Never Mind the Birds | Something Something Stoned
I got nothin': Click to wail on a rocksichord.
For both the famous and everyday folk, acts of venting are getting generalized now by political zealotry as "what the individual truly / privately believes" ....
This has been, in my lifetime, one of those weird inversions where now that the empowered are expected to answer, we suddenly need to fundamentally alter the nature of our discourse.
I have a joke:
The people who think I have no sense of humor are also the people who don't laugh at my jokes.
When I was young, all the bully's threats eventually added up to nobody could take a joke, because in the end, say, school administrators didn't want to punish the white kid for racial animus. So when the bully was caught and cornered everyone else was to blame for treating him poorly.
However, anyone else behaving that way was a threat.
No, really. Try ...
punk rock. The so-called respectable people could say the worst things, but a punk shows attitude when rejecting their shit, now everyone is afraid. And this, generally speaking, was the empowerment majority. As such, the behavior permeates the culture. For all they complain about "PC", in the end the bully class cowers behind it.
The only truly surprising thing about school shootings over the last, say, eighteen years, has been our approach to bullying. Apparently we needed to wait until the middle of the Gay Fray, and perhaps the timing and driving cause behind the idea that It Gets Better isn't purely coincidental; that is, in a weird way, the Gay Fray is when we can do it when it's not about "white" or "male" in particular. It's hard to explain, but examining the role of bullying in school violence would, at some point, require a close examination of American classism and its manifestation in ritual socialization. This is part of what is notable about the Appeasment faction in the Democratic Party's ongoing debate about their future course: Okay, we can finally talk about classism, but we're going to talk about white men, because anything else is mere identity politics.
Inasmuch as "acts of venting are getting generalized now by political zealotry as 'what the individual truly / privately believes'", we might look to market influences. It sounds complex when we start tallying up the details for those who demand but have no intention of attending the answer, but it also feels pretty simple when we're living it.
So, let's try an example with men. White men, sure, but this transcends color boundaries.
And most of my life, men have gotten away with saying some pretty terrible things about women. We've gotten away with
doing some pretty terrible things
to women. And this happens because "we" men are in charge; "our way" of seeing things is "the way" of seeing things.
But let us consider a moment, then: The rape joke or even threat doesn't register as dangerous because that's how the world works, and that's "the way" people see things. One need not even accuse "all" men, many men will make the leap for them; simply point out the rape advocacy, which feels ugly and dangerous to the accused, and now we're into the range of "zealotry". Mundane, accurate description can be denounced as zealotry, and what an individual truly and privately believes can be dismissed as just a joke so stop being so serious about everything damn it.
Which reminds: Maybe one expresses explicit sexism, but we can't take that to be significant. The other, though, who says, "fuck off" in response? Well, the one says it feels threatening because the other hates all men, so therefore hating all men must be what the other truly and privately believes.
Or hating all white people.
Or hating all Christians.
Honestly, this has been going on pretty much from the outset.
It's not quite mass hysteria, but ego defense trends among populations, and between the appearance of strengthening identity assertions to the one, and the simplification of potentials as a market result requiring its own discussion to the other, the prevailing influences driving the behaviors you describe are informed by the prevailing influences of society.
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When I saw the Dilbert cartoon (in Saturday's early edition of the Sunday paper) making fun of 'climate science' rhetoric, I expected that it would make the climate cultists angry. My informal behavior model is verified!
You think too highly of yourself. Many people are distressed at the sight of the incompetent embarrassing themselves in public.
Then again, one of the things we need to remember about
Dilbert is that everything taking place inside that building is presupposed to be pretentiously stupid. That is, we can expect that the soulless, barely-competent corporate employer couldn't find anyone better than the quick-buck speaker's bureau circuit. I mean, really, you've got the aging comedic actors, retired military and law enforcement, and maybe some of the doctors who have sacrificed their credentials for the sake of politics, and who's this goofball that can't even explain the basics of climate change? Hey, maybe they called over to Exxon/Mobil, but remember that in addition to the goofball eminence front, they also retained some real scientists to tell them the real truth about what is really going on. In the end, it's all a matter of how deeply we wish to read into the narrative. Scott Adams, to the other, just isn't very deep, so, yeah, sometimes a clumsy excuse for sleight is exactly what it looks like.
