George Lakoff said it years ago. Conservatives argue for conservatism no matter what. When conservatism fails, they either blame Democrats or insist they weren't conservative enough. There is no reflection because everything conservatives say is to forward their cause.
I haven't heard one Republican politician object to Trump's interpreting "fight DEI" as "fire all the not-white people." Isn't that going a bit too far?
Also. Nobody respects milquetoast, namby-pamby people. No-one. A small red town in my state elected a transwoman as Mayor. She was a local, a former "good ol'boy". She didn't take shit and she had a sense of humor about the situation. And regarding Bernie: I knew plenty of conservative people back in 2016 who were pretty fired up about Sanders. He spoke to things that affected them- healthcare, housing, veterans care, a living wage, eldercare... and it was THE SAME MESSAGE he gave when he talked to us Lefties. Amazingly, a lot of us want the same things from the government.
What drives me nuts, and I say this as a centrist (or I would be, if the window had not been shipped into orbit) is the idea that centrists /would rather get in bed with actual fascists than, idk, consider that maybe civil rights are important. Because that is what the right means by "woke" and "DEI" and all the other scare terms they latch onto and use and abuse (hullo, identity politics!) They mean civil rights. The same rights people died so that we could have. That is what "centrists" are telling us to give up, so that Republicans will vote for us.
Many people want to be considered centrist because there are social benefits to be considered centrist. Especially if you're more extreme than your voters.
People on the left tend to be very self-aware, I think, and at times they're too accommodating to the demands of others. This isn't so much a failure on their part, to be fair: it's part of being a reasonable human being with at least some commitment to truth. When one is surrounded by knaves, liars, brutes, and rogues, this approach becomes a burden. As the saying goes, a lie can circle the earth while the truth is still tying its shoelaces.
This entire article is just a long-winded way of side-stepping the issue that progressives are their own worst enemy: dumbasses. that 'defund the police' was in fact the worst phrase ever invented. You have to wonder if someone from Fox was in the Anarchist's Against White People with Dreads meeting when the term 'DefundThePolice' was being crafted. Like, I know progs like to shit on the 'pod save america' of it all, but maybe yall could take a page from the John Favreau playbook and do a poll or two to see if 'defund the police' plays in Poughkeepsie... SPOILER: it does not.
And... "when someone confronts them with an “extreme” person or belief from their own side, they don’t take responsibility for it, they don’t dwell on it, and they don’t denounce it and try to distance themselves from it," ...is some advanced-level projection. Ask Lindsay Ellis about cancel culture. Listen to the 2020 episodes of El Trapo Chap House or whateverthefuck when them scream at Elizabeth Warren for having the temerity to exist when Berny Sanders IS ALREADY HERE ...and tell me how 'Bernie bros' aren't a thing.
But the police does actually need to be defunded. They have a lot of social tasks that other departments should do, so funds should shift away from the police.
Also, police stations are breedings sites of authoritarianism, which always always always turns out evil. There is no such thing as a good authoritarian.
And All Cops Are Apples is also still a valid point. any police station that has a rotten apple needs to be completely and utterly destroyed without letting any of the apples or anything they've touched into the replacement police station or any other police station. Because that's what the saying means. One rotten apple spoils the bunch, if you then spread those apples to other bunches, those bunches will then have a high chance of also having a rotten apple and that way the rot spreads. The point isn't that there are no good cops, the point is that good cops are likely to turn rotten when they are in close proximity to rotten cops, and you can't tell. It is about what is knowable and how to be secure. It is about quarantine procedures. In the end, it is about long term large scale consequences, it is not about individual justice. So no, the good cops do not deserve to be protected, their job is to protect, they're ablative armour, to use a metafor the USA militarized cops can understand.
I too hate “the left went too far” blather. But I did have a bad feeling about “defund the police.” Swing voters are dumb by definition. You have to speak in a language they understand. Not to reckon with that reality is self-defeating.
I would just like to say that while I have never watched a single episode of Drag Race, I love Jinx Monsoon. She was fantastic as The Maestro on Doctor Who.
And Fox doesn't hurt either, we don't have a liberal station that parrots the party line (however ridiculous or untruthful it is). But Democrats are too nice, we play by the rules and expect them to which they have proved over and over there is no bottom to what they will do to win an election or help their wealthy friends and corporations. Until we stoop to their level, we're going to continue to lose. Sad but true.
I think it’s even simpler than that. And this only my opinion. But the reason nothing “sticks” on the right and everything “sticks” on the left is we on the left reflect, and the right don’t.
And the reason for that is also very simple, conservatives, especially white Christian Conservatives, are simply not good people. They evil. To their very core.
Now, you can legitimately argue that they don’t realize they are awful human beings, that’s very fair to say, because they are also extremely ignorant.
But they are all awful. There is no such thing as a good white Christian. Christianity is the dominant religion on earth, whites are 25% of the world’s population but control 75% of the world’s wealth, and the wealthiest are all conservative. At least with their money.
Case in point. Christian conservatives love to scream about Christianity being under attack, BS, there’s 400,000 churches in America, show me one with atheists out front screaming obscenities at Christians as they try to pray.
Liberals want to live. Conservatives want to tell other people how to live. And it’s nothing against white people, and it’s nothing against Christianity, but power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We won’t truly advance as a country until we are ready to say that conservatives simply are not good people. And they know it too. They continuously say how they are tired of being made to feel like they’re awful people, but they’re feeling that way because us good people are revolted by their behavior, and it’s only our revulsion to them that gives them any awareness of how awful they truly are.
That would require changing out the default mental software on a significant percentage of the nation, which basically hates and fears anything it doesn't understand, and what it doesn't understand is rather a lot.
It’s easy to change minds for the worse with ragebait - that’s why Fox and OANN and Newsmax are successful.
It’s far harder to teach empathy and compassion, which is why churches are ineffective.
rethuglicans have been saying gov’t doesn’t work and then proving it when elected for my entire life. The citizenry is sufficiently ignorant, ineducate, and venal that it continues to buy their zero-sum arguments. They continue to elect rethugs bc the rethugs play on their fears that they won’t be given first fruits for the harvest by default any more just bc they’re white and/or privileged.
It doesn’t help that a significant chunk of the country has as part of its basic software an absolute belief in race-base hierarchies of worth and fear of the dark-skinned other. That’s America’s original sin - the inculcation of that belief from 1619 onward to keep the poor from making common cause - and until we find a way to counter that, we’re going to have to deal with zero-sum racist thought as a boundary condition of American politics.
Of course, hard to find common ground with this (excerpt from Vox article):
The strange link between Trump’s tariffs and incel ideology; Meet the lonely men who think the tariffs will get them girlfriends.
"“A lot of men (specifically, single and frustrated ones on the right who have a negative view of women) have a perplexingly reverse-SJW attitude toward women in the workplace,”explained Substack writer Cartoons Hate Her in March. “They believe women are part of an oppressor class, who has for some reason been granted unfair degrees of privilege in the form of being hired for fun, pretend jobs.”
In this worldview, the fun, pretend jobs include federally funded government jobs. These men further believe that because DEI initiatives mandate that women get these fun, pretend jobs — usually described as “email jobs” — women have achieved unnatural degrees of self-sufficiency. No longer do they have to rely on marrying a good provider for economic stability. With that impetus gone, women’s standards for romantic partners have skyrocketed, leaving these hapless men unable to get a girlfriend.
These men read Trump’s economic policy as a project of redistributing money and jobs away from women and back to men, ultimately for men’s sexual gain. DOGE slashed away the email jobs in the government, they argue, while tariffs will force a recession that will ultimately kill the email jobs of the private sector. Meanwhile, tariffs will bring manufacturing jobs, which are understood to be the rightful domain of men, back to the US. By the time the process ends, they believe, men will be gainfully employed and now-destitute women incentivized to sleep with them, and the world will be restored to its proper order."
The people who use it mean to diminish intellectual work by associating it with femininity - which only works with their cadre - and trying to claim that it is not 'real work.'
As a four-plus-decade system admin, that is SUCH bullshit. Most of those morons could not be an SA or devops if they tried - they lack the critical thinking skills necessary to navigate a world in which change is a constant.
It's appalling - and it ignores the fact that (for example) WWII was won by intelligent people like Turing, and the 80 year peace following by similar people who looked to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number.
I take great offense to my job being an "email job." They're welcome to write SQL scripts to scrape data for a faculty member, or sit and redesign an entire screen based on actual real world usage, or to grunt work rewrite a page of documentation for clarity in under an hour.
These non-fuckers never worked in a factory and it shows. Women were the dominate force on assembly lines back when I worked low wage factory work. It wasn't "men's work".
If you're not operating the tool with your penis it is not men's work, it's just work.
Now, if it is physically hard in specific ways, for example it requires reaching high places then physical characteristics will matter, so you are less likely to get a perfect reflection of society in your workforce, but that still doesn't require a penis.
George Lakoff said it years ago. Conservatives argue for conservatism no matter what. When conservatism fails, they either blame Democrats or insist they weren't conservative enough. There is no reflection because everything conservatives say is to forward their cause.
I haven't heard one Republican politician object to Trump's interpreting "fight DEI" as "fire all the not-white people." Isn't that going a bit too far?
Also. Nobody respects milquetoast, namby-pamby people. No-one. A small red town in my state elected a transwoman as Mayor. She was a local, a former "good ol'boy". She didn't take shit and she had a sense of humor about the situation. And regarding Bernie: I knew plenty of conservative people back in 2016 who were pretty fired up about Sanders. He spoke to things that affected them- healthcare, housing, veterans care, a living wage, eldercare... and it was THE SAME MESSAGE he gave when he talked to us Lefties. Amazingly, a lot of us want the same things from the government.
we went to far in trying to treat all people with dignity..................................how dare we
What drives me nuts, and I say this as a centrist (or I would be, if the window had not been shipped into orbit) is the idea that centrists /would rather get in bed with actual fascists than, idk, consider that maybe civil rights are important. Because that is what the right means by "woke" and "DEI" and all the other scare terms they latch onto and use and abuse (hullo, identity politics!) They mean civil rights. The same rights people died so that we could have. That is what "centrists" are telling us to give up, so that Republicans will vote for us.
idk. Just a bridge too far for me.
Many people want to be considered centrist because there are social benefits to be considered centrist. Especially if you're more extreme than your voters.
People on the left tend to be very self-aware, I think, and at times they're too accommodating to the demands of others. This isn't so much a failure on their part, to be fair: it's part of being a reasonable human being with at least some commitment to truth. When one is surrounded by knaves, liars, brutes, and rogues, this approach becomes a burden. As the saying goes, a lie can circle the earth while the truth is still tying its shoelaces.
This entire article is just a long-winded way of side-stepping the issue that progressives are their own worst enemy: dumbasses. that 'defund the police' was in fact the worst phrase ever invented. You have to wonder if someone from Fox was in the Anarchist's Against White People with Dreads meeting when the term 'DefundThePolice' was being crafted. Like, I know progs like to shit on the 'pod save america' of it all, but maybe yall could take a page from the John Favreau playbook and do a poll or two to see if 'defund the police' plays in Poughkeepsie... SPOILER: it does not.
And... "when someone confronts them with an “extreme” person or belief from their own side, they don’t take responsibility for it, they don’t dwell on it, and they don’t denounce it and try to distance themselves from it," ...is some advanced-level projection. Ask Lindsay Ellis about cancel culture. Listen to the 2020 episodes of El Trapo Chap House or whateverthefuck when them scream at Elizabeth Warren for having the temerity to exist when Berny Sanders IS ALREADY HERE ...and tell me how 'Bernie bros' aren't a thing.
i hate all of you. thanks for listening.>>
But the police does actually need to be defunded. They have a lot of social tasks that other departments should do, so funds should shift away from the police.
Also, police stations are breedings sites of authoritarianism, which always always always turns out evil. There is no such thing as a good authoritarian.
And All Cops Are Apples is also still a valid point. any police station that has a rotten apple needs to be completely and utterly destroyed without letting any of the apples or anything they've touched into the replacement police station or any other police station. Because that's what the saying means. One rotten apple spoils the bunch, if you then spread those apples to other bunches, those bunches will then have a high chance of also having a rotten apple and that way the rot spreads. The point isn't that there are no good cops, the point is that good cops are likely to turn rotten when they are in close proximity to rotten cops, and you can't tell. It is about what is knowable and how to be secure. It is about quarantine procedures. In the end, it is about long term large scale consequences, it is not about individual justice. So no, the good cops do not deserve to be protected, their job is to protect, they're ablative armour, to use a metafor the USA militarized cops can understand.
I dunno, I'd say "Jews will not replace us" sits pretty high up inthe worst phrase ever stakes.
I too hate “the left went too far” blather. But I did have a bad feeling about “defund the police.” Swing voters are dumb by definition. You have to speak in a language they understand. Not to reckon with that reality is self-defeating.
I would just like to say that while I have never watched a single episode of Drag Race, I love Jinx Monsoon. She was fantastic as The Maestro on Doctor Who.
Seems that everyone forgets the second half of the aphorism.
"A few bad apples SPOILS THE ENTIRE BARREL".
And Fox doesn't hurt either, we don't have a liberal station that parrots the party line (however ridiculous or untruthful it is). But Democrats are too nice, we play by the rules and expect them to which they have proved over and over there is no bottom to what they will do to win an election or help their wealthy friends and corporations. Until we stoop to their level, we're going to continue to lose. Sad but true.
I think it’s even simpler than that. And this only my opinion. But the reason nothing “sticks” on the right and everything “sticks” on the left is we on the left reflect, and the right don’t.
And the reason for that is also very simple, conservatives, especially white Christian Conservatives, are simply not good people. They evil. To their very core.
Now, you can legitimately argue that they don’t realize they are awful human beings, that’s very fair to say, because they are also extremely ignorant.
But they are all awful. There is no such thing as a good white Christian. Christianity is the dominant religion on earth, whites are 25% of the world’s population but control 75% of the world’s wealth, and the wealthiest are all conservative. At least with their money.
Case in point. Christian conservatives love to scream about Christianity being under attack, BS, there’s 400,000 churches in America, show me one with atheists out front screaming obscenities at Christians as they try to pray.
Liberals want to live. Conservatives want to tell other people how to live. And it’s nothing against white people, and it’s nothing against Christianity, but power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We won’t truly advance as a country until we are ready to say that conservatives simply are not good people. And they know it too. They continuously say how they are tired of being made to feel like they’re awful people, but they’re feeling that way because us good people are revolted by their behavior, and it’s only our revulsion to them that gives them any awareness of how awful they truly are.
A person's personality is the result of their environment. So try to figure out what is different about their environment and fix that.
That would require changing out the default mental software on a significant percentage of the nation, which basically hates and fears anything it doesn't understand, and what it doesn't understand is rather a lot.
Yep, it's not easy and it will take a lot of time. Guess what the far right has been doing consistently and well for decades.
It’s easy to change minds for the worse with ragebait - that’s why Fox and OANN and Newsmax are successful.
It’s far harder to teach empathy and compassion, which is why churches are ineffective.
rethuglicans have been saying gov’t doesn’t work and then proving it when elected for my entire life. The citizenry is sufficiently ignorant, ineducate, and venal that it continues to buy their zero-sum arguments. They continue to elect rethugs bc the rethugs play on their fears that they won’t be given first fruits for the harvest by default any more just bc they’re white and/or privileged.
It doesn’t help that a significant chunk of the country has as part of its basic software an absolute belief in race-base hierarchies of worth and fear of the dark-skinned other. That’s America’s original sin - the inculcation of that belief from 1619 onward to keep the poor from making common cause - and until we find a way to counter that, we’re going to have to deal with zero-sum racist thought as a boundary condition of American politics.
Perhaps the near total collapse of a civil society would cause one to believe that "we're not all in this together" ? Just spit-balling" here.
awesome, spot on
THANK YOU ROBYN! It's wonderful to see a thoughtful STRATEGIC article here, and one that never gets lost in the trees or irrelevant details.
Of course, hard to find common ground with this (excerpt from Vox article):
The strange link between Trump’s tariffs and incel ideology; Meet the lonely men who think the tariffs will get them girlfriends.
"“A lot of men (specifically, single and frustrated ones on the right who have a negative view of women) have a perplexingly reverse-SJW attitude toward women in the workplace,”explained Substack writer Cartoons Hate Her in March. “They believe women are part of an oppressor class, who has for some reason been granted unfair degrees of privilege in the form of being hired for fun, pretend jobs.”
In this worldview, the fun, pretend jobs include federally funded government jobs. These men further believe that because DEI initiatives mandate that women get these fun, pretend jobs — usually described as “email jobs” — women have achieved unnatural degrees of self-sufficiency. No longer do they have to rely on marrying a good provider for economic stability. With that impetus gone, women’s standards for romantic partners have skyrocketed, leaving these hapless men unable to get a girlfriend.
These men read Trump’s economic policy as a project of redistributing money and jobs away from women and back to men, ultimately for men’s sexual gain. DOGE slashed away the email jobs in the government, they argue, while tariffs will force a recession that will ultimately kill the email jobs of the private sector. Meanwhile, tariffs will bring manufacturing jobs, which are understood to be the rightful domain of men, back to the US. By the time the process ends, they believe, men will be gainfully employed and now-destitute women incentivized to sleep with them, and the world will be restored to its proper order."
https://www.vox.com/culture/408578/trump-tariffs-incels-misogyny-email-jobs
"email job" as a term is purely derogatory.
The people who use it mean to diminish intellectual work by associating it with femininity - which only works with their cadre - and trying to claim that it is not 'real work.'
As a four-plus-decade system admin, that is SUCH bullshit. Most of those morons could not be an SA or devops if they tried - they lack the critical thinking skills necessary to navigate a world in which change is a constant.
It's appalling - and it ignores the fact that (for example) WWII was won by intelligent people like Turing, and the 80 year peace following by similar people who looked to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number.
I take great offense to my job being an "email job." They're welcome to write SQL scripts to scrape data for a faculty member, or sit and redesign an entire screen based on actual real world usage, or to grunt work rewrite a page of documentation for clarity in under an hour.
These non-fuckers never worked in a factory and it shows. Women were the dominate force on assembly lines back when I worked low wage factory work. It wasn't "men's work".
If you're not operating the tool with your penis it is not men's work, it's just work.
Now, if it is physically hard in specific ways, for example it requires reaching high places then physical characteristics will matter, so you are less likely to get a perfect reflection of society in your workforce, but that still doesn't require a penis.
Remember the college Republicans all gung ho for the Iraq War so long as they weren't doing the fighting?