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Things Conservatives Don’t Have to Do
As a relatively new convert, here are some burdensome tasks I’ve been glad to let go:
- Trying to convince myself (or others) that Trevor Noah or Amy Schumer are funny.
- Trying to believe or saying how great Michelle Obama looks or how much style she has.
- Trying to believe the veil/hijab/niqab are just fine and not proof of membership to a backward sect antithetical to Western values and culture.
- Watching the Oscars (or any awards ceremony).
- Believing that “educated” people know things (burden of proof is on them and it isn’t an Ivy League diploma).
- Feeling sorry for people.
Feel free to add!
Published in General
Not needing to pretend to crave action movies where a 110 lb woman clad in latex physically overcomes big men throughout the film.
Not needing to pretend to ignore the obvious condescension, blatant Big Brother social engineering and historical illiteracy of diversity casting, in which Victorian England, the WWI trenches, Hugo’s Paris or fin de siècle Vienna are populated by people of African, Pakistani, Sikh origin. Why bother with the period costumes?*
*See Mary Poppins, 1917, Les Mis, The Nutcracker…
Not needing to be “represented” every place I go, ie I can walk into the room and be the only American, the only woman, the only white person, the only mother, the only whatever, and not throw a hissy fit because there aren’t 8 other examples of Me in the room.
Educated people know things by definition. Bill Gates, for example, could likely answer any question you might have about programing computers. I’d take acting advice from Robert De Niro in a heartbeat, and I would love a piano lesson from Sir Elton. The problem is when we assume these highly educated people are necessarily experts on social policy as well.
We often speak of identity politics as if it’s something (relatively) new and inherently destructive, but I don’t think that’s right. Each of us has an internal Sorting Hat (see Potter, Harry), that makes us keenly aware of our insider/outsider standing relative to those around us. This mechanism has been around “forever.” What changes is the criteria we use to sort ourselves.
As long as most of the country considered American to be a commendable, first-pass sorting criterion we pretty much felt “represented” every place we went. Other characteristics (woman, White, mother, etc.) didn’t matter as much. That, to my mind, was identity politics working in a constructive, inclusive way. As American has become a pejorative, and we’ve begun fixating on increasingly trivial characteristics, it’s becoming impossible for anyone, anywhere to feel “represented.”
It’s ironic that even as the Left pushes us to view everything in terms of group dynamics, they are parsing the groups to such a degree that individuals are struggling to feel like they belong in any group. We’re not built for this hyper-isolation and I think we’re seeing a huge spike in mental illness because of it.
@ammodotcom : I think the problem is when people are really good at or celebrated for something and then they think they are therefore good at another thing. Like Michael Jordan not being so good at golf. Bill Gates is not a medical expert. Frank Bruni was the restaurant critic at NYT and now he has an opinion column.
I think we suffer from the tyranny of experts, and I think a lot of the problems we currently face are rooted in class conflict, egged on by academics (who know which side their bread is buttered on) and high vs low status beliefs.
I just read Abigail Shrier’s book about the transgender craze among teenage girls and it’s bonkers to me that all these highly educated liberal lawyers needed to “read up” on hormone blockers before opposing them for their daughters or that these Ivy leaguers thought it was some sort of harmless benign thing to be asked to call their daughter a boy’s name with different pronouns. They just started merrily down that road following some Pied Piper “expert” with a psych degree from NYU. It’s a sign of an expensive education to reject common sense.
The guy who takes care of my dad’s pool told his (albeit preteen) granddaughter “go upstairs and put on a dress!”
A college professor I had many moons ago had several definitions of “Expert.” One was “Someone from more than fifty miles away with a good shoe shine.” Another was, “Well now, an ‘ex-‘ is a has been and a ‘spurt’ is a drip under pressure, so an ‘expert’ is a has been drip under pressure.”
Are there any?
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” George Orwell
Nail on head. It’s called the “halo effect,” where we assign greater value to people’s beliefs because they excel in unrelated areas. And it’s hard to refute in casual discourse – if I say Jack Black’s politics are bogus, someone else can retort by saying “Well he’s rich, and you’re not, so what do you know?” It’s an easy trap to fall in. When I hear a celebrity parrot something that I actually agree with, as rare as that might happen, I have to pause and remind myself that they may be an idiot (like me).
I don’t have to break out in a sweat figuring out what ‘2+2’ equals.
It also ruins what they do well, for example. Matthieu Kassovitz is a great actor and a woke jacka*s off camera.