why the Occam's Razor explanation isn't right.
Would you do this kind of hedging for someone that really likes posting crime stats and HBD commentary? Would you extend so much charity when they say that no no, they're not actually anti-black? When there's Harvard professors arguing that old white people should die for health equity, Yale lecturers fantasizing about shooting white people, the whole insanity around "being on time is white supremacy," are you able to wonder if it exists and isn't something I (and Jeremy Carl, and others) nightmared up?
But what do I know, I've been largely wrong about every prediction I've made in my tenure here.
I'm with you there, hoss.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2d ago
I'm constantly struggling over this both sides fig leaf people keep throwing out there for the sake of unity... It's a farcical comparison, but they keep making it.
Always has been. The Che posters and shirts, the hammer and sickle posters and shirts, well that's "just a phase." Approximately nobody makes swastika posters or Goering shirts (if he weren't, ya know, a Nazi, the Nuremburg picture would make a fine meme), they're definitely not sold at university-sanctioned and hosted poster sales, and if they did exist they certainly wouldn't be treated like it's "just a phase." Anti-black racism, unforgiveable; anti-white racism, doesn't even exist, definitionally impossible. No right-wing terrorist has ever become a university professor or gotten an honorary degree from Cambridge. Et cetera and so forth.
The thing has, somebody has to be the better person if they want to keep a country. That sucks, it's difficult, it's no fun, it's unfair, illiberal, quite often you'll feel like a chump. If you want there to be any chance of somebody on the other side listening, you have to carefully couch your point, hem and haw both-sides, avoid any invisible fence collars (inverse dogwhistles, if you prefer to skip the article; only the metaphor is relevant to my point). Otherwise you trip their trigger and they shut down.
It sucks and I'm bad at it. Absolutely terrible at avoiding inverse dogwhistles. But I still believe trying is better than the alternative.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3d ago
There is plenty of institutonal and cultural support for violence among the right. Take, for example, conservative fascination with firearms as a political tool. Or greater suport for state sanctioned killing to achieve policy goals, like the death penalty.
One could model this as the right having an interest in violence that they rarely if ever indulge, and the left blinkering their jaundiced eye to carefully ignore a higher rate of violence and destruction. The right barks, the left bites, as it were; matching relative tastes in dogs and what should be done about pitbulls.
Such a model is a little too self-serving and pat, of course. And yet, I can't shake the grain of truth in it.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3d ago
If a pro-immigrant pundit were slain by an illegal immigrant, would conservatives make callous remarks on social media? I think so, yes. I don’t think they would “celebrate” it, but they would definitely make brusque political comments online.
I don't have links handy but I recall a spate of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" type comments on Twitter after Ryan Carson's stabbing. Further back and less parallel to what you're getting at, there was that couple beheaded while bicycling through... Afghanistan? that got similar comments. People continuously point out the Paul Pelosi gay jokes, but I haven't come up with a similar example of the right celebrating in the Kirk, Trump, 10/7, etc way.
it’s something of a sacrosanct public tragedy because of the aforementioned incidental memetic properties of the event.
Good way to phrase it.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3d ago
The left cancelled people for relatively mundane political opinions and for making edgy jokes
And for having your hand hanging out of the window of your truck.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3d ago
One problem is that "right" and "left" are big amorphous constantly-shifting groups, and can't really satisfy these disagreements in the way that individuals can. What people want is for one side is to make a conscious, costly display of commitment. I don't think I'm alone in thinking the left is most in need of that display, and I would find something like the ACLU recommitting to free speech, make a big Skokie to-do about defending a right-winger instead of ceding all speech issues to FIRE, and firing their lawyer that wanted to ban and burn books to be a conscious, costly display. They don't represent the whole left, no one can, but it would be better than The Troubles back and forth with each administration or social disaster.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3d ago
Yes.
She’s dangerously stupid and net-negative for society, but I wouldn’t celebrate her death of any cause. Nor would I mourn her. Silence is so simple.
It’s remarkably easy to just be quiet about such things, and yet! So many people are seemingly incapable of holding their tongue and not being ghouls.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
4d ago
He said Floyd hagiography is possibly sillier than Kirk hagiography. Not that it is.
Given that one was a drug-addled serial criminal and the other a controversial but otherwise law-abiding speaker, any comparison that Floyd hagiography- and its attendant violence and racism- isn’t categorically orders of magnitude worse is insane or trolling.
It is uncharitable, but I think my lack of charity is roughly correctly tuned to Anti’s past issues in the forum.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
5d ago
Yeah, I recall the case, still waiting to see if it has real impact or gets worked around by some other loophole or discretion.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
5d ago
“If not more so”?
just here to push buttons, aren’t you?
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
5d ago
That’s an absurd steel man. Floyd gets sainted because he wasn’t evil enough? Celebrating violent idiots makes the world a worse place. No excuses for that.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
5d ago
No, I have no sympathy for those people and no sympathy for the concept of celebrating a death. Publicly. Like some soulless amoral ghoul.
There are people I hate, politicians and intellectuals that I think are strongly net-negative for the world. To be clear, I would not mourn them, were they struck by lightning or fed to sharks. But neither would I celebrate, it wouldn’t cross my mind. Especially not publicly. At most, a passing thought that thank goodness such tragedy didn’t happen to a decent person, but I’ve got enough of a heart to keep that to myself.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
5d ago
Still a process as punishment situation if the university wants to risk it.
Ward Churchill is one of the most infamous for calling the 9/11 victims Eichmanns, he got no payout and didn’t get his job back. Some teachers and professors fired for things like deadnaming did, eventually, get a payout or their job back. The climate is certainly different now than it was then, but I wouldn’t want to be a university employee floating a test case in it either.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
5d ago
doesn't exactly advance the aims of the Civil Rights Act
Neither does the judiciary gutting the black-letter law of the CRA to decide that harassment is a one-way street and protected classes are not general categories.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
5d ago
But all the blue tribe leaders are saying the right things Bernie and AOC included.
Politicians aren't really leaders, anymore.
See: 2020. Politicians were terrified of pissing off their uncontrolled constituents.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
5d ago
Is your position that the US doesn't follow international rules of war and therefore all US citizens are legitimate targets of violence anywhere?
I don't think Functor is David French in disguise but that isn't far off from French's analysis of how the admin would justify the Venezuelan boat strike.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
5d ago
Ketanji Brown-Jackson as affirmative action hires
Don't forget Biden said that part.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
5d ago
No I would prefer they shut up and keep their opinions to themselves.
Good luck with your totalitarian utopia.
That's the big catch. The likelihood of anything in Sudan affecting me is basically zero. The likelihood of, say, inappropriate police behavior caught on video going viral and affecting me for months or years is not high, but significantly non-zero.
We have a culture that prioritizes concern based on identity, and in some ways it's a banal evil (cueing Hannah Arendt?), and in some ways it's an encouragement for people to violate or otherwise ignore their stated principles.
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