Red Mosquito

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Orpheus wrote:Do you remember that Trump very literally ran on the idea that political correctness and niceness were un-American

I mean, they kind of are. At least, the phenomenon where the expression of a thought is critiqued while the thought is missed, it's at least a little bit counter to the idea of freedom.

and his supporters accepted that idea and ran with it enthusiastically? This is what they wanted! They hoped for an environment where they could freely hate and treat their different-thinking neighbors like shit and get away with it

This thought is exactly what I am walking away from. I mean no offense but this sounds hysterical when divorced from the countless headlines swirling around increasingly large echo chambers on the daily. Who are you to say that political incorrectness comes from hatred? Why is this your go-to conclusion? Are you actually witnessing this on a daily basis?

Trump has been hawking white grievance politics that articulates a racialized enemy as a stand-in for the increased precarity caused by capitalism's further descent into the crisis of accumulation that has been bubbling since at least 1973. That's literally the package. Not all of his voters buy into it, at least not consciously, but that is what he's selling.

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Mickey wrote:

washing machine wrote:

Mickey wrote:

washing machine wrote:I guess, to answer both of you, the general idea that Trump is an evil human being who must be vanquished to save the world is a non-starter for me. I have spent four years watching the media and a vocal sect of the left become unhinged to the point of hysteria. This has done much harm to idea of discourse in this country. Trump isn't the cause. He's a tool that hammers in the effect. The direction the conversation about Trump is going will be far, far worse than whatever the hell Trump decided to do with his time in the Oval office for 4-8 years.

I do think Trump is a bad president, but I do not trust that his critics are being fair when they describe the effects of his policies. I do think that he stokes the flames of division for his own gain, but I do not think that he is unique in any way in this regard.

This post is relatively baffling to me, even though I share many of its premises. I do not think Trump is uniquely evil, I do not think his vanquishing will save the world, I do not think he's the cause of a lot of what we're seeing (sorry, that's still capitalism!). I don't even think Trump is the worst president of this century--that's easily W and he has the body count to prove it. And yet--the idea that the "harm done to discourse" is worse than the mishandling of the pandemic, the multiple incursions on civil rights, the egregious amount of wealth transferred upwards by the tax cuts, the attacks on the ACA which continue to leave millions of Americans without healthcare coverage, to say nothing of giving the green light to cut women's access to reproductive health (via SCOTUS) or the environmental rollbacks which will probably play a (small) role in the way that all of us die? Discourse? Civility? That's your takeaway?

It's interesting that you bring up W. I think I agree with you that a lot of capitalism's worst tendencies thrived under him. Particularly crony capitalism, which I'm beginning to think is the real foe here.

Repealing ACA, women's reproductive rights, environmental and fiscal regulations on businesses...those are all things that can and should be discussed through civil discourse. They used to be. It feels like any and all conversations that start with those things today quickly turn into something else, and that's what I'm noticing and lamenting with more frequency every damn day.

Leaving aside the fact that repealing healthcare coverage or banning abortion should probably not be a "civil" conversation, when is this "used to be?" Because saying this relies on both a short memory and an active ignorance of how and where social change is produced.

This is worth an hour of your time.

BurtReynolds wrote:There is nothing sadder than a communist convincing himself to vote for Joe Biden.

I dunno, there's always your day to day routine.

The likelihood I vote decreases by the second

verb_to_trust wrote:The likelihood I vote decreases by the second

You probably didn't do a full ballott for the RM hall of fame a few months ago.

elliseamos wrote:

verb_to_trust wrote:The likelihood I vote decreases by the second

You probably didn't do a full ballott for the RM hall of fame a few months ago.

I don't remember it even happening

washing machine wrote:

Mickey wrote:

washing machine wrote:

Mickey wrote:

washing machine wrote:I guess, to answer both of you, the general idea that Trump is an evil human being who must be vanquished to save the world is a non-starter for me. I have spent four years watching the media and a vocal sect of the left become unhinged to the point of hysteria. This has done much harm to idea of discourse in this country. Trump isn't the cause. He's a tool that hammers in the effect. The direction the conversation about Trump is going will be far, far worse than whatever the hell Trump decided to do with his time in the Oval office for 4-8 years.

I do think Trump is a bad president, but I do not trust that his critics are being fair when they describe the effects of his policies. I do think that he stokes the flames of division for his own gain, but I do not think that he is unique in any way in this regard.

This post is relatively baffling to me, even though I share many of its premises. I do not think Trump is uniquely evil, I do not think his vanquishing will save the world, I do not think he's the cause of a lot of what we're seeing (sorry, that's still capitalism!). I don't even think Trump is the worst president of this century--that's easily W and he has the body count to prove it. And yet--the idea that the "harm done to discourse" is worse than the mishandling of the pandemic, the multiple incursions on civil rights, the egregious amount of wealth transferred upwards by the tax cuts, the attacks on the ACA which continue to leave millions of Americans without healthcare coverage, to say nothing of giving the green light to cut women's access to reproductive health (via SCOTUS) or the environmental rollbacks which will probably play a (small) role in the way that all of us die? Discourse? Civility? That's your takeaway?

It's interesting that you bring up W. I think I agree with you that a lot of capitalism's worst tendencies thrived under him. Particularly crony capitalism, which I'm beginning to think is the real foe here.

Repealing ACA, women's reproductive rights, environmental and fiscal regulations on businesses...those are all things that can and should be discussed through civil discourse. They used to be. It feels like any and all conversations that start with those things today quickly turn into something else, and that's what I'm noticing and lamenting with more frequency every damn day.

Leaving aside the fact that repealing healthcare coverage or banning abortion should probably not be a "civil" conversation, when is this "used to be?" Because saying this relies on both a short memory and an active ignorance of how and where social change is produced.

This is worth an hour of your time.

I'm not going to watch this video, not because I don't think it's worthwhile in the abstract or that it's from a disreputable source. But I can tell from the description that it's not going to address the problem at hand--that it is interested in a kind of transhistorical political solution (imbued with a heavy dose of hagiography):

Ellis uses the founders as a springboard to wrestle with eternal problems of American life.

And the problem with this is that we're not dealing with a transhistorical crisis or an "eternal problem"--some kind of cyclical lapse into incivility that can be righted if we just have the right first principles of discourse. Believing that would mean believing that people just *decided* to get more uncivil one day--it doesn't make any sense. Rathe, the increased polarization you're seeing is a symptom of a system of governance in crisis because it is unable to manage the contradictions engendered by late capitalism: people are turning away from civil discourse because civil discourse hasn't done shit for them, certainly not since 2008 and I would wager for certain groups it's been a lot longer than that. That's it. And the insufficiency of insisting on a different kind of discourse rather than a shift in material conditions is revealed when you try to turn to a group of essentially pre or proto-capitalists (depending on where you index slaveowning) and their renowned civility. But of course they believed in dialogue, because none of the questions they were discussing directly imperiled their capacity for self-reproduction. That kind of detached and abstract consideration isn't really a plausible solution for folks facing racialized police violence or who are rationing their insulin because their healthcare won't cover it or who are late on rent because there's no COVID stimulus or who are small business owners who have been tasked with providing unaffordable healthcare for their employees because the state refused to do so.

And so again you (Reid) are in this situation where you're simultaneously saying that you're more focused on your immediate material conditions, but you expect other people to be concerned about civility and the state of discourse which comes at the expense of demanding the security of their immediate material conditions. If you were just talking about MSNBC, fine, yes, absolutely, but as I said earlier, you pinned this on "the left" and that's walking you into all sorts of contradictions you should be smart enough to avoid.

I am literally asking you to log off of this website (echo chamber) for an hour and listen to a conversation that I found relevant to your question and relevant to the bigger picture that I am trying to describe. Instead of doing that, you pulled a quote from a description, refuted that quote in some of the most Mickeian language I've read on this website in a while, then gave me a backhanded compliment.

Maybe you're right and an attempt at dialogue really is a waste of time.

RM is hardly an echo chamber. It may skew liberal (center left) but we have a pretty robust presence of right-leaning or otherwise dissenting voices

And it should be noted that posting a one-hour video and saying "watch this" is also not dialogue

Jorge wrote:it should be noted that posting a one-hour video and saying "watch this" is also not dialogue

Of course it's not. It was embedded in a quote pyramid in hopes that it would supplement the conversation already happening.

So you're saying I did successfully refute the quote?

I'll also note that I have never said that dialogue is a waste of time (though with someone like Burt is most often is). I just think dialogue, discourse, levels of civility--these things are effects of people's lived realities, and not the causes of them.

Jorge wrote:RM is hardly an echo chamber. It may skew liberal (center left) but we have a pretty robust presence of right-leaning or otherwise dissenting voices

And it should be noted that posting a one-hour video and saying "watch this" is also not dialogue

It's the Thomas Jefferson hour for fuck's sake

Jorge wrote:RM is hardly an echo chamber. It may skew liberal (center left) but we have a pretty robust presence of right-leaning or otherwise dissenting voices

Don't talk about PHATJ'S c-cups like that

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BurtReynolds wrote:RM is definitely an echo chamber, at least in terms of post quantity. The Trump thread is 1300 pages of liberal opinions. The 4 non-democrats here can't hope to produce that much content.

apply liberally

Mickey wrote:So you're saying I did successfully refute the quote?

I disagree with a lot of it, especially this line:

Believing that would mean believing that people just *decided* to get more uncivil one day--it doesn't make any sense. Rathe, the increased polarization you're seeing is a symptom of a system of governance in crisis because it is unable to manage the contradictions engendered by late capitalism: people are turning away from civil discourse because civil discourse hasn't done shit for them, certainly not since 2008 and I would wager for certain groups it's been a lot longer than that.

I don't think the lack of civility as of late has the same roots that you do. The weaponization of information, increased tribalism, identity politics, those are the things that are turning people away from civility. That's my whole point. As Ellis states in that talk, the founding fathers and the citizens of the young country all had the same basic debates that we are still having: racial bullshit, income equality, fundamental differences in what the nation's government should look like. Weirdly enough though, nowadays an actual duel on the shores of Weehawken seems more civil than Twitter on debate night.