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A False Dichotomy: Be Patsies, or Be Like Them
I’m pretty much a broken record on the theme of speaking out, arguing that conservatives have to express conservative ideas boldly, and as clearly and with as much grace as we can muster. One common response to this is the claim that we’ve tried that and it hasn’t worked, and that now we have to adopt the techniques of our opponents.
I ran into this just today, when I suggested on another thread that the woke practice of “doxxing” (publishing personal information about private citizens) and getting people fired for the things they say or do on their own time was something we conservatives should not embrace. I’ve tried to make the same point on other occasions about such things as violating people’s first amendment rights, electoral cheating, and lying to further the conservative agenda. These are all things our opponents do. I don’t think that we should do them.
A lot of people seem to be of the opinion that we really have tried boldly speaking out, and that that’s now been proven to be inadequate. I don’t believe that. I think that the majority of conservatives are “normal” Americans (which Old Bathos very competently described in this comment), and normal Americans are reluctant to counter the prevailing media/academic/entertainment narrative that ever-faster seeps like a miasma into every facet of our lives.
Most of us don’t want to be the cranky relative at the family gathering arguing that mask mandates probably do more harm than good. Most of us don’t want to be the one who points out that BLM is a fraud. Most of us don’t want to be the insensitive so-and-so who argues that the “trans” movement is a dangerous fad, that America is as far from a racist country as one is likely to get, and that what torments our black communities is bad policies and broken culture, not anti-black bigotry.
So most of us don’t speak out. Many aren’t equipped — with information, temperament, or opportunity — to express those views. Others are worried about the professional or social blowback. There are lots of reasons why conservatives tend to be quiet, but the reality is that we do.
Pay attention to how free progressives are to give vent to their opinions. People who parrot the conventional leftist narrative clearly feel safe repeating what they hear on the radio and television, read in the paper, learn in school. It’s the air they breathe — that we all breathe. It takes no boldness or real conviction to go along with what looks like the majority view — even if it isn’t really the majority view.
Those of us who can speak up without endangering our livelihoods have to do so, and do so in ways that other normal people find persuasive and inspiring. We have to be reasonably well informed, well self-controlled, and understand that others need our example so that they, too, feel more free to stand up and be heard.
We have the advantage that we make sense and they do not. Most Americans still believe the things we believe. They just don’t realize that they’re in the majority, and that, if they speak out, they’ll be joined by others.
Published in Culture
Maybe we don’t need to doxx people, but we can let it be known that anyone who threatens us in our homes will be in danger of being met with deadly force. BTW, I didn’t agree with everything you said, but I “liked” your essay because you stated your case well.
Military law is not extrajudicial.
You just switched sides without knowing it. We-all, your new team, already make this same distinction. It’s why we aren’t patsies. But we can always use a few more folks who are good in a knife fight.
That has always been my personal policy.
Thank you. I don’t always agree with everything I say, either — at least, not on second reading.
Oh? How about if we refer to your recommendation as “martial law?”
I don’t think he’s talking about summary executions. (But I really don’t know.)
That seems to be where he’s heading, yes.
You know, 2020 gave me more than enough usurpation of normal civil government. I don’t want any more of it — certainly not to deal with something as minor as the Antifa creeps. Legislate that they go unmasked, flood the zone with cameras, and prosecute them.
Organized crime is a menace. We don’t want to get like Mexico and Central America.
Good idea. Outlaw the Democrat party.
I suggest a different common sense rule:
Hank, I particularly disagree with your first rule. It creates no room for righteous indignation. I’m not sure that your rule 1 is scriptural.
I seem to recall Jesus clearing the Temple. I recall him calling Peter “Satan.” I recall him telling the Sermon on the Mount crowd that they were evil. I recall him calling a Jewish crowd something like “sons of your father the Devil.” I recall him calling the scribes and Pharisees a “brood of vipers” and “whitewashed tombs” and telling them that they make their followers “twice as much a son of Hell as you are.” Or something like that.
This is the best and frankly only answer to the current problem.
This is also the tremendous value of Ricochet. It helps members find those succinct and powerful words and it helps them gain confidence to use them in other settings. I can guarantee members that arguments and rhetorical points they sculpture here will stand out in any other setting in which they eventually use them.
It takes an enormous amount of time and hard work to arrive at those words and phrases that resonate with people. But it is worthwhile, and without this forum and work, it’s unlikely we’ll find the right answers to the Left because we need the feedback of our fellow members to guide our sculpting hands. The Left has a numerical advantage right now, but there is hope we can prevail with common sense. The suddenly growing popularity of DeSantis and Florida are all the evidence I need that there is hope that the sane Right will eventually win the important arguments.
All the work we do here will pay off eventually. We will find those words and phrases that strike at a universal human purpose and sensibility.
There’s an interesting history behind Twitter. I’ve been around the Internet so long that I actually remember how it started. :-) A programmer whose name I do not remember (his name began with a T, I think, something like “Taggert” I think, and it’s not listed with the names of the founders on Wikipedia so I don’t know what happened to him, ) had a political website that was very popular. To beef up that website, he wanted to track political conversations that were happening around the Internet using just real-time Internet traffic data. He, or programmers he hired, accomplish that feat. So began political coverage based on conversation “tags.”
I don’t know how or why the forty-character comment became part of that invention (rather than longer-form comments). But the combination of the brief responses to the news of the day, which played to an information-overloaded, give-me-the-bottom-line boomer mindset, and the ability of people to see how many of their fellow people shared their bottom-line reaction to the news headlines was powerful. Twitter is here to stay. And only because of that initial forty-character cap.
We won’t get to the right forty characters without a lot of analysis and argument. Ricochet can help. Ricochet is like Twitter in that it reveals the current public opinion, at least as I’ve seen it expressed on the Wall Street Journal and other right-leaning websites. If your ideas work here, they will stand out everywhere.
Wow! Well-said, Marci.
Of course not.
I’m claiming that your use of the words “false reduction” (thus my emphasis in quoting you) presumes its own conclusion. It is one thing to say “The assumption that there are Patsies and Non-Patsies is false because the Universal Quantifier Human Beings contains Existential Quantifiers of Patsies, Non-Patsies, the Ignorant, (and possibly more).” It is something else to say “The reduction of the Universal Quantifier Human Beings into the two Existential Quantifiers in your thesis is faulty.” This is how I interpreted your remark about “false reduction.” (Apologies if that is an unfair characterization of what you intended.)
My memory (a very large and inflamed Achilles heel) of dichotomy academically is that it requires two mutually exclusive and exhaustive sets. This is something the OED addresses only to the extent that we agree on what is meant by “division.” Are human beings divided into Patsies and Non-Patsies? To shape a dichotomy, no other subset of human beings is allowed. (I noticed you suggested as much with your reference to a trichotomy.)
My criticism of your analysis simply attacks its form, viz: stipulating that a Universal Set contained a false reduction of subsets. On the substantive question of whether the Existential sets of Patsies and Non-Patsies exhaustively form a Universal set, I am doubtful–a condition that finds you and me in agreement on everything except just how many angels are dancing the the head of this pin.
What a surprise! This is so out of character. ;-)
Thank you. :-) It took two cups of coffee to put that together. :-) :-)
Here’s the problem:
I’ve ruined my fair share of family dinners without coming close to being a crank. Speaking out effectively requires a unique set of skills. I don’t suppose they can be taught but they can be developed, and like golf it’s a game most can play and improve on until the end.
Maybe the best starting place for conservative quietists is to start by trying to identify those friends and family members who are still old fashioned liberals and prod about without even trying to convince them of anything. Perhaps more important is to get better at identifying the ones who are potentially lost for good.
Great post, Mr. R!
“Define assault weapon”. I didn’t say anything else.
That was my biggest mistake of 2016. My brother-in-law went insane. lol
That’s the problem, isn’t it? You can’t even talk about things anymore.
I have so many examples, but I just can’t do it today.
In this case, he has heard the word so much he thinks it is actually functional and meaningful, when it really isn’t. Why would the Democrats use a non-functional word?
All he did over and over is physically act out a semiautomatic gun firing really fast. Over and over. He eventually left the house without any explanation. It was nuts.
He had never thought about any of this.
Enlarged for everyone’s convenience. (I hope.)
Jerry, if I were Jesus I would probably use a different list of rules. But we don’t have a problem with people being excessively polite, rather with the opposite. Of course people will adjust rules as they see fit. We’re not robots. I’m just trying to provide some common sense guidance.
Well, I don’t agree with this, either. I think that we do have a problem with conservative people being excessively polite. They see a man like Bruce Jenner and agree to call him “Caitlin” and “her,” and we all end up having to lie about trans people all of the time. We don’t push back, because we’re too polite. At least, that’s the way that I see it, much of the time.
I was talking about within the context of an argument, Jerry. The whole point of my post is that we SHOULD argue. But we should do so graciously, to persuade those who are afraid to speak up.
Is it possible to be… courteous, or something… to the individual, without somehow appearing to give acceptance to the movement?
Perhaps what I mean when I speak of being “polite” is ambiguous. I don’t mean that we have to sugarcoat a message. I think the trans movement is destructive and foolish, a fad that is injuring countless young people and quietly sanctioning emotional abnormality and confusion. So-called trans-women are in fact men, so-called trans-men are in fact women. Sex doesn’t change, and there are only two.
You can say all that, and refuse to indulge pronoun fantasy, and still not be rude and angry. And if you couch it in concern for people who are led astray by this nonsense, it can even be shown to be kind.
I will never advocate embracing a fiction in the interests of being courteous — except in response to questions of the “do you like my hair?” variety.
Good thing he wasn’t carrying.