Our Culture of Contempt

It’s only painful in a stable, peaceful society with a strong rule of law. In any other context it’s downright lethal. Take the extreme of Dark Forest theory; you can try to explain your position and values all you like, and while you do it just serves to broadcast your location to someone who already decided to kill you. That’s extreme of course, an hopefully fictional, but in the intellectual and social spectrum it takes two to tango. If I’m just trying to waste your time and energy, and you’re insisting on addressing every point of my Gish Gallop... I win.

Suspending judgement is an interesting and valuable intellectual exercise, and trying to see other perspectives makes us better people. We have to accept however, that a time comes when just like any other approach, such measures not only fail, but full catastrophically. Just like an ardent pacifist, or an equally ardent militant, lack of adaptability is doom. Sometimes you have to sit down and talk, and sometimes you have to fight to the death.

The trick, and no one has yet figured out a formula for this, is to know when to adapt and how much. Anyone who tries to tell you that the only way to deal with a Nazi is a bullet, or conversely, love, is wrong. It’s advice that sounds good, but it’s totally useless. When to to talk, when to listen, and when to reach for a sidearm is the real question and more often than not people don’t even acknowledge that; it’s too nuanced, too open to interpretation, and too messy.

The thing is, it’s messy regardless of whether or not we choose to approach conflict (intellectual or otherwise) programmatically rather than dynamically.

Here's what HRC actually said:

>"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.

But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change."

So, what you have is people self-identifying into the abhorrent, contemptible "basket" she explicitly describes (versus the one that is "honorable" and even sympathetic), then crying foul. It really is a remarkable thing.

Now, she was overly broad with her statement "half" and --though she likely used that word to convey "two groups" vs literally 50% -- she admitted as much herself. But, the core of what she was saying is objectively true and observable: a substantial share of Trump's support was made up, in significant portions, of each of these groups.

So, to the question of "contempt", is it acceptable to have contempt for contemptible views? Because what she described in that first basket was certainly contemptible.

And that sums up the modern Right: troll, own the libs, and generally act in ways that are purposely and overtly provocative and comtemptible. Then, cry foul and victimization when you are called on it.

From Trump, to his sons, to the basket of deplorables that just spoke at CPAC, these people are first and foremost, purposeful trolls who seek contempt as a motivating force. Then, people like Brooks from AEI come along with facile, disingenuous articles and lament the contempt coming from "both sides".

This comment, the parent, and many others on this thread sound eerily alike and similar to those propagated by trolls and bots during the failed WalkAway campaign.

That's silly. We're not talking about "tangentially similar" viewpoints (as you said before you edited your comment). Denial of free expression (and thought and conscience) as a fundamental human right is arguably the pillar upon which oppressive statist ideologies stand, as well as the mechanism by which they operate.

@claudiawerner argues, albeit obliquely, that speech that makes certain particular groups feel unsafe should not be protected. She might have somewhat different ideas about what constitutes safety compared to Tony Perkins or Yelena Mizulina. But they'll all argue, convincingly and articulately, that the notion of a fundamental human right to freedom of expression is an error. In general, history has shown that the consequences of such people gaining power over societies is tragic beyond words.

So, yeah, I agree that that comparing them based on their choice of clothing or diet would be a bit of a red herring. Good point, I guess.

It's bizarre to see so many (allegedly former 'liberals' or 'lefties', itself a conflation) talking of / agreeing with a "firehose of hatred" supposedly coming from the left. What do these people think of the language and ideas coming from the right?

My suspicion is that they consider the right these days the calm voice of reason – not in spite of the racism, the misogyny, homophobia, or hatred of the poor, but because of these things, because maybe their sympathies simply lie with maintaining the comfortable order that they are used to, not with any of the ideals that they actually claim/ed to uphold.