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Really, seriously, stupidity. I forget who said it, but: always remember that half the population has an IQ under 100. And if that isn't enough to send you into the depths of depression for the rest of the day ...
I know that when someone asks me a piggish loaded question based on the premise that I said something I did not say, there is probably a 50-50 chance that s/he really, really believes I did say it.
Now, of course, that person probably also had a 50-50 chance of understanding what I actually said, since it was right there on the monitor in front of him/her. So why would any such person choose to believe that I said something as utterly stupid or evil as what s/he has decided I said, instead?
Well, there's your other explanation. Evil. If half the population has an IQ under 100, an overlapping half is probably also just plain rotten. I mean, how else can one explain things like George W. Bush being President of the US?
The problem with stupid people is that they really don't know they're stupid most of the time. Remember "Unskilled and Unaware of It"? They just can't get it, and they don't get that they can't get it.
But they gots their opinions. They grew up in the land o' Jerry Springer, where the most important thing in human life is to have an opinion - and to proclaim it, loudly and constantly. People who have loud, strongly held opinions are admired, no matter what the opinions might be. Opinions about other people are particularly admirable.
Couple this with the whole US history of one form or another of prosperity theology -- anyone can become president, Horatio Alger, god rewards the good so if you are rich you are a priori good and if you are poor you are bad. This makes it impossible, for instance, to recognize the reality of exploitation. To do so involves recognizing that anyone, even one's self, is weaker than someone else, and really does not have access to the same opportunities as some others have. And that not everyone is to blame for what happens to them -- leaving one without a bunch of people to feel superior to, even if one is a total failure one's self. Because that's the problem with prosperity theology; if one is poor and vulnerable, one has to regard one's self as bad and a failure. The only salvation is having people who are worse than one's self to look down on. One can even tell one's self that one had some back luck, but those other losers, they're the authors of their own misfortune.
Where is there a weak link in this godawful chain?? How can people be persuaded to identify with the exploited and vulnerable? when it means admitting that they are themselves, in some way, exploited and vulnerable. When they are so stupid that they can be manipulated by anyone with a soapbox, and so self-centred that any appeal to their image of themselves as righteous will suck them in.
And that brings me to another thing -- the whole view of "rights" in the US. Rights are things that I have, and that other people want to claim in order to take away what I have. There is simply no understanding of rights as things that WE ALL HAVE, and that other people may need or want the protection afforded by different rights in different ways from what I need or want.
And because the dominant class is white and male, the dominant right in the discourse is generally "free speech". White men are simply not vulnerable to the same kind of exploitation as women and people of colour; or as children. The only right of theirs that they're able to characterize as under attack most of the time is free speech. There will always be something they can characterize as such an attack, because there will always be some limits on speech, in some public interest or other. And they'll raise a hue and cry about every one, because otherwise somebody might get something that they don't get, even though they've got more of everything already.
Their security is not in jeopardy most of their lives -- or at least, if they are poor, say, they have been persuaded, if their security is in jeopardy, for instance at all those crappy jobs we're always hearing about, that it is nonetheless in their interests to identify their interests with those of the superior class. Otherwise, they'd just have to think of themselves as downtrodden, and that would make their heads explode. They'd have to identify with all the rest of us losers they've spent their lives looking down on.
Any discussion about any public policy that matters to people like us -- health care, pornography, prostitution, equal opportunity -- has to start from the fundamental understanding that there are people who are in need of assistance through no fault of their own and a fundamental agreement that as human beings we have a responsibility to those people, and that part of our responsibility is to put our own interests second to the interests of others in some situations. Apart from those arbitrary fundamental principles, it also helps to understand that it is in the interests of everyone, collectively, to meet the basic needs of people who can't meet their own.
Any argument should stem from consensus on those things, and then be about the questions of when any individual's or group's interests should be put second to a public interest or another individual's or group's interests.
No discussion of that nature can ever occur with people who simply assert that their own interests are identical to the public interest in all cases, that no one else has any legitimate competing interest, and that in any event their own interests are superior to any competing interest.
Exploitation lies on the line between ability to meet one's own needs and inability to meet one's own needs. The idea that action should be taken to prevent people from hurting themselves doesn't jibe well with the idea that people should not be prevented from exercising choice in everything.
The other aspect of the pornography/prostitution issue, for example, is the idea that choices freely made by people who are not vulnerable to exploitation (which is of course possible only in a utopia we don't live in) may still have an impact on a public interest such that the public is entitled to limit the exercise of that choice. In this case, we run into flat, simple denial. Huge numbers of people using narcotics is not something the public has any interest in; widespread alcoholism is not something the public has any interest in; the objectification of women in every element of the media is not something the public has any interest in; handguns in every household is not something the public has any interest in.
It's really the same thing, of course: everyone is to blame for what s/he individually does, and hot damn, blaming someone for something just gives 'em all the warm fuzzies. As someone just said in the internet misogyny thread, anyone attacking anyone else's website or sending death threats for any reason should be held accountable. Point that finger, lock that cell door, go home and have dinner and feel real good about punishing the guilty, and all morally superior to the bad guys. Never mind the fucking victim, and all past and present and future victims. Never mind trying to prevent the harm that has been and is being and will be done. Blame somebody for it when it happens, and wash your hands of it all. Because actually trying to stop it from happening might mean that you have to give up some tiny thing you want.
What Benjamin Franklin actually said (there being different versions, but the gist being the same) was:
Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Their liberties are ALL essential, you see; and our safety is of no consequence to them.
And I'm done.
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