A.R. Moxon 🦋 Profile picture
Aug 4, 2018 31 tweets 6 min read Read on X
A thought about our current 'political' divide:

What's happening is a critical mass of people are done putting up with abusive bullshit anymore—taking it or excusing it

Which seems very divisive and dangerous to people who rely on abusive bullshit for either fortune or identity
When a wife leaves her abusive husband, he thinks that's something she is doing *to* him, rather than *for* herself.

Abusive people always make themselves both the victim and the hero of their own stories.

And a critical mass of us are done hearing those stories.
The abusive husband uses his own victimhood as justification:

She's refusing to see his side of things

She's not giving him a chance

She's being very unfair

How dare she

Well, then

She deserves what she gets

That's the story we keep hearing these days in different ways.
As I've said before, I'm pretty much done debating with people who have shown they're operating in bad faith.

But I think I might like to ask them to defend their bad stories.

I'll explain.
First, what is meant by ‘operating in bad faith?’

There are a lot of ways that people do this, but I think the underlying idea is, this is somebody who is expresses ideas not because they believe them, but to accomplish a bad intention.

Which is what abusive people do.
But how can you tell a person’s intent?

Sometimes it’s obvious. If somebody demonstrates a commitment to a totally alternate reality, a deliberately impervious ignorance of facts, or downright abusive language, yeah. It’s clear.

Bad faith. Don’t waste your time.
Other times someone acting in bad faith is less apparent.

They appeal to reconciliation. Peace. Forgiveness. Acceptance. Those are *good* things.

Who doesn’t want those things?

But those things are worse than useless, if the abuse that caused the divide isn’t first addressed.
It’s very important that we figure this out. If we don't, we risk becoming abusive people ourselves.

Asking a victim of abuse to reconcile with their abuser while they are still under persistent ongoing threat of abuse, is itself abuse.
What an abusive person wants is this: reconciliation without reparation.

Watch for it.
Reconciliation without reparation.

Continuation of the power that allowed the abuse, and the permission to continue that abuse without consequence.

And an apology, for the insult of resisting.
Reconciliation without reparation.

Watch for that, and you’ll know.

Bad faith.
Reconciliation without reparation.

The clumsy will yell to get it. The sly will flatter your best instincts. Appeal to things they don’t usually care about. They’ll even change their behavior for a while.

The way to detect it? Use story.
Ask them to tell the story where they are the hero.

Ask them for their favorite story about the brave rich country that saved their society by building a wall around itself, to keep all the dirty poor out.
Ask them for their favorite story about the country that was brave enough to torture in order to stay safe.

Ask them for their favorite story where the heroes targeted a specific religion for exclusion.
Ask them for their favorite story about the people who wisely separated the children of refugees from their parents, to better dissuade any other refugees from coming.
Ask them for their favorite story about a heroic military strongman.
Ask them for their favorite story about people who relied on legality to shoot children on the streets, and to put others in cages.

Ask them for their favorite hero who owned a prison.
Ask them for their favorite story where the heroes made sure that only the deserving hungry got food, where only the deserving sick got care.

Tell them they can use their Bible, if they want.
They can hide their intention behind stats, or news stories catered just to them, or they can duck and weave and mourn the loss of civility.

But if you ask for a story, what story supports those intentions?

Atlas? The best he could manage was a shrug.
They’re bad stories about reconciliation without reparation. If you tell them as stories, they're about the villain winning through power.

We’re not listening to them anymore.

And it’s not a political difference.
Remember, when our divide is caused by abuse, as it now is, the effects of the resulting divide—the consequence—is not something that has been done TO the abuser.

It's something the abuser has done to the rest of us.
The job of reconciliation belongs to the abuser, and the work of reconciliation is reparation.

It's not our job to reconcile the abuser to their intended targets before then.

It's our job to protect—ourselves, if we are the target, or others, if we are not.
I think these movies are exactly that. But these movies do not make the human spirit soar, and anyone who believes their heroes are admirable should be approached with caution. If it’s the best they’ve got, they don’t got much.
Also, this gets us into the interesting category of what I’d call “trap” movies.

These are movies that present a villain in such a way—whether through charisma or unapologetic expression of worldview, etc—that their villainy escapes the notice of people who agree with them.
Gordon Gecko was not the hero of Wall Street. You’ll still get people who say “greed is good.”

Colonel Nathan Jessup was not the hero of A Few Good Men.

Scarface was pathetic.

These are movies about people who missed the point, beloved by people who missed the point.
Quick point of clarity: In this thread I’m not talking about presuming, I’m talking about detecting.
But I don’t think debate is at all an effective tool for changing minds. Explained here:
Detecting bad intent isn't always hard. Here, for example, is a fellow who is upset that people like me presume racism just because we disagree on multiculturalism. He then follows it up with overt racism.

What to say?
A story of a country that saved their society by mixing vastly different cultures together?

Well, the story of the United States, for example.

Or, if you prefer the Biblical, what about the story of Ruth?

For something more current, how about The Guardians of the Galaxy?
A story of "importing poor people?" In my house we call that "generosity." I hope you take it as given I can put my finger on a story or two celebrating that.

Where's the story about the heroic monoculture of wealth horders that we all admire so much? And where are they now?
By the way, the idea for this thread drew from a longer essay I wrote last year. If you're interested, here it is. armoxon.com/2017/09/bubble…

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More from @JuliusGoat

Jun 16
In the linked essay, I mention Nancy Mace's standard TERF question, asked most recently to Tim Walz: "What is a woman?"

My answer is simple. A woman is not a *what.* A woman is a *who.*

I want to expand from the essay on why I think this matters.

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Mace’s question seems like a non sequitur, since the topic was immigration. It’s actually part of a unified supremacist frame of domination.

The question invites us into a frame where a woman must be defined. It's very important to refuse the invitation by rejecting the frame.
In this frame, a woman is a *thing* that must have a definition. Once you accept that premise, all that's left to determine are where the boundaries are and who gets to establish and enforce those boundaries. So, from the fascist frame, it is a border security question of sorts.
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Oct 28, 2024
There's a moment in Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic where the newly freed drug boss says to the drug lawyer who had been working behind his back "do you know the difference between a reason and an excuse? Because I don't."

At this point the lawyer knows he is in deep shit. 🧵
(By the way this thread is part of a longer essay, but if I lead off the thread with a link to an outside source, it usually gets crushed by this site's dork owner and his algorithm shenanigans, so here you go.)

the-reframe.com/out-damned-spo…
Anyway the lawyer knows he's in deep shit because "do you know the difference between a reason and an excuse" means "I'm not buying your bullshit," and if newly-freed-drug-lords-behind-whose-back-you've-been-working aren't buying your bullshit, then it is murder goon o'clock.
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Oct 24, 2024
One thing I’ve noticed is, the meanest tables are often popular ones. Sometimes they are the most popular. My observation here would be that bullies know that cultivating friendly relationships is useful and necessary for effective bullying.
Any abuser knows they need accomplices. If dad is getting drunk and beating mom up he’s going to need everyone to keep nice and quiet about it, and if anybody squawks then it’s got to be quickly framed as something bad being done to him rather than the other way around.
If it looks as if the truth of the story is about to get around he’s going to need people to stand up for him in that moment and say things like this: “Nooooo! Not him. I know him. He would never. He has never been anything but nice to me.”
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Oct 22, 2024
I’d like to talk about what leadership is and what governance is. I’d like to talk about the compass, the navigation, the travel, and the corrections.

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When people decide to leave the place they are and move to a different place, there’s an observable order to it. The order is very important.

So, in movement, there is the moment of arrival at the destination.
But before that moment, there is the actual journey. We began here. We moved until we got there. We put one foot in front of the other. We set sail and kept going until we arrived. The aircraft cut its way across the sky. This is the journey.
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Sep 24, 2024
There's so much scandal all the time, it can be hard to remember where we are, much less how we got here. But they say it's important remember the lessons of the past, or else we're fated to do...something, I forget what, I forget, I forget.

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Where we are.

It's really hard to know where to begin when it comes to where we are. There's only so much sheer volume of blatant corruption and noxious hate that a person can stay aware of even if they're trying. Eventually something pushes out.
It came out this week that NC Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson has in past years spent his time posting pro-slavery and pro-Nazi comments on porn sites, and other things of that nature, many of which are so bad CNN, who broke the story, declined to print them.
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Conservatives keep telling us they're oppressed, and when they define what form the oppression takes, they explain that other kinds of people ... exist.

You know what? Let's do it. Let's actually do it. I think we ought to oppress conservatives.

Other people *should* exist. 🧵
Let's oppress conservatives with a kind and open and generous world that they will hate and fear specifically because it will care for everyone, even them, while it refuses any longer to accommodate the revenge fantasies that they call "self-defense."
At the bottom of it all, it strikes me that conservatives are driven by fear. They're big fraidy-cats, scared specifically of the ongoing danger of good and necessary things, of openness and diversity and peace and plenty.

We should stop accommodating those fears.
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