Sunday, March 1, 2015

political correctness

One doesn't expect this kind of excellence from dailykos: "Liberal Racism: 25 Things I Learned After I Wrote About ISIS and White Racism at the Daily Kos"

"Right-wing racists are much more honest, and thus easier to deal with, than liberal racists."
That's true on the majority of issues. Liberals co-opt egalitarian language from systemic injustice sufferers/critics and use it to rebrand status quo power imbalances to suit their own well-positioned intellectual sensitivities. Liberals know there's kind of an issue there, while conservatives are left to say, "but c'mon, we all know (group X) is the scum of the earth." "No, they're not," say liberals, allies of the punished side of power imbalances who, at least symbolically, support egalitarianism. Conservatives, with little self-awareness or understanding of what systemic injustice might even mean, say "f%!k those guys." Liberals, thinking systemic injustice is mostly a relic of the past, and is on its way out the door if the good guys (them) win, in some impossible future, say "no, we should fight for our just, if flawed (it's not perfect!), system, protect it from those right-wingers who would do away with justice altogether." Liberals consider themselves allies of the downtrodden, a lie exposed when the objects of discussion open their whiny, unappreciative mouths and accurately point out that "no you're not" and the fake allies ask, in some way or another, "where's the appreciation?", and work to maintain the symbolic framework in which they're the good guys, living in those sweet ill-gotten houses, fighting to elect the next politician to run the war-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, etc. You can put them in jail all you want, but don't you dare use the "n" word. You can kill them in their sleep, but do it for democracy.

2 comments:

d.mantis said...

Vote for the lesser of 2 evils, cause we have 15% less evil!

Is it no wonder that the "ratchet effect" is such a perfect metaphor for our political system?

In 2002, Hussein was elected after receiving 100% of the vote. He was the only person on the ballot, obviously. What fun was had in the US mocking this show election.

Of course, we had just had an election in 2000 where we had 2 people on the ballot. Plus the losing candidate had the plurality of the popular vote.

We are obviously so much more civilized.

Devin Lenda said...

"What fun was had in the US mocking this show election."

Gotta keep that distance that makes the ingroup so much better -- the justification for everything is in that gap -- so they find a symbolic difference with moralistic appeal and blow it up to a million times its actual size, like new atheists focusing on texts.