Color me shocked.
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For people I dealt with in Schoharie County? Simply talk to them as intelligent people who get everything you’re saying without talking down to them, and talk the way you talk normally and not worry about it. A lot of people are baiting each other. Also had a lot of luck with really listening to what they were pissed off about (thought at its base a lot of it is racism). A lot of it was the rich bullies from NYC (who I had to explain were mostly not originally from NYC) who pushed them around with their wealth - to which I’d say “and that system of hyper capitalism is something you want more of?”
Also a valid answer.
Yeah, using reason and logic and ‘being decent’ has worked just great so far, hasn’t it?
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and this is relevant to the forum comment section of a blog article about MTG … how?
Are we supposed to be pretending we’re having a one-on-one conversation with Greene and she’s sincerely interested in what we have to say?
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Some people just suck. But that’s not the majority anywhere. If your goal is peeling off the non-assholes, I think that’s as good a way to go about as any…
From studies I’ve seen, in places where these creeps win it’s more specifically about perception by voters of waning or lost skin and religious privilege (which, stupid as it is, is all a lot of them have left after the Republicans decimated the ability to attain a mid-century middle-class lifestyle). Whether it’s affluent gentrifiers or immigrants or PoC or LGBTQ+ people coming into their communities, they’re going to lash out this way.
Unless they’re willing to engage with that honestly and without defensiveness, you’re not going to get very far. From what I’ve seen, the best response you can get from them in response is “so you think you’re better than me?” (probably not followed by a chant of “Mandelbaum, Mandelbaum…”)
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White Supremacy - the belief that white people should be treated as if they are superior to everyone else especially when they have proven that they are superior to no one.
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So again… what’s a viable solution, in your sage opinion?
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Have you considered that they’re likely just patronizing you because you’re management, a cis straight white guy and have economic power over them. Like those bully New Yorkers.
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Hadaway and shite, she’s better educated than I am. I didn’t get to go to university because of ill health, yet I know better than to vomit hate everyday. Maybe it’s because I didn’t go down the anti-intellectual rabbit hole.
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It’s like Pratchett’s anti-light:
In a truly magical universe everything has its opposite. For example, there’s anti-light. That’s not the same as darkness, because darkness is merely the absence of light. Anti-light is what you get if you pass through darkness and out the other side.
In this case, “poorly educated” is just not being formally educated. MTG isn’t that, she’s the opposite of it, not the absence of it. She is an example of the anti-educated, that which meets education and attempts to destroy it by cancelling it out.
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I’m not sure if telling me to read that story is you defending the movie or not, but a eugenicist story inspiring a eugenicist movie is not much of a case to make.
People have been saying variations of “stupid people have too many children” since the beginning of time, and it has always been arrogant, ignorant bullshit. The notion that stupidity is genetic or that self-proclaimed smart people get to be the arbiters of “stupid” is disgusting classism at best and genocidal at worst.
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The point of their research is that we all have flawed thinking in this way. People use it as an accusation thrown at others, which is incorrect.
There is no correct “colloquial” use of the words “Dunning Kreuger”. Either you are correctly invoking their research or you are not and the words have no meaning. Dunning and Krueger themselves rail against this “colloquial” usage in every interview where they are asked about it. Dunning recently expressed regret at ever publishing that study because people took the completely wrong message from it and now people think they know something they don’t about how other people think. Which is pretty ironic.
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Yet one of the primary ways people get elected by that crowd is by treating them like venal, petty bigoted idiots. It’s been hugely successful in getting them to vote against their own economic interests.
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Pointing out that voting for the GOP goes against the economic self interests of most people never goes well with that crowd. They get very upset (“what does a big city librul know about my economic self-interests?!”) when you bring it up and even more outraged when you discuss the benefits for them of programmes like single-payer health insurance or unions (“soshalism!”).
What they want is a return to the mythical 1950s past that Republicans of various stripes have been offering them since Reagan: one where any white man with a HS education could – on the basis of grit and rugged individualism and faith in Jeebus – be the sole breadwinner for his (cis-het) family, owning a house and two cars in a (lily white) exurb.
To anyone who thinks critically (including those who sell it) it’s obviously an ahistorical BS narrative that conservative economics can’t deliver on (quite the opposite). None-the-less it’s a powerful one subscribed to by at least 27% of the electorate. At this point we need to consider them political write-offs and instead focus our efforts on ways to dilute their influence.
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Meanwhile in Bolívia…
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She’s a fascist. Yes. We SHOULD mock fascists. She doesn’t believe this stuff because she’s “poorly educated”… she believes this stuff, because she is a fascist.
Also…
And it appears she was raised in a north ATL suburb that has a long history of violent racism. There was a major ethnic cleansing of Black citizens of Forsyth in 1912 and it was STILL a sundown county when she was growing up there.
How about we STOP coddling the precious feelings of violent racists and mock them for their horrible views on the regular instead.
From the flagship institution of the State of Georgia, no less. I would not be surprised if she actually purposefully speaks incorrectly as a means of trying to make herself seem more “folksy”…
Would explain her admiration for Trump? But also, she was an upper middle class white woman of means whose father dropped the business she owns in her lap. She is a grifter all the way down, and a violent bigot to boot.
I think it was likely she was raised in that shit, too, and never took the time to interrogate any ideas she was raised on.
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The above is a viable solution for dealing with your neighbors, if you live in a largely red area. What’s the solution for changing the fascist direction of their political group? Damned if I know, other than shaving off 1-2 percent of them might be really helpful.
And my point is that once someone comes up with a concept - any concept - it has a new set of meanings based on what the public believes it is about, and while those may be “wrong” those meanings have a much wider impact on people than the original academic definitions. Take… quantum anything. Or the blockchain. Or permaculture. Or CRT. The words Dunning Kreuger have evolved their own meaning to everyone else - wrong or not - because that’s how human culture works. And if the trend of bringing it up doesn’t go away, it will eventually become the “correct” version, and you can spend your time arguing on its wikipedia page. Your clue I am aware that there is a precise academic meaning, and I’m not using that, is “colloquially”.
Btw, here’s the abstract from Dunning: “I describe the Dunning–Kruger effect, in which poor performers in many social and intellectual domains seem largely unaware of just how deficient their expertise is. Their deficits leave them with a double burden—not only does their incomplete and misguided knowledge lead them to make mistakes but those exact same deficits also prevent them from recognizing when they are making mistakes and other people choosing more wisely.”
If we all have this form of flawed thinking, by the way, it inherently means that it is correct to apply it to others for some domains (though self-knowledge that everyone can do this is definitely a good idea.) As I work in an engineering field, I’m not using it as “this jackass is just stupid” but as “this person is taking their best guess at any area where they have no expertise, and refusing to listen to actual experts, because they can’t tell the difference.” It’s like the libertarians buying a cruise ship and docking it in Panama to make it into a sea-sted - because they all made money in Bitcoin or whatever, which proves they are universally geniuses - and then finding out “boats are hard”. Who knew?.. Oh yes, everyone with the experience.
