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Daily Rant
Today’s focus: People who strawman liberal bogeymen without knowing what they actually are saying.
No specific news trigger, but God is it irritating.
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6 Responses to “Daily Rant”
Thank you, David. I’ve had those same thoughts many times but never bothered to put them into words. You’ve done it well.
This is of course the classic case of seeing the worst in your enemy and the best in yourselves. People on the right see the furthest left as the entire left and people on the left think the same of their counterparts.
I’ve actually ceased to find any real use for the term “politically correct” anymore. By and large, it’s pulled out to simply disparage the views of one side. No one likes being politically correct, so if a belief or action is successfully labeled PC, we get to disregard it from then on.
This also should be classified under “we all do it sometimes”, not necessarily just with politics, but with the people we work with/for, people we meet in the streets, etc…
I think it’s a heuristic we develop in our individual worldviews. life is like X, so every piece of information that gets processed is interpreted through our worldview narrative.
Heuristics are shortcuts, and by their very nature, often wrong, but I don’t know if it’s possible to get rid of them since they sublimate so easilly.
Here, let me toss out one: A company is said to be laying off people, while making a record profit. One’s first reaction is pretty telling here, as mention of “fat cats”, “capitalists” etc.. really oversimplifies things, but I can’t think of a way around it without actually have someone lecture me on the topic and show me the numbers, and all the data that made the company take that decision. I shouldn’t take the shortcut of assuming it’s just greed, but since it fits my view so well, I really can’t help it.
However, I should add that while I think the problem is a genral human one, I’m not forgiving it. I think that polite discourse requires people to avoid directly insulting others without having a good reason, like impactful words, or zen slapping.
I have no beef with your rant, David, as long as you acknowledge that people who strawman with conservative boogeymen are equally irritating. And belli’s comment is important too: it’s human nature to do this in almost all areas of life, but just more obvious when people are doing it in political terms.
Conservative strawmen are equally irritating, but they have somewhat less prevalence. There are far fewer people who hold Dworkin’s views in high regard than hold Coulter’s (and, there’s probably no equivalence — I haven’t seen Dworkin wish for the death of pornographers. Maybe she has, but no one’s listening to her.) Very few people are ideologically committed to the extremes of political correctness, but this administration has repeatedly defended keeping open options for torture. I tend to assume people are rational until they give me otherwise, but frankly saying “I trust Michelle Malkin” is enough.
It just seems to me that there are a lot of conservative strawmen that aren’t strawmen. Kansas school board did in fact put creationism in the classroom, the Bush administration does violate the Geneva Conventions and imprison people including US citizens without trial, and folks like Coulter, Limbaugh, and Savage have HUGE followings, the budget is balloning out of control, etc….