Hey, y’all. Hope you are well.
I really don't like Twitter. I think it’s a performance venue for whatever social signaling a user wants to broadcast, inherently lending itself to focused attention of the type the user seeks. That may be good attention, or a signal-boost for something worthwhile, granted; but it may also be pure meanness, and seems like it often is. For the record, I held this dim view long before America’s current President began abusing the platform from behind the privilege of his ill-gained office.
Sometimes, however, one can find worthwhile content on Twitter (and I admit that in my cynicism I may miss much of that). With a hat-tip to Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog, I ran up on one of those today.
Here’s his article, which lists most of the twitter thread I found read-worthy and share-worthy. However, he seems to have stopped at Amanda’s brief self-plug for her book (which I want to get now), and some (IMO) really important stuff comes after that.
Here’s the start of Amanda’s thread. I’m linking rather than dropping a clickable image link to twitter itself because I’d like you to read the whole thing. (I do add one such link in a second, below.)
Here’s the stuff that I think needs more eyes.
Notice the VERY on-point observation about HRC and Al Gore. Please don’t focus on those figures in particular. Just be aware of the methodology that Amanda is incisively pointing out:
… a “safe” target … for which any accusation, no matter how false or outrageous, is somehow within bounds.
Please keep reading down to the end. It’s worth your time.
Please don’t make this completely about Omar, either. She’s the (or a) current target, but this is the GOP Hate Wurlitzer’s MO — make a recognized (or rising) politically liberal figure ground zero for any attack they choose to launch, using the same bad-faith argumentation tactics discussed in Steve M’s blog and further up Amanda’s thread, and — pivotally — make that same figure toxic to their own team. And while again I’d rather not make this a pro- or anti- thread for HRC or Gore, if we can’t recognize how those two figures were made toxic to team D, we’re blinding our own eyes, to our detriment. I fully admit, I fell prey to some of this messaging myself, because — again, crucially — I trusted some of the sources before digging into the meat of the content.
That’s the danger of confirmation bias. It’s one of the most comforting pillars of false argumentation and opinion manipulation, and that very comfort factor is what makes it insidious, effective, and sometimes more difficult to spot than you’d think.
That’s what I’m asking everyone to take careful note of, and to… I’m not sure how to put this… maybe install some mental filters specifically for it?
It’s not just “our worst is better than their best,” although that’s true. It’s, we can’t let them put words in our mouths, or our minds.
I’d like to drop a quote from Liss McEwan, one of my favorite feminist authors (it’s a bit long):
Mike Pence would say he doesn't have a problem with who Pete Buttigieg is. He would say he has a problem with what Pete Buttigieg chooses to do. He would even say he doesn't have a problem with Pete being gay; he has a problem with Pete acting on it and that God gives us all tests and challenges, and that Pete is failing his test.
I know this because I heard it growing up. Over and over. So did many of you. Hate the sin; love the sinner.
If Buttigieg actually went up against Pence in a debate on this, he'd lose. He'd cast Pence as hating who he is, and Pence would put on his compassion face and talk about hating the sin but loving the sinner, and Buttigieg would have inadvertently set us right back to the Bush era, when homosexuality was sickeningly regarded as a matter of opinion on which good people could disagree.
And we are fighting an uphill battle against some of the most evil and most sophisticated fuckers on the planet. We can't win with someone who can't see at least as well as I can how shit like the above would play out.
(Source. Emphasis added.)
Obviously, Liss isn’t a big fan of Mayor Pete. Sorry, I know I’m saying this a lot, but please don’t get lost in those weeds either. This isn’t about a particular candidate, it’s about not falling for the psyops of the other side. And those cheap tricks and shit-shots are going to be leveled at any and all of our potential candidates, in this race and every one coming, out past the horizon.
My point is, evaluate — evaluate — evaluate. Mass media is a more slippery term — and thing itself — than ever it has been. The messaging we are getting is, IMO, designed as much to shape opinions as it is to inform. A cogent case can be made that this has been the case for a long time, and I’d agree for the most part — but there’s another element. To quote yet another author I like, Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station:
We’ve been given the tools and access to god-like awareness, but not the training or the intellect or the self-discipline to manage it.
This, this right here, is the problem with America.
The source of that quote is here, but he’s written quite a lot about the subject. His point, with which I agree, is that we modern folks are bombarded, barraged, deluged with information, most of which is minimally vetted for factual integrity, or not vetted at all. (And by “factual integrity” I don’t just mean that it contains facts — cherry-picked facts can be just as bad as falsehoods, and frequently are.) Unjudging acceptance of such questionable information is a vice we’d love to lay at the feet of our ideological opponents — and to do that is, again, to blind ourselves to an uncomfortable but useful truth — we’re just as capable of doing it as they are.
The problem is, looping back to Liss’ point above — the message-makers on the other side know that and are trying to use it.
So how about we don’t let ‘em.
Don’t let ‘em turn one — any — of our bright stars into a black hole. Not Rep. Omar. Not AOC. Not Mayor Pete. Not Beto O’Rourke. Not anybody.
And no, since I expect it’ll come up, I’m absolutely not saying “ignore bad stuff our people do,” like VP Biden being Mr. Grabbyhands. (There’s a fantastic diary about touch awareness and consent by KM Wehrstein that you should absolutely read.) I’m saying let’s evaluate our potential candidates on our terms, not theirs; and let’s not let opposition messaging creep its way into our discourse.
I always use too many words, and I’ve done so again here. I hope some of these stick, and make sense.
If we have any candidates who are potentially toxic, we need to be the one to make those judgments. And we need to do it through introspective analysis, not by accepting the messaging of bad-faith actors, even unknowingly. (So be willing to look twice at sources, and sources of sources. Please.)
And we need to be able to talk about these things in a way that isn’t internally toxic and corrosive.
So, you know, let’s work on that.
Thanks for reading.