One of the most damaging tropes in public discourse is the idea that there is some posture that normal decent people just trying to live their lives can take toward conservative Christians and other American fascists that will be deferential enough to preclude their oppression.
There is no appeasement or strategic retreat that will convince them to permit people to just live their lives.
Nothing other than full surrender to their exact specifications will stop them from smiling and praying for you as they lovingly lower you into the boiling oil.
The only strategies we should accept are: witness to their hatred w/o room for debate; moral clarity about our own entanglement with their oppressive structures, resolute hope to believe liberation is possible, and uncompromising defiance of their grotesque methods and beliefs.
This is why I reject calls to "appeal to their better angels." No group who ever performed atrocities against their fellow humans ever did so before 1st convincing themselves they were uniquely good.
They already worship their "better angels." They don't need our help.
Christian fascists need total control but they demand to be seen as good while receiving it. Take that away from them. Refuse to give that to them. See them exactly as they are, and reflect what they do to their fellow humans back to them.
That's witness.
What makes this trope so noxious is that it makes oppression the fault of the oppressed, for failing to be deferential enough—a framing that defends and reinforces the total blamelessness Christian fascists demand.
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Let’s pretend it’s deadly. Let’s say it’s a novel new strain of an old structure that we’ve known about for a long time.
Let’s imagine that one reason this virus spreads so effectively is because a large number of people who get it are asymptomatic.
Next, let’s pretend it’s discovered that the best way of containing such a virus is for everybody to agree, for the sake of those who are most vulnerable, to accept some inconvenience. Maybe wear a slightly uncomfortable face covering, or avoid travel when infection is high.
This is not the proclamation of an expert. This is the confession of a fool.
I should explain.
I wrote the words you’ll find between these covers after August 2017, which was a key date in my rapidly dawning awareness of the true nature of my country. the-reframe.com/very-fine-peop…
August 2017 is when tiki-torch waving Nazis invaded Charlottesville, Virginia, in defense of treasonous slaveholders and their own perceived supremacy.
August 2017 was also when the White Christian president defended those who marched with the Nazis as “very fine people.”
We know the Nazis were Nazis because they were chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and “blood and soil,” and all the other Nazi hits, and because they believed in Nazi causes and utilized Nazi symbology, and so on.
Hey everyone, Very Fine People releases on June 25, and the paperback version is available for presale right now! (eBook preorders will be available later this month.)
You can preorder it any of the places where books are sold, and if you go and order it you'll be doing the thing that helps authors more than anything else you can do. Preorders make bookstores and other instruments of publishing take notice.
I've been working on this book for about 7 years—almost certainly longer than you've been reading anything I write. I have thoughts and feelings about that, but first:
This link places a preorder for personalized signed editions.
Seven lessons learned from a quarter century in a war-oriented society.
It's 2001—the year the movies promised we'd make contact with aliens—and the United States has rather recently been attacked by terrorists who flew passenger planes into buildings.
I have a distinct memory from the day of the attacks, of a news anchor announcing—before the buildings even fell—that we were now at war, which we technically weren't yet; thanks to my high school civics class I knew that news anchors aren't empowered to declare war.
But sure enough, here in late 2001, old what's-his-name the news anchor has been proved right: we're heading to war in Afghanistan. Old what's-his-name knew, with the sage wisdom of somebody living in a war-oriented society; when you are attacked, war is not optional.
In 2017 American Nazis invaded Charlottesville, VA, which is a major U.S. city in case you didn't know. Maybe you remember this. They called themselves "Unite the Right." They wanted what Nazis want, and did what Nazis do, which was to kill.
They also wore polo shirts and held tiki torches, and chanted Nazi chants; about blood and soil, and others predicated on the idea that the white race was being replaced by races that Nazis view as inferior.
Probably it is worth talking about what 'the white race" means.
"The white race" is a pretend thing that certain people made up in order to consolidate social and political power and wealth by organizing the application of brutality and violence.
Anyway the Nazis believed they were white, and this was very important to them.
But we're often the sort of place that fails to maintain what it has built; mostly because maintenance costs eat into tax revenues, and revenues could be used for tax cuts, and tax cuts help profits, and profits are very important, so collapses are just a thing that is coming.
But even if we had performed adequate maintenance, the bridge was probably doomed. Dali is the size and mass of a skyscraper (far larger than container ships used to be—but larger ships lower prices in supply chains, and lower prices help profits, and profits are important).