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Through A Tweet, Darkly
I understand lynching now.
The way the Covington boys were treated brought me a moment of clarity. The fundament for this understanding came not from the left (I know what to expect from them) but from the right. Watching in near real-time as thinkers, writers and pundits that I may not agree with but used to respect go off like Roman candles at the mere hint of a whiff of the notion that white teenage males wearing MAGA hats were everything bad in this world was a wake-up call. Those poseur “conservatives” are every bit as intellectually brutish, morally smug, and ideologically craven as those leftists that I despise so.
First, if you went off on a hair trigger after seeing a sliced and diced snippet of film taken at a political event and published by the mainstream media and assumed the very worst about people ostensibly on your side, then you are stupid. You aren’t bright enough to have gleaned the least clue as to the left’s hate-mongering, smear-hungry, hysterics-reliant playbook. Congratulations, you got played. It did not even occur to you that the March for Life would bring leftist provocateurs out of the woodwork to ply their sinister and dishonest trade. Really? Not even a little bit?
You are also stupid because, despite all your proclamations and protestations about being reasoned, balanced, phlegmatic thinkers, you cannot resist turning your opponents into two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. That’s what muttonheads do. Despite your smarts, you cannot see your opponents as three-dimensional moral agents. You cannot take a digital moment to ponder “why would they do that? Did they do that? What are the odds this happened as stated?” Sad.
Your provided aid and succor to those that would take your liberty, your property, and your legacy because you don’t like MAGA hats.
If you were willing to cast every aspersion upon a bunch of kids and throw in with the rabid digital mob that wanted to dox, punch and kill these kids, then I beg you to take some time for introspection. If you could do that digitally, then you could, in the flickering light of the torches, help body surf the rope over the crowd to string up that uppity black boy that allegedly looked inappropriately at a white girl. Honest truth.
C’mon. Wake up.
I wouldn’t presume to ask you to study critical thinking, reason, and rhetoric. You had to have had all those classes, even if you didn’t internalize them. I would admonish you to get off of Twitter. It’s hurting you. It’s hurting the way you think, the way you process information, and the way you weigh variables. I don’t know if it’s the thrill of being part of a digital mob, the instantaneous feedback, or them there dopamine hits all the egg-heads talk about, but it brings out your worst self.
If you are addicted to dopamine, c’mon down; I’ll teach you how to generate it unilaterally, internally. Because you aspire to be a conservative, I’ll give you a rate.
Published in General
Well I heard that Jonah deleted his tweets on the subject, but they were captured first. I don’t use twitter though. As for the others, just listen to last week’s Ricochet Podcast. I don’t know what the others said about it later, but James was on another podcast later in the same day where he admitted he’d fallen for it.
I went and looked for them. Couldn’t find any. His worse statement was that (paraphrasing) the NRO is home to differing opinions. I haven’t listened to the podcast in ages. Something about the incessant OMB ruins it for me.
Ignore this if I sound ignorant since I don’t have Twitter. It seems to me that deleting a Tweet (is that what it’s called?) is the act of a moral coward. Doing so means the person is trying to erase who he really is. Is the video that started all of this being deleted? If you were man enough to say something you shouldn’t be able to erase it away as if it never happened.
Amen!
I see your point. Really.
Here on Ricochet we have the opportunity to edit our comments after we make them; a useful tool if we comment in haste.
Twitter has no such functionality. Thus, if you said something in haste or if upon further reflection you felt it over the top, the only choice you have is to delete it. Certainly you can quote your offending comment and append a correction via the retweet with comment provision. However a sure problem remains, for the rest of your twitter life someone can always go and retweet and endorse your previous, erroneous comment – further victimizing the object of your erroneous tweet.
So I generally don’t hold deleted tweets against people, unless it is evidence of a deeper problem. Bill Kristol, Jay Nordlinger, Jennifer Rubin are virulent NeverTrumpers. They only smeared the Covington boys because the Covington boys were wearing MAGA hats. They later deleted their tweets, because they were over the line – The impetus to tweet was Trump hatred and projection and hopefully they will learn from it.
Unfortunately, the Pharisaical Nicholas Frankovich has learned nothing, judging from his non-apology.
It does have the benefit of limiting the spread of your misinformation, since idiots can’t resend to all their friends and neighbors.
During the 2016 campaign I remember having a conversation (argument) on Facebook with one of my friend’s friends. During the course of this conversation, whole comments on the thread were getting deleted (both hers and mine) by her. I never knew you could delete the comments of others from your wall or whatever it’s called. It was startling, and it solidified my following of people like Trump, Milo, Sargon, Jordan Peterson, Ace of Spades, and others who were then associating with the label alt right before alt right was overrun by identitarians and white supremacists. Anyway, erasing statements is not a welcome development. Think twice, write once, and don’t erase. Nowadays, it seems the slogan is write then delete, think later if there’s time.
I’ve commented things I never should have said and wiped them out of public view, because I don’t want to expose any more people to them, I don’t want to go on defending the indefensible, and and I don’t want people to think that’s really what I think.
Of course I’m not a journalist, but I’m a man who makes mistakes and so are they.
Identitarians?
Are they bad people?
Bad? I don’t know about that, but it’s a way of viewing the world and oneself that I don’t agree with and that I think is harmful to values I hold. It’s like when people say Tribalism, but without the overbroad expansion of that definition. To me identitarians think that identity (whether racial, religious, gender, sex, sexual preference, etc) are and should be the main drivers of political activity and a determinant of justice.
Yep. Intersectionality is another model that is not useful.
I had not heard of any self-described identitarians until this thread, but a literal interpretation of the word brought to mind Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” of society. Are conservatives now rejecting that concept?
No, I described what I’m rejecting and Burke’s little platoons are not it.