re: #140 Targetpractice

I stick with the opinion I expressed downstairs: A lot of these assholes sound like somebody who is “asking for a friend.” They voted for Trump, they know eventually it’s going to come out to their circle of friends, so they’re trying to push the “Can’t we just get along?” bit in order to set the stage for their own confessions.

Within the hot take industry, I think there’s a more basic bad drive where performative hot takery requires there to always be a Hegelian synthesis…not because it’s sound reasoning, but it’s the least dangerous take that keeps people reading article after article while proposing nothing and taking no stance that could alienate an advertiser or “access” to a public figure.

But there’s also the flying monkeys whose “reasonable” politics are just polished turd conservatism—David Brooks being the prime example—where this sudden demand for understanding and nuance is just another form of working the ref. “You have to understand these people, you have to forgive now and move on” is just a form of damage control—the ideology failed (again), so now we put time and effort into concealing its failure and acknowledging our participation in how it failed. To extent there’s confession, it’s only a performance of contrition in an attempt to extract reciprocal contrition and care from the wronged parties: relying on their genuine mercifulness and kindness with the full knowledge that, granted power, they’re going to once again be awful.

It’s why I keep comparing all this to an abusive marriage. Conservatives over and over use the good faith of liberals against them, but get insanely vicious if anyone points out the pattern of bad faith contrition. And it works…lots of people who think of themselves as conscientious and reasonable still view individuals and groups that point out that this is a cycle where each iteration the conservatives do more harm and get away with are viewed as the unreasonable people who don’t understand the relationship between the governing parties.

And it’s not as simple as a lefist/liberal split. When Sanders says that Trumpists are disappointed working class voters…he factually wrong, but also creating a compassionate reading of people that should be treated with wariness and distance. But when someone like Biden says (paraphrasing) “Republicans are my colleagues, they’ll find their way back to normalcy” or “we need to not treat fellow Americans as our enemies”…it’s exactly the same problem. Both attempt to locate good faith motives for bad faith actors.

Right now, we need to set distance and boundaries, declare bad faith to be bad faith, and see if any of these people are willing to re-establish a working relationship in good faith. Forgiveness will not work; compassion unleavened by self protection will not work…but to powerful people who do not want things to be better, but do want things to be “normal” enough that they profit (often by making things more desperate for the rest of us) the emphasis is going to be on forgetting the concrete bad things that happened and moving on…restarting the cycle of abuse.

And if that sounds batshit…it’s what we did with W and his goons and all the cultural damage they did, and the outcome was just them rebooting into the Tea Party and doing the same shit.