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John Holbo Profile picture
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3 Aug, 5 tweets, 1 min read
That's pretty darn interesting!
I should say more than that. This piece by Moser does a good job of capturing a kind of insincerity & confusion I often suffer from. It's one thing to 'think the best' of your interlocutor for the sake of keeping the line open, seeing value where one might have missed it.
It's another to fetishize 'interestingness', to collect a menagerie of 'interesting monsters' from 'the other side'. I like to think of myself as a clever person, in a higher-order dialectical-analytic way.
Sometimes I go looking for subjects on whom I can exercise - vent - my sort of adversarial-collegial cleverness. This isn't immoral but less self-evidently useful and appropriate than I like to imagine.
It's like one sets up a false rubric of 'tolerability'. If the person can be engaged with interestingly, cleverly, then whatever they are doing must be tolerable. That's obviously not right. So, yeah, it's interesting the trouble that 'interesting' gets you in.

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More from @jholbo1

John Holbo Profile picture
4 Aug
OK, one thought about all this and I've got work to do. The argument from the right about why we need to overthrow liberalism, the election, the constitutional order, install an American Orban, whatever, is that 'Wokeness' is an existential threat to Western Civilization.
But what is the threat from Wokeness supposed to amount to? A lot of it is 'cancel culture' stuff that really bothers conservatives: the Covington teens; people were mean to Brett Kavanaugh; Dr. Seuss; that guy who got fired from Google; de-platforming; statues coming down.
Some of it is cultural stuff that conservatives would themselves like to cancel: "Blues Clues" and the Muppets going all trans-friendly. L'il Nax X. Too many pronouns; the 1619 project; CRT.
Read 8 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
19 Jul
This sort of Dale Carnegie 101 point is reasonable in the abstract but hard to know what to do with in practice. It seems like public health officials and Dems are doing - well, not the best they can, but they are trying to reach persuadables. (There have been slips, sure.) 1/
But that leaves a large basket of right-wing anti-vaxxers who are unpersuadable by Dems and public health officials, due to FOX news (and OAN & etc.) and negative partisanship. @michaelbd and McLaughlin taking the 'feelings are facts' line, with regard to this lot, is - bad. 2/
Blaming the left for not reaching out actually makes things worse because it doesn't afford the left useful Dale Carnegie tips but does give the unpersuadables a feeling that it's the left's fault that they are unpersuaded - and feelings are facts (but only on the right). 3/
Read 11 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
18 Jul
MY is screwing with us but I lectured on this! The Ur-Indie era MPDG run is Lulu to Leeloo. That is, Demme's "Something Wild" (1986), largely forgotten - although it makes the MPDG lists - to Besson's "The Fifth Element" (1997) which clearly qualifies but is seldom counted in. 1/
In film, it goes back to classics like "Bringing Up Baby" (1938) and "My Fair Lady" (1964) - the latter is later but, due to its "Pygmalion" origins, makes the clear connection to earlier English drama. 2/
The English original MPDG is Gilbert's "Pygmalion and Galatea". These were originally described as 'fairy comedies', showing the aptness of 'pixie', later. 3/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion…
Read 21 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
18 Jul
What's the genetic link between Schopenhauer's pessimism and "Hello, Dolly!" ?
Answer: "Hello, Dolly!" was based on a play by John Oxenford, who wrote a review piece for "Westminster Review", in 1853, "Iconoclasm in German Philosophy". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Oxen…
That review made it's way back to Germany, in translation, and made Schopenhauer's fame, late. From Safranksi's "Schopenhauer and the Wild Years in Philosophy".
Read 5 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
17 Jul
It's very neat and tidy, as Philip Bump notes. And that's suspicious. So here are the possibilities. It's real or fake. It was leaked deliberately by the Kremlin or not. It's supposed to hurt Trump or not. 1/ washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…
It might seem obvious at least that it's supposed to hurt Trump. But it's not obvious. Because, almost certainly, it won't hurt Trump. The Kremlin leaking that it has kompromat on the sky, to the effect that it's blue, won't cause more people to believe the sky is blue. 2/
There's a good chance it will help Trump, therefore. Normally we don't apply the 'no such thing as bad publicity' show biz rule to political scandals. But the effect of this leak is to put the focus back on 'Russia Russia Russia' and that's good for Trump. 3/
Read 19 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
14 Jul
The thread in question implies Trump himself, like his followers, probably doesn't believe any of his own claims about having evidence the election was stolen. And Trump himself gives a shout out about how great the thread is! He agrees! He's probably just getting it off Hannity!
And yet somehow it's not Trump who is showing "unmitigated contempt" by knowingly lying to the American people for months on end that he has reason to think the 2020 election was stolen; somehow it's not Trump voters who show contempt by being unwilling to accept the election. 2/
Seriously, we are supposed to re-watch the video of the insurrection, this time imagining it's all about the Steele Dossier. And that's supposed to make it better? It makes it worse. 3/
Read 11 tweets

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