This isn't a call to civility, it's a call to enablement of abuse, which I suppose is an apt way to honor John McCain, a man who once called his wife a c*nt in front of a press gaggle and joked about bombing Iran.
Note, there's no attempt to unpack what it is we disagree on, or what the problems might be.
That's by design.
It's not a desire for civility. It's a desire for quiet.
What this reasonable-seeming line does is separate our national politics into two sides, neither of whom have any real stakes in the outcome.
Know who doesn't get to "agree to disagree?"
LGBTQ people
Muslims
Immigrants
People of color
Sick/disabled people
Poor/homeless people
The people the Republican Party intentionally targets for menace, harm, marginalization, and death, never ever ever get to opt out of it.
They never get to 'agree to disagree.'
They never get to agree OR disagree.
They just get to suffer.
McCain would have us abandon them.
Perfectly reasonable, right?
It's also the sort of thing a serial killer might murmur to somebody they have chained in a basement.
McCain just wishes her neighbors would stop complaining about the screams.
Our 9-11 call isn't about you, or your husband's legacy, Cindy.
John McCain deliberately elevating an ignorant incompetent race-baiting populist to the level of presidential candidate. He normalized that.
Then he deliberately ran an intensely racist campaign against the first black major party candidate.
You want his legacy? Here it is.
I don't agree to disagree.
I agree to never abandon friends and family and strangers who live under the daily threat and menace of harm, abuse, and death, to the deliberate cruelty of who seek to bring it about, or the civil cruelty of those who've made themselves indifferent.
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.
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.)
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.