The left is really good at pretending that disagreeing with them means you don't care about the intended goal.
Meaning like, if you don't agree about tax policy or minimum wage or whatever thing, they interpret it as not caring about the poor.
As though you're in a maze and they think we should zig, and you think we should zag, in their mind it's like "oh he doesn't want to get out of the maze".
No dummy, I also want to get out of the maze. I disagree about how we do that.
It can be conceptual and a little bit of a surprising "ah-ha!" type of thing (especially if you went to college and were taught the wrong way) to see how intervention in markets hurts poor people most, and why laissez-faire is better for them.
So it's fine if you don't agree and think you're right.
But you should assume that people who disagree with you are trying to get out of the maze and have it wrong rather than their goal is to stay in the maze.
I get it. They're dogmatic.
If lowkey you know you're stuck on a belief and probably it doesn't truly make sense, there's a hesitation to squarely engage with disagreement. (Because square engagement will go bad for you.) So it's easy to go ad-hom 🙈🙉 as a way to try to rationalize it.
Whereas really your first impulse should be to give reasons.
And whatever, it's nothing new that corrupt people behave in corrupt ways.
But what I wonder is..
I bet it's easy for conservative or libertarian type of people to forget that you actually probably do care about the poor.
It's a pretty tired story line really. Taxes shmaxes. Go ahead. Skim a little off the top. Have your little paws in things. Life is still pretty good.
Hard to get too heated about economics.
But now they do a similar thing with race!
If you don't agree with their version of how to foster equality and justice and all that, they think you don't want those things.
But just like economics or getting out of the maze, it's much more constructive (and sane, and just accurate most of the time) to assume people have the same decent goal that you have, and worry about the logic and reasons for why your way works better than theirs.
It might be kind of fun though to just assert myself to be correct and allege people to be uncouth when they disagree with me 🤷🤷
Maybe I'll try it.
Like finding a warp zone when you thought you had to actually play the game.
Race war!!!
The euphemistic "they" really do feel to be starting something.
But I don't think it sticks.
There are too many people who just like.. aren't racist and stupid.
Consider the motivating factors in play..
The more you can make people feel at odds with each other, it means there's less ground-up cohesion and a bigger role for top-down coercion. (Which many entrenched interests are hooked on, and it's not like they won't try hard to keep it that way.)
So it's not like it should be surprising that there's hysteria and an effort to divide. It's not like anything stops them from being artistic and creative.
Whether it's rich vs poor or black vs white, they prefer people to be in groups and to feel at odds with each other.
But it's like a parasite feeding on a host, where you don't actually want to destroy the host.
(And then there are more acute versions of that, like it's an election year.)
So we'll have the war .. but it will happen on Twitter! 🤗🤗
A mindfuck of violent ideas that make no sense but allege themselves to be righteous and good vs people who actually are way more egalitarian but aren't so good at emotionally manipulating people.
This is the war.
I might eat my words, I might regret it..
But I feel like what's going on right now is kind of good and cleansing.
Sometimes you have to LET IT OUT
And even if your wall turns out to be surprisingly soft and your chairs goes through it and now you owe them money, that still might be better than letting it swim around inside you.
I can't speak for what it's like to be black in a country of mostly white people, with a history of how black people were treated by white people.
But I try to picture it and understand.
The history of it is really annoying to me, because I like to be in the present. If I'm playing chess, I want to look at the board and make my move. I don't want moving the Queen to H2 to possibly involve the historical significance of space H2 and how we should feel about it.
I'm here, you're here, let's go.
So it sucks that this history exists.
It's essentially like there are two different things: There's slavery and historical racism, and then there's racism as it exists today. The latter is all that really matters.
And it's easy to conflate it where you imagine more of the latter because of the former.
(The former is of course tragic. I just honestly don't lose sleep over what people who aren't me did a long time ago. I save my frustration for things that exist right now that we can change.)
If I'm a black American in the 1800s of course I'm passing on skepticism and frustration with white people to my kids. (It would be insane not to pass that on.) And if you think of age 25-35 being around when people have kids, realize that there aren't that many games of telephone between each 100-year span.
It's not that we just believe whatever our parents tell us, but we sort of pick up their vibe. Especially if it's true and sensible and justified, as those feelings were.
So whenever things start to tip better, there will always be a lagging appreciation of that. There should be some residual attitude that maybe doesn't totally match how things currently are.
And I feel like that's essentially what we're living thru right now.
And in a way it's beautiful.
If the pendulum has swung where now we over-estimate how much racism and lack of opportunity there is rather than under-estimate it, that seems like actually a good thing.
It's chaotic. Because groups and interests and extreme ideology (and in general the thing about people in power preferring there to be division) will latch onto it and fuck around.
The micro picture of it is chaotic.
But the macro is we're swinging back and closer to the pendulum settling.
This is a part of that process.
It feels kind of similar to a market bottoming.
Anyone who's into Bitcoin would be familiar with how wildly low it can go. There are the diehards who don't care much and know it'll recover..
But bottoms get really bad, and start to seem like there's no way it could possibly turn. Which is exactly what needs to happen (weak hands out) before you can pick up from a more solid base.
And then we win. 🇺🇸🇺🇸