Click to blow out loud.
And Betsy DeVos is a "christian wackjob billionaire" but he agrees with her? What did I miss?
I'm tempted to suggest you're simply overlooking what you already know about reliability. To the one, sure, maybe it
looks like he agrees with DeVos, but, to the other—
This is fundamental to understanding how we got where we are now: if our opponents start saying 2+2=4 we should NOT turn around and say 2+2=5, it costs us votes!
—we already know his word isn't reliable, and this latest invention he simply isn't capable of explaining is just another reminder.
Heads or tails? Do we really want to know what his two plus two actually is, or does his arithmetic failure represent one or another of those spectacular, uneducated, temperamental lashes that we probably shouldn't laugh at for ethical reasons because you and I both know there are real issues not on that table that we should probably account for. It's really easy to presume people are lying for some cheap thrill, but when I come to phrases like,
determined unreliability, the question of why someone would put any significant degree of effort into such self-denigration—that is, why is one so determined to be unreliable—seems important.
Like the part where he yells, in boldface, "
Young college going women are not ALL women!" Okay, great, but here's the thing: If I ask him what his straw man is supposed to mean, to what degree should I expect any useful, honest response? Which, in its own, draws us back toward the ethical consideration: What if the reason he appears unable to follow the discussion from thread to thread and even post to post is that he actually
can't follow himself from post to post?
To wit: We might suggest, in colloquy and disgust, that our neighbor isn't even trying, but that doesn't seem true. That is to say, he
does seem to be
trying, but nobody knows what he's trying to do. One appearance is that he is following through on his attempt to make people who support equality under law miserable. The problem with any of that, though, is that he seems to putting a tremendous effort into dishonesty and hatred, which in turn is by no measure healthy behavior. But the thought of such seething, focused calculation intending to deliberately miss so many points seems an extraordinarily extraordinary proposition; to the other, I do wonder what long-term survey retrospection will tell us about this period in terms of understanding the rising wave of increased psychiatric necessity possibly defining the next chapter of American healing:
No, no, we can't work on healing the rifts between people, because we need to spend the next twenty years helping supremacist malice rehabilitate its humanity, because, you know, before everyone can have justice for all, society needs to cure the psychiatric distress of the privileged who are disgusted and terrified by the prospect.
No, really, remember that bit in school, how when you finally reached the top grade on campus they instituted new rules against hazing and bullying, and everyone thought it was so unfair because we had endured it like we were supposed to and despite hearing the classes ahead of us make the same complaint we come to believe that we're the first who isn't supposed to behave like everyone else, and it feels so goddamn unfair. Seriously, it was hard to not laugh when my daughter laid that one on us, and I'm one who
knows how important it is to start dealing with that one seriously.
Because that's what's coming. Before women, for instance, or people of color, can have justice, we need to devote our efforts to assuaging the lamentations and making reparations for taking this away from people because they're not kids in schools, anymore, and we can't bully them this way. Yeah, poor them: Rape is bad, m'kay? And poor effing them: Lynching is a crime, m'kay? And the modern juxtaposition to that latter is the law and order excuse in a society where the two plus two equals a functionally effective assertion that an unarmed black man with his back to you as he walks away is a greater threat to life and limb than a white guy with a gun threatening to kill you. There are a lot of problems in our society, and as the arc of history is expected to bend toward justice, that means there will always be someone disappointed that their scheming for ill gets tossed to the rubbish tip of once upon a time. We really do come back to delaying and denying justice for the comfort of the unjust.
Meanwhile, what is anyone supposed to tell him—
I think "people" have been asking, bet let me make it clear again and again: I believe that accusation of rape, ALL accusations of rape, should he handled by the police, and only the police, for the justice system is fairest system we have for this kind of serious crime and is also the only system we have that can provide proper punishment and best means of protection of society. Yes the justice system is imperfect, has serious problems, we should fix those problems, but we should not create an alternate system of justice ad hoc! This should not be a liberal verse conservative issue, and certainly we should not be choosing the morally deprive position of demanding alternative justice.
—if he can't be bothered to address what is already on the record? Do we point back to discussion of why Title IX and Department of Education that he skipped over the first time around? Or perhaps, what is the framework for investing the enforcement duties of the Department of Education in the Department of Justice? Should all executive-branch departments? As his general complaint does not seem to wish to attend the functional realities presented, pretty much any response people offer can be dismissed as irrelevant to whatever point we are to believe he thinks he's making.
What we have to deal with is an incoherent, patchwork complaint showing no real civic comprehension, and possibly demonstrating a real lack thereof.
You know, there is a joke—with myriad variations—about young people looking at a book and not being able to figure out what to do with it because they can't find the power control. He claims to be a university educator, so I do wonder if it would be possible to get a degree in which every paper I write simply consists of a screengrab or hyperlink:
Watch this other person's video; that's my paper.
And the reason it seems important is that he doesn't seem to know how to write. Follow the discussion with
Iceaura↑ (
"No. Transcript or forget it. These videos are spam."); EF's response (
"Then don't watch, she is basically saying what I have been saying already: have justice department deal with ALL accusation of rape (or any other CRIME for that matter) not the education department, simple as 2+2=4.") functionally equals the assertion that at some point in that video that other person will say something that he summarizes thus.
What I find striking is the
aversion to presenting data. Is it sloth, then, or something one puts effort into? I start to wonder, attending
your earlier note↑ about the dead link, if our neighbor even knows what's in the video, or if he is just cribbing someone else's summary. And at some point, it might occur to you or me or anyone else to wonder, in turn, just how much effort we should put into figuring the answer, and therein lies part of the point. He's like everyone else in the world; he wants to feel special and empowered.
There is a contemporary theme in anime about social media and the credulity of participants; the chatline in
Durarara!! is shot through with it. Actually, there are a couple, but the one we're concerned with has to do with online credulity. (The other is immersion, and both themes keep coming up, and apparently for particular reasons.) One of the results is that a traditionally racist phrase like "Chinese fire drill" can now be replaced with a new racist analogue, the "Japanese chatline". In any case, what it describes is incredibly credulous people running around atwitter because they aren't taking time to think things through. As a general human statement, it is an emergent variation on the traditional thesis asserting that
people are stupid.
Naturally, it occurs to wonder just how much effort we should put into analyzing what is, in reality, just cheap begging for attention. How seriously should we be taking what our neighbor won't? Just how much should anyone run around like a cheap punch line about naïveté and credulity for the benefit of someone who can't be bothered to put in any genuine effort?
To a certain degree it is too much to ask that he make sense.
