Random people on Twitter are not helpless victims, though. That’s the kind of thinking I think we need to get away from.
The more I think about this, the stronger I feel it.
I don’t really see this as a both sides issue. No one is afraid of being fired for expressing ‘woke’ views, and there is no social penalty for deliberately insulting groups that vote Republican, let alone for doing so accidentally. Minorities who express right-wing views are even considered an exception to the usual PC rules - their ‘lived experience’ is discounted and it’s okay to attack them. All the pressure is to conform to a progressive agenda.
You’re right, of course; that’s a major difference. I got my wires crossed.
I suspect that I strongly disagree with you about the abuse dynamic, but I don’t think I’m fully grasping the analogy. Who are the abusers and who are the victims of the abuse, specifically? My understanding falls apart when you apply it to Republicans saying they won the election, and claiming Democrats did the same.
I’m not really talking about the Twitter scrum, though.
I’m talking about the discourse higher up, and the fact that elected Republicans and influential pundits are trying to convince the conservative “base” that the RADICAL LEFT BLM ANTIFA are going to murder them in their beds and burn down their houses, what with BLM being a terrorist organization and all.
I think this is an EXTREMELY dangerous situation, especially coupled with the rise in right wing violence and the proliferation of militia groups, many associated with fundamentalist churches that are preparing for what they see as a holy war.
Earlier this year, I found out that a family member of mine, a construction worker, was carrying a handgun in the glove compartment of his company owned work vehicle (he has a carry permit). His employer had instructed him to do so because the work truck was painted with an American flag design and therefore he might be attacked by Antifa. It was really freaky and I didn’t know how to respond except with “That’s bullshit”, but it wasn’t sufficient. At least he doesn’t work there anymore.
This is what I mean by abuse dynamic, and to be honest I haven’t quite worked out how I feel about the dynamic down at the Twitter scrum level. It feels like a fair fight if you look at it on that level alone, but I think what’s happening higher up might affect that, but I don’t have a theory yet.
I’ve heard the abuse metaphor being used before with regard to Trump. I could relate to it immediately. To those who have been abused by a narcissist or sociopath, it really felt like half the country just enthusiastically elected our abuser. There have always been parallels in the way my own suffering was swept under the rug in preservation of the status quo. And of course for those of us who went through something like this personally, Trump’s election sent us straight back to therapy.
But I think it can be useful to separate the primary cause from the external trigger. Trump is a massive trigger for a lot of us, but it doesn’t actually mean we are helpless and in danger. I guess danger is subjective, but I’m not being dragged out of my house and shot for being a liberal, and if some conservatives choose to demonize me, it affects me not one iota.
Someone recently posted on one of my social media groups that she’d been sexually assaulted by a doctor. She went on to describe what sounded like poor bedside manner more than anything else (he was not communicative, he ignored her pain.) But because she had a history of abuse, she felt unsafe, she felt violated and she reported him to the medical board and was seriously considering filing a police report. I wasn’t there but it seemed to me she was confusing her primary trauma, the abuse, with the trigger, a shitty doctor.
Trump is probably more like the shitty doctor in this analogy.
But is that what actually happens?
Or is it that someone who is already a public figure says bigoted shit, and people ask those who are giving them that platform if they support those statements of bigotry?
Or go back to the 40s-50s, right? I like to think that we are better than those places. And especially if you phrase it the way that you did there, people may just think that you are coming from a place of intolerance.
Do we want to put in other worker protections in the many work-at-will states? Or just this one? If a worker expresses their personal opinion about a co-worker, or about a boss, should those be protected opinions?
I’m not even sure how you would legislate that, much less enforce it. What if he expressed his opinions to his co-workers that he despises them for their particular minority status, then that gets out to the internet?
They have no co-workers, no bosses, and no possibility of every being in a position of power over anyone else?
Would a VP not have any influence over the hiring and promotion of the people working in their department?
But does secretly use their bigotry to influence their hiring or promotion decisions?
That’s two different things. The first you have just said should be inactionable, as it is simply their personal opinion. What’s the difference between being in the KKK and being in an knitting group, if you remove the personal opinion of bigotry?
The second is something that is pretty hard to prove, as has been demonstrated time and time again.
Not true. I’ve had bigoted bosses who would reprimand employees for not agreeing with their bigotry. They voted Republican, and would ask who I voted for, with a very strong implication that my job would be made less comfortable if I gave the wrong answer.
Many small business owners are Republicans, and they are generally less tolerant of dissent in their employees than liberals would be.
A restaurant I used to go to put up a larger than life size picture of Trump, do you think that there would be no penalty for one of his employees insulting a group that voted Republican?
Yes, that is exactly what happens. You don’t usually hear about those cases because they’re not famous.
And is there a social media mob who will find their criticism on Twitter, investigate them to find out where they work, and send emails to their boss about it? If so, then it is a both sides thing.
But even so, I consider the progressive version to be a far bigger threat. Because the real issue is not people being fired, it’s people self censoring as a result - and it is the progressive side that has control over academia (including academic publishing) and the majority of the mainstream media. Forcing people in those professions to toe an ideological line is much more serious for society than forcing employees of small businesses to do the same.
A fine example of right-wing virtue signaling, I’m sure you’d agree. If a restaurant did that in a predominantly blue part of the country, they’d surely be facing a customer boycott that would possibly put them out of business. I think we discussed this in the past when talking about Taylor Gourmet. I realize there were other financial considerations for them going out of business but the boycott certainly did not help.
As to staff insulting customers, well, that’s just bad for business regardless of politics.
But @DemonTree is probably right about there being little to no consequences for expressing progressive views in general. At the height of the Trump Administration, liberals were very vocal about how much they hated Trump and Republicans who supported him. There was virtually no social consequence for 4+ years of some of the most vitriolic criticism of the right by the left. I know this because I not only read it but expressed it myself without fear of reprisal. Many of us did. And even though there was a rise in hate crime against minorities by people who largely aligned with right wing views, that did not result in shutting down anti-Trump/GOP rhetoric. In fact, it lead to huge anti-Trump demonstrations and played a major role in igniting BLM protests.
Where I disagree is here:
I don’t think that woke rhetoric is as big a threat at the end of the day than nazis marching and the type of cult personality devotion that was on display by Trump supporters at MAGA rallies. That, to me, is a far larger existential threat to the thin veneer of America’s civil society.
I see moderate liberals as being an effective guardrail against overly zealous left wing extremes. Many people in this thread have been critical of the more ridiculous ideas put forward by the left extreme. I do not see that kind of thing happening on the right with the exception of a few responsible conservatives like those in the Lincoln Project.
Absolutely. Right now there’s an active campaign to fire a Subway spokesperson for kneeling during the national anthem. My cousin is furious about it because she has relatives who gave their lives for our freedom blah blah blah. This is just a political reality no matter what you believe.
I’m not talking about Trump, though. Trump’s a mascot, a symbol, an incarnation. He’s every hateful and negative Republican idea made flesh. He’s a cheerleader, an instigator. Without diverting the thread, I’ll mention that I hold the unconventional opinion that we would be in an even worse place right now (in the beginning of President Cruz’s second term) if Trump had never oozed down that escalator.
He’s not the problem. The problem is the religious fervor he’s unleashed, combined with the idea the Democrats and democracy are evils that need to be eradicated.
Conservatives have been verbally, and sometimes physically, assaulting liberals on a daily basis, and it’s a one way street. Restaurant workers and store clerks, flight attendants, health care workers, teachers and election workers bear the brunt of it. There was the attack on the Biden campaign bus, and a barely mentioned attack on an AC contractor who had the misfortune to be working at a voting center — because if there’s a van in the parking lot, it must be full of ballots, right?
A certain percentage of the population has decided to opt out of the social contract, people on one side only.
I can also relate to this dynamic personally, although my story is different than yours. My young adult foster child began to exhibit some disturbing personality disorders, including irrational paranoia (he thought I was poisoning him). I made an appointment with a therapist with the intent of working on my communication skills.
I began to tell my stories to my therapist, and after a few minutes he stopped me. He said “You are in a very dangerous situation, and you need to get out now”. I replied “You don’t understand, he’s not hurting me, he thinks I’m trying to hurt him.” He said “I know, that’s why he’s dangerous”.
Ten or fifteen years ago I would’ve been more conciliatory. If my fiancé hadn’t died in 2005, I’d probably be on here ranting about my Trump supporting asshole of an ex-husband. But this isn’t a normal political squabble over taxing the rich or climate regulation, it’s about one side putting a gangster into the Presidency and letting him do whatever he wanted as long as he pwned the libs.
In about a half hour, im leaving my house for an HOA board meeting. Im really dreading it, because at the last meeting one Trump supporting asshole on the board verbally assaulted me for being a goddamned New York liberal who came down here and ruined everything and I’m still not sure what set him off. It may be affecting my mood today.
ETA: what ostensibly set him off was me voting to repair a pothole on a street he doesn’t use, but I think it may go deeper than the pothole. Which was pretty deep.
I think this opinion in the Washington Post about not using the word “exotic” to refer to food is a fine example of annoying virtue signaling. https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/07/07/exotic-food-xenophobia-racism/
Boy, that does not make condos sound appealing… I’m sorry you have to deal with that BS.
I think this final paragraph sums it up well:
Ultimately, there are just two kinds of food: food you’re familiar with, and food you’re not. If any particular food fits into the latter category, for you, rather than expressing disgust or disdain, ask yourself: Why am I not familiar with it, and don’t I want to change that?
I mean, I love to cook and enjoy a variety of international cuisines. Figs will always be exotic fruit to me even though I can buy them any time I want at Trader Joe’s. As are Moroccan tagine dishes. The exoticism comes from the spices and cooking methods that are “other” to what I grew up eating. What is wrong with that? But also no, I do not want to try everything I’m not familiar with. I’m confident that I never want to eat dishes made with insects, or reptiles. I don’t give a damn if they do taste like chicken. I’m just not interested in changing that.
Yes, it is. In the modern era, everyone has a platform thanks to social media and a lot of the popular mainstream media sites get a lot of their “News” from Twitter/Facebook/Reddit, so “People on the internet are angry about a thing” pieces are extremely common and help spread the story around, which further puts employers in a difficult position.
It’s one thing to say “Yeah, we don’t care that Steve from Accounts is transphobic” when it’s just a couple of people on Twitter with single-digit followers getting upset about it, it’s another thing when one of the reporters at a tabloidy news website finds the thread, turns it into a story, and then contacts the company basically saying “So, what are you going to do about this?” and puts “Company X did not respond to requests for comment” at the bottom of the story if the company’s people ignore the journalist.
I’m not American so I don’t know what that means, sorry.
Unless it’s an Ethnic Supremacist knitting group, the differences between membership of an organisation which spents its time knitting tea cosies and baby jumpers and dolls and scarves etc, often for disadvantaged/underprivileged/the less fortunate, and a group dedicated to, well, the stuff the KKK is associated with, should be patently obvious enough for the answer to be self-explanatory.
It’s interesting as you mention this, because as a foreigner it was quite concerning seeing the concerted vitriol directed at Mr Trump from the media - not just “traditional” outlets, but a huge number of media outlets in general and especially those with a youth focus/skew.
What was more concerning was that so much of it didn’t seem to be based on specific flaws with proposals (and there were flaws, as there are with any proposal), but more just “Orange Man Bad” at every opportunity. It became hard to work out whether issues were because something he’d suggested just wasn’t feasible because it wasn’t practical (like building an anti-fascist protection rampart border wall across the length of the entire US-Mexico border), or whether something he’d suggested wasn’t feasible because he’d said it and therefore must be dismissed out of hand simply because Mr Trump suggested it.
Legitimate questions he asked, like “Why have we got nukes if we can’t use them?” were met with the editorial equivalent of miming someone having an epileptic fit and ‘see how stupid he is???’
The polarisation of US politics has always been a bit eyebrow raising but I think we can all agree things got a lot worse over the past four years, and that it’s moved on from governmental politics and is now manifesting itself in this woke-vs-normal-people culture war we’re seeing play out.
You may not be aware that Trump has been a punchline his entire life. People treated him as the flamboyant idiot and braggart that managed to bankrupt his way to fame. He was a media darling because they could always count on him for the perfect illustration of Dunning-Kruger effect.
Again, Trump was fundamentally flawed and intellectually stunted. That is not an exaggeration:
QED
There is a grain of truth in this. I’ll give you that. Trump never failed to step on his own dick even when the idea his was pushing was not entirely wrong. His immigration policy was a disaster, particularly with respect to the child separation fiasco. But he was not wrong for wanting to control illegal border migration. But if he had sent Pence to central Latin America and instructed him to say, “Do not come to America”, heads would explode. When Biden sent Harris to do it, it was in the news for a few days and now you have to make an effort to find any news about it. Where is the vitriol about that and about the detention centers which prohibit media from access and reporting? I’m sure somebody will provide a helpful link to some recent news that progressives are very upset about this. But they’re not, are they? Not really.
Cult of personality politics, QAnon conspiracies, alternative facts, insurrection and anti-mask/anti-vaccine resistance is not “normal”. The fact that you call it “normal” shows the extent to which the abnormal has been normalized among a significant part of the population. Even among those abroad to whom authoritarianism holds appeal.
Yup. And plenty of the Republican officials endorsing Trump are doing so for similar reasons. Whatever they really think, they know they need to do it to gain the support of his base.
I wasn’t actually comparing those things, but more like comparing the Subway spokesperson getting cancelled for kneeling during the anthem, vs a doctor getting cancelled for publishing an academic paper. Both those things are wrong and likely devastating to the individuals involved, but the latter is also damaging to the pursuit of knowledge in academia, and as a consequence to public trust in institutions. The hugely disparate scrutiny that papers going against the ‘liberal’ ideological position now attract, and the significant chance of reputational damage for trying to publish one, means no one can have much trust in the academic literature going forward. Studies that get the ‘wrong’ result will most likely not be published. Studies that get the desired result will be vaunted no matter their flaws.
Similarly, when journalists are nakedly partisan, and see their job as being to campaign for a particular outcome, and any journalist who steps out of the ideological line risks being fired, no one can have much trust in what the media reports. That’s both a problem in itself, and also feels in to the Maga phenomenon as Trump’s supporters increasingly reject any outside sources of information.
And although moderate/classical liberals are to some extent trying to stand up against this, I don’t see them having much success. Rather anyone who objects is designated as right-wing and then ignored.
As for Trump’s personality cult, that is also a serious threat. I don’t really know which is more dangerous. In many ways they feed off each other. Both have to some extent abandoned the principles that upheld the old liberal order, both in many ways seem more interested in tearing down than in building.
This is my impression too. The entire media spent so much time screeching about him that it was impossible to pick the signal out of the noise. After 4 years I just tune out most of it, and maybe that makes me more blasé about the threat than I should be. Since 2016 they’ve been telling us the world is going to end, and it hasn’t, so…
Most people paying attention were not worried about the feasibility of Trump’s policies so much as incompetent leadership, a hard push into authoritarianism and attempts to stack the justice system and other critical roles with wildly incompetent people. Not to mention the gleeful undermining of the democratic process. These aren’t minor things. And unfortunately history bore out the fact that we were right to be concerned. Our country is pretty much shattered. Biden is a temporary reprieve, at best.
Let’s get one thing clear. Nobody gets a pass because of some stupid shit liberals or the media does. It doesn’t matter how nutty the woke crowd is, there’s still no excuse for supporting Trump or supporting anyone who supports him. “Confusion” is a cop-out. Being put off by “virtue signaling” is a cop-out. This was a case where there was clear and away only one correct choice and only one correct course of action, and Republicans failed on every measure. No amount of whining about the Twitterati is going to change their moral culpability.
This is important to remember. Trump was to 1980s-90s big business sort of what the Kardashians were to post-2000 show business. Something that some would consider a joke about succeeding on the strength of image without substance… while dismissing that large parts of the population actually admired that.
It was when he went into politics and went hard for birhterism and RW populism and got no effective pushback but rather complicity from the alleged “conservatives”, that he began being feared.
From a foreign observer’s perspective, the whole thing was just as worrying as the sidling towards authoritarianism, IMO.
I’m pretty sure Mr Trump could have proposed giving every single person in America an ice cream of their choosing for free, and the headlines would be “TRUMP PLAN TO KILL AMERICA’S DIABETICS” or “TRUMP DISRESPECTS VEGANS WITH REFUSAL TO OFFER NON-DAIRY TREAT” or something equally unhinged.
It honestly seemed to me that a significant number of journalists in America decided their job wasn’t to report the news, but to be part of some “resistance movement” working to undermine and bring down the President.
I’m not talking about legitimate and warranted criticism, but more how everything related to Trump was seemingly an excuse to stick the boot in, in one form or another.