Ironically, The author sounds super right wing in her critique of the right wing. She’s using incredibly conservative and right wing reasoning throughout this essay. She says she’s a liberal but her reasoning reveals that actually she’s conservative. She wants to conserve access to the public sphere, not dole it out liberally. The author is conservative, not liberal.
Can you elaborate? I do not see any of the textbook talking points or perceptions attributed (usually in a biased way, such as yours) to either extreme. Why the need to extrapolate some ideology when the topic is clearly defined? This increasinly is what modern bigotry looks like.
I’m not extrapolating anything. The crux of her argument is a desire to CONSERVE resources (access to the public sphere), not dole them out liberally. She is quite literally making a conservative argument because her entire position is based on CONSERVING resources instead of doling them out liberally. Thus it’s extremely hard/impossible to understand her position because she is actually adopting the same emotional stance (wanting to conserve resources) as the people she claims to oppose who also want to conserve resources. The liberal argument would be to allow anyone into the public sphere but she is arguing AGAINST that. Which is a fundamentally conservative argument.
I’m not extrapolating an ideology I’m calling a spade a spade and a conservative argument a conservative argument.
It's a very interesting conundrum and highlights the invalid stereotype of conservative = right-wing and liberal = left-wing.
Avoiding using the left/right terms because it simplifies a hugely complex set of behaviours, I think part of the problem is that the current global state of confected fear is pushing the average-joe to blaming all the ills of the world on 'the unfamiliar' (those who are superficially different by skin colour, language, culture, religion etc.).
The Bannons and Trumps of this world both encourage that fear and play up to the blaming of "the unfamiliar" because it is popular (populism?), and if nothing else, politics is a popularity contest.
Moderate folks aren't bombastic. People that believe in a cooperative society aren't bombastic. People that are scared of "an invasion of the unfamiliar" feel they need to be bombastic as "identity self-defence" - this is correctly categorised as 'conservative' because it's seen as a conservation of the status quo.
The biggest, loudest people seem to be those with the most to gain from a fearful, compartmentalised, under-educated society, and because of the loudness and bombast and overall 'theatre' that goes along with it, these people get more air-play than is representative of their numbers, but also more influence than is representative of their numbers - popularity plays (sells) in media, which flows into political influence.
The author is requesting better forms of discourse that don't play into the hands of bombast, which is essentially not possible, so the author then moves to a restriction of the air-play these loud minorities receive, which is what radiantswirl is saying, not incorrectly, is a conservative position. It's also just as impossible as improving the style of discourse.
What I see as the solution is that the moderates need to adopt the same strategy of theatre. It feels 'spinge-tingly icky' to suggest it, like marketing cigarettes and sugar to children, but if your message isn't getting through, then your methods of communication must change.
Climate Change, as a nicely divisive example. Would you believe Exxon (cue images of oil slick covered penguins), or BP (cue images of oil volcano in the Gulf of New Mexico), or would you believe what 90% of scientists are saying (cue images of clean, white laboratories with test tubes of bright colours and people with glasses in lab coats with clip boards).
>What I see as the solution is that the moderates need to adopt the same strategy of theatre. It feels 'spinge-tingly icky' to suggest it, like marketing cigarettes and sugar to children, but if your message isn't getting through, then your methods of communication must change.
I think this change is happening already, the press surrounding the migrant detention centers is definitely an example of an increased level of showmanship on the part of the Democrats. I basically think the democrats are playing a word game but the republicans are playing an image game, and images are more powerful than words. When Hilary talks about “our democracy,” no one understands because democracy is a complex idea that is impossible to fully grasp —- she’s playing a word game. Meanwhile trump is showing off all the women with big tits that he’s fucked. If the dems want to win they need to have a lot more big breasted women on stage and a lot less talk of “OUR DEMOCRACY!” which is the equivalent of a nonsense concept because it means different things to everyone. Basically they need to stop playing word games and start playing image games because images win elections and words just confuse people. Why do you think trump uses tiny words lol, he knows no normies care about words, they just care about the image he presents.
while this is one of the worse political commentaries i've read, you have a point in that the education system in the US has been so mishandled for so long a significant number of people can't critically analyse language
No dude. It’s not the fault of the people for failing to “critically analyze language”. It’s the fault of the language for being so counterproductively nebulous and hard to understand.
Democracy is a nebulous concept. There’s millions of different variations of it. No one cares about “our democracy” because it literally has no actual meaning that anyone can point to. But a lot of people care about big tits.
Your blaming the US education system is just laughable because “democracy” is actually the one thing my teachers DID spend way too much time trying to explain to our class — yet still, literally no one understood it enough to form an emotional attachment to it, because it’s an inherently nebulous concept and impossible to emotionally attach to.
Your claiming that 20+ years of teachers earnestly trying to explain democracy to earnest students and failing miserably is somehow a result of the educational system and not a fault of the language itself is a massive LOL. The explanation of democracy is literally the ONE thing our school system does well, and still it’s not enough — because it’s literally not possible to explain democracy in such a way that people become emotionally attached to it. It’s just not a stirring concept. The concept of democracy does not stir up emotions in anyone except the most out-of-touch philosophers who only understand it abstractly anyway. Democracy does not stir up emotions.
