JHUS Staging

Tag: hypocrisy

  • The Progressives Are Winning

    We – the people, the “left” – are stronger every day.

    We have it right. We know – at least in broad general terms – what needs doing to create a smooth transition into the next chapter of human evolution, and we know how to do it. All we need now is more people tuned in and turned on, so to speak.

    It is absolutely critical to this effort to break the hold panderers and grifters have over left wing discourse in this country. I’m talking about the clickbaiters who don’t really do anything but copy and paste other people’s tweets into their branded template and call themselves activists, Twitter insta-pundits whose only discernible contribution to the discourse is being able to write “fuck” a lot and direct it toward right-wing public figures (James “Sweary History” Fell excepted because that’s his gimmick and he’s written books and done other things and has an identity beyond his Twitter handle). Superfluous grifters. The kinds of drizzling puddles of humanity that charge you five hundred bucks to “engage” with you for four tweets. The kinds of self-proclaimed “liberal” and “leftist” and “progressive” “activists” who are so bad at what they do that they will unironically create a campaign shaming mental illness and playing on violent racist tropes to defeat a candidate that was a laughingstock in the first place.

    Now people are catching up and catching on, and the time is (at least of those presented thus far) optimal to start pushing hard on this whole concept of media and information literacy, discernment of sources, knowing who’s getting paid by your social media activity and making sure they really are who they represent themselves to be.

    These people and others of their same basic mentality and ethical vacuum have spent ridiculous amounts of energy trying to end progressive integrity completely, and they have failed. They have failed because they understand neither integrity nor progress. Fundamentally they want to make money, and the way they’ve chosen to do that is by pandering to the political biases of people who think of themselves as progressive. In doing so, they’ve cratered genuine leftist movement in this country and did a great deal to give us President Donald Trump by throwing their weight behind status-quo middle-path capitalism in the hopes of making political careers for themselves through sycophancy to entrenched power.

    They hurt us, and they hurt our country, and they made fools of us, and they took millions of dollars from us.

    Now it’s time to return the favor. Not by going after them personally (because that’s petty and weak), but by ending the whole series of logical breaks, ethical corner-cutting, and self-deception that empowered their grift in the first place.

    We must stop taking our cues on the left from people who don’t care about what’s right but only about what’s profitable. It’s a conflict of interest; if all you care about is numbers, it doesn’t take long to start making sacrifices to integrity in order to chase them.

    The folks who do this are a big part of why instead of looking for new progressive leadership so we can all have the lives we want, need, and deserve, we continue looking at the old pillars of the center-right capitalist wing of the DNC, which is the wing that controls most of the party, hoping that somehow THIS will be the time when capitalism-lite works.

    The win condition of capitalism is fascism. It’s unavoidable, and it’s time to start crafting whatever we decide to call the thing that is post-capitalism.

    These bad actors don’t want to move past capitalism because it’s the only reason they have any power in the first place and they know that they can’t survive on a level playing field where merit and integrity are more important than one’s ability to buy their way in.

    They’re part of the reason we’re not moving forward like we should be, and it’s time to shed their anchoring weight from the evolution train.

    We have the numbers and we have the ethical high ground. They’ve got money, and right now that’s an advantage. We live in a capitalist system and to some degree are forced by that to need money; that’s why I have a Patreon.

    The only reason people like Omar Rivera (Occupy Democrats) and Matt Desmond (Being Liberal/AddictingInfo) and other grifters and panderers like them aren’t out here doing the same thing I do, asking directly for contributions to help them stay alive and able to produce work, is they lie through their teeth about what they’re doing (generally lies of omission; they just don’t mention it). They’re living on what they make online just like I do, I’m just honest about it. I say “hey I’m doing this work and need to survive.” They want to sell you branded beach towels – the illusion and presentation of an identity offered as a for-profit saccharine homoncular pretense of activism, intended primarily for consumption by that particular breed of human who values style and social validation over truth and accuracy and progress. I and others like me – writers and activists of integrity – are trying to eat, pay bills, and have the equipment to put our skills and talent to the best use to make the world better.

    It’s the same thing all these people who do kickstarters for books and stuff are doing; trying to survive and pay the bills long enough to do what they believe they’re supposed to be doing. “Pay me, and I can write a novel.” It’s really not that complex or underhanded, until people like the Occupy Democrats and Being Liberals of the world get involved and try to turn it all into a grift, and they’re terrified you’ll notice that some of us aren’t doing that, so they work to take us out before you do notice and realize you’re being taken for a ride by them. Since they’re starting from a position of power and are willing to make compromises to core principles (if they’re even able to recognize a compromise when they see one), they naturally have the upper hand against the rest of us.

    The behavior tends to be self-rewarding and self-perpetuating; it’s hard to lose money by pandering to people’s egos…and when money’s the point, any damage done to discourse or our overall political health, for instance by allowing critical messages of truth and progress to be dulled and deflected by those more interested in pleasing those holding power, is just another bullet point on the collateral damage list.

    With friends like that, the US left definitely does not need enemies.

    That’s why it’s so important that we, the people, get it together on an individual level and take it upon ourselves to seek true literacy with humility and an open mind. In particular we need to be very cautious about allowing the knee-jerk emotional reactions of our ego to lead us into ignoring realities that are unflattering or unpleasant.

    That set of problems solves itself when people get too smart to fall for cheap appeals to ego and bias in the first place. That’s what I’ve been working to do for these last dozen years or so, beyond a broader lifetime of other activism.

    That’s why I particularly scare them and why I draw so much heat from them: because that’s exactly what we’re making happen and I’m the face of that.

    Thanks for continuing to energize and support me and us and what we do here. We’re right.

    We are right.

    We have the answers we need.

    Now we just have to push past the bastards that don’t want anyone to hear them.

  • Five Bad Arguments That People Use All The Time

    There’s a lot of bad argumentation on the internet, that’s no secret.  More ways have been invented to insult your mother in the last ten years than ever previously existed, thanks to the social media.

    You find a lot of arguments and bickering, and that too is a tired observation.  What’s not so tired, though, is noting the overuse, misuse, and fallacy of some “points” that come up time and time again.

    It’s time to rid ourselves of these five “arguments.”  Generally speaking, they serve little to no positive purpose, except as an attempt by the person making these arguments to establish dominance in the conversation.

    You don’t want to be that person.

    So here’s five clichéd non-arguments that you can eliminate from your linguistic repertoire, and in so doing, you’ve done a little bit to make the world a little less stupid.  Thanks for that.

    (A note:  attentive readers may think this article looks familiar; it’s a re-work of a piece I originally posted back in 2013.)

    5. “Name calling means you lose”

    Nonsense.  If I think you’re a jerk and I say so, nothing has been “lost” except perhaps the comfortable, criticism free bubble in which you live.

    Of course, that rebuttal is no less oversimplified than the original assertion.  The reality – as so often happens – is that this is a case-by-case situation.  If you think you’re making some profound political statement by referring to the president as “Barry” or always including his middle name when you talk about him, or if your discourse regularly includes words like “libtards” or “repukes,” then it’s a pretty safe bet that you don’t really have anything to say.

    On the other hand, if you are espousing/promoting a hateful, ignorant ideology, it does not make the slightest difference to the (in)validity of that ideology if I point out that it’s hateful and ignorant.  It doesn’t add validity to your ideology if I tell you that you’re a greedy, selfish asshole for promoting it.  Jeffery Dahmer does not suddenly become a martyr because I say he’s a dick.  This is silly schoolyard nonsense that adds nothing to the conversation except a clear statement that the person making this assertion is desperately trying to control it.

    4. “You Mentioned Hitler; You Lose”

    Also, with all due respect to Mike Godwin, not nearly as iron-clad a conversation stopper as people like to think.  While it’s certainly true that buzzwords like “nazi,” “communist,” “socialist,” and others are often employed as ad hominem attacks with no real bearing on the subject at hand (and often a manifest ignorance as to what those words actually mean), it’s also entirely reasonable to point out when someone is making a suggestion or drawing a parallel that is uncomfortably reminiscent of the Nazi ideology.  For instance, some idiot bigot on some forum or the other that I was recently reading made a remark to the effect that homosexuals should be imprisoned and subject to any and all manner of “examination” to determine what “went wrong.”  Besides the obvious logical flaw (who says anything “went wrong?”), in reality this statement reminded me strongly of Dr. Mengele’s horrific human experimentation during the Nazi years which included gross violations of the rights and dignity of thousands of gays, Jews, Roma, and even included invasive and in some cases fatal research on twins.

    I made a remark mentioning Mengele, and suddenly it’s all about how I “lost.”  I didn’t “lose” anything, nor was I trying to “win” anything.  I was trying to draw the writer’s attention to the nature of what they were defending, and to make the larger point that this sort of passive-aggressive enabling is exactly how oppression is empowered.  What enabled Mengele wasn’t some secret and obscure distortion of his psyche, although there were plenty of psychological issues there.  But what allowed him to get away with it simply an extension of the same crap you hear every day:  the deliberate dehumanization of various groups of people.

    You see it constantly – consider how we refer to undocumented immigrants as “illegals,” for instance.  They’re not people anymore, certainly not living breathing human beings with dreams and hopes and aspirations and a rich and complex emotional life, because if they were then those of us who choose to regard them as sub-human might have to actually stop acting like assholes.

    Mr. Trump, being what he is, has not only encouraged this way of thinking but given those who engage in it a false sense of social approval and acceptance, which is why it’s become so prevalent in the last three years (and it wasn’t exactly uncommon before that).

    To some extent, any such grouping or pigeonholing is an exercise in the same behavior.  Reducing everyone to “libtards” or “teabaggers” is rooted in the same place.  This expression is pernicious and devious and nearly ubiquitous; consider how so many of these labels are used to depersonalize individuals and hold them accountable for the imagined misdeeds of their imagined co-conspirators.  Consider how words like “thug,” “urban,” or “ghetto” are all commonly used euphemisms in mainstream media for “black,” particularly “poor young black men.”  Consider the phrase “migrant laborer.”  I promise you, even if you can’t admit it to yourself, that when you read that phrase the picture that came into your head was of a Mexican – not a “Latino,” a “Mexican.”  And now when I say “This is Joe, he’s a migrant laborer,” there’s a whole set of attributes that goes with that phrase, which you have now just imparted to Joe.  You even have a picture in your head, right now, of what Joe probably looks like…and you and I both know that Joe looks like a guy with dark skin, black hair, probably a little short, probably not dressed in expensive clothes, probably not driving a new car.

    Joe looks like that because that’s what you’ve been trained to think a “migrant laborer” looks like.  You were trained that way because someone, somewhere decided it was to their advantage that you think that way.  Someone decided Joe would be a lot easier to oppress if you could be made to forget that Joe is a human being who loves his wife and kids and has insecurities and worry and gastrointestinal distress and runny noses and enjoys a good joke.  If you can forget about Joe and just deal with “migrant laborer,” then Joe isn’t a fellow human anymore; he’s a usurper and a thief driving around the country in a low-rider with 85 of his cousins in the trunk.  Rather than a person, he’s a racist stereotype.

    This behavior wasn’t invented by Mengele; he just used it as an excuse to go a couple of horrific steps further.  After all, these are “not really people,” so there’s no ethical qualms about experimenting on them, right?  See also:  The Tuskeegee Experiments,  Calmette-Guerin (experimental testing of a TB vaccine on infants of First Nations tribes in Canada, which actually happened prior to Mengele’s ascension in the Nazi party), or the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, among many others.  (The latest, this Florida man who didn’t understand why he was being arrested for killing a guy who came to his door, telling police he didn’t see what the problem was because he’d “only shot a n—-r.”  See?  Not a person anymore – an archetype, a symbol, an icon, a representative member of a predefined sub-human class.)

    While it’s important to avoid casual comparisons to the horrors of the Holocaust, it’s also important to remember that one of the biggest things which allowed the Holocaust to happen is that people by and large refused to call out oppressive actions and attitudes.  One of the ways this was enabled was by depersonalizing the victims.  They are “only Jews,” they are “only homosexuals,” they are “only midgets,” they are “only twins,” they are “only gypsies (Romani),” they are “only [anything but Aryan],” so why should the ethics which apply to human experimentation, apply to these groups which are obviously not human?  VERY dangerous road to toddle down, it’s a slippery slope from step one.

    3. You’re Intolerant Because You Dislike My Intolerance, Therefore You Lose

    Another classic bit of nonsense from the peanut gallery.  My refusal to put up with you being a stupid bigot does not mean I’m “intolerant,” it means I refuse to put up with stupid bigots.  I also refuse to put up with axe murderers, but that doesn’t make me “intolerant.”  It makes me somewhat less likely to fall victim to an axe murderer.

    This is a favorite refuge of stupid bigots who are desperately clinging to the idea that their stupid bigotry is not actively, visibly dying out in our lifetimes; that being a bigot is still something people can do and expect to live without consequences for it.

    You can try all you want to pretend that’s the same thing as “refusing to put up with blacks” or “refusing to put up with homosexuals” or whatever your thing is, but in the end this line of argument leaves out two things:

    1. You choose to be a bigoted prick.  You weren’t born that way.  For any adult to behave or believe in such a manner, as an adult or even a reasonably intelligent older child you have to make a decision to ignore all of the facts and logic and reason which clearly suggest that bigotry is stupid.
    2. Nobody is hurting you by being gay or black or whatever.

    As my friend Pope Snarky pointed out so succinctly, tolerating intolerance is not itself an act of tolerance; it is an act of passive-aggressive intolerance.  It’s the behavior of the bigot who has enough ego to worry that being a bigot will have negative social repercussions, but not enough actual character to stop being a bigot.  So, with their hands “tied” by public perception, they have to sit back and live vicariously through the stupid bigots who are ridiculous and delusional enough to think that their behavior is acceptable anywhere outside of their circle of bigoted friends.

    2.  I Don’t Like The Source, Therefore The Information Is Wrong, Therefore You Lose

    I’ve burned myself on this one several times.  A few years ago, one of those half-ass “liberal” “news” sites ran an article about the gathering of several fairly unhinged individuals to basically take over a small Pennsylvania town where a very unhinged individual – who happens to be the Chief of Police – was faced with a 30-day suspension for being a stupid douchebag.  Instead of taking it like a person of honor and maybe even getting the hint that his cro-magnon chest-thumping is not appropriate or acceptable behavior for a nine year old child (let alone for a man charged with the duty of protecting a small town), he doubled down and did even stupider, more insane things until he got his ass fired.

    My mistake was that I initially blew the story off because I knew the source was garbage clickbait that tended to lie a lot in their headlines.

    Turns out that, aside from the predictably salacious, hysterical headline, the clickbaiters had the gist of the story right – that a bunch of yobbos with guns had shown up in this small Pennsylvania town for the express purpose of terrorizing both citizens and local government into backing down.

    I blew it, because I looked at the source first.

    This isn’t to say that you should believe everything you read.  It’s not to say that when someone quotes a “News of the World” or “New York Post” or “Washington Times” article that you should assume that person is well-informed about media quality or that the story itself isn’t either made up from whole cloth or grossly distorted from one core fact.

    However, if I’d taken a second to check the story out I would have seen that (as usual) this particular site was just rehashing reports from actual news organizations, and saved myself the embarrassment of having to publicly admit that I blew it.  So before you jump to point out that this paper or that one is junk, remember this one key reality:

    The National Enquirer broke the story of John Edwards’ affair.

    Obviously that doesn’t mean that I should stop thinking of “breaking news” in the context of many sites as more like “broken news,” but it does mean that I should check out legitimate information sources before assuming that any story – even a Fox News Exclusive – is entirely wrong.

    1.  Taking Offense At My Offensiveness Is Violating My Rights!

    There’s a little aphorism that floats around in various forms and guises, which basically says that if I’m offended about something, then it’s my choice to be offended and what I’m really doing is acting like a cheap bully that’s trying to control the conversation.

    So next time someone claims that you’re some kind of terrible person for being offended at their racial or gender or sexuality stereotypes, and you ought to stop being a bully and trying to tell them what they can and cannot say, just find an offensive joke that you know they’ll take personally and for them to get offended…and then use their own argument against them.  “What, now you’re going to try to tell me what I can and can’t say?  How dare you!  What are you, some kind of nanny-state liberal treehugger who wants to tell me what I’m allowed to think is funny?  You’re just choosing to be offended because you want to dictate what I can and cannot say, it’s not me that’s offensive, it’s that you are choosing to take offense so you can bully me into silence.”

    If they can’t figure out that their reasoning is entirely invalid after that, you’re either dealing with a complete idiot, or with a troll who doesn’t actually care about making a meritorious argument.  In either case, they can safely be dismissed and you need no longer waste time trying to have an intelligent conversation with them.

    Bonus Round: You Lose!

    This, the careful reader will note, is the common fallacy to all of these arguments.  The phrase “you lose” and the attitude that lies beneath it are clear indicators that the person making the argument isn’t really trying to engage in a discussion at all; they’re trying to engage in a competition.  They don’t want to learn, they want to “win,” which is of course entirely pointless in any genuine exchange of ideas.  If you’re getting involved in a discussion to “win” something, you’re turning it into a battle, instead of a conversation.  The only way to truly win that game is to not play it in the first place.

  • Stop Shaming Teenagers Because You Think They’re Hot

     
    Screencap of Yahoo! Article describing outrage over Millie Bobby Brown's outfit
    Courtesy Yahoo! News

    Trigger Warning:  sex, sexuality, adolescent and teen sexuality, brief mention/discussion of sexual violence and rape.

    Generally speaking, I avoid anything related to “celebrity news,” but this needs saying loud and clear, so I’m gonna say it:

    I’m glad I don’t live in a world – or in a mind – where I feel the need to body-shame a fifteen year old because I’m terrified that if I admit (out loud or even to myself) that I can see her cleavage and it makes me think vaguely about the concept of sex for second and a half, I’ll be socially outcast as a pervert even though that thought-line is entirely normal for a heterosexual adult man catching a glance of a decolletage developed enough to be called that.

    We are sexually reproducing life forms; as long as we think we’re capable, we instinctively judge everyone we see, before nearly anything else, on their fitness as a reproductive partner.  If you want to be embarrassed about that you can, although in my opinion that’s totally unnecessary and maybe even not super healthy.  But please stop trying to pretend it doesn’t happen.  It happens automatically, at the gut level, with little to no conscious thought, but it happens, and it happens to you.

    Humans are made to find human bodies attractive, and I find that most of them are, of any age, if you just look at them, and that includes all the bits that some of us don’t like to talk about.  That doesn’t mean I am attracted to all of them, but I can see they are attractive without feeling perverted or creepy about it, because I have zero perverted or creepy intent.

    “Let The Men Stay Home”

    Let me drop that bomb again in case you missed it:  it is entirely possible and entirely normal to find someone sexually attractive and not be sexually attracted to them.

    Well-adjusted adults with healthy sexual outlooks are capable of that (and most who aren’t well-adjusted – I’m not, and I’m capable of it).

    If you find that hard to believe, maybe you’re not as well-adjusted as you’d prefer to think.

    Human beings become sexually mature before they become emotionally or psychologically prepared for parenthood and relationships. That is a reality.

    We have a whole system of social conventions and laws built up to both protect young adults from predation and also to keep adults reminded that there are moral and ethical reasons why young adults shouldn’t be sexually active outside their age group until they grow in to the psychological and emotional maturity required to deal with the potential results of sexual activity, from love and babies to sti’s and domestic violence.  Indeed, almost by definition when they have reached that level of psychological and emotional maturity, they are no longer “young adults” but simply “adults.”  (Obligatory dad lecture:  anyone who is sexually active should always engage in safe sex practices including the use of condoms, birth control, and how to understand, respect, give, refuse, and withdraw consent.)

    I’m really tired of people – mostly men but also many women, and mostly female targets but it happens to young men too – trying to shame and bully women and young people about their bodies because they, the adults/men, are apparently so lacking confidence in their own self-control they’re afraid if they admit that someone too young for a grown adult to have sex with can still be sexy, they’ll be helpless to stop themselves from trying to have sex with teenagers.

    It’s exactly the perverts who can’t rip their eyes away who make all this noise, and it’s exactly them who turn out to be the predators and exploiters (no problem making billions on preteen beauty pageants, right?) themselves. They always make it about what they’re worried someone else will do, but it’s really about what they’re afraid *they’d* do if they had the chance and thought they could get away with it, and how guilty and ashamed that makes them feel.

    They see it as temptation because they find it tempting.

    “Inappropriate and Disturbing”

    Nothing is inappropriate or disturbing about Millie Bobby Brown or her outfit, and it wouldn’t be even if she was completely naked. I think she looks great, and no I don’t think it’s inappropriate to say that out loud nor should it give her or me the slightest pause for concern, shame, discomfort, or embarrassment.

    What is inappropriate and disturbing is that we continue to allow people who have no self control, who are themselves the primary sources of prurient interest and hide behind grand public expressions of outrage as a smoke screen, to bully women and children into being uncomfortable with or ashamed of their bodies and sex.

    More importantly I think she’s a really talented young actor with a bright future and I think it’s obnoxious as hell we do this to teen actors, as soon as they start showing signs of sexual maturity the conversation immediately becomes totally about their bodies and how they look, and nothing at all about their work and what they do and what makes them good at it.  It’s insulting to them and it’s insulting to me as their fan, especially because it’s always done with euphemism and double-talk so if anyone calls you out on it you can just go ‘OMG I TOTALLY WASN’T EVEN THINKING THAT YOU PERV.”

    Bullshit, and to hell with you for even trying to run that bad lie past anyone.  I don’t want to think about people’s genitals, I want to watch a movie and enjoy a good performance.  Stop trying to make everyone else think about what YOU want think about.  YOU’RE the ones reducing the poor kid to a set of boobs, I just want to watch my show and see a great young actor rewarded with fame, respect, and recognition.

    Stop worrying about controlling OTHER people and worry about controlling yourselves, perverts. If you’re that worried about someone else’s body, you probably ought to sort that out in therapy instead of trying to bully women and children.

    Stop demanding the innocent and decent of all ages and genders cover themselves in fear and shame, and start demanding the prurient, indecent, and rapacious keep their damned hands – and their black bars – to themselves.

    Matthew 5:29.

  • God Dam

    This is more of a broad-topic philosophical essay than the more pointed work addressing environmental and other issues that I was producing during this period. Also a bit lighter-hearted, maybe, at least not quite so intense. And the analogy stands.

    Original description: Did that guy just compare religion to playing with yourself? Yeah, I think he did. JH takes on religion, hypocrisy, responsibility, and asks why we’re waiting for the invisible man to solve our problems for us.