These chuds were parading around a noose and chanting "Murder the Media" - by which they mean him and his colleagues! - and he's so deep in his bubble of privilege and security he feels the need to dole out humanizing anecdotes
I actually mean it when I say people have a duty to push back on the relentless humanizing of the right wing
That's the whole asymmetry here - they *start off more humanized*
The definition of being right wing is being the kind of person people reflexively think of as authentic
Normal, decent folk
Salt of the earth
Everyday old-fashioned red-blooded Americans
People with a picture postcard version of how the country should look in their heads, based on what they think is the country's history since its founding, and hate to see it change
You can't imagine someone passing anecdotes to try and show a human side to a foreign terrorist
The Nigerian "underwear bomber" from 2009 was much more of a farce that was much less likely to hurt anyone than this
No one told cute stories about his childhood
I think the media does this kind of thing on a deep unconscious level
Even if they know people on Twitter will drag them for it
It *feels wrong* to define some blonde Christian white woman by her crime, to just say "Welp a terrorist rushed the Secret Service and got shot"
It *feels* to them like going out of their way to "dehumanize" the subject, it feels like cruelty, even when it's just reporting the news the way it's reported normally about other people
They feel like they *have to* find some "humanizing" detail "for the sake of your own soul"
They aren't even aware of the discrepancy
When they just report "Two Black gangsters were killed in a gunfight" or "Six suspected Iraqi militants were killed in a drone strike" or whatever
That's normal, that's just giving the facts
That realization "That could be my son, that could be my daughter" never kicks in because, well, it couldn't
It's perfectly natural
It's also infuriating and it will destroy us
This isn't even a real story! She put his bags on her tray table! Just before she tried to open the door for an angry mob to seize control of the election proceedings!
Wow, I guess the other person on the plane who didn't help their seatmate with their bags because they didn't want to catch COVID, but also didn't participate in a fascist coup, is about as good a person as her
If I really want a gold star I've got to help people with their bags AND not try to rush the door to a secure area of the Capitol
This is the thing about people going "Oh, how ironic, you're dehumanizing Nazis the way Nazis dehumanize their victims"
It's an "irony" that goes back to Sartre's "Anti-Semite and Jew"
When their whole power, their whole advantage, is being the person who naturally belongs in society as it's presently constituted, and you're in the position of always being the outsider who's there on sufferance
You cannot win the game of humanization
It does not matter what they do or what you do, the reasonable people in the middle will find a way to humanize them and dehumanize you
There'll always be some cute story about the people putting up the gallows and how nice and polite they were to the people they wanted to hang
You have to deal with Nazis *based on what they do* - in this case violently storm the Capitol building and try to steal the election
If you don't keep your gaze laser focused on that you can see the conversation drifting around in real time to humanizing them again
That crazy-pills feeling of people talking about togetherness and reconciliation *directly in the aftermath of a coup*
Deciding to just go ahead and move forward with a Congress that *went ahead and seated the elected officials who openly supported sedition*
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The upshot is really just that you can't leave anything on autopilot and expect that institutions and norms will protect you from fascism in and of themselves
The simple existence of hate speech laws is no reason to relax and neither is the existence of a "free market of ideas"
I would actually be fine with the First Amendment fetishists' demand that state action always be off the table if they actually kept their promise to always oppose Nazis by every other possible means (public shaming, deplatforming, ostracism)
I hate to be the gatekeeper but there's so many fake Orwell fans these days
I hate people calling 1984 a "big tech" dystopia
The only real Big Tech is the telescreens and they play a really small role in the plot - the point of the book is everyone is very poor and aside from the telescreens people live like it's the Great Depression still
If you know ANY history it's really really fucking hard to find anything funny about the Capitol attack, even with inherently hilarious self-owns like the dude accidentally tasing himself
The anti-Chinese riots in LA in 1871, the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, the Tulsa Massacre in 1921
Scenes that at least some of the rioters were deliberately evoking
Symbolically attacking the Capitol building is the ending of The Turner Diaries
Running all the Black elected officials out of the state house is the ending of Birth of a Nation (based on the 1898 uprising)
@JARKH87@iburs17 The crowd was this close to breaching that door and actually getting access to the legislators so you know what no
I'm relieved as hell that someone actually took that shot and I'm still terrified it got that close and could've easily gone further
@JARKH87@iburs17 I am angry beyond reason that the institution supposedly safeguarding our system is so weak and filled with so many sympathizers that the fascists even got indoors
I have seen how fragile the infrastructure protecting us from them is and I can't unsee it
@JARKH87@iburs17 What happened yesterday is proof that we hang by a gossamer thread above the pit, that we are always one hesitant security officer away from being ruled by these fucks
They will always be seen as more human, more legitimate, more worthy of life and liberty and voice
I took a playwriting class a long time ago where the teacher talked about how in music "the rests are just as important as the notes" and how it's the same when writing a script
What we call "compression" tends to involve sucking all the empty space ("ma") out of "content" and it sucks
Cf. the "loudness war" when it came to music, i.e. "dynamic range compression" -- trying to make every second of a track equally loud so it "stands out" on the radio
I keep thinking back to that viral video of those kids discovering Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" for the first time
And how that beat drop is totally meaningless if the song doesn't start out mellow and quiet and then build up