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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   38816 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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to actually call for Trump to be assassinated

Prof. John McWhorter, of all people, did, on a public podcast. He later recanted, but still.

Glen Loury can't abandon the propaganda of McWhorter as a " moderate, centrist calm reasonable person" while criticizing him for his comments of favoring the assassination of Trump.

We really are living in the times of the cult of symbolic centrism, symbolic antiracism, symbolic racism, symbolic nazism, etc, etc. Where groups and individuals are assigned irrational undeserving positive and negative status and associations, based on false expectations.

Hope we see some genuine lowering of status and consequences for people like McWhorter and the end of the illusion that people like Loury want to maintain. Is Loury going to stop constantly talking with McWhorter in the way he isn't talking with many people to the right of his?

Is Loury going to stop constantly talking with McWhorter in the way he isn't talking with many people to the right of his?

I doubt it. I don't think he chooses whether or not to talk to McWhorter based on political purposes. I think they do just honestly go way back as friends first. It's extremely easy to shun people who you're not friends with based on political differences. When you start doing it to your pre-existing friends, it's a short road to loneliness, above and beyond the typical concerns people have (especially influential public figures) with determining whether anyone who appears to be a friend is acting that way because they genuinely like being friends or if it's just a means to an end.

There is likely a friendship there too, but Loury and McWhorter podcast together is also very much so political content. I also get the impression that part of their friendship has to do with their common political ground.

Alternatively, things really are coming apart to such a degree that even the calm, reasonable people are losing their minds.

A lot of people think that Trump dead would be a net-positive outcome. My problem isn't that this is mean, but rather that it is dangerously wrong. Trump does not generate the culture war, but rather was generated by it. Killing him will not magic it away, but will only throw gasoline on the fire.

I've been of the opinion for a while that Trump having a heart attack would be net-good, although this is not entirely for culture war reasons (part of it is just that he's too old to be POTUS in a term that might include WWIII).

However, on the one occasion I did mention this on theMotte I did also mention that this doesn't apply to murdering him (which, as you say, would end Badly).

Trump got Babbit killed. Trump is getting people killed.

Trump is not some magical output of a culture war. Trump is a danger to us all.

If you want the violence to stop, the person blaring violent rhetoric nonstop has to be silenced.

  • -24

Trump got Babbit killed.

How, exactly? Please explain the causal chain between something Trump did and the Babbit shooting.

I don't see much justification of how things have changed for McWhorter to be calling for the assassination of Trump. He isn't a reasonable guy who lost his mind because there is an event that justified him supporting openly Trump being assassinated, but someone who should lose the quality of being considered reasonable and he proved that such estimation was mistaken. Trump is someone who isn't even particularly right wing. The criticism should be on the mentality of people like McWhorter, who have no adequate justification for this. My belief is we live in an age of too much unnecessary rage against compromising establishment "right" figures who probably deserve criticism for failing to even do their promised duty. So, that outrage is unreasonable, and so is putting people like Trump on the pedestal for being targets of it, even if he should be defended against such unjustified anger.

McWhorter being dangerously wrong is part of the fact that his politics are unreasonable and he is unreasonable.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/donald-trump-violent-rhetoric-catalogue

someone who should lose the quality of being considered reasonable

Trump has lost the quality of being reasonable, and his continued existence in our public life or any advocacy of such should be grounds for having lost the quality of being considered reasonable.

  • -19

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