The imbalance of the social discipliners being somewhat exempt from discipline themselves is not new. In the extreme, lynch mobs were not consequated for crimes that were worse.
Yet I think there is some new intensity in our current 24/7 news, social media environment. People who attempt to rein in critics of BLM/rape/harassment/GOPe are immediately accused of supporting BLM/rape/harassment/GOPe thereby. The discipliners are getting something of a free pass to do as they please.
Unfortunately, some of us are not inclined to be disciplined.
ReplyDeleteI thought about leaving this as a sort of response to Texan99 on another thread but I think it fits here.
ReplyDeleteI'm not surprised by the Democrat freak out over Trump. I remember the ones over Reagan and W. GHWB didn't garner as much, as I recall, but we Republicans had our own over Clinton and Obama.
I too think the intensity is new but I locate it in a different source. I think the Democrats really believed all their press releases in 2008 about the arrival of the 'emerging majority'. Those beliefs were confirmed in 2012 when Obama won over the kind of Republican who the Democrats now say they yearn for (after calling Romney Hitler when it was necessary to win the election). They got pretty good at ignoring the evidence from 2010 and 2014 (and even 2012) that things weren't really going all their way. They had the phone and pen in the Oval Office, the court cases to celebrate, dominated Twitter and Facebook, and that's what really mattered. Then the GOP nominated a real loser, and 2016 was Going. To. Be. Their. Year. They were going to coronate the first female president, and the orange-haired small-handed buffoon was going to drag down the GOP legislative majorities. The overwhelmingly white GOP was going to be a minority party again, the way God, FDR, and JFK intended, and the way things had been between about 1930 and 1990. Elections would still be held but they were going to be nothing more than validation of the selection of right-thinking people, and any GOPers who won were either going to be from cousin-marrying mouth-breathing backwaters that could be ignored or would be easily co-opted after being subjected to a Twitter-storm or two.
And then things just spiraled out of control. That old white geezer from Kentucky got a spinal transplant, and refused to do the right thing by gambling on the Presidential election outcome instead of confirming the Chosen Justice. There were troubling signs aplenty, especially the ones that showed GOP legislators were still popular, in some cases more popular than the buffoon. Then the buffoon slipped through the maze of the Electoral College, breaking through the firewall that was supposed to ensure the election of the Chosen Woman, and the offal really started to hit the rotating oscillator.
They could not, and still cannot, process how this happened. And they show no signs of understanding how continuing to dial their outrage up to 11 is making them more and more unpopular.
If Trump et al were really like Hitler, resistance would be appropriate. But aside from the minor detail that they aren't, is the kind of disruption going on likely to have the desired effect of inspiring others to resist and disrupt?
ReplyDeleteIf so then we're in trouble.
I gather that the enforcers of the true doctrine out Berkeley way were wearing black shirts. They're allegedly anarchists, but we wonders, aye we wonders.