Taking Joy in All the Wrong Places
What's that meme about cruelty being the point?
I don’t know who is in charge of the White House Twitter feed, but they have the sensibilities of a wannabe edgelord. Yesterday, as I noted, they posted a mock-up of Time magazine cover with Trump as king.
They also posted this.
Even if you are avoiding Twitter, I think you should watch the video.
For those who don’t know what ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) is, Wikipedia provides the basics. “ASMR is a subjective experience of “low-grade euphoria” characterized by “a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin”. It is most commonly triggered by specific auditory stimuli, and less commonly by intentional attention control.”
Some people find the sounds of crinkling paper, whispering, or any number of things to be triggers for said sensation. It’s not my bag, but hey, whatever works.
However, thinking that the laying out of shackles is a relaxing sound that puts a tingle in your spine, well that’s just sadism.
We can debate the relative merits of how to deal with illegal immigration. But the notion that forced deportations should be a source of pleasure is not what I want my government to stand for.
And yet, here we are.
Please note that this is not subtle. This is not innuendo that leaves us trying to parse out the meaning.
This is a cartoon villain telling his henchman, “I love the sound of shackles in the morning,” except it isn’t a cartoon. It is an official communication channel of the President of the United States.
I am not going to search for it now, but yesterday I posted a link to Elon Musk reposting the @WhiteHouse link/video with the Musk comment “Haha wow.” Our co-President.
@charontwo:
Not s0 much co-president as puppet master, and Trump is the puppet.
You know, that other person says that this isn’t Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. They’re right. This is Jim Crow America. We’ve been here before. The only difference is now the Chuds in charge are both stupider and way more insecure. Like they get up every morning and say “You’re man! You’re a big tough Man! You’re the Boss Man! These whiney women are afraid of you! You’re a man! WOOO!” and maybe they believe it for a few minutes.
The key about this under Jim Crow, White people were diminished too. Men were diminished, everyone was diminished. The targets of Jim Crow governance suffered way worse, but everyone was diminished. Eventually it will get around to everyone.
The stupid and malignant see those chains being put on other people. I see those chains being put on all of us.
I read recently how Saddam Hussein, right after he successfully came to power, put a bullet in the head of his closest ally and friend. This was real, and it was meant to terrorize everyone else. This is why warlords often target women or children. They want everyone to know they won’t stop at anything.
This video is meant to terrorize us. That’s not saying it isn’t real. The shackles are real. The sadism may or may not be real, but the shackles are real.
Right now, my critical method includes the heuristic of “don’t believe anything coming from MAGA. Don’t take it at face value, regardless of the message.”
They are so deep into lying, bluffing, and bullshitting, nothing they say can be trusted.
That doesn’t mean I want to stop y’all from addressing it at face value.
I mean, that’s some sick, sick stuff there.
AND, if I let it scare me, and show that, they are getting what they want.
@CSK:
As Trump slides deeper into his “second childhood” he comes more inattentive and easier to manipulate.
“Cartoon“
Is X now our defacto Pravda?
That this is posted under the official White House account is grotesque and an affront to America’s name. I want all Republicans electeds to be forced to watch it and then defend this cruelty as an official White House statement. I want Mike Johnson to go pick up a Bible off his shelf and read to me where this kind of wanton act is compatible with his biblical worldview.
I want the media to spotlight this relentlessly until there is some squirming from the tiny few Republicans who still have a weakly functioning moral compass.
@Steven L. Taylor
Wow. Who knew that the person next door, at the cash register, running for school board etc. was a closet sadist? I did not.
So, as we are learning it’s “the sociopath next door” and the “sadist” next-door to them, with which we share community.
Perhaps, it has always been so, and now Trump has gathered kindred spirits into MAGA and given them the largest stake, the largest voice in our societal power structure. I cannot avoid the conclusion that our popular culture has had decades to set the conditions for mass dysfunction at the level of the individual psyche, compulsion, fixation, and all.
Definitely a candidate for a termination letter.
@Beth:
This. And it’s the source of why I qualify what I say when I go off on the working class and poor people who support Trump. They have every right and reason to be angry.
This country grinds people down to nubs. And all regular people have to show for it is debt, bills, and constant stress. Debt just to obtain the basic necessities of life. Lifelong debt just to maybe get a chance at full participation in the economy.
It used to be that most people accepted that we are sinful the moment we take our first breath. A birthmark of inescapable flaw. Born in debt to God. Before we can even understand the concept of undeserved mercy. If you believe in that, fine. That’s your business. It has nothing to with any of us until you try to make it our business as well.
Now that birthmark is a dollar sign. Original debt. Negative balance for us; value to extract for a few. Born in debt to people we never asked to associate with, before we even understand the concept of debt. People who do not even pretend to grace us with mercy.
But they retain the moral judgment. They retain the presumption of sin. They still demand faith. They still demand obedience. They still dictate. They make us pay just to exist. And thank them for choosing us as their marks. They expect the sacred awe once reserved for God. Yet we are the ones that threaten their religious beliefs?
That ain’t freedom.
That ain’t liberty.
And yet, these hard working people act like I’m the villain. They act like you’re the villain, Beth. They act like Eddie, Jim X, DeD, and DK are villains. Just for thinking. Just for existing as ourselves.
They take it personally that you think you are entitled to the same oxygen molecules that they breathe.
They come here and act like we are supposed fill in the logic they omit from what they say. We are supposed to say we kinda get what they meant. If we respond or ask questions, we are putting words in their mouth. When we don’t, we are elitists circle jerking inside an echo chamber, excluding them from discourse.
The sense of entitlement is astounding. Entitled to a higher social status. Entitled to economic security while voting for people who take their vote and money and take more in exchange. Entitled to our intellectual work so that the blanks they are unwilling or unable to fill themselves have something scrawled in them. They expect us to let them crib of our tests and plagiarize our papers. And pay us with nothing more than contempt.
They yell at actual victims, yet their only self-conception is as victims of imaginary enemies. They fight windmills while orange and botoxed men steal what little they have. They turn around and grab the first Black or Brown foreign or gay or trans person they see and accuse them of theft.
Soft people willingly smoothing out their own brains.
To all of those silent ones out there, who refuse to engage, offended that some sharp words get thrown at you. You applaud @Connor and condemn us. But he’s the one who takes. Not us. Musk. Trump. Vance.
Not.
Us.
You can’t handle feeling condescension. You can’t handle your ‘arguments’ being questioned. But then you dare question the actual pain of being excluded like Beth, Eddie, Jim X, DeD, and DK.
Grow up, you can’t even pick the right targets for whatever legitimate resentment you hold.
I chortled when someone who feels marginlized by us called us elites. Yeah, some of us are economically privileged. But most of us that are got there through their work, overcoming barriers you never had to face. The rest of us are more like you than you can countenance. Yet you melt if someone makes you feel stupid?
I chortled. I am not part of the economic or social elite. I was in the lower middle of the former, and don’t give a damn about the latter. But you know what? Yeah, I’m elite.
I could run intellectual circles around most of you by the time I was 12. I didn’t need someone to tell me what CRT was–I knew what it was when I was in high school. I had read some of it. And I knew then and know now the school of thought it grew from. Yet you choose to believe someone who admitted that he was lying about what it was. And you call us liars. You call the media who tried to accurately define it liars.
You praise and fawn over Trump’s gifts. Over Musk’s gifts. They take from you, and you don’t even get a thank you. They expect you to thank them! But turn around and get mad at me if I display my gifts to you? Gifts, I might add, that I worked hard to develop while Trump was stiffing contractors and workers like you. And continue to develop them while Musk spends his days scrolling Twitter, following neo-Nazis, paying people to play video games for him, and ‘managing’ a bunch of emotionally stunted, adolescent, know-it-all brats.
Here is my offer to all of you who spend every day, as a famous rapper spit, “doing five dollars worth of work just to get a dime.” I will stand shoulder to shoulder with you. My price is you point your anger in the right direction, and that you choose to stand with Beth, Eddie, Jim X, DeD, and DK along with me. And if they don’t want you around unless you demonstrate that you do not hold them in contempt for who they are, then you cannot, if you have a conscience, blame them.
But if you refuse to pay that small price to us, but pay more just to be held in contempt by the parasites you voted for and cheer on, then it’s on you. I’m tired of bending over backwards to try to understand you. You don’t deserve the effort. You deserve whatever pain that will continue coming to you. And you have no one but yourself to blame for it.
The veneer of civilization is thinner than an eggshell.
@Rob1:
You mean a candidate for rapid promotion.
@YeahRight: “Millions of illegal immigrants flooding the nation because the government refused to control the southern border. The U.S. enabling the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians.”
Hands up, who believes in the existence of one who is so concerned about human rights that he is horrified by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians and yet is so unconcerned about human rights that he believes people who have endured unspeakable hardships to achieve a better life here that he condemns them as “millions of illegal immigrants flooding the border?”
YeahRight should change his name to BadFaith.
@Jay L Gischer:
I dunno, Jay. You’re giving in one way or the other. That is one of the ways authoritarianism works. I pointed this out the other day, authoritarians weaponize the opposition’s principles.
It’s worse than that, actually.
Say we have stated principles 1, 2, 3, and 4. They find actions that will force us to choose between upholding 1 or 2 and 3. While we are weighing those principles against each other, they do a bunch of other shit. Then once we figure out what to do, it’s too late. If we object, they say, “but you said this…”.
We look indecisive and hypocritical. Meanwhile, they did a bunch of things that are difficult or impossible to undo. And we have our credibility is damaged in the realms of both fact and principle.
One side elects an obvious bully, and then criticize us for being anything other than gentle when we criticize them.
It’s the old football conundrum–the player who retaliates is the one who gets penalized. Authoritarians are skilled at exploiting that assymetry.
—
A similar process has played out here at OTB.
If some of us act in good faith and try to understand an elusive commenter, no matter for how long, we never get anywhere. Even then, the only thing the silent snowflakes focus on are the (understandable) snide comments. None of the people who tried to engage in meaningful dialogue get credit for the effort.
If one of us, often me, sometimes Matt, finally gets frustrated by an (possibly deliberate) elusive commenter offering ‘unwanted’ opinions, we are condescending and mean. We are bullies. We are the hypocrites espousing principles that we ourselves do not uphold.
But if we ignore them as trolls, we are dismissive and closed-minded.
We are always forced to choose between principles: pluralism/understanding/empathy, dialogue in service of democracy, civility vs. Honest and rigorous inquiry all while never knowing if our interlocutor is acting in good faith.
All I can really say is I guess you’re a better, more patient man than I. I’m tired of my good qualities, some of which I had to work hard over the course of years to develop, being used against me. I lose either way.
@Kurtz: I was raised in an environment where matters of faith and matters of politics were predominantly two different arenas. Ironically, the people I grew up with bought into the “take over the nation for Jesus” schtick sold by the right wing snake oil peddlers just like everybody else. You don’t have to agree with me on this, I don’t care, but I still believe in original sin; I see evangelicals validating it every day.
Count me on your side.
@YeahRight:
To review, Steven L. Taylor was NOT bothered by…
Having a “President” who got more accomplished in four years than any president in my lifetime, including getting us through Covid, Infrastructure Bill (which Trump didn’t do in four years), and a booming stock market and record job creation.
Millions illegal immigrants flooding the nation because big business wants the cheap labor.
Hamas creating an environment that led to the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Hundreds of thousands killed in Ukraine, while defending themselves from an invasion, against all international norms.
Years of inflation crushing American families, which was a worldwide problem in which the USA fared better than EVERY SINGLE OTHER NATION.
The Democratic nominee for President being someone who, by the rules in place, won her party’s nomination. (BTW, she lost. So what is your beef?)
MAGA lying about Russian collusion, which, in fact, led to seven guilty pleas and five people being sent to prison, including Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
Fixed those for you.
You’re welcome.
@just nutha:
A clean division between politics and religion is tricky. We run into the same problems with most, if not all, forms of pluralism, though they usually manifest differently depending on what domain we are discussing.
I think a lot of people fail to appreciate just how difficult it can be to balance conflicting commitments, specifically as it pertains to rights. But we are back to whether Derrida was correct, right? (I think it was you that made that reference the other day.)
Personally, I struggle to identify myself as anything with regard to religion. I mean, atheist fits best. Agnostic may be more in line with science (emphasis on “may”). Non-believer is incomplete. I can say I am not an anti-theist.
@EddieInDR:
I’m shocked anyone would even attempt to respond to those truth bombs. It was so well argued. Airtight logic. Such attention to detail.
I would make a joke about someone like that owing a debt of gratitude to those who fought against eugenics. But that person may be a physician or an engineer.
@EddieInDR: Thanks for the corrections.
But note this is a known banned person, and hence the original comment has been deep-sixed.
@Kurtz: Clearly, we see with our own eyes these days that the division is tricky. Theoretically, it doesn’t have to be. On my side, I have “give Caesar what belongs to him.” The division looks clear to me. Teh gubmint is his; I have no particular stake in what all y’all decide to do. (Not my nation, not my people, not my circus. My home is elsewhere–or nowhere, depending on who’s right on the metaphysics.)
My tribe, at large, disagrees with me. Dramatically. But I’m not in charge, so I have to allow them their agency; knowing that we are witnessing I John 2:15-17 being lived out live on a week-to-week basis in churches across the nation. As to Derrida, is it the text that is failing under the weight of its own inconsistencies in this case, or is it the readers failing under the weight of their unbelief? I vote “B.” You can make your own choice.
As I have said before, if I were God, I’d not have chosen “you may be the only Jesus the people you meet will ever encounter” as the marketing plan for this project. On the other hand, it’s been working for 2000-some years and it’s not my place to second guess. And it’s possible that there’s no other plan available anyway, and I’m just reflecting on my (in) ability to fit the role.
@Kurtz
I hear ya, man.
The whole “elitist” as derogatory epithet is/was contrived nonsense. Just like “woke,” “social justice warrior,” “political correctness,” “virtue signaling” etc.
MAGA (and precursors) have their own “wokeness” (red pill). They have their own political correctness that excoriates any deviation. They have their own “justice warriors.” They “virtue signal” with their crosses and flag lapel pins.
What the Right has perfected, is efficient weaponization of language. To a willing and conditioned base, they can merely yell “woke” and point a finger, while their opposition spends reams of words, time, resources explaining why tolerance is good for society — or why climate change is real and demands our attention — or why it is in our utmost interest to support Ukraine.
Asymmetrical warfare with language. They’ve identified a weak point in the human psyche and how to exploit it with the advent of technology and the social media it has spawned.
And to understand any of this, must require some “elitist” education and discernment — as perhaps the Right may counter.
Except, I know quite a number of people who do not fit the “elitist” profile who reject the Right’s distortions. Just as I know people who do fit that profile, but do not understand how they have been manipulated by language — or refuse to acknowledge the awful truth of the MAGA ideals they hold.
Everything is now scrambled.
The Right had to figure out how to undermine reason, logic, empiricism, to seize power. And that requires the highest degree of intellectual dishonesty and amorality on their part.
@Kurtz: You do a great job of outlining a lot of what constitutes the problems with a certain kind of trolling commenter.
@Beth:
@Kurtz:
I sat and thought about this all afternoon. Late evening before I got to where I could write.
I’ve been shackled and chained 14 times in my life.
To and from the courtroom for my trial. Then 3 hour bus from King County Jail to Shelton for processing. Next, 5 hour bus to WSR. Two times being taken to solitary. Last time was when I was transferred to a college release program in Seattle.*
I’m more than 40 years older than then, but I’ll die the next time they try to chain Luddite. And I’ll have my teeth locked in someone’s throat when I go.
I wish people like you, @Beth and everyone else targeted by these vile excuses for humanity didn’t have to become like me to survive this government, but the hand I wish in isn’t the hand that’s filling. Good luck.
*ETA – Every time was standard leg chains, handcuffs, everything chained to a waist chain.