Posts by Rich Lock
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Tom, you know jack shit about who I talk to and what my background is. Please fuck off.
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Lynn Yum,
The very act of bursting the bubble is about finding common ground with others rather than living in our own universe.
I absolutely agree that finding common ground and a way to communicate that cuts through is crucial.
I absolutely disagree that they are currently going about it the right way.
And tangentially but not directly related.
https://medium.com/@tuckerfitzgerald/alternative-history-bb3d53f7d874#.aozkyr7dz
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Lynn Yum,
The Guardian publishing an article from the Trumpian right is one way to show good faith
Let's assume for the moment that I accept your argument.
Can you provide an example of an article on The Guardian that meets this goal?
I'm not saying they aren't there, but the number of articles I've seen that do what you say needs doing (aimed at Trump voters, extending a hand halfway, in good faith), is zero.
And the ones I have seen, which I'm complaining about, fall into two categories: 1) insane 'post-fact' gibberish like the one I linked to, or 2) articles aimed at their existing liberal/lefty/metropolitan elite readership, literally called things like 'burst your liberal bubble'. I mean, really?
This month in Cosmo, 19 ways to achieve orgasm while bursting your liberal bubble!!!1!!!11!!! You won't believe number 12!11!!!1!
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I was also majorly surprised to hear on Morning Report that he tweeted this during a CIA briefing!! I'd have thought those would be held 'in camera' with devices excluded.
The tweet was sent from an iPhone. Cheetolini usually uses an unsecured Android device.
Draw your own conclusions.
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Russell Brown,
America’s growing political and cultural divisions have finally split the United States apart. Now, as the former blue states begin to collapse under the dead weight of their politically correct tyranny, a lethal operative haunted by his violent past undertakes one last mission to infiltrate and take out his target in the nightmarish city of Los Angeles, deep in the heart of the People’s Republic of North America.
Holy shitsnacks. Did he drop too much acid one night while 'Escape from LA' was playing on cable?
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Lynn Yum,
Wait, isn't that a good thing?
Well, as Russell's post just above this points out, there is less-than-zero effort to do the same on the other side. There is a constant attempt, not to find balance, but to pull the entire centre of gravity as far to the right as possible. It reminds me of an old story I was told about different cultures and personal space and distance in conversation. An Italian businessman talking to a British businessman will want to talk at far closer range than the uptight Brit is comfortable with. So at your meet-and-greet cocktail party, the pair find themselves completely unconsciously sashying from one side of the room to the other, as the Brit shuffles a few inches away, followed by the Italian shuffling in, followed by the Brit shuffling away, etc.
From my own 'micro' point of view, if I want my liberal bubble burst, I just have to go and stand in the queue at the local supermarket, and while I'm waiting have a quick skim of the front pages of The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Express, The Telegraph, The Times, and so on, and let the vitriol wash over me.
Nearly all the weight is on the right-hand side of the scale already. I don't think we particularly need more pushed from the left towards the middle.
Michelle Obama said 'when they go low, we go high', which, ok, yes, fine. But that tells you your opponent will go low. By all means keep your own arguments Marquis of Queensbury, clean and above the belt, but never forget that they'll be aiming to kick you in the nuts as hard as they can at every opportunity.
So I applaud the Guardian for being more contrarian, and trying to see the argument from the other side
More specifically, this isn't what they're doing. They are printing think pieces without comment, and without providing any context on who the author is and what their connections are, and then leaving it to their BTL commentators and bloggers like Russell to pull them apart. That's not 'trying to see the argument from the other side', especially given that most online readers won't go below the line, and zero hardcopy readers will see the comment counterpoint.
Here's an example from December last year, published shortly after the US election. Hmm, Professor, eh? 'One of the 20th Century's leading Philosophers', you say? Must be a clever chap, probably knows what he's talking about. Yeah, perhaps not so much...... I think the only thng that stopped me putting my fist through the wall after reading that was the pile-on in the comment section.
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Mark, the reason I keep replying to you rather than ignoring you is because I think you are arguing in good faith and are receptive to arguments. So I'm not trying to paint you into a corner or trap you in some sort of gotcha!
But having said that, I really don't understand the point you're trying to make. We kicked off this conversation because you appeared to be conflating structural inequality with White Supremacist ideology, a position you now appear to be defending while at the same time wanting to discuss 'nuanced communication'.
I'm perfectly happy to discuss intersectionality or whatever, but the ideological gulf between a set of people that includes John Key, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, or George Bush as examples, and literal neo-fascists is huge. I cannot overstate this. They're different leagues. The beliefs of the first group veer between 'doesn't see that there's an issue', and 'perfectly happy to line my pockets and align the system towards doing so', while the outer ends of the second set start at 'people with darker skin than us are less than human', and end up at 'let's literally exterminate them'. If you keep putting them in the same box, then any discussion we have is going to keep stalling on this point.
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Shaun Lott,
I've been giving some thought recently to Trump's promised Mexican wall, and I have come to the conclusion that it has nothing to do with border security and everything to do with trade. If you have a friendly border, it is in the interests of both sides to control it and maintain its integrity. If you think the other side of the border is your enemy, you fortify it. The narrative around 'bad hombres' seems to be more about setting up Mexico as the outsider and enemy in the forthcoming trade war. Or am I missing something?
There is a huge amount of trade across the border through various more-or-less open nodes. In 2011, 287,000 trucks passed through the
Nogala-Mariposa Port of Entry, for example. That's one of the biggest, but there are dozens (full list here). Very, very few are fully checked in terms of customs inspection or similar. In addition to that, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens legally cross the border to work in the US every day, and return home to Mexico at the end of the work day. As an example, the 'border zone' in Arizona is currently set at 75 miles from the border, inside the US (if you have a border crossing card, you are currently allowed 75 miles into Arizona. There are plans to extend that to the entire state).Huge lengths of the border are already fenced, sensored and patrolled by drone, helicopter and truck.
It's really, really hard for me to understand, just on a practical level, what exactly a 'wall' would achieve. Firstly, that the fence isn't already doing (the border is 2,000+ miles long - it's impossible to fortify the entire length), and secondly, unless you close the Ports of Entry and stop the day workers coming across, a wall is going to be little more an expensive ornament. Not entirely sure what closing the PoEs would do to the economy, but I suspect nothing good.
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Russell Brown,
The Guardian has given...
The Guardian has been repeatedly doing this type of thing recently. They seem to have some sort of recently-implemented, ill-thought-out, half-baked limp-wristed kumbaya editoral thought process about bursting the liberal bubble, meeting-in-the-middle, or whatever. It's starting to get extremely annoying.
Had to vent.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to mark taslov,
So when, for example, Trump talks about ...[snip]... for an abortion and get one then and there, as a basic human right in the 21st century.
Your argument veers dangerously close to the sort of argument that bloviating windbags like Piers Morgan here in the UK throw up all the time: 'why are you protesting [bad thing X], when [bad thing Y] is also happening?'
He recently attempted to take down reporter/activist Owen Jones by sarcastically asking him why he was so keen on protesting Trump's visit to the UK, but didn't protest visits by other oppressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia. In response, Owen Jones pointed out that he had in fact organised a protest against the Saudi visit.
The exchange is here, for reference (scroll down to the text below the video).
The first point would be that you can do both - protest and work against [bad thing X] and [bad thing Y].
The second point is that this comes up in comment sections all the time (along with it's sibling 'why-are-you-writing-about-[frivolous fun thing]-when-[lots of bad things]-exist?'
I'm always rather tempted to ask if I missed a memo from some sort of global summit where every bad thing ever was catalogued and ranked, and that all True Followers of The Way are hereby instructed to make their way throught the list systematically and without deviation. While imagining that the person asking has stripped their life to the bare bones, spending every waking hour in their monastic cell fighting the good fight, only pausing to choke down a bowl of gruel or take a short nap on their spartan cot when fatigue and hunger force them to.