I'm at Panera, and I don't really feel like writing anything in particular. But I do really feel like playing 4thewords, so Imma just ramble for a while.
My Twitter feed is All Politics All the Time Now. A big popular thing is Punch Nazis in the Face. Some white nationalist dude got punched in the face and my Twitter feed is now all Pro-Violence
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I don't think I can live with the former. I have too many gay friends whose marriages, potential or actual, are important to them.
The thing that gets me about Trump is that... Either there are very few people who have lived with abusers in this country, or there are so many that they've normalized it. I looked at him and I saw my late sire, writ larger and with richer parents, and fled screaming. (Though for what it's worth, my sire might've had better picks for Secretary of X Departments. Which is saying SOMETHING. *headdesk*)
I am of two minds on punching Nazis. Maybe 3, because I am bloody-minded (look, I embraced the Sith label a long time ago and am waiting for my lightning badges to arrive...). On the one hand, yeah, you're right. On the other hand, it also strikes me as pushback for a social norm that says, "Being a Nazi is socially unacceptable." In a problematic way. Though for Nazis, who believe in Nazi things, and are currently emboldened to be kind of publicly Nazi... I' ( ... )
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Yours sounds like a perfectly reasonable description of Trump to me.
I already said my bit about Nazi-punching, so, yeah. I think Cluudle below has a good point that most people are using it as a joke, and while "use violence against speech" is not the awesomest thing to joke about, I can understand why people find it funny. :/
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I'd like the government to not be involved either, but unfortunately, with varying degrees of recognition for different formations of People Living Indefinitely With Other People... Someone needs to have the big stick to say, "No, hospital where dying person was taken because it was an emergency, you MUST allow the person's designated PLIWOP-partner(s) to visit them, and make medical decisions, even if you don't approve of that pattern of PLIWOP!"
There's also the structure of taxation, that currently impacts PLIWOPs... So it's tangled. It'd take a lot of editing to untangle in something vaguely resembling a fair way.
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Part of twitter being a bad medium for politics is that my absolute glee about a Nazi getting punched in the face doesn't have wordspace for bits like 'that doesn't mean we should make a habit of punching Nazis,' or really any other complicated bits.
I have a complicated tangle of feelings about people who voted for Trump, but I haven't stopped talking to anyone over it yet.
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Today is difficult, but cheering violence against speech, even of the most detestable, disgusting variety, is not a look that will age well.
- Nick Spencer (@nickspencer) January 20, 2017
The reaction was that this -- that saying "maybe don't cheer use of violence against speech" -- was a completely unacceptable, unforgivable, monstrous thing to tweet. His work needed to be boycotted! He needed to be destroyed! HOW DARE HE. He is Neville Chamberlain! He is saying we should all stand still and be slaughtered!
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So it's not just "Rape jokes are hilarious!" but "IF YOU SPEAK OUT AGAINST RAPE JOKES YOU DESERVE TO BE RAPED."
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I guess after a while of this, I lost my sense of humor. v_v
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I'm a little too tired to make sense tonight, I'm sorry - I'll swing back around later. We shouldn't tear each other to pieces, though, turning the internet into a circular firing squad.
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If we're going to get ourselves out of this deep division, we need to stop demonizing everyone who disagrees with us. :/ Punching people in the face doesn't move us in that direction.
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Although, I have to admit, I don't mind people demonizing white nationalists. I mean, Richard Spencer (the guy who got punched) advocates for "a white homeland" and "peaceful ethnic cleansing" and deliberatle uses Nazi rhetoric. I am totally down with people calling him a vile scumbag, because wow, HE REALLY IS.
But yeah, it bugs me a iot that (a) people have collectively decided that his speech is enough to justify violence against him and (b) that I can't tell the difference between what lot of vocal liberals say about Richard Spencer vs what they say about any given conservative. v_v
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I feel like "Trump is president" should be an object lesson in the virtues of a limited government that can't do much and especially CAN'T DO MUCH HARM but unfortunately, this does not seem to have persuaded anyone but people who already leaned libertarian. :/
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I so hear you about not wanting to promote "kill the bad guy" as the ideal form conflict resolution. I wrote The Moon Etherium and The Sun Etherium both because I wanted stories where the good guys do not win by killing the bad guys. The tidy narrative where heroes kill people because they're bad people and that's all they can ever be is viscerally gratifying but I do not think it is true to life. Real people do not divide nearly so neatly into "good" and "evil". The point at which we decide a large fraction of the population is "evil" and can only be stopped by killing them is also the point at which we consign a large fraction of the population on "our" side to death, too. Because the people we decided are evil are not going to just ( ... )
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Oooh, I haven't read/watched V for Vendetta, but that reminds me of the other thing I was going to say: the people on my Twitter timeline posting "life under authoritarian regimes is okay for most people" stuff were definitely doing it from a place of pointing out that you don't wake up one morning and discover that it is now We Are Living In A YA Dystopia Day -- it just happens gradually, bit by bit, and your life changes in subtle ways until at some point you're there and didn't notice, but it's not so bad after all, is it? That there's not going to be a watershed moment where you can stand up and put your atheist/agnostic/Christian/Jewish/whatever self down as Muslim on the religious ( ... )
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I am glad to hear you are reading TME, behind or otherwise! Today's installment is one of my favorite parts. ♥
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