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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   35138 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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All I fucking see from people who voted for and supported Trump is euphoric glee that he's doing exactly what he said he would do. After being lied to and lead along by controlled opposition our entire lifetimes, and maybe the entire lifetimes of our parents too, a guy is actually making good on all the promises he, and the Republican party broadly, has made for decades

Personally I think this speaks to the larger conceit among liberals when it comes to their Message: Liberals are automatically right, and everyone who does not heed the wisdom of our words is just too stupid to understand what we are saying so we need to say it louder.

At no point in all this political discussion have I seen liberals consider that maybe their words have been heard and understood and have been found wanting. That the foundational reality the liberals aim at creating is not one that people want to live in, and that the path to get to that reality is even more broken than the end result. A nanny state run by Sorkins fantasy West Wing archetypes is great to a liberal, but when I watch that show I see careerist egoists unable to resist sticking their grubby fingers in everything they don't even have the interest to understand.

Personally I think this speaks to the larger conceit among liberals when it comes to their Message: Liberals are automatically right, and everyone who does not heed the wisdom of our words is just too stupid to understand what we are saying so we need to say it louder.

I recently did a long post on my Tumblr about this, making an analogy to a classroom:

Consider a school teacher. Suppose she’s teaching, say, math. Or American history. Or whatever. And the kids keep failing tests, because they keep giving similar wrong answers. Like, say, when asked to do 2x2, they give “22.” Or put down as the year of Columbus’s first voyage as “1942.” Or whatever. There are a few possibilities as to the issue.

First, maybe the teacher isn’t teaching it well. Perhaps she needs to change how she’s presenting the information; find a method that communicates it to the children in a way and at a level they can comprehend. Maybe she’s using too many big words, and the kid’s aren’t smart enough to grasp what she’s saying. Or she’s giving it too quickly, and hasn’t repeated it enough, particularly for those kids in the back of the classroom who might not have heard it the first few times.

Second, maybe the lessons are fine, but the kids are paying more attention to something else. After all, even if you try to “make learning fun,” class is still going to be a bit more boring than the alternatives, and the kids would likely rather watch TikTok videos on their smartphones instead. Maybe the kids in the back of the class have their phones carefully placed and hidden to do just that. And maybe that’s where they’re getting their wrong answers. Perhaps some YouTuber has started a troll campaign to convince young people that 2x2=22. Or maybe a popular rap song that drops bars about how “Columbus sailed the ocean blue/in nineteen hundred and forty-two,” and it’s an earworm getting stuck in the kids’ heads.

The problem then is to figure out how to keep the kids off their phones in class; and if the problem is watching these videos out of class, then get the PTA on board and contact their parents to try to get enough of them to control their children’s time online better.

Third, if it’s not how the teacher is teaching, or bad information environment, then the only thing left is the children themselves. Maybe a whole lot of them have undiagnosed dyscalculia. Maybe they’re answering “1942” instead of “1492” because dyslexia is causing them to swap the digits. Maybe a bunch of them belong in a Special Needs classroom.

Or maybe they’re a bunch of troublemaking little shits who’ve coordinated this to mess with their teacher. They’re trying to drive her to her wits’ end, or maybe even sabotaging their own grades to mess with class outcome metrics to make her look bad and sabotage her continued employment. In which case the answer is to discipline them — particularly the masterminds instigating and coordinating it — until they stop.

What you don’t do, in any case, is change the curriculum. You don’t start accepting “2x2=22” as a “correct” answer no matter how many students put it down on their math quiz.

I've seen a lot of Youtube video on this, too. That they didn't do enough to point out how Trump is an evil, racist fascist campaigning on pure hate and desire to hurt people, and how the Democratic party stands for joy, hope, and everything that is good in the world. The metaphorical teacher just isn't giving the lesson properly for the dummies in the back of the class. Or they're being drowned out by lies and disinformation pouring from far-right pipelines like x.com, and we need more censorship and fact-checking.

At no point in all this political discussion have I seen liberals consider that maybe their words have been heard and understood and have been found wanting.

I have seen people, on Tumblr, Reddit, and Youtube, who do indeed consider that. They do hold that a lot of voters did understand what the Democratic party was selling, and rejected it in favor of Trump. That their words have been found wanting… which is why Trump voters aren't stupid, but evil. Because if you knowingly, with full understanding, choose the "indisputably fascist" Trump and his party of pure hate over Harris's "flawless campaign of joy and unity" with all the objectively correct policies, knowingly choose lies over truth, knowingly choose fascism over democracy, then you're a Nazi. It's not that everyone on the other side is "just too stupid" — it's that they're either stupid or evil. The former just need to hear the message louder and more often, until they finally get it. The latter need to get what they deserve, just like Corey Comperatore.

If the voters don't like what the Democratic party is selling… then the voters are wrong, and it's the voters who are the problem needing fixed.

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