One of the things that I spend a lot of time wondering about, and honestly, it is way too much time given the subject matter (which you will soon see), is why people choose to be the way they are. Why do so many people just choose to be garbage human beings when there are so many other options. What triggered this most recently was this tweet:
this Judge Holden motherfucker https://t.co/r32NlYea0k
— John Cole (@Johngcole) June 14, 2023
Now before we get too far, I know why some people are the way they are, and much of that comes down to them just being stupid. I don’t mean your run-of-the-mill stupid- I mean, math rules the world and just by nature half the people out there are dumber than average. I mean stoopid with two o’s stupid. Lauren Boebert comes to mind. The Wasilla Wingnut herself, Sarah Palin. Your average MAGA moron. The dumber Trump son, Eric.
There’s also people who I think are just pure evil. Matt Gaetz comes to mind. He’s just rotten through and through. Born into power and privilege, but just a flawed soul. When I watched the miniseries on Netflix about the Murdaugh family, every time I saw those shitty pig ignorant evil cunts I thought of Matt Gaetz. The other Trump son, Don, Jr. According to Craig Mazin, Ted Cruz fits in this category.
And then there are the people who do it for money, and there are lots of people we can put on this list and I don’t want to think about them.
But what I don’t get are the people like JD Vance, or Josh Hawley, or Nancy Mace, or Elise Stefanik, or Lindsay Graham. All white. All well educated. All with viable careers without having to sell their souls. All could live happy, good, wealthy, well adjusted, and decent lives, but they choose not to. They have all made conscious decisions to be awful. To rot themselves from the inside out and take the rest of us with them.
And it doesn’t have to be this way. They could change. The American people love a redemption tale. No one is too far gone- basically if you have not murdered, raped, or molested a child, there is a path to redemption in the US (if you are white). But they choose not to. They choose to be the way they are.
And I don’t fucking get it.
The only thing you really can control in this world is how you feel about things and how you behave. You can control your story, you can, to a large extent, change who you are and how people think about you and how people interact with you and how history will remember you if at all.
And they choose to be awful. And for what?
Citizen Alan
If I ever met J.D. Vance in person (and it wouldn’t be career suicide), I would tell him to his face that I 100% believed his mother could have kicked drugs and gone on to have a happy decent life if only she hadn’t been saddled at a young age with a POS like him for a son. An absolutely loathsome specimen of humanity.
BR
In 1941, Harpers published a piece called “Who Goes Nazi?” The different groups of folks they consider there are pretty similar to the groups you list. Some things don’t seem to change.
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
Oclarkiclarki
John, you are assigning way too much free will to humans.
Tinare
Why do they do it? Power and money. Few Republicans are safe in primaries without being horrible people.
West of the Rockies
Malice and stupidity is another option: Trump.
Jeffg166
I think Vance is a deeply unhappy person. I did read his book and he came from a really screwed up family. So did I but I did not go his route. His weight problem tells me he eats for comfort. That says a lot.
Tony Jay
Because if you’re an absolute shit on a power trip, there’s no better feeling than being an absolute shit 24/7, hurting people who can’t hurt you back, having other people who know what you did defend you, and getting away with it, all in the serene conviction that the people who write the stories of the day will cover for you and resolutely refuse to build a narrative about the absolute nature of your shittiness.
Or to put it another way, If you’re already an absolute shit, why wouldn’t you join the Guild of Shittery Absolute?
Ohio Mom
Ah, my Senator JD Vance (makes me nauseous typing that). He partnered with Sherrod Brown rail safety bill after that horrendous derailment and chemical spill in that little Ohio town.
And then he watered down the bill at the behest if his chemical company donors: https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2023/06/report-j-d-vance-watered-down-his-rail-safety-bill/
He’s just plain greedy, at a level I barely understand.
Old Man Shadow
There are many paths someone can take in life.
Some people who see the inequality, injustices, suffering in the world take the path of empathy. They may see themselves in the other person’s eyes. They may think if they were that person, they would want someone to help them. They may consider it a divine mandate to care for the people suffering those things. Empathy. Let’s help one another out.
Some people see all that and think, “I must be really something because I’m not like them. I deserve what I have. They deserve what they have. They must be doing something wrong or they’d be as well-off as I am.” I am part of the upper caste or the top of the pyramid. It’s my duty to keep the pyramid in tact because only people like me, the worthy, are fit to rule the masses of failures, losers, and fools.
The path of authoritarianism or power or pride.
That’s the path Graham and his ilk are on.
I hope it leads them to destruction.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I think Vance may have been damaged by the unexpected success of HillBilly Elegy. Of course, his walls were thin to let that damage him. But it increased his sense of his own brilliance and the deference he’s entitled to.
Chris
I was a Republican for all of a couple years as a teenager (blame the post-9/11 zeitgeist and too many Tom Clancy novels). And while there were multiple reasons I ultimately quit and started moving left in the mid-2000s, when I look back, one of the things underlying all of them is that it just did not feel good. You spend enough time on the right-wing blogosphere sharing their outrage and their ideas and it’s like, you know what, this is just not the kind of person I want to turn into.
Matt McIrvin
I recently saw a video by trans YouTuber Lily Simpson about Graham Linehan, the British comedy writer who became a huge figure in the UK TERF movement. She was looking at his body of work–“Father Ted”, “Black Books”, “The IT Crowd” (including the “trans episode” that started it all) to see if you could see seeds of his later fall into full-time bigotry in there, and concluded that you really couldn’t. He wasn’t terribly enlightened on these subjects but wasn’t a monomaniacal hater either. Even that “IT Crowd” episode… wasn’t good, but it also wasn’t worse than the run of comedy in that era dealing with the subject, way less bad than what you’d see on “Family Guy”.
What happened was that trans advocates criticized him for various elements of that episode, and he refused to accept any criticism whatsoever, took it as a grave insult to his progressive bona fides and pushed back hard, and then he fell in with a crowd of people who were egging him on to go further. And it was just this self-reinforcing feedback loop.
I think the desire for approval by a clique of admirers is powerful in a lot of people and can drive them to dark places. I don’t know if that’s what happened to these people, but it might be in the same ballpark.
bbleh
@Tinare: this is closest to my take, except I would include attention. Nobody becomes a politician at that level without absolutely craving attention and approval. Some of them don’t need the money, and while I think some are intoxicated by power, others don’t really care because they have no interest in governance of any sort. But they want to be in the spotlight and be applauded.
And I would distinguish between being awful, in an ontological sense, aka to “rot themselves from the inside out,” and behaving awfully. By all accounts some of these people in person are very different from their public personas, but they choose — cynically imo — to behave that way because it gets them the attention and the applause, at least in modern MAGAland.
Now this ain’t all of them. As observed, some are just rotten people — Trump, Gaetz, and I think MTG — and they just happen to have found their niche, to the detriment of us all. But I think the majority are just acting the part (although after a lifetime of acting, the line between being and behaving becomes blurry indeed).
Jeffg166
@Ohio Mom: It may be due to feeling inadequate next to the people he is around now. Money and power confers status on him. Or maybe he’s just another psychopath.
Baud
Sadly, there are times I feel like I would have been more successful in life if I acted like a Republican asshole. Still glad I took a different path though.
trollhattan
@Dorothy A. Winsor: He went from “I have a fancypants degree” to money and fame pretty much overnight. Senate seat adds the missing power, to the trifecta.
He did not have to embrace Trumpism in any form in order to gain his goals, that’s 100% on him and renders him a sociopath, at the bare minimum.
Was he an Oprah product?
HumboldtBlue
And being kind is free. It doesn’t cost you anything, it can certainly help others if for nothing more than a smile and a good morning. Of course, that requires some measure of empathy, of self-reflection, of reciprocation without any guarantee of reward other than being kind.
It’s simply a lot more fun than being an asshole.
West of the Rockies
It also takes so much energy to live in a state of perpetual anger and resentment and fear; it makes life soooo much less pleasant. I don’t know why people choose it. Actually, I do know: ego dictates one cling to obviously-flawed beliefs than to admit you were wrong, gullible, stupid. Also, you’d rather cheat to win than lose and learn humility.
bbleh
@Baud: I’ve often thought the same about certain careers. But then I think, no, because I would have had to be with those people all the time, and that makes all the voices in my head scream.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@trollhattan: I believe he was.
Betty Cracker
@Old Man Shadow: I think you nailed it. In my experience, the “I must be really something” people are trying to convince themselves as much or more than anyone else. Their insistence that they’re special has an air of desperation. The same impulse drives schoolyard bullies and snobs who harass outgroups. They don’t want to be a victim, so they victimize.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I think I could have been REALLY GOOD at peddling pseudoscientific bullshit as a profession. “Quantum” self-help books, that kind of thing. My absent-minded-professor affect and degrees could be played for credibility, and I think I could write better versions of the patter than most of the practitioners do. But it’d require a really deep rot of the soul.
Roger Moore
@Tinare:
Sure, but you’re just pushing the decision making back one step. Nobody is required to run for office, much less align themselves with the Republicans. They’ve already chosen their course of action by deciding to run for office as a member of a party that requires its candidates to be awful people. Why did they choose to do that?
randy khan
Some of these people crave power and will do whatever they can to get it and maintain it. For Graham, being a Senator is pretty much his entire life at this point, and “retired Senator” wouldn’t give him the same kind of jolt.
Vance, well, I think he’s mad at people who don’t buy his schtick.
James E Powell
@BR:
I recall reading that or something just like that on some website during the years of the Bush/Cheney Junta. I realized then that I had “would be a Nazi” people in my family and among my circle of friends and acquaintances.
They were pro-torture, pro-killing any and all Muslims, pro-invading & bombing any Muslim country, and absolute worshippers of Bush Jr, comparing him to Winston Churchill.
That they became ardent Trumpsters should not have surprised me, but it did. I thought there was a line, but there is no line, no bottom beneath which they can sink.
I shared a bedroom with one such person until I was 18 years old. I have no explanation that makes any sense. When I asked him to explain it, he gave me a list of defects in my character that could have come from any right-wing talk show host. It was like he didn’t know me at all.
AM in NC
@BR: Holy shit. Holy shit. I mean this is today EXACTLY. Down to being able to picture the specific modern-day example (Stephen Miller, Trump, Bethany Mandel, etc.) of the fascist type being described. Just wow.
bbleh
@HumboldtBlue: as I believe the Dalai Lama said, “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”
OzarkHillbilly
Can’t speak so much for the others, but Hawley is ambition to the 8th degree. He is a gaping void of morality and will do anything to get what he wants.
Michael Bersin
Because they can.
MFA
“…they choose to be awful. And for what?”
Status.
kindness
And for what you ask? More money. More power. It’s the only thing that drives the Republican ego & id.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
I wonder if there’s just something broken inside them. I don’t know if they’re born that way, or if it’s something that weakens over time until it snaps. Either way, I think they’re missing something. A lot of people would call it a soul, and maybe that’s as good a name as any.
But you look at them, let’s say Hawley. There’s just something missing there. There’s something that decent people have, a soul if you like, and he doesn’t have it. He’s empty inside. It makes me wonder if there people could be better people. I guess that they could, but it would take years of dedicated work, and a willingness truly look within themselves and own up to the awful things they’ve done.
That kind of work is hard enough for essentially decent people. We don’t like baring our worst selves to ourselves. Think how unappealing this would be to somebody like Stefanik or Hawley–and what’s the payoff for them? That’s they’ll be better people? It won’t win them votes or make them more money. All they’ll have at the end is that they can say truthfully, “Well, I’m a better person now.” How much easier is it to just tell themselves that now? They can have the satisfaction of knowing they’re good people without having to earn it.
It makes them lost causes, or nearly so. They all could choose to do that. But because they’re the people the, this isy are now, they never will.
There’s one asterisk here, which is that if, let’s say, Hawley did something that led directly to something so awful and tragic and immediate that he couldn’t just wave it away, that might be enough to spur him to rouse himself from his moral stupor enough to commit to changing. Something like if something he championed politically led one of his children–I don’t know if he has any, this is hypothetical–killed themselves, and left a note specifically and pointedly connecting Hawley’s words and deeds to the kid’s death.
Short of something like that, there’s no hope for any of these people.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
I wonder if there’s just something broken inside them. I don’t know if they’re born that way, or if it’s something that weakens over time until it snaps. Either way, I think they’re missing something. A lot of people would call it a soul, and maybe that’s as good a name as any.
But you look at them, let’s say Hawley. There’s just something missing there. There’s something that decent people have, a soul if you like, and he doesn’t have it. He’s empty inside. It makes me wonder if there people could be better people. I guess that they could, but it would take years of dedicated work, and a willingness truly look within themselves and own up to the awful things they’ve done.
That kind of work is hard enough for essentially decent people. We don’t like baring our worst selves to ourselves. Think how unappealing this would be to somebody like Stefanik or Hawley–and what’s the payoff for them? That’s they’ll be better people? It won’t win them votes or make them more money. All they’ll have at the end is that they can say truthfully, “Well, I’m a better person now.” How much easier is it to just tell themselves that now? They can have the satisfaction of knowing they’re good people without having to earn it.
It makes them lost causes, or nearly so. They all could choose to do that. But because they’re the people the, this isy are now, they never will.
There’s one asterisk here, which is that if, let’s say, Hawley did something that led directly to something so awful and tragic and immediate that he couldn’t just wave it away, that might be enough to spur him to rouse himself from his moral stupor enough to commit to changing. Something like if something he championed politically led one of his children–I don’t know if he has any, this is hypothetical–killed themselves, and left a note specifically and pointedly connecting Hawley’s words and deeds to the kid’s death.
Short of something like that, there’s no hope for any of these people.
HumboldtBlue
@BR:
Goddamn, that’s a hell of an essay. Thank you for that.
Alison Rose
This is a thing I often wonder when confronting bigots. Like, hating people is a choice you make. And why would you choose to be that way? What does it do for you? Even whatever sense of superiority or whatever they get from it, still, what does that do for them? It doesn’t make their lives better, it doesn’t actually confer anything on them. Why would you choose to be a hateful person when it’s far easier to choose to be kind?
hitchhiker
Tim Miller wrote a book called Why We Did It, in which he lays out a set of categories into which he, his former friends, and old associates fall.
It helped me to see what the hell these people were telling each other at the time (some of them still are, obviously).
The obvious answers are the right ones. They’re greedy. Or they’re mean. Or they’re just “being ironic.” Or they’re crazy. Or they’re very, very skilled at looking away from things that would make them uncomfortable. Or they’ve persuaded themselves that if they weren’t doing their part to promote trump and trumpism, someone else would, and they need the job, so …. shrug.
Anyway, it’s a good book. Miller is one of the former rightwing people I can stand to listen to, along with Michael Steele.
The answer to why Vance’s book took off, imo, is that it happened to come out just as the MSM was clawing its hair out trying to figure out what they’d missed in 2016. He was part of the disgruntled diners in Ohio thing, only with a degree from an Ivy League school, a Wall Street pedigree, military experience and big money from techie friends. The book itself was pretty bad: self-serving pap, mostly.
PJ
@Tinare: For most of the chuckleheads Cole is talking about, where advocating for the worst possible behavior seems to be something they deliberately chose out of much better options, this is the reason: money and power. It’s also the reason for many of the other groups of people who choose to do shitty things.
But I think it’s a mistake to ignore the deep pleasure people get from persecuting others and being cruel, which boosts their own sense of self-worth and power while hurting and demeaning others, and the boost of energy that hate coursing through their system provides.
schrodingers_cat
They don’t think they are being bad or awful. That’s your POV.
Michael Bersin
@OzarkHillbilly:
Josh Hawley (r).
Over forty years ago I met someone who was forced/required to be a member of the Hitlerjugend. He hated it with all his being.
Josh Hawley (r) would have willingly joined for all the free swag, the crisp uniform shorts, and the cruelty.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Same and I could give it a patina of being new agey using some Sanskrit etc. I could even market it to the BJP fan base who fall for anything if you a slap some Sanskrit and some made up Hindu greatness in front of it.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin:
What was really frustrating about that was that the trans aspect of the episode was the B-story. The A-story (Clueless Jenn has to deliver a speech on the Internet, which Roy and Moss persuade her is contained in a tiny box with a blinking red light which they “borrowed from Stephen Hawking” for her to use in her presentation) was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen.
And it’s all just ruined by this awful, offensive crap about how Douglas (the moronic man-child who owns the company) has fallen in love with a trans woman … played by a female actor who represents her trans status by drinking beer, enjoying boxing, and being good at darts. And when he dumps her, they get into a violent brawl that ends with him punching her out. Just … awful.
Chris
@BR:
I have two friends (former, in one case) whose politics changed significantly in the Trump era that always remind me of that essay. One was actually a fairly normal Democrat when I first met her, but spent the entire 2010s going further and further into the generic centrist anti-partisan both-sides-do-it rabbit hole, and finally dove headfirst into anti-anti-Trump politics during his presidency (I finally ghosted her before it happened, but I’m 100% certain she voted for him in 2020, which wasn’t the case in 2016). The other was an anti-partisan Ron Paul voter with weird and idiosyncratic politics when I met him, but the Trump presidency disgusted him thoroughly enough that he voted Biden in 2020, and wrote to various congressmen and other politicians of both parties after 1/6 urging them to hold Trump accountable.
… The difference between them? Plenty, but looking back, I think the two root ones were that 1) the pro-Trump one was a perpetually aggrieved Twitter rage addict, which is something the other one avoided like the plague, and 2) the anti-Trump one had a basic “be kind to other people, help them if you can” ethos ingrained in him that the other one… didn’t so much. Or to put it more bluntly, one of them wasn’t an asshole or an egotist and tried to avoid anything that would point them in that direction, while the other chose to feed those parts of herself until she got worse and worse.
“Nice people don’t go Nazi” is something I probably would have dismissed as too simplistic before the Trump era, but there really is something to it. At its core fascism is the philosophy of assholes, who’ve chosen to ignore or back-burner every other aspect of their personality. Any ideology can lead to that, but with fascism, that’s literally all there is to it.
moops
I suspect there is some kind of feedback loop where you take on the trappings of right-wing talking points to get your standing amongst their tribe, and you end up becoming what you pretend you are, and you have to keep taking things further to keep your place in the Hierarchy, which then also becomes what you really are.
Decent people never want to take even the first step. Crappy people cynically take those first steps in a Faustian bargain, and the rot sets in. Being educated might make people more prone to delude themselves into thinking they won’t be caught in this trap. They can dabble in right-wing idiocy to acquire power but can quit any time.
Tinare
@Roger Moore: Power and money. That’s why they became Republican politicians.
To anyone saying someone is rich and doesn’t need the money, there isn’t a billionaire that would agree with you. They will always take more money.
jimmiraybob
Josh Hawley. My Senator. Bless his pea-pickin’ little heart.
He’s a old school Christian Nationalist. He’s a true believer. His mind freely floats between the worlds of ancient & Medieval Christian battles to enforce orthodox doctrine. He’s obviously irked that he was born too late to jail, torture and burn the heretics and apostates along with the witch and the unbeliever. Damn, those were the days when men were men and didn’t need a book to tell them how to be manly.
To better understand Josh you have got to watch his commencement speech at King’s College a few years ago. CSPAN has a video and transcript archived. Apparently, there is no greater sin than the free mind that leads to “unfettered and unrestricted free choice – a crisis of our public life.”
Must stop free choice!
Maxim
I think most of it boils down to lack of empathy. To be awful, you have to just not care about the harm done to others.
The “Who goes Nazi” article says nice people never do, which is another way of saying kind people, which is another way of saying empathy.
That leads to the question of why some people are so lacking in kindness, empathy, basic human decency. Were they all given insufficient love as children, or spoiled, or both? Or are some people just born “wrong”?
gene108
@West of the Rockies:
Trump isn’t stupid. He’s not a toddler.
He’s intellectually not at all curious about learning anything new or anything that won’t directly help him in his hustle.
He’s damn good at promoting himself, telling people what they want to hear to close a deal, and other skills that don’t require a lot of academic rigor to do, but do require a certain type of smarts to do.
What tripped him up was getting a job in the government, where rules are rules and the rules overrule whatever thoughts he had about using government for personal gain.
Soprano2
@Ohio Mom: You could trade me for Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt!!
Frankensteinbeck
@Tony Jay:
You have a very, very good point. Being mean is a psychological rush. A neurochemical rush, even. A lot of people enjoy it. Give them a chance to go balls-to-the-wall with it, and they will turn into deranged monsters, for fun. Some people who enjoy being mean have a wall of internal morality (rather than exterior enforcement) built up to stop that, but even for them the wall can crumble because it just feels so good.
@Matt McIrvin:
One thing I have noticed watching the anti-trans movement is that once people start on that road, it utterly consumes them. It’s bizarre. Being criticized is definitely involved. Tell them they’re wrong for hating trans people and you might as well have made profane remarks about their mother. They get obsessed, monomaniacal. It takes over their life.
Gravenstone
This dumbass also proclaimed Trump as the “duly elected president of the people” and therefor has the right to retain and all secret documents as he pleases. Fuck this fucking clown. Good job, people of my home state. Fucking idiots.
PJ
@Alison Rose:
People love to hate because it makes them feel so good. And it’s even better if they can hate with a group of people against a smaller group – now they are part of something bigger. They don’t have to do anything to change their lives, that jolt of hate will boost them over any personal misery or failure they don’t want to examine, and it will make them feel stronger for it while giving them someone to blame.
Citizen Alan
@Baud: Oh I’ve always known since early adulthood that I would have been much, much more successful in my life and probably much happier if I’d been a sociopath. But you can’t make it as a lawyer in private practice in Mississippi if you’re the sort of person who feels bad about demanding poor people pay top dollar up-front before you’ll help them.
hotshoe
@bbleh: ” … the majority are just acting the part (although after a lifetime of acting, the line between being and behaving becomes blurry indeed).”
Yep, Vonnegut said ya have to be careful about that:
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
— Mother Night, 1962
NotMax
First time visitor to our bustling little planet?
;)
different-church-lady
I’ve had a lot of personal circumstances in the past half year that have lead me to a recurring thought that’s developed into something of a crisis in my soul.
The thought is: all my life I have tried, and struggled, and engaged, with the question of what it is to be a decent, moral, good person.
And the past few years (steeply accelerating in the past few months) I’ve come to the horrible conclusion that too many of my fellow citizens are not even remotely interested in any of that. Not even curious.
In my dark moments, it all just makes me feel like a sucker for wasting my time trying all these years.
Chris
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
The most interesting reversal I’ve seen was Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs. I have no idea what his deal is. If you’d asked me in the 2000s to rank which right-wing bloggers would be likeliest to repent and go the other way, he would have been the absolute last on the list; his website was the Bible of English-language Islamophobia for an entire decade.
And yet there was still something in him that snapped when he went to that conference in Europe and found himself surrounded by neo-Nazis, and apparently set him back on the right path.
I’m enough of a sap to think everybody has just enough of that little piece of soul inside them that they’re capable of changing their ways, no matter how bad they’ve gotten. But I’m also enough of a realist to think most of them won’t.
different-church-lady
@PJ:
So does heroin. Both come with a terrible cost.
laura
LOOK AT MEEEEEE!
We all have something broken inside of us. We all are unique and special. And yet, there is something that drives some people to use their time energy and talents to do whatever it takes to get attention be it positive or negative. That neediness that gaping hole that can only be filled by the attention of others is a sickness and our culture really supports filling that neediness. That gaping hole reminds these fame whores of what they know about themselves- that whatever they are and whatever they have achieved is not enough to cure them of their shame. So LOOK AT MEEEEE buys time and space to avoid their true selves. That’s my take.
Alison Rose
@PJ: But that’s what I don’t get. HOW does it make them feel good? I don’t like hating people, I don’t enjoy the feeling of hatred, no matter how justified it is, like with Trump or putin. I just don’t and never will understand how anyone can enjoy the feeling of active hatred toward others.
different-church-lady
@Chris:
Half baked thought: seeing Neo-Nazis in the flesh made him realize virus conservatism was emotional, not intellectual?
different-church-lady
@laura:
Social media has unquestionably warped the reward system for that sickness. That’s why I call it “cigarettes for the mind.” All that matters is getting the next hit, all you care about is getting your next smoke.
trollhattan
In which we learn Thomas and Alito truly remain our worst SCOTUS justices. Coathanger? Will wonders never cease.
Sandia Blanca
Today’s Talking Points Memo has a clip from J.B. Pritzker’s commencement speech at Northwestern University, where he equates idiocy to cruelty, and says that the kindest people are often the smartest. Here’s the link: https://twitter.com/GovPritzker/status/1668399578155024384?s=20
Michael Bersin
@jimmiraybob:
Josh Hawley (r).
A long time ago I attended a “home school” talent show – my spouse had a music student who was playing on the program.
One of the kids, maybe six-years-old, got up on the stage and recited a massive amount of Bible verse from memory at auctioneer speed, taking fast breaths so he could keep reciting. Rote memorization, with no need or desire for any nuance or understanding.
I was horrified by the display.
Josh Hawley (r) is the adult version of that kid.
Paul in KY
They want power, John. Power!!!! Buwahahahaha!!!!!
different-church-lady
In Vance’s case, it’s pretty clearly resentment-run-amok. He’s going to punish as many people as he can for his lifelong frustration about being a smart person born in a poor community. It’s pure lashing out.
Maxim
@Alison Rose: Same here. I am baffled by the statement that hating people feels good, because it doesn’t. I get very angry at injustice sometimes, and that anger can feel very righteous, but that’s not the same thing as actively hating another person. I just don’t get it.
Alison Rose
@trollhattan: God, of COURSE the white dude’s name was fucking Chad. Also, jeez, the cajones on these people to insist that their lily-white asses could do a better, or even decent, job of rearing a Native child than Native adults could.
different-church-lady
@Maxim:
We’re just not all born with the same dopamine triggers.
different-church-lady
@trollhattan:
You know what was really racially discriminatory? The Native American Genocide.
Maxim
@Alison Rose: No doubt they were convinced of their Christian duty to save that child’s soul by leading them to Jaysus.
Roger Moore
@Michael Bersin:
That sounds like my Junior High German teacher. She was born in 1933 and had to do all the stuff they made children do under the Nazis. She hated it. She also told us she learned about the value of a second language after the war, when she was able to use her English to ask GIs for food.
different-church-lady
I mean, it’s really good to have you back, John.
narya
In good news for today, ICWA was upheld, 7-2!!
ETA: I see others got there first–yeah, the dissent is evil, but I’m gonna celebrate the win.
NotMax
@Alsion Rose
Dopamine is an ethics-neutral messenger.
Barney
I think with Vance it’s ambition. He’s now committed to a Republican political career, and he doesn’t just want to be an Ohio senator for 36 years, he wants to be powerful – Senate leadership, or a presidential run. And so he wants to be noticed outside his state, and at the moment, that means swearing fealty to Trump and his moron MAGAs. He wants to be on Fox, a lot. To be someone that McConnell has to talk to, rather than ignore or order about. He’ll have backup plans on how to sidle away from Trump when it’s all going to go tits-up. You could probably list this under “pure evil”, because a human shouldn’t be ambitious but amoral, and it may be what you’d say about McConnell, too. Neither of them have active hatred for groups as their driving force, just the desire to make the decisions, for the sake of it.
Alison Rose
@Maxim: Meanwhile, Jesus is like “Could y’all stop doing this shit in my name, please? Oy gevalt.”
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: I remember Charles Johnson BEFORE he went Islamophobic. Before 9/11, Little Green Footballs was a tech blog that talked about stuff like Web design and was not terribly political, and he apparently identified as a liberal.
(I actually noticed the blog in the first place because I remembered the name “Little Green Footballs” as the brand name of some shareware he wrote for the Atari ST computer back in the late 1980s!)
I think he went a particularly hard version of 9/11 crazy (which I did too to some extent, so I can sympathize with that) but he fell in with these really hardcore haters, and… somehow, in his case, it wasn’t one-way. At some point he realized that that cesspit really wasn’t him. It hadn’t been, before he got traumatized the same way we all did.
john b
From downstairs (attempt 2, but now focusing on this topic):
@AM in NC was talking about NC Governor Cooper and his attempts to reduce the damage NC GOP could do. But Tricia Cotham (mentioned there) is a case of (I think) a person being evil for the money.
My quick summary of her: She is the daughter of two long-time NC Democrats and ran for her seat in the NC House in November on typical Dem platform in a blue district in Charlotte. Then a few months later, switched parties to the GOP and was the deciding veto override vote for the restrictive abortion law that passed last month.
She is HATED by many of her constituents now. And for good reason. There’s no way she wins again in her district. I can only see a few possibilities:
She has a different GOP position lined up for her (in a different district or in some non-elected position)
She has a private gig lined up
She had some kind of break.
This was someone who spoke on the NC House floor about supporting abortion rights (eg in 2015 in the article linked above)
Paul in KY
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.): I hope they look over their shoulders fearing the payback they so richly deserve (and will probably never come). Always fearful of what their brains know they should have coming…
Frankensteinbeck
@Alison Rose:
And some people do. Physically, it is pleasurable to them. Think of it like roller coasters. Some people love the thrill of adrenaline, and others that same adrenaline makes them feel sick and pained. I don’t know what dictates who is on either side. Some people – a lot of people – who love being angry still build a moral wall against it, but we’re looking at people who either didn’t or whose wall failed permanently.
Citizen Alan
@jimmiraybob: Didn’t Hawley write a book recently that condemned the pursuit of happiness?!? Anti-human, the whole lot of them.
CaseyL
Some people have an internalized ethos. Once upon a time, maybe 40 years ago, I would have said “most people.”
But an internalized ethos actually seems pretty rare.
An internalized ethos is one you don’t need other people to validate for you. You don’t need other people to tell you what it should be.
(Maybe my biggest beef with religion is how it requires believers to outsource their consciences to the religious hierarchy. If the religious hierarchy insists that something you know is wrong is actually right, your choices seem to be to fully surrender the last of your free will to the hierarchy or leave your faith group.)
It seems that an awful lot of people lack an internalized set of values. They’re adrift, no conscience to call their own. They’re EMPTY.
They fill the emptiness with the expediency of the moment, depending on what gets the most approval from their social circle.
I don’t think of these empties as sociopaths. Sociopaths are loud and proud about having no values other than ME ME ME. They’re not hungry for validation; they don’t care.
How internalized value systems happen is beyond me. They might be innate.
Maxim
@Frankensteinbeck: Right-wing hate radio has a lot to answer for when it comes to degrading those walls. How many not-particularly-hateful people were radicalized by that poison?
Alison Rose
@Frankensteinbeck: I also hate roller coasters!!!!
It just makes me sad. Choosing to be cruel when you could just as easily choose to be nice.
BR
@john b:
A friend in NC was saying he thinks it’s more petty than that, that she felt unimportant in the Dem caucus and the GOP buttered her up, and that she’s not thinking ideologically or monetarily.
Citizen Alan
@different-church-lady: There’s something to that. I was a gifted, neuro-divergent child (at a time and place when “neuro-divergent” wasn’t even a word), but while my parents were somewhat distant, had I been born to any of their siblings, I’d have ended up an alcoholic or a drug-addict or something worse.
zhena gogolia
That is not true of my religion. Or of many, many others.
NobodySpecial
Money and power. You think he’s an asshole, and you’re right. He also makes more in one year than any virtuous burger flipper makes in 50, and he has celebrities and richer people who make life super nice for him without having to do much in the way of actual real work. And the world is wired for those people = it’s why the rich and powerful are largely complete assholes, and the exceptions stand out like a neon sign.
Fuck, this world is depressing some days.
PJ
@Alison Rose:
@Maxim:
I would argue that rage and fear are our two most immediately powerful emotions, probably because, as mostly furless primates in the savanna or jungle, our survival depended on it. Combine those two emotions, and add the belief that members of that other tribe have harmed and will harm you or your tribe, and the hate that emerges carries a huge adrenaline rush.
Just look at the faces of the white people who rioted to stop integration. They were high on hatred. Why else are their modern descendants addicted to Fox News? It’s the rush of outrage.
And it gives their lives meaning. Take away their hate, and who are they? That might be a mighty deep and steep pit they have to crawl out of. Better to fly over it on the wings of hatred.
Baud
@NotMax:
I’m on the fence on whether to nominate that.
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: I have heard it said, though I don’t have links to evidence, that authoritarian parenting styles with an emphasis on arbitrary rules and punishment train kids to have an externalized conscience. They think of right and wrong as a set of rules handed down by an outside authority, and also think heavily in terms of what they can get away with
We were talking about Huckleberry Finn in another thread. I think the central thing Mark Twain was concerned with in that book was setting up a situation where Huck’s internal ethos was telling him to do something that the moral system he was brought up to believe told him was evil. And he made the right choice, but thought he was a damnable person for it.
Chris Johnson
Oh geez. You don’t say? Well, that sucks.
I happen to think Black Books is insanely, unreasonably funny. But the thing is, it’s funny because it’s so convincingly representing these horrible people (well, mainly the proprietor?) and that’s why: like Fawlty Towers, you’re watching a freak show.
I guess that falls unexpectedly into the ‘Kevin Spacey in Seven’ category. The art is unreasonably good because there’s authenticity in the villainy or dickery. Hmph.
Citizen Alan
@CaseyL: You’re talking about souls. I’ve called them “the soulless Right” for decades now.
satby
Well, once again I’ll put in a plug for Hoffer’s The True Believer, which talks about the psychological attraction of mass movements for some people; because we’ve had an authoritarian, sociopathic mass movement going on in this country a long time. And to be successful in that sphere you have to go deeper and deeper into sociopathic behavior to be accepted, much less become a leader.
Also, numerous psychological studies have demonstrated that fearful people tend conservative, and tend to display less empathy. Which circles back to the above book. And that Harper’s article.
satby
@different-church-lady: Right? He’s the most thought provoking writer on the blog.
Paul in KY
@BR: Excellent article. I assume all of them were white. Of course, you’d have to be a regular Clarence Thomas (IMO) to go Nazi as a black person who was raised in the USA.
Citizen Alan
@Alison Rose: I mentioned my RWNJ sister’s last blow-up in an earlier thread. At one point, she outright acknowledged that she knew I hated living in Mississippi and was miserable here. And she stopped just short of admitting that was why she was so angry I was finally leaving — because she wanted me to be miserable to the point of suicidal ideation and she was furious I was finally escaping.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Matt McIrvin: Yes. That moment when Huck says okay, then I’ll go to hell.
JPL
@BR: Thank you! Foreign Affairs magazine allowed access to one of her articles entitled the Problem Child of Europe. It is no longer available without subscription, and I should have printed it when I had the chance. Dorothy Thompson was a treasure.
Paul in KY
@hitchhiker: I think his book had a good title. Never underestimate the power of a good title to get people to buy your book, before they’ve ever leafed through it or read the book jacket.
Paul in KY
@Michael Bersin: And the ‘Thank you, sir. May I have another?’
Josh really likes that, I think.
Betty Cracker
@Citizen Alan: Does she like living there?
Chris
@Citizen Alan:
I’ve suspected for a while that this is a big part of rural American rage at the cities and suburbs.
“The city” is their children who never call anymore, their ex wife who moved away after the divorce, their gay brother who moved away because the small town was making him miserable, and so forth.
Scout211
This sounds . . . not good.
US government agencies hit in global cyberattack
PJ
@NotMax:
https://daily.jstor.org/how-white-supremacy-is-like-a-drug/
trollhattan
@Citizen Alan: Just wow. Unpacking that pathology would take a phalanx of psychiatrists and shovels full of drugs.
A hearty “Buh-bye” as you hit the state line that final.
raven
I’m going to ask again, anyone had a DATScan?
Roger Moore
@Chris:
I would say that the core of fascism is grievance. The people who are most attracted to fascism are the ones who are perpetually aggrieved, but any sufficiently severe single grievance might push somebody that way. As a national political movement, it’s easiest to push fascism when the grievance is against some big, external enemy who as many people as possible can be angry about, but our contemporary fascists are surprisingly successful at making the enemy be an abstract thing like wokeness.
JWR
I think a lot of it comes down to good old fashioned misinformation. Once people expose themselves to Fox News, the conditioning begins, and eventually, they’re ready for the “hard stuff”, like NewsMax, OANN and similar, where they’re trained not to accept anything a Dem says.
Case in point, on last night’s PBS News Hour was a female Frank Luntz along with 6 or 7 Republican voters sitting around a table, and every time TFG’s latest crimes came up, they were all, “but what about Hunter Biden’s Laptop?” They were all guilty of accepting really stoopid “facts”, and nothing would change their minds.
Here it is:
What Iowa Republicans are thinking after Trump’s federal indictment
Must of found them in some Iowa diner.
Citizen Alan
@Betty Cracker: She’s a 61yo retired school teacher who married money. She has three grown children. She works part time at the nursery at a local church that runs a day-care, mainly, I think, to stave off boredom. She is educated, but incurious. She loves Tucker Carlson and, as of last Christmas, was looking forward to voting for Desantis. I think she’s one of those people who is so unhappy that she doesn’t realize how unhappy she is. But by the standards of Mississippi, she’s living the good life. Though I wonder how she will react when the people she keeps voting for make it impossible for her two younger children, both elementary ed teachers, to survive in Mississippi.
(I have tentative plans to lure the middle child out to Fresno at some point and talk him into getting a job teaching in California. All of his leisure activities involve the outdoors and there are multiple national parks within easy driving distance. That will be my revenge if I can pull it off.)
Scout211
@raven: My friend just had one last month. She has had essential tremor her whole life and it has gotten much worse in the past 5 or so years. One of her doctors thought she had Parkinson’s Disease in addition to the tremor and I guess this is the only test that can determine if you have either or both. The test determined that she has both now.
She said it was fine and she had no problems with the procedure. She went to the VA for the procedure.
I hope this helps.
ETA: edited for clarity
Added: I had to look the procedure up to figure out if that was the test she had.
I found this Cedars-Sinai page that seems very helpful for patients.
DaTscan Procedure Information
Alison Rose
@zhena gogolia: Seconded.
twbrandt
@raven: I’ve never even heard of a DATscan.
Alison Rose
@Citizen Alan: God, that’s horrible. I’m sorry.
BTW I asked in a thread a few days ago but I don’t think you popped back in–where in California are you moving to, if you don’t mind saying?
Omnes Omnibus
I watched a law school colleague slowly go Nazi. In 1994, when Betty Montgomery won the AG election, she overtly hired only R students as summer associates and then as AAGs ( a stark change from the previous AG). This guy joined the Federalist Society and registered as an R where he had previously been a card carrying ACLU member. We had both been picked for summer positions under the previous AG. We were asked to reapply. He got an interview and job. I did not. Little by little, he slid further and further right.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: Oh, wow, bringing in the “Eastern mysticism” angle! Yeah, people eat that stuff up.
Gravenstone
And you can be sure that poor kid was beaten black and blue until he could do exactly that, exactly like that.
laura
@Citizen Alan: I hope that you will find California is where you’ve always belonged and feel an overwhelming sense of coming home to your true self 💙
raven
@twbrandt: I hadn’t either but my neurologist was interesting in some of my lousy motor functions I had in a fall prevention study,
Hoodie
Greed, ambition, group membership, etc., they’re all tied up in the search for identity. Otherwise, you’re just an insignificant bag of undifferentiated protoplasm. The other day I was watching a snippet of an interview with Lindsey Graham regarding the Trump indictment, and was struck by his response to being asked how could he approve of the things that Trump was alleged to have done, if true. His first words were “Well, you have to look at the Republican point of view . . . ” This pretty much follows most of the GOP reactions we’ve seen, the Hillary/Biden whataboutism, the “weaponization of the DOJ,” etc. It struck me that this was particularly interesting in Graham’s case since he has a long history of identification with institutions like the US military, which traditionally has strong mores against things like lying, releasing sensitive information, etc. His first rhetorical instinct, however, was expressly partisan.
There seem to be times where a self-defined group of people only view the world in terms of the fate of their perceived category because they’ve painted themselves into a corner where they feel they will become extinct if they don’t “win.” It’s almost like they feel they’ve reached an evolutionary dead end, and that any beneficial change for them is impossible, hence necessitating a twilight struggle for dominance. Maybe the debacles of the last several GOP presidents and their failure to come up with a viable alternative to the post-Depression/WWII social democracy has created that mentality in the GOP, i.e., they know they’re out of ideas to offer people, so all they can offer is conflict. In that kind of situation, the imagined welfare of the group can outweigh everything else, including things like facts or previously held mores that may be perceived as in conflict with the group survival. Many reactionaries have effectively said that they are worried that “whiteness” will disappear, which implies that they fear that they will disappear themselves. Hence, all these silly books about things like manhood, as if that is something that can be defined.
Someone above quoted a particularly salient observation by Vonnegut, i.e., be careful about who you pretend to be because you can become a victim of it.
Betty Cracker
@Citizen Alan: Ugh. Good luck liberating the nephew. I know there are DeSantis-supporting teachers, but it will never compute for me. It’s like chickens for Colonel Sanders.
Kent
Because Democrats let them get away with it. Democrats are the majority party in Congress and could limit or stop these games if they had the political will (and votes).
Brachiator
Neither whiteness nor being educated naturally bends towards decency.
We are social animals. I don’t know that we are inherently “good” or inherently “bad.” I do think that we can choose how to live in society and how to treat others. Maybe we choose to wear a mask of decency in order to get along, and to prevent others from wanting to harm us.
But for some people, the mask slips. Or they toss it away. Something has happened with some Republicans. Too many of them claim to respect law and to want to preserve civil society, but their actions are to hurt people, and to try to amass more power to do more harm.
We have seen this before and had to fight to try to restore a better society. And here we are again.
cain
@Maxim:
I’m not so sure.
I think it’s important to realize that trauma response is a big part of why humans act this way. An imbalance.
For instance, many conservatives might be gay or trans – and they live in a world where those things are not acceptable. They literally living a lie, and not themselves.
Others could be victims of sexual assault, rape, incest – and they bury those feelings and they come out in other ways.
Maybe a minority come out and are shitty straight from birth – but there is always some kind of trauma response that affect and they feel the need to act out in a way.
raven
@Citizen Alan: “lure the middle child out to Fresno”
That’s not fair!!
Paul in KY
@Citizen Alan: Cause if you are in anyway amenable to the ‘pursuit of happiness’, you’ll never willingly come within a mile of Josh Hawley.
Paul in KY
@CaseyL: They don’t like thinking about hard things. They don’t like making hard choices. They are intellectually lazy or vacuous.
Scout211
@raven: Did you see my reply at #111 re: datscan?
cain
@trollhattan: Clarence Thomas is one hate filled son of a bitch. Fuck him. Also fuck, HW Bush for putting him into that seat.
May a thousand fleas distract him from life’s pleasures.
john b
@BR: The cognitive dissonance is just staggering. And then for what? 18 months of being popular with the GOP and then you lose your seat? It just doesn’t add up. The SPEED at which she changed her tune beggars belief that she didn’t have some inkling that she was fooling her constituents in the campaign.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: Quoi?
Paul in KY
@Citizen Alan: Run and don’t look back. Best wishes to you!
NotMax
@raven
Gives fresh meaning to Blue’s Clues.
;)
trollhattan
@Citizen Alan: Christmas card photo concept: self-portrait from Vernal Falls on the Mist Trail, Yosemite, waving.
“Seasons greeting two hours from my new home!”
Dave
@hitchhiker: I’m listening to it at the moment; and honestly he’s aggravating me. The real answer I find is his own preening, indulgent, shallowness. The conviction that they were “the adults in the room” and the fear that it really isn’t true and it’s all just a game anyway; people that never really questioned the common phrases of their youth. And that is a solid explanation for the staffers the background bees who are well off and complacent but the dude is just aggravating me. Caveat that I’ve only just started so maybe it improves but the existence and the flow of the book itself is at this point the best example of “Why they do it”.
Ksmiami
@BR: Then she’s a weak ass shit human who doesn’t care about anyone but herself. Fuck her, ppl like her can’t be saved – only defeated and then ignored.
owlbrick
A little bit of money.
https://youtu.be/CdlLbRPB9ic?t=32
Ksmiami
@cain: many conservatives are just entitled asswipes who never see injustice, or empathize with those who struggle. Fuck em.
cain
@JWR: on reddit, there are just stories and stories from kids who said who their parents are now and who they were – they were like two different people.
Fox News makes you fear – and fear will make you act in ways because going back to my last post – it creates a trauma response.
Maxim
@cain: Sure. But many people respond to their trauma by becoming kinder and more empathetic, so it’s not that simple.
We can’t choose our circumstances or our upbringing, but we still have at least some ability to choose how we respond to them, unless one is a Skinner acolyte.
Tony G
What’s particularly depressing to me about all of the horrible people who you mention is that (with the exception of the Trump fail sons) all of them WERE ELECTED. (In the case of Donald Trump, of course, he lost the popular vote twice, but he won a very large minority of the vote.). I’d feel better if these awful people just landed on a spaceship, but they have the power that they have because tens of millions of their fellow citizens looked at these piles of shit and said “Yeah! That’s what I want!” Hitler was elected too, in 1933. It’s a sickness in our society, and I don’t know whether there’s any solution.
Omnes Omnibus
@owlbrick: Browning comes to mind:
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat—
Redshift
@JWR:
One of the things that pisses me off the most about lazy claims that Fox and MSNBC are opposite equivalents is the very clear fact that right-wing outlets say “don’t listen to anyone but us, everyone else is lying to you” and ones with left-leaning hosts (like MSNBC) or even full-on liberal or leftist talk radio/stream/podcast outlets just… don’t.
Maxim
@cain: “May the fleas of a thousand camels infest [his] armpits” was the way I heard it growing up.
Paul in KY
@trollhattan: Or maybe in front of a beautiful, huge sequoia tree or at a gorgeous Napa vineyard with a large glass of chardonnay and a great big smile.
Caption: Just another day here in California…
owlbrick
@Omnes Omnibus: 30 pieces of silver sounds about right.
James E Powell
@Kent:
Spare me.
Tony G
@cain: Fox News (and its right-wing competitors) are, of course, horrible — but I’ve never heard of anyone being forced at gunpoint to watch Fox News. Fox News makes a lot of money because it tells its viewers the hate-filled lies that the viewers want to hear. The viewers have a choice, and they’re too stupid and hateful to turn the damn thing off.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ksmiami: In practical terms, that’s probably the way to deal with current ones. Understanding, however, how they came to be like that could help us stop some new ones from developing.
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Wales!
Roger Moore
@raven:
It sounds like it’s similar to a PET scan. You take a mildly radioactive cocaine analog, which binds to the dopamine receptors in your brain. When it undergoes radioactive decay, it releases gamma rays they can use to image the dopamine receptors in your brain. If you’re starting to lose those receptors, the signal will be weaker than expected, and they’ll be able to see where and how much of a deficit you have.
The radioactive compound used for the study has a half life of about 12 hours, so it will take a few days for it to decay to background levels. Some of it will probably be metabolized by your body, which will result in the radioiodine being released as iodide. To avoid risk of the radioidodine damaging your thyroid, they’ll give you a big dose of cold iodide before giving you the drug.
Redshift
@hotshoe:
A strong theme in Cat’s Cradle, too. I remember reading a while back about research showing that trolling can be a gateway to radicalization. I think it was about gamers, specifically, but I can see how it could happen. I got into it slightly years ago, and there’s a rush from being mean to someone, and even if you’re doing it to bad people, I could see how it could harm your sense of empathy if you did it a lot. (At the time, I stopped not because I recognized that, but because having my brain fixating on thinking of the next comeback wasn’t pleasant.)
Omnes Omnibus
@Tony G: It’s not our society. It’s human nature. Pretending that the population of the US is uniquely prone to these problems is just a perverse form of American Exceptionalism.
twbrandt
@Kent: oh this is just “blame the victim” bullshit. JD Vance, MTG, Trump, etc were awful people before they got involved in politics. As for “letting them get away with it”, as even you point out, the dems don’t have the votes. They are in the minority in the house, and have the slimmest of margins in the Senate.
And even in spite of this, they have got a lot done.
CarolPW
@trollhattan: Particularly good if taken the week after Thanksgiving when there is hardly anyone there and often snowy enough for a Christmas picture. On one of our trips on that trail during that time we had a lynx-regarding-people-regarding-lynx moment that lasted a good long while, and it was one of the most transcendent moments in my life.
Redshift
@Baud:
There are many times I’ve looked a profession or path in life and thought “you know, I could do that and be good at it and probably make a bundle, if only I had no shame.”
cain
@Maxim: Absolutely – that’s true. But we’re talking about the people who are shitty. I went through trauma and I only responded by being more emphatic. I don’t think everyone does.
Roger Moore
@Maxim:
This. I often hear surprise when a member of a previously discriminated against group winds up discriminating themselves when given the power to do so. This is usually put in some version of “they should know better, since they’ve experienced discrimination themselves.” The truth is, though, that having suffered ourselves doesn’t guarantee our response. Some people will react with empathy and decide they shouldn’t discriminate against others because they understand the pain of being discriminated against. Others will act out of anger, seeing it as finally their chance to get revenge for all their pain.
Citizen Alan
@Alison Rose: Fresno. 31 days and counting.
trollhattan
@CarolPW: So true. The kid had a middle school retreat in the Valley between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and they had magical weather, snow included, and many of the falls were running too. Among her fondest memories.
Redshift
@Roger Moore:
And there are actually politicians who realized it was becoming too awful for them and got out. They can also choose that. There aren’t a lot (if you don’t count the ones who might have retired anyway and it’s just the last straw), but they do exist. You can always do something else instead of continuing to abase yourself to a greater and greater degree.
sukabi
they choose to be awful. And for what?
money and power
Citizen Alan
@Betty Cracker: I think it’s because a lot of female teachers, especially in red states, go into teaching at least in part because it’s a Patriarchy approved profession for women both before and after marriage. And (cynicism alert), if you’re an elementary school teacher who is not responsible for teaching children anything that a RWNJ might find triggering (the history of US slavery, To Kill A Mockingbird, the theory of evolution), it’s very easy to compartmentalize your conservative world-view and your job.
Tony Jay
@Redshift:
That’s Coldplay’s loss, pal.
Salty Sam
Years ago I might have had trouble believing this. But then we had a part-time guy start on our crew. His other job was Prison Guard in one of those “for profit” prisons in a small south Texas town. The stories he would tell abut how he and his fellow guards would sit around brainstorming ways to fuck over the inmates made me sick to my stomach. When he told stories of how those plans actually worked on the inmates, I felt a dark rage come over me, and I couldn’t help but fantasize about doing the world a favor by killing him. Instead, I’d just find a different place to work on the job site…
But yeah, absolutely he did it for sadistic pleasure.
Barry
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.): “There’s one asterisk here, which is that if, let’s say, Hawley did something that led directly to something so awful and tragic and immediate that he couldn’t just wave it away, that might be enough to spur him to rouse himself from his moral stupor enough to commit to changing.”
Jan 6.
NotMax
@Citizen Alan
Gotta link it once again.
:)
Matt McIrvin
@Tony G:
Yes, though that one was after Hitler was already chancellor and was able to exert massive violence through his lackeys against anyone who opposed him–and his party still only won a plurality.
The thing that really enabled him was that the stodgy old money conservative party thought they could keep the Nazis on a leash if they made a coalition with them. Which is an awfully familiar story.
Citizen Alan
@raven: I think he’s the only one I can save. The older boy is basically a wastrel who’s been living cheap in a 3BR house he rents from his maternal grandmother for $300 a month. He watches Alex Jones religiously and has aspirations of “going off the grid.” The niece is a sweet girl, but is very timid. She asked breathlessly if I was “scared” to move to Queens for 9 months to get my LL.M. But the middle child is the adventurous one.
geg6
@satby:
I also think some of the literature on cults is illustrative for trying to understand the Trump minions. Been reading a few articles about cults and watching some docs about them and I see a lot of these people in those cult members.
Tony Jay
@Frankensteinbeck:
Indeed. Hardly anyone bullies alone, and those that do are more likely to be actual psychopaths. The vast majority don’t even really do the hands-on bullying. They’re the back-ups. The braying chorus. The ones who enjoy the rush you mention and the warm security of not being a target, but lack the extra performative zip to go front of house themselves and take charge of the show.
Give those acolytes a place where bullying is expected, codified, celebrated and rewarded, though, and they can shed that last sliver of moral fear and really push themselves to bring the hurt.
Being a Republican is a helluva drug, if you’re into that kind of thing.
raven
@Scout211: Thank you very much for this!!! I’ve been having weakness and discomfort on my left quad and leg for about 3 years and nothing has helped so it would be good to get more info. The link you provided is helpful as is the Michael J Fox PS site.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
The other Hindenburg disaster.
//
Alison Rose
@Citizen Alan: “Fresno? Nobody goes to Fresno anymore!”
Sorry. We watched Airplane 2 so many times when I was growing up that my brain goes right to that line in response whenever the town is mentioned :P
It’s not the bluest part of the state, but I’d imagine in comparison to Mississippi, it’ll seem like a sapphire, and you’ll have a much more pleasant state government, as well. Welcome to the Best Coast :)
Omnes Omnibus
@Matt McIrvin: Watch Babylon Berlin (especially the third season) to see this play out in drama.
raven
@Roger Moore: Thanks!!
Elizabelle
@Citizen Alan: Do not give up on the timid niece. (Take it she’s a schoolteacher too?). She might be timid for protective cover. She could bloom, if out of an ugly environment.
Maybe the middle child, if he succeeds in California, can inspire her to move out there, too.
I love, love, love California. Would love to move back there, even temporarily, some day. (I know, expensive. But it’s a wonderful place, and a big state with a LOT of coastline.)
CarolPW
@trollhattan: We hiked the Panorama Trail, and did not see another person all day although we did see someone’s footprints in the snow (and maybe they were with a dog or something with dog-like footprints was following them).
raven
@Citizen Alan: My brother manages a Pink Floyd cover ban that plays there once-in-a-while.
suzanne
I think some people really just have an innate insecurity and need to follow a crowd. Lindsey Graham. Josh Hawley. They can’t conceive of not having friends and admirers. Being flattered. Esteemed. It scratches a psychological itch even deeper than romance.
And if the crowd is a bunch of assholes, it leads to dark places.
Captain C
@Maxim:
Some people are into getting tied down and whipped. I don’t get that either. But it seems that the bottoms in the BDSM crew are doing a lot less active harm to others than the hate-tripping people who try to act out their desires on unwilling victims.
Separately, as to the difference between doing and/or pushing for actively harmful things to others because (notional MAGA) you believe in your hateful ideology, or because it’s helpful to you on a professional or personal level and you’re a really good person inside (cue Springer/Maury guest: “you don’t know what’s in my heart!!!”), well, I can’t see what’s in your heart or mind. I can see the harm you caused with your actions and words, so that’s all I’ve got to go by in assessing you as a person.
But they want approval from their victims and the bystanders for their loud hate and active misdeeds.
SpaceUnit
@BR:
Thank you for the link to that Harpers essay. It’s an excellent read.
JaySinWA
@JWR: I don’t think Sarah Longwell is another version of Frank Luntz. They both do R focus groups, but Luntz is a lot shadier in that he often seems to push his current pet (or paid) idea. She is definitely conservative and her focus groups are usually all Republican, but this is not the Ohio diner crowd. OTOH these are select groups that have agreed to be in the group, so not a random sample. I have never heard her groups picked apart as having high level R party ringers, unlike the NYT interviews.
Her results can be pretty scary, and not as easy to dismiss as Luntz’s IMHO. There aren’t many glimmers of hope for rationality in the common R voters she interviews
ETA there is a podcast with Longwell, Rick Wilson and Luntz as part of the panel. They do travel in the same circles. I just trust Luntz less.
karen marie
Fame.
‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’ – Oscar Wilde
Other MJS
I suspect that at least for some, the point is identifying a group that deserves to be hated, which makes you a Good Guy by contrast. Then the hatred is a ritual performed to reinforce this self-concept.
I’m about to turn the big seven-oh, and I frequently wonder why people like, say, Mitch McConnell see what they are doing as the best way to spend the time they have left. But I guess for some the reaction is to just double down.
brendancalling
Since it’s an open thread, did anyone settle on where the Philly meet-up is going down?
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
Speaking of “being this way”, new Twitter is working about as expected:
Matt Taibbi got “atted”, and a ratio of hilarity ensued.
Roger Moore
@Citizen Alan:
If you’re really a right winger, you might be happy that someone like Ron DeSantis is stepping in and changing the curriculum so you don’t have to teach stuff that contradicts your conservative beliefs.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
@Barry: No, that wasn’t immediate enough. It scared him, but it wasn’t lasting. If his own words drove his kids to kill themselves or something, that might be enough. But a peaceful protest [sic] getting a little out of hand isn’t.
CarolPW
@brendancalling: Juicer Meetup in Philadelphia — 15 June (today) at 6:30p
The Abbaye
637 N. 3rd Street, Philadelphia PA 19123
Look for the balloons! WaterGirl knows how to reach me.
Posted by rekoob
NotMax
@karen marie
Trio of choice quotes from Adlai Stevenson.
“Why is it that when political ammunition runs low, inevitably the rusty artillery of abuse is always wheeled into action?”
“The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions. But there is also, it seems to me, a moment at which democracy must prove its capacity to act. Every man has a right to be heard; but no man has the right to strangle democracy with a single set of vocal chords.”
“Unreason and anti-intellectualism abominate thought. Thinking implies disagreement; and disagreement implies nonconformity; and nonconformity implies heresy; and heresy implies disloyalty — so, obviously, thinking must be stopped. But shouting is not a substitute for thinking and reason is not the subversion but the salvation of freedom.”
rikyrah
@Maxim:
Lack of empathy + White Supremacy
Maxim
@Elizabelle: Seconded. The niece may just need a chance to escape.
rikyrah
@Frankensteinbeck:
pointing out that they are phucking monsters for wanting to genocide a group?
Yeah, they are that evil, and the other side should just accept it and respond to them accordingly.
John S.
@Betty Cracker:
My partner was a Florida teacher for over a decade. Does not compute.
ETA: She is much happier being a teacher in Washington state.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: Nailed it. Its about group identity and seeing yourself as a cut above the rest. I see it in India too. Replace white supremacy with caste hierarchy
The Sanskrit word for caste is varna which literally means color/complexion. So its colorism/racism with social sanction.
gvg
If you are brought up on enough false information, it can be impossible to even understand reality. I mean a lot of these people think Jesus promotes capitalism and getting rich. They actually believe preachers who tell them that. They also think God favors America and don’t know religion is not a single nation. So I think in many cases they have been taught up is down and left is right on so many principles and words that they have been misprogrammed. Unpredictable results but often bad.
Maxim
@rikyrah: For the GOP in this country, absolutely. As some have pointed out, we have our particular brand of pathology; but this type of behavior, more broadly speaking, is not unique to the US.
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
Don’t have any hard and fast statistics to cite but feel it is so that the number of Disney employees who are simultaneously supportive of DeSantis is not zero.
Bupalos
I think what deserves a little more scrutiny and thought is why people just absolutely insist on this idea that people choose to be the way they are. Do you really think you chose to be a well-adjusted, kind, considerate person? Maybe we’re all a combination product of our random chemical reality and the forces and accidents around us? Which doesn’t mean anything is cast in stone, and yes people can change and others can help change them. But this insistance on “defective souls” and people “choosing to be this way…” I mean come on. It doesn’t make a lick of sense to me anymore.
NotMax
@gvg
“Power tends to confuse itself with virtue, and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor.”
— Wm. Fulbright
.
Maxim
@schrodingers_cat: I have noticed that movie stars, etc. in India all tend to be lighter-skinned. Forgive my ignorance, but is the caste hierarchy in India aligned pretty closely with skin tones?
jimmiraybob
@JWR:
That is a terrifying clip. It’s like having 6-7 TVs around the table that are all tuned into the Sean Hannity show (or worse). It’s all about the same fantasy propaganda talking points.
Every time I see something like this I immediately think of Jim Jones and David Koresh and their adoring mind-warped flocks. This level of willful or otherwise ignorance and reactionary rallying around the leader is the antithesis of rational thought.
Oh yeah, Hunter Biden’s laptop!
suzanne
@brendancalling: I’m going to Abbaye, that’s the last thing I heard!!!!
Maxim
@Bupalos: I think the more you take choice out of the equation, the easier it is for people to feel powerless. And that is a deeply uncomfortable sensation.
Sherparick
@BR: “It profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world, but for Wales?” J.D. Vance sold his for a Ohio Senate seat.
schrodingers_cat
@Maxim: Lighter skin is considered more beautiful. But there is no one-to-one correspondence between skin tone and caste.
I think I have given the example of my mother’s maternal family before. My great grandfather was quite dark and tall while my great grandmother was petite had green eyes and was light skinned. They 12 children representing every shade known to mankind. From light (what in this country would be considered white passing ) to darker than most black people in the US. And they both came from the same community
I would think that the rules of endogamy must not have been always strict.
Roger Moore
@rikyrah:
I think the lack of empathy is more important. White Supremacy (and Christianism, Patriarchy, etc.) determines who the targets will be, but it’s the lack of empathy that guarantees there will be some targets.
rikyrah
@trollhattan:
You know who paid for Chad and Jennifer’s legal fees?
BIG OIL
Yeah, marinate on that.
NotMax
@JWR
Let’s use the WABAC to momentarily peek in on Murphy Brown. some 30-odd years ago.
;)
rikyrah
@Citizen Alan:
Because, why should you be allowed to leave.
You deserve to be miserable like the rest of them.
Jay
@Captain C:
Pain and fear release the same chemicals in the same area of the brain as great sex does. And BDSM usually involves sex as well. Bondage and being dominated, removes a lot of societal taboo barriers.
At it’s base, it’s a “kink”, often formed in pre-adolescence arousal experiences.
The Dom’s job is to feed the kink, edge it over a bit, but be ready to stop at a seconds notice. Good Dom’s are kinda sexual psych therapists, talking it out after safe words are called.
Pornhub is not the place to learn about BDSM, or even sex.
Where damage occurs, is when a Dom doesn’t stop and pushes too far, a sub becomes self destructive, or safety is not followed. Eg, the Southern Baptist Preacher.
BDSM is supposed to be safe, sane and consensual.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for US?
I’m reading a P.G. Wodehouse novel at present, entitled Picadilly Jim. Wodehouse is not an author I look to for deeper truths (although one theme he constantly harps on that is a deeper truth is that there are few more pleasant places to be than a formal English garden on a nice summer day). I mostly read him for the entertainment. But…occasionally he does drop pearls of wisdom and in this particular novel summed up the current Republican party to a T. Coincidentally, Wodehouse spent some time amongst NAZIs as a prisoner during WWII. Anyway, the germane quote is:
“Mrs. Pett, like most other people, subconsciously held the view that the ruder a person is the more efficient he must be. It is but rarely that any one is found who is not dazzled by the glamour of incivility.”
The entire party is seduced by the idea that you have to be an asshole to get things done. It’s the only thing they believe in. The thing is they don’t even notice whether the things are actually getting done so long as someone is being an asshole about them. I mean, Trump didn’t do any of the things he promised to do and they still love him because he’s still being an asshole about those things and to those people.
lee
Can’t post link but at The New Republic there is an article about how the GOP wants to stop all free lunch programs as a priority in 2024.
PJ
@Bupalos:
That everything in this world is determined and there is no free will or choice is one perspective. If that view gives you something helpful, then by all means look at the world through that glass.
But, in my opinion, it is not a very helpful perspective for looking at individuals or society, because taking it seriously as something to be applied in society means giving up on changing them (and yourself), and judging them as well. That just means a world where the powerful do what they will and the weak suffer.
lowtechcyclist
@Maxim:
Among what passes for the intelligentsia of the evangelical right, there’s a bunch of people arguing that empathy is bad. Need I say more?
NotMax
@lowtechcyclist
“Give us Barabbas.”
//
Jay
@Bupalos:
Life often “gifts” people change notices. Many people take notice, learn what they need to do, and enact change. Many don’t.
It’s like the ReThug Party after the election loss. Millions spent on studies of what they needed to change to get a majority, all clear cut and well defined,
tossed in the garbage as they doubled down on the same old, same old.
If it’s your 4th marriage, and none of the ex’s or kids are talking to you, maybe it is actually you.
George
In case no one else has said it: Bad people are malignant narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths. They are born or, sometimes, created by circumstance.
Some can change but choose not to. Others–especially the psychopaths–get off on causing damage to good people.
All of them have free will. All of them. Too many people who might otherwise be good and sane serve as willing, and occasionally unwilling, facilitators of those baddies.
They get off on causing you pain, on causing pain to people who are not like them, and even causing pain to people who are like them. They are the basis of today’s GOP.
tokyokie
A mental exercise in which I used to indulge was imagining Republican leaders in SS uniforms. Newt Gingrich would look entirely comfortable in one, as would Rafael Cruz, were he to shave off the beard. (The same problem stymies my ability to imagine J.D. (Juvenile Delinquent?) Vance in one.) But Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton? No problem. Trump, however, is too fat for an SS uniform, but he could easily fit into Hermann Goerring’s service attire.
After a long career in newspapers, I became a nurse several years ago, and I find myself acting egregiously politely with patients. So much so, that I’ve carried that behavior into everyday life, opening doors for people, being polite and outgoing with those running cash registers, that sort of thing. And you know what? It makes everyday life more enjoyable. I get a thrill out of brightening a stranger’s day, just by being nice. Those who turn Nazi cannot imagine treating others as equals.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for US?: My wife in her music career ran into many untalented males who got positions by dint of being an asshole, because the people who do the hiring think “he’s so terrible, makes everybody cry, he must be talented”. It’s definitely a career path.
Ksmiami
@Omnes Omnibus: short of denazification on the scale of WW2 and the destruction of the Rt wing misinformation machine- how?
Oclarkiclarki
@PJ:
I think that some degree or form of free will exists in most people, even if that degree is typically slight and that form banal. To a large extent, the ability to change society is then more a function of adapting methods/approach(s) to the actual feelings and urges of people instead of pretending that they are logical or persuadable in large lots. TFG didn’t provide a superior debating position to get into the presidency, he gave permission to the rubes to vent their deeply-felt grudges and grievances.
Redshift
@Tony Jay:
Don’t I know it!
BC in Illinois
@NotMax:
Thank you for these. Do you (or any of y’all / plural) have a recommendation for a good place to start reading up on Adlai Stevenson? I really don’t know anything beyond the basics [Wikipedia] and the fact that JFK in 1960 introduced him as “the man who made us proud to be Democrats.”
[Though upstairs, in a desk drawer, I do have an Adlai – Estes button.]
NotMax
@Oclarkiclarki
Kaiser role model.
(Quip works better spoken than written.)
:)
Jay
@Redshift:
Nickleback is hiring,…….
Bupalos
@Maxim: in the context we’re talking about, the question of why a lot of people are miserable wingers who do nothing but wreck shit, I find the reality to be more comforting. They’re people who lived a certain set of circumstances that combined with their existing physical makeup. They were changed, which means they can be changed, or circumstances can be changed to create less of them in the future. “They have bad souls” is what would be demoralizing to me.
I think it’s more like that people want to insist on the “bad souls” to flatter themselves that they themselves have “good souls.” Like a kind of calvinism
Either that, or to convince themselves that they have no responsibility for the bad people becomming bad, nor for making effort to help them.
MC
@different-church-lady:
I am absolutely with you on this.
JWR
@JaySinWA:
Thanks for the info. It’s just that her collection of R voters reminded me of the execrable Frank Luntz, who I agree tends to push for the answers he wants to hear. Another thing about Luntz is that some of the old fashioned radio Liberals, like the one’s we used to have in Los Angeles before the Fairness Doctrine was abolished, were like putty in his hands, laughing away at his “jokes”. It was disgusting.
Scout211
Loose Cannon has issued her first order.
Link
Omnes Omnibus
@Ksmiami: Would you prefer sterilizing Republicans and exterminating their children? The solution seems sort of final to me.
NotMax
@BC in Illinois
No recommendations in that area, bur a few more quotes:
“Man is a strange animal, he doesn’t like to read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.”
“Understanding human needs is half the job of meeting them.”
“The government must be the trustee for the little man because no one else will be. The powerful can usually help themselves — and frequently do.”
“He who slings mud generally loses ground.”
jimmiraybob
@lowtechcyclist:
Since nobody on the right can offer a definition it only takes looking at context to figure out that “woke” is empathy. And, also too, compassion and understanding. Woke is recognizing and embracing our diversity. Woke is seeking equity (e.g., fairness and impartiality). And woke is inclusion over exclusion.
I am making a list so please feel free to add.
NotMax
@Citizen Alan
While am on a quotation binge, Frederick Law Olmstead:
“The citizens of the cotton States, as a whole, are poor. They work little, and that little, badly; they earn little, they sell little; they buy little, and they have little – very little – of the common comforts and consolations of civilized life. Their destitution is not material only; it is intellectual and it is moral. … They were neither generous nor hospitable and their talk was not that of evenly courageous men.”
James E Powell
@jimmiraybob:
Respect. Courtesy.
Ixnay
@Matt McIrvin: Rachel Held Evans has short piece about Huck’s tribulations. “OK, I guess I’ll go to hell.” Wonderful short essay/sermon.
Maxim
@lee: They have their own interpretation of “suffer the little children.”
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady:
These people have figured out exactly what it means to be a decent, moral, good person. They’re not curious because they already know the answer, that it’s them. They, the bigots and haters, are the only good people.
(Though the ones who are into evangelical Christianity may harbor anxiety about whether they’re quite hardcore enough for salvation.)
Captain C
@Jay:
Way back when I lived in Arizona, I had a few friends who were part of the local BDSM scene. This was one of the things they strongly emphasized, that everything was and should be consensual, and that it was the Dom’s job to make sure that the Sub was not pushed too far. They often pointed out that ultimately, the Sub had control of the encounter.
Absolutely.
This.
Jay
@Bupalos:
change comes from within.
You have to want to change. There is no shortage of support out there for that.
Instead, like Jan 6, many decided that the problem wasn’t that they are assholes, they just wern’t asshole enough.
Like the GrOPer party spending millions on studies to figure out where they went wrong, tossing it all in the trash bin and deciding that they just wern’t racist enough.
You can’t fix people, they have to fix themselves.
Soul, there is no soul, other than the music.
JWR
@NotMax: LoL! “… and some of them aren’t even good dancers!” TY! ;)
Ksmiami
@Omnes Omnibus: No, just disrupting Fox News etc… and after WW2, the US established schools and programs to help Germany move past its past. That was the denazification program, along with arresting the perpetrators of violence.
Citizen Alan
@Tony G: This! Fox News is not beaming mind control waves into people’s brains, and Donald Trump is not an evil Professor X with telepathic mind control powers. The lies they sell work because there is an audience who wants those lies and prefers them to reality. Just like the Holocaust happened in large part because must Germans CHOSE to believe “the Jews stabbed us in the back” because it was more comforting than “we got our asses handed to us by the British and the Americans in a war that we were idiots for joining in the first place.”
Jay
@Captain C:
the local BDSM Health and Safety Committee meetings were always “interesting”, //
Citizen Alan
@Maxim: I have trouble pretending to be cruel when I occasionally play evil characters in D&D and other games. Even when I played Vampire: the Masquerade, I gravitated towards high Humanity characters.
Maxim
@Roger Moore: I think it’s impossible to separate white supremacy from a lack of empathy. The very notion that melanin-deficient people are inherently superior to melanin-rich folks requires the willingness to dehumanize the latter.
@Bupalos:
I’m with you on that. I don’t think we really have good answers to the nature vs. nurture question (the studies on identical twins adopted separately are intriguing). But we do know, of a certainty, that early childhood environments are important. I would like to see us go all out on subsidizing quality childcare and providing free preschool. I’d also like to see empathy taught (and it can be taught) as a core value in every school, starting with the teachers and administrators.
NotMax
@Citizen Alan
When I’ve participated in RPGs I will move Valhalla and Earth to avoid engaging in overt violence against NPCs or the villainous. Incapacitating, bargaining with or detouring around them more in my wheelhouse.
The other players tend to look askance at the predilection but (grudgingly) accept it as coming with the territory. One reason I’ve gravitated away from such participation is the hack and slash mayhem so applauded by compatriots.
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
This. One really important thing to understand is that they think moral goodness is part of one’s identity. They’re good people not because of anything they do but because of who they are. Similarly, the people who aren’t like them are just bad people because that’s who they are. I guess it’s a little bit more complicated, because you can become a good person by joining their group, but it’s group membership that’s important.
The classic example of this is the way they talk about some people as criminals. When you listen to them for a while, it becomes clear that being a criminal is a matter of identity, not behavior. A member of their group doesn’t become a criminal just because they were convicted of a crime, while a person they discriminate against can be a criminal even if they’ve never even been accused of doing anything wrong.
frosty
@NotMax:
That was really funny. In an OMG it’s true! kind of way.
Roger Moore
@Ksmiami:
I’m not sure I agree with the wording. One of the really important parts of denazification was forcing Germany to confront its past. We didn’t let them slide over the inconvenient events in their past they’d rather forget about, the way we let the former Confederate states lie to themselves about the Civil War.
Betty
This may have been mentioned, but I am seeing the latest GOP priority is eliminating free lunch for school children. Classic example of John’s point.
Ksmiami
@Roger Moore: and we need same approach here
brantl
@Roger Moore: Laziness is a prime motivator.
Jinchi
I have to say I’m enjoying the resurgence of John Cole posts lately.
Jinchi
Well, now that they’ve finished the hard work of repealing child labor laws, why should the little tykes think they can get a free ride?
There are plenty of good jobs available at the local meat packing plant and they’ve no excuse not to take them, anymore.
jayne
I think Elise Stefanik has secret ambitions to be the next Mrs. Trump and is getting panicky because she’s close to aging out of the role.
Ruckus
@HumboldtBlue:
It’s simply a lot more fun than being an asshole.
One is either a natural asshole or has to have a burning desire and work to get there.
BellyCat
@BR: Superbly well-written and insightful article you linked to. Thanks!
The one type not addressed — because they are “not invited to the party” whose attendees are being speculated about — are those of lower socioeconomic and educational status who swallow fascism hook, line and sinker. What motivates them? Moral superiority, lack of a moral compass, and a desire that somebody have less then them (no sparrow and no rod). Racial and behavioral categorizations (such as LGBTQ+) are simple convenient aggregators to get one’s hate on.
Excellent thread! (Thanks for delurking, with verve, Cole)
Paul in KY
@Maxim: Yup (speaking as a non-Indian person)
Edit: SC had much more correct & nuanced answer up above
Paul in KY
@NotMax: Boy, did he know em!
Paul in KY
@Citizen Alan: Also the French. France took tremendous losses in WW I.
Paul in KY
@Roger Moore: We let Japan lie a bit, IMO.
brantl
@Alison Rose: It only works with an over-weaning sense of self-righteousness.
brantl
@Oclarkiclarki: Spleen, as s substitute for a heart.
Batocchio
Well said.