Hell of a Week, or Something Like That
Though here I was more interested in the strawman-ish fixation on "cancelling" and suppression of speech and where it intersects with the curious confusion over whether something that may be true ought necessarily be said, simply because it is true.
I suppose my response to Foghorn was according to his attempt to slight the context,
i.e., Floyd, slavery. Depending on how we take Sartre, in re supremacists at play, changing the subject is one of the easiest and simplest pretenses of disconcertation. Redirection (¿misdirection?) is pretty much what Foghorn does if we allow ourselves to take him seriously.
However, to your point—
I see it as a bit like saying that a child who is routinely beaten by their parents likely learns some valuable skills about avoiding or evading violence done unto them. It's probably true, sure, but why would anyone bother to point this out other than to diminish the nature and severity of the harm done unto said child?
—it stands out that over the period, we've had some direct reminders: It's one thing if a politician wants to tout the valuable job skills acquired by child labor on a factory floor, but I might dare any parent to look their kid in the eye and tell them the slaughterhouse is the better course.
(Moreover, we can at least acknowledge how complicated that argument can get if one is so determined to totally not support child labor, but, y'know, it shouldn't be wrong to pretend that way. After all, the statistical results of education in re quality of life are compelling, but they aren't hard science like physics, so maybe any old fallacy or article fo faith in favor of child labor is equally valid.)
(Not entirely unrelated: There's a line from Puba about black contributions to American invention and innovation, and even I can think of the obvious way to spin this for white supremacism and, say, the benefits of slavery. Puba aside, I figure some version of the white supremacist argument must already exist on the record, somewhere in American history. But I also find myself wondering if the reason I never hear certain, obvious turns is because the people who would otherwise make them aren't actually listening to what black people say.)
The "strawman-ish fixation on 'cancelling'" is a weirdly characteristic, and relies on a pretense of
perpetual newness↗ and nearly unbelievable E&O.¹
And here I
return to↑ the idea that Sciforums is where people finally learn about something that has been going on in the public eye for years is kind of strange. To wit, demanding material consequences against another person according to false pretense is, in fact, defamatory. Why would we pretend defamation is heroic, for instance, or even somehow reasonably respectable? To the other, this behavior isn't new. Such sanitization of infamy is common, for instance, in the American discussion of racism.
†
Which brings us to a certain point, that on both sides of the Pond a certain subject is sensitive to the point of volatility.
But it's also true, while you can't look at these people and say these things are happening in the U.S. because of them, there
is a question of some sort of
people like them. That is to say, along the way it includes their approximate American equivalent. And, no, it's not just Boomers, but there is a Boomer ethic underneath it all.
And it's one thing if some of our overseas neighbors might sleep fitfully because of all this, but for some of them, it's the difference between the allegedly thin rightist base and the everybody else who goes along with them.
Like, for instance, people I know who defended Trump voters according to obsolete, shattered pretenses, even through the last election. And it's kind of hard to express the power of anti-liberalism insofar as that's all it's ever about,
i.e., these people aren't
-ist, but liberals [(
insert conservative complaint here)].
And if it happens that someone in my circles, a middle-period Boomer from overseas, tried to make a point, once, about a simplistic Manichaean trap, and then recited a typal antiliberal complaint, there's nothing new about it on this side of the Pond. If we consider that he was about seven, or so, when women started getting uppity in a certain way, and they just haven't stopped, since, maybe it's not surprising if he turns out to sympathize with a particular traditionalist crackpottery seeking to regulate women.
Because it's always the little things. One of my favorite antiliberal lectures was actually here, nearly eight years ago, when one of our ostensibly liberal neighbors faulted right², because well, right, it's always the little things: "Your obsession with pampering to ever smaller demographic groups,"
he complained↗, "while the majority of the population gets more and more livid from economic stagnation that they don't vote or worse vote for trump has gotten us to this horrifically low place of total lack of government power."
The conservative version, as a 2024
election post-mortem↗: "Focus on just the small groups in society that don't even vote to the exclusion of everyone that does. This is how you get the current result."
It's not irony: Both the would-be liberal and the post-Reaganista defender of the faith would labor to scold and cockblock women. Moreover, the general formulation is the same:
If [conservative caricature of liberalism], then [conservative justification].
†
We might wonder how many times I can do the bit about when science informs differently than superstition, but inasmuch as
progress is always a buzzkill for someone↗, what we learn in times and discussions like these is who has met their threshold.
And toward that, a note from five and a half years ago, at the intersection of
racism and homophobia↗:
An interesting example: The terf wars landed in my Twitter feed a couple weeks ago, and what stands out most is the idea that this so-called radicalism is apparently really popular feminism in Her Majesty's dominion, and it's only when I look at the proverbial everything else that goes on in this period that it really does make sense: There is a reason why such feminism should be popular among the British, as it strives to help women achieve their proper place and potential under a man. Of course British radicalism aims to serve traditional power.
The thing is that the world is scary, the future unknown, and new concepts, influences, and outcomes alter people's understanding of how the future should go. As more of the world around a person seems harmful, and as individuals perceive dwindling empowerment, some will reach or lash out in order to establish a reference point; the empowerment or authority to leave that mark, sometimes, is all they feel they have left. This becomes the measure of their empowerment. Not every domestic abuser was known antisocial before it started; even the petty rewards of, say, what goes on around here, eventually drain even righteous utility. Even if we think we have found an object worthy of such fear and scorn, there comes a point at which exercises in futility are simply about gratification. And then at some point, they're not, and people are left with whatever skeletal justifications they don't seem to have actually explicitly considered, before. Those who dig in, time and again, to hold and even push the line, essentially gamble against becoming what they contest.
Consider that at some point over the last couple years, it started feeling like I was bludgeoning the noncompetent; to the other, noncompetency, by that assessment, would be alarmingly widespread. It's just that most people don't go out of their way to advertise it like that. The part that I don't get, though, is that if they are right, then why do they act like the guilty? It's as if some part of them still recognizes they are wrong, and they cannot silence that voice of dissent.
It is, of course, unfortunate that something goes here about the possibility that people might need any explicit disclaimer about the cynicism of the line having to do with British radicalism serving power—
i.e., the contrast is the point—as the intervening period has much to say about subtlety, futility, and the manners in which nature abhors a vacuum.
____________________
Notes:
¹ There comes a point where even they, as such, become sensitive about their own
reading comprehension↗. What's really weird is that the most ockhamly obvious alternative is unbelievable in the sense that these people never really come up for air, and, moreover, apparently think they're fooling ... er ... someone.
²
cf. #3746414↗, note 2:
Blaming the penguin↱ as one faults right↱
