The Lumpenproletariat.
Or as Clinton called them, deplorables.
Yeah, but this is more like reprinting a Twitter post, like we see all the time. It is the name they posted the comments under, and the pics they chose to post publicly. Facebook’s “real names only” policy could be argued to be a problem, but it’s then a good lesson on why we should fight those policies on a wider level, why you should not use Facebook, and if you must, don’t post threats under your own name unless you want to make the papers, either like this or when the police press charges.
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I refuse to cede reality to these assholes, especially when it’s such a twisted version of reality. The more we adopt and accept their conceptualizations, the more they control the narrative, something they already have a vast amount of control over, given their positions in our societies. I don’t think it’s in our collective best interest to do so.
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Calling Boris and Trump “outcasts” implies they were cast out of society by others. This is clearly not the case. For example, Trump’s position of wealth and privilege had him hob-nobbing with people in the highest level of power and influence in society for decades before he ever entered politics himself. Even with his myriad personal scandals he wasn’t “cast out” from anywhere, because he was in a position to buy the attention and prestige and popularity he so dearly craved.
Just look at all the pictures he took next to other celebrities over the decades. Look at the fame and access he bought for himself. He managed to get himself a seat at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner during the Obama administration even after years of making baseless claims that Obama wasn’t even an American citizen. It was almost like he was TRYING to get cast out of society and kept failing.
He wasn’t a social pariah, he was just an asshole. Any alienation he experienced from other elements of society was purely self-inflicted.
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Kinda’ tame, init?
Make a shitty comment in a public forum, get called out by the public for being a shitty person. Seems fair. It’s not like they were writing these things in private messages intended only for friends and family.
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Yes, but who’s emotion? Seems like a bunch of people with a gut feeling that climate change is a hoax very much agree with you.
Folks, this isn’t about whether to give a shit or not. It’s about whether to give a shit because of a passionate people, or because there are hard facts coming from science that say you should give a shit. Climate deniers have plenty of passionate people, but they don’t have the facts. Same with anti-vax, flat earth, etc. If you are cool with appealing to emotion, you validate making decisions based on gut feelings.
That’s not so say you can’t have emotions about the subject. You should give a shit.
Second, it should be about the message, not the messenger. Every article about Greta screws that up.
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I suspect if you go up one level and see where these guys are getting their news, you’ll find they all come from the same source, a source that is more than willing to run hit pieces from the fossil fuel industry. People are angry at Greta because they’re told that she’s a bad person from companies that feel threatened by her message. It’s propaganda in action.
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I’m in 100% agreement. I think believing or repeating the idea that Trump or Johnson is an “outcast” is giving them power.
I think that’s a daring “should”. Enlightenment values tell us we should pay attention to the message and not the messenger, but McLuhan’s “the media is the message” is probably a lot more useful. A 17-year-old girl travelling the world to tell old powerful people to shape the fuck up (without giving a fuck about decorum) is a more powerful message than the words someone might choose.
To you this is not about whether to give a shit or not. But the fight that is being fought out there in the world is the fight to get people to give a shit.
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Well said. Also, I wanted to remind you not to visit Alabama.
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So careful selection of two words out of context to make a pun on the word real in reference to real numbers so that you could reference an utterly bizarre* math fact all for the service of making a pun about zero.
You’ve chosen the right audience for this joke. (Perhaps my quip about a “philosophy of math” class was a good hint)
* Bizarre from the perspective of someone who isn’t into math: “Why does that need to be stated and why does it need a name?”
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So it’s PR then. Get an interesting messenger to sell that message. I’m not going to disagree that works. And it’s nice when it’s used for good. But it makes room for demagogues. Maybe not for climate change in particular, but for dialogue in general.
Hey, I’m just throwing out my opinion. And folks have been respectful of that, even if they slightly missed my point.
I think that no matter what somebody feels about posting these photos, everyone should agree about posting this guy’s photo:
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If you can get members of the general public to sit through and understand this (MIT climate symposium) instead of a 5 minute speech from Greta Thunberg, do tell.
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Yes, but they are outcasts since they’re not part of a traditionally victimized minority that’s only recently received public support from progressives.
Why won’t anyone think of the sisgendered, wealthy, white-male class who’s only fault is the misogyny and racism they were always told was their birth right?? Their long held and highly intellectual culture is on the verge of collapse due to persecution by all the lower classes who’ve recently forgotten their collective places!
Sarcasm, sarcasm, sarcasm.
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Exactly. exactly this. Far too often advocates for generalities end up tripped up by edge cases, and yet somehow fail to realize that this is why you can’t just have the general case and be done with it.
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If that were true, these gentlemen wouldn’t be calling for violence against the messenger. How we’d like it to be, but how it is.
The thing is, this isn’t new - ask any female politician or person-of-interest how often their hair/makeup/wardrobe is the subject of scrutiny versus their male counterparts. We can’t just pretend that’s not the way it is - that is the way it is. We can work to change that, but not by trying to dismiss it.
The messenger and the message are intrinsically linked, because she is who she is, and because she is a she, and because of those who feel they are the target of the message. You can’t disentangle one from the other without ignoring significant aspects of society as a whole.
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I don’t like to dismiss it as PR, because that says it’s a canned thing, crafted to create a particular response. People understand the world in different ways, and probably none of us understands it by a bunch of well-ordered, internally-consistent ideas. I think I’m surpassing my ability to express myself (in case bringing up McLuhan didn’t make that obvious) so I’m sorry if the following is a garbled mess.
Ideas exist in complicated forms. I don’t think that an idea about the importance of planning for the future taking the form of a teenage girl in people’s minds is really dangerous or toxic. I also don’t think personifying the need to plan for the future into a child is the same mode of thought or carries the same dangers as personifying the need to return to a golden age into a powerful man does.
The first seems, to me, like a natural connection. Children and the future go together. Also, I think we have a correct and helpful idea that adults are supposed to take care of children, so it’s powerful to us when a child tells us that we are not doing so.
The second is born of inherently poisonous ideas - that it is natural for men to lead, that we solve problems by exerting power, that the future is too dangerous and we should retreat into the past.
So I see it a bit like the difference between punishing children for misbehaviour and establishing natural consequences for misbehaviour. If a kid throws their cup of milk and you say, “Okay, no TV for you today” that is one thing and if you instead say, “Go get a cloth and clean that up” that’s another. From one perspective both are an authority figure with power imposing a punishment/consequence. But that perspective waters down or misses out on something important in the kid’s experience.
I don’t think following demagogues springs from being ready to invest ideas into people. I think if you studied people to see whether they freely associate ideas with the people they learned those ideas from you’d find that the majority of them do. Some of the people who do so freely associate their idea that they should be kind with Jesus or Gandhi or Buddha. Some of the people who do so freely associate the idea that they should take what they can and everyone else can go fuck themselves with Nietzsche or Trump or Rand. But they still have values. A person whose only value is to attach themselves to another person and do whatever that person says is a very disordered person, and I think probably very rare.
There’s definitely something reasonable about thinking that a person who is willing to join one cult of personality will be willing to join another. I’m just not sure that’s a good picture of how people actually think.
