07mk
20d ago
As a complete non-sequitur, as someone who was a child when Ice Ice Baby hit, I recall hearing from people older than me that his "word to your mother" was considered a legit controversial line at the time. Which I found confusing and silly. I also recall that Zinedine Zidane, one of the best French soccer players of his era, in his retirement game, got red carded for obviously intentionally head-butting an opposing player, and some of his fans defended him on the basis that the opposing player apparently made some insult about Zidane's mother. Finally, one of many things that I recall about the 1980 film The Terminator in terms of how the culture it depicts is different from the culture I'm familiar with was one of the detectives responding to a playful insult with a simple "yo mama" in a completely unironic way (others include the 80s hair and waiting on hold for 911).
Of course, mothers being sacred is a common trope in reality, but I found it curious just how seriously some people seemed to take it, to the extent that some off-hand insult directed at a generic "your" mother causes offense, or that it would justify headbutting someone during your send-off game after one of the best soccer careers anyone's ever had. It just seems strange when the syllables coming out of someone's mouth are clearly intentionally designed to upset you, the response is to be upset instead of ignoring.
Perhaps this isn't so much about mothers as it's about the talk about honor culture and all that that are happening elsewhere in this comment section. That there's a perception that it's not only justified but actually your duty to respond to someone obviously fitting themselves into the role of "intentional provoker" by fitting into the separate role of "the one who is provoked to shut them down," lest you sully your honor, instead of just saying "I have better things to do than LARP with you."
07mk
20d ago
Rock didn't really get in any hot water over the bit in a way that compelled such a response, though. Even before his public acknowledgement about these potential issues, his bit was considered an absolute banger in the "funny because it's true" sort of way, and I recall his acknowledgement being a footnote, an interesting piece of trivia, in terms of how well publicized it was, so I don't think that had much of a factor.
I think the main difference was that Rock's thing was purely a comedy bit. He didn't have any extra messages before, after, or surrounding his stand-up act berating the black community or whatever. Cosby probably incorporated plenty of comedy to his messaging, but he was perceived as actually trying to push ideological and cultural messages as a comedian, putting himself into an oppressive patriarchal role. Rock was trying to make you laugh by hitting on a shared truth about culture that is taboo to say, which feels almost like the archetype of a stand-up comic - "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you" - "only one who's allowed to tell the truth in the king's court is the jester."
07mk
20d ago
Which “actual accusation” are you referring to? I obviously agree that the expansion of “hatred” to mean “supports policy positions which are less-than-maximally-optimal for some specific group” is a transparently bogus rhetorical trick.
The "actual accusation" would be that Harris "genuinely hates white men.". Which would be roughly equivalent to, "Kamala Harris feels similar antipathy for white men as is claimed about Trump feeling antipathy for women when his haters accuse him of 'hating women.'" Once we get to the colloquial definition of "hatred," we're not dealing with the accusation, but something stronger.
If she still did, I find it highly unlikely that the “compartmentalization” or “cognitive dissonance” which you propose exists would long ago have broken down and some inciting incident or slow buildup of aversive incidents would have caused the breakdown of the relationship.
We have very different intuitions around the power of compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance, it seems. It's hard to get rigorous empirical evidence around this in general, but my experience is that there is no such thing as overestimating its ability to allow people to hold self-contradictory beliefs. Even presuming the colloquial definition of "hatred," I've seen it happen too many times that someone absolutely hates someone that they also love, and other times someone that they convincingly act as if they love, and I've seen it happen for decades at a time. But for the deranged meaning of "hatred" being invoked in this topic, I'm absolutely certain that the stress of this level of cognitive dissonance would just be noise relative to the general stresses and suffering of everyday life.
Alright, fair enough. If you're saying you genuinely buy this argument and genuinely don't consider it discredited, then I have no grounds with which to claim that you are wrong. But, honestly, none of this is galaxy-brain contrarian psychobabble. The ability of humans to compartmentalize apparently-contradictory views is something that has been observed long before anyone ever came up with modern critical theory.
More to the point, the word "hatred" when used to describe someone like Harris "hating white men" is clearly meant to invoke the same kind of meaning as when someone claims that someone like Trump "hates women" or someone like Charlie Kirk "hated gay people." It's perfectly reasonable to complain that this re-definition of "hatred" in order to keep the negative affect and connotations while expanding its scope to include entirely loving and empathetic behaviors towards someone is dishonest. I consider that as a non-discredited way of arguing against accusations of hatred: my behavior only counts as hatred under your deranged, stupid re-definition of hatred, and I don't respect your deranged, stupid re-definition. But I do consider the argument that "this other behavior I engage is inconsistent with someone who hates [x]" as fully discredited, because it's neither engaging with the actual accusation nor engaging with the reality of cognitive dissonance.
07mk
20d ago
That feels like someone riffing off of the "This machine kills fascists" sticker that was somewhat en vogue in the 2010s that people would stick on their laptops. Not that common, but common enough to form a stereotype within my blue tribe enclave of a keyboard warrior who genuinely believed that his activity on the internet via his laptop would play out eventually in killing fascists (or just preventing them from existing, I suppose). As you say, it's pure applause light.
07mk
20d ago
And yes, it is an attack. Being vague about it won't change it.
This is where I disagree. I believe that being vague about it would have been more than enough to paper over it to not look like an attack. Perhaps an extra step of vagueness by excluding "blacks" altogether and just saying "Pete polled poorly in key voting blocs we needed," and then deflecting with word salad when pressed on the details would've been needed. But underestimating the ability of motivated voters to fill in vagueness from people on their side with good things for their side and bad things for the other side is something that has burned me too many times to fall for again.
07mk
20d ago
Nothing in your comment indicates that people actually genuinely believe the argument you're making, over the ones I pointed out. I don't doubt that somewhere, someone likely had a genuine reaction of "he's married to [x], therefore the likelihood that he has hatred for [x] is lower," if only for Bayesian reasons. But, I'll reiterate, I've never actually observed this happening anywhere. By my observation, people consider it exactly as discredited as the "My best friend is black/gay/trans/etc." explanation for why someone isn't racist/homophobic/transphobic/etc. in basically exactly the same ways (note that some people will say that this is discredited because it's a lie - this person's best friend actually isn't black/gay/trans/etc. - this is one form of discrediting it, but the more common one is that presuming that that statement were true, it still says nothing about whether or not that person has hatred for [x]). Because "hatred" is such a loose term that can encompass a near limitless range of behaviors and attitudes.
07mk
20d ago
I honestly think Harris's chances at becoming POTUS in 2029 would've skyrocketed (to single digits) if her book and her interviews had that tone.
07mk
20d ago
I don't think I've ever seen being married to [x] as being genuinely interpreted as evidence against hatred against [x]. Because of limitless ability for people to practice cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization, and also because "hatred against [x]" never literally means "hatred against each and every last individual who belongs to [x] category, without one single exception even theoretically possible" (otherwise, the amount of accusations of "hatred against [x]" would drop by several orders of magnitude lower than it is now). In practice, one common trope is "one of the good ones," where "hatred against [x]" actually describes a bigoted negative affect one attaches to individuals belonging to [x] category, and "one of the good ones" is someone for whom whatever negative bigoted beliefs they have about [x] either doesn't exist or exists in small enough amounts to be overcome by their positive attributes.
07mk
20d ago
which is just transparent 'cede to all of my group's demands or you are a whateverphobe'
Yes, yes it is. That you noticed this doesn't mean you have any ability to stop it from working, though.
07mk
20d ago
The point of the deflection is that it's not accusing blacks of homophobia. Again, this is an invisible fig leaf, an Emperor Has No Clothes sort of situation, but one of the biggest takeaways from the past couple decades of US politics for me has been that the least believable part of that story was that the crowd had to pretend to see the Emperor's clothing, rather than the crowd genuinely experiencing the qualia of seeing their Emperor wearing impressive clothing, because they were motivated to see such a thing by their superiors. And Maddow herself, along with the remaining audience of Maddow seem far more likely than the general populace to see that fig leaf if Harris points it out.
Instead, Harris came out looking homophobic to that same audience, and stupid to a wider, likely overlapping, audience. Which, perhaps doesn't speak to her incompetence as I had initially thought, but a rational calculation that, as a black woman, she has the privilege of copping to homophobia without being politically punished. Perhaps I ought to give her credit for taking personal responsibility for making a homophobic decision, unlike most of her other comments about her campaign, even if she probably did it unintentionally.
07mk
20d ago
I saw one twitter user summarize her answer as: "I didn’t not choose Pete because he was gay… I didn’t choose him because he is gay and I had 107 days."
This was roughly my immediate response upon seeing Harris's answer to Maddow. I found this disconcerting for a few reasons.
One is that other excerpts reveal that she's aware of the "word salad" criticism, and yet she clearly hasn't taken it seriously enough to polish up her interview/conversation/PR skills. Either she lacks the desire to improve, or she lacks the ability to improve, neither of which is a good characteristic to have in the leader of your party.
Two is that she presumably provided this answer with the expectation that the audience would go, "That is a reasonable response that properly negates Maddow's supposition." This either speaks to her having extremely low opinion of voters' understanding of logic or her lacking an ability or desire to engage in logic. Again, not what I want in the leader of my party.
Three is related to two, and it's that there was an OBVIOUS deflection RIGHT THERE! Just say that Pete polled poorly with blacks - which is a bloc we need to keep heavily shifted in our favor - for a variety of reasons. Truly, it's a mystery wrapped in an enigma, a question for the ages, something as hard to figure out as how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop (if you're not a snarky owl, anyway). And in 107 days, we simply didn't have time to do the deep analysis needed to figure out what was going on and how to fix it, and so we decided to go for someone who polled better among blacks. It's an invisible fig leaf, but for people who want to see the leaf, this could've provided them enough ammo with which to convince themselves that the leaf is visible and to bully others into loudly proclaiming that the leaf is visible. And Maddow herself certainly has the motivation for the former.
07mk
20d ago
The progressive idpol ideology that has been dominant in the Democratic party for the past decade+ groups all dimensions of anti-[demographic] bigotry into one, and more generally all dimensions of oppression into one. This is why AGW/climate change activist Greta Thunberg also happens to be a socialist who is pro-Palestine, and why mainstream journalism outlets publish opinion pieces about how "fatphobia" is rooted in white supremacy and misogyny.
As such, if Trump has ever said anything that could reasonably be construed as transphobic or sexist, then the people criticizing him over such things also genuinely, honestly believe that that necessarily means that he's also homophobic and racist and fatphobic and pro-fascist. So whether or not Trump ever said anything homophobic (or displayed any signs of having any particular antipathy towards homosexuality) is neither here nor there for determining whether or not he is a vile homophobe who would homophobically weaponize Pete's homosexuality against him for electoral gain.
07mk
20d ago
That's probably oversimplifying a bit, but I don't think the idea that "victim blaming can be bad" is wrong per se, just misapplied.
Indeed, absolutely. The key thing here, though, is that "victim blaming can be bad" was already the default state of modern culture, heck even BEFORE the 1st 2 waves of feminism. The idea that "X can be bad" no matter what X is is a pretty good default that almost everyone has about anything, and the idea that blaming someone for something can be bad had already been built into society for centuries, as evidenced by legal justice systems.
The part that progressive idpol added was the enforced misapplication.
07mk
20d ago
You're right, but also, this just fits more into the pattern of "They say lots of things, but anything that's good isn't new, and anything that's new isn't good." The idea that saying "Well if you're going out doing XYZ you can't be surprised if somebody rapes you shrug" to someone who's been raped is rude or bad doesn't come from progressive idpol, it was already baked in to the existing system as just a form of manners that much of American culture already bought into. The innovation that progressive idpol added is that even neutrally stating that, empirically and physically, certain behaviors can influence one's vulnerability to being raped, in any context even without any specific or hypothetical rape or rape survivor involved, is still exactly the same as explicitly saying that rape victims deserved it because they were asking for it.
07mk
21d ago
I live near an East Coast city, and I too see masked-up young-looking people (seemingly) every time I take the bus or subway or go to the mall. They're not common, they're definitely a small minority, but they're common enough that I continue to notice them during my day-to-day times in public spaces.
07mk
21d ago
Which makes it not exactly baffling that this happens, though it is baffling that nobody seems to be trying to fix it on the cultural level. There are lots of attempts to blame the police and reduce their aggression towards minorities, but I don't see the same level of impetus towards teaching minorities "Don't fight the police!" When this is the obvious and easiest solution to the issue. It's not that minorities need to be extra submissive towards police, it's that everyone needs to submit to police, but certain subsets of minorities haven't caught on yet and need to be brought up to the same level as everyone else.
Is this really that baffling? The last several decades have seen the continual rise of an ideology that is based on dividing populations into groups, declaring some of them "oppressed" and others "oppressor" and declaring that the former has zero responsibility to improve things and the latter has full responsibility to improve things. A prominent example of this phenomenon in a different topic (with mostly the same players) is "rape culture," where even advising a woman against putting herself in a position of vulnerability around strange/potentially malicious men with alcohol or other drugs involved is considered full-throated justification for her being raped. Heck, even pointing out the fact (citation needed) that this raises one's odds of being sexually assaulted has been equated with explicit condoning of rape.
As such, any sort of recommendation that black people adjust their culture such that the rates of violent or otherwise troublesome encounters with police go down is verboten. That's condoning White Supremacy which we can always invoke as blame-worthy (of course, abstract concepts like White Supremacy can't really catch blame - people that you think of when you think of White Supremacy, such as white people, or brown people who disagree with you, OTOH...) in any troublesome encounter between any black person and any cop for any reason. Whatever culture that black people have, it's either innate - and good and to be supported in and of themselves, because everyone (that we've deemed sufficiently oppressed) deserves to be not just tolerated, but celebrated, intrinsically for who they are - or an adaptation that they had to take on just so that they could survive in this oppressive White Supremacist world they were unjustly thrust into, and so it's 100% the responsibility of White Supremacists to modify the policing system such that black people have to spend zero effort to change their culture and the rate of troublesome police incidents involving black people goes down to zero.
07mk
22d ago
So all these people subscribing to ASMR content producers must have an unusually wide gap between the threshold of pleasure and the threshold of disgust/pain, just like these people who blanket their food with cayenne powder or subscribe to /r/popping do.
I have similar issues with ticklishness like you described, but I also enjoy ASMR and enjoy blanketing my food with whatever spice I'm into at the moment, so this is probably specific to the stimulus. Never been to /r/popping or know what it's about, but based on context, that sounds disgusting & I'd rather stay away.
07mk
25d ago
Someone left-wing will quite naturally think that permitting Holocaust denialism would be much worse than permitting arbitrary thuggish looting and mayhem, because the former is the first stepping stone on a road that leads potentially to dictatorship and genocide, while the second (they perceive) is only ever going to be a marginal problem, not an existential threat to civilization.
I'm on the left, and I disagree heavily. And many on the left do as well. That thought process requires buying into a particularly anti-liberal view of the world, which many progressive leftists certainly do, but which is nowhere near defining or universal among leftists. Notably, believing that one knows so much about the future and cause-and-effect that they can have confidence that permitting Holocaust denialism would be more likely to lead to dictatorship and genocide than less is certainly a massive act of hubris and could only be justified through faith, given what we know about history. Which is all well and good, but it certainly should be openly stated.
07mk
25d ago
As a Blue Triber, I could not disagree more with this and find this description almost derogatory; a Red Triber could hardly insult the Blue Tribe better if he tried. Blue Tribers tend not to like guns and tend not to use guns, but gun-toting/gun-hobbyist Blue Tribers aren't unicorns. They're just rare, and the idea that gun usage is so out-there for a Blue Triber that simply knowing how to operate such a thing would be viewed with noticeable suspicion is something that could only apply only to particularly secluded/sheltered members of the Blue Tribe, not to just a typical Blue Tribe. I've lived in especially urban, especially sheltered Blue areas for most of my life, and even there, demonstrating/stating knowledge of how to operate a gun and even admitting a hobby of shooting guns wouldn't raise an eyebrow.
I repeat zeke5123a's statement that this is nonsense. The idea that there could be any sort of honest point to be made about concluding that the murderer was "one of [MAGA's] own" given the evidence available at the time is such transparent motivated reasoning that, as a leftist, it makes me angry to see other leftists discredit our side like this, which demonstrably fails in meeting up to our actual claim of being meaningfully better than the right.
07mk
25d ago
This is what I'm explicitly against, ideology-based redefinitions that are clear perversions of the words, themselves, generally for the purpose of leveraging positive/negative affect for ideological purposes. War is Peace and all. No, sorry. We already have definitions.
Fair enough, but terms mean things based on how they're used, and the progressive identity politics crowd have done a pretty good job using this term (since they're generally the only ones who want to use it anyway). These people own the humanities and the media, so it'll be hard to keep them from redefining words as they see fit.
My personal attitude is that a rose by any other name smells just as sweet. Let's call it a microaggression and also acknowledge that microaggressions can be aggravating, they can be totally awesome and positive, they can be neutral, and anything in between, depending on the details. Just like how a White Supremacist can be a black egalitarian in treating individuals as individuals rather than representatives of their race, which means that white supremacists can be awesome people that we want more of in this society, depending on the details.
I'm sure they genuinely have no idea that by doing this redefinition, they're microaggravating me. But if their definition holds, then again, they are committing a little act of violence against me every time they use the term that way.
Absolutely. What did you think decolonization social justice meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? No, it's righteous violence to take away the chains that people we've judged as the oppressors are using to oppress the people we've judged as the oppressed. See, they've already depicted themselves as the Chad and you as the soyjack judged that they're fighting for Justice and that the people they like really are The Oppressed, which means that your complaints about them microaggressing upon you don't count.
It's impressive what you can accomplish when logic, rationality, and reason are deemed as oppressive tools of white supremacy that should be discarded used selectively as needed to achieve the desired outcome.
07mk
25d ago
You're trying to work out the definition based on the etymology. Words generally don't work that way, and especially so for ideologically invented terms like "microaggression." The function of the word "aggression" in there isn't to describe what happened, it's to provide negative affect for anyone listening to the term.
The defining portion of a microaggression is that the microaggressor genuinely has no idea that he's doing anything aggravating to the microaggressed-upon. Their failure to model the other person well enough to recognize that what they said would be aggravating to them is enough to describe as an act of (micro) aggression. Implicit in this is the belief that all of society ought to restructure itself so that people who have been deemed "oppressed" doesn't suffer any sort of annoyance from others that they judge as "oppressive," without limit. This kind of pattern might appear familiar, because it's one of the guiding principles of modern progressive identity politics that you've probably seen play out all over the place.
07mk
25d ago
A microaggression properly understood is a deliberately microaggravating comment, knowingly pitched by the offending party as a subtle enough thing that it has inherent plausible deniability and affords them the ability to deny any ill intent while still getting the satisfaction of making the receiving party momentarily uncomfortable.
No, this is a misunderstanding of what microaggression means. A microagression, by definition, requires no intent or deliberation on the part of the aggressor. The fact that it's made with good faith effort to be decent or positive is the defining factor that makes something a microaggression. An act similar to a microaggression, but made deliberately with intent to have plausible deniability is generally called "being passive-aggressive" and has been considered rude generally long before the concept of microaggressions were invented.
The key thing about "microaggressions" is that they're entirely dependent on the mind state of the person who believes they've been micro aggressed upon, and, as such, provides unlimited leeway by which people who have been labeled "oppressed" can accuse anyone else of being oppressive via microaggression.
This is why, eg a classic example of a microaggression is a woman grabbing her purse more tightly when a black man walks into the subway car, which is a microaggression regardless of if she noticed that he had entered, noticed he was black, or if she was holding her purse closer for independent reasons. If the man perceived that action as being an act of stereotyping him as a potential mugger based on his race, then the woman has certainly committed a microagression on him.
07mk
25d ago
I certainly think he could have beaten Trump for the standard reasons. Clinton almost beat him, and I think Sanders would've leached off more populist-type voters from Trump than he would've lost relative to Clinton. The type of Clinton voters who would've been upset enough at Sanders not to vote for him seems likely to be small, particularly Clinton partisans also tended to hate Trump even more, and Sanders's downsides to them were things he shared with Trump, i.e. old white guy. No way to know for sure.
I believe that at least some parts of woke would've carried on mostly the same way, which is everything to do with trans. The writing was on the wall beforehand with parallels being made between trans and gay in terms of being something innate to oneself that one discovers by being true to oneself, versus being something that can be influenced within people, especially impressionable young people in whom certain amounts of hormones are flowing for the first time, with the emotional influences thereof. The situation with Lia Thomas, the MTF college swimmer who's caused controversy for obvious reasons, probably would've happened regardless. I have to wonder, though, if we would have learned about WPATH suppressing research in order not to give political ammo to their critics.
Entertainment media is where I think there might have been a noticeable difference. Living in a blue area, I've yet to see it overstated how much President Donald Trump seemed to have broken an unfortunately significant number of people's brains, and this seemed to have been especially true in Hollywood, which I think probably led to more messaging being prioritized over quality, likely in subconscious ways. I can't remember any in particular now, but I'm pretty sure I've read a number of interview answers by directors, writers, and even video game devs who said their work was inspired by the idea of fighting against the rise of fascism in the USA in the form of Donald Trump. President Sanders probably wouldn't have inspired such works, and maybe execs might have had a slightly higher priority on profit over in-group approval among political peers such that some of, say, Disney/Marvel's downfall due to woke-ifying old franchises could've been slowed down.
No, ANTI ICE clearly indicates an anti-global warming leftist who wanted to protest internal combustion engines for producing so much CO2.
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