The funny thing with the recent Tweet I want to highlight from perpetually aggrieved Rep. MTG is that she right off the bat starts with the most obviously offensive thing that liberals actually don't defend. She writes:
"If you are defending pedophile priests and those that protect them, groomer teachers & Disney LGBTQ propaganda, Drag Queen story time, saying it's not Satan convincing women to abort their unplanned child, and that children can be mutilated to change their gender, you're wrong."
While I'm in favor of freedom of religion, I've long deplored the Catholic Church's cover-up of pedophilia in the clergy and would not ever defend it, and many people would tend to agree with that--particularly former Catholics and people who define themselves as atheist, agnostic or "none of the above" religiously. If anything, the Church's protection of perhaps 2-5% of clergy in those hopes of preserving its worldly reputation and self-defense against outside criticism has displayed the rot of an organization closed to debate.
Where she goes from there is a peculiarly tightening circle of pronouncements of less certainty--groomer teachers? Sure, I think teachers like Mary Kay Letourneau or Pamela Joan Rogers or Debra Lefave are deeply troubling, but it seems to me that this is not exactly what Greene is referring to. She appears to be considering simply being LGBTQ-affirming with being a groomer, and with being Disney "propaganda".
The common understandings of words like "groomer" and "propaganda" have negative connotations and she is employing those negative connotations to distort the impression of the actual things many teachers (like a teacher recently censured for putting up rainbow stickers in her classroom) might do without any malicious or nefarious intent or what Disney had done (mildly support LGBT people).
To put it bluntly, she's trying to make people agree with her wildly false interpretations of the world. And no, Marge--I know a lie when I see one. Sorry.
She also throws in Drag Queen story time which is a thing that amuses me--wearing women's clothing isn't a problem when I (cis-gender female) do it, but suddenly becomes a problem when men do it? So weird! And yet, I imagine there's considerable overlap between the people who would consider a man wearing women's clothing wrong and who would definitely ask a woman "What were you wearing?" if she were sexually assaulted, so I guess there's that. But there's nothing really disturbing about reading by a drag performer in a well-attended public setting vs what quite normally-attired, heteronormative persons have gotten up to when quite out of sight.
Maybe her real problem is people being exposed to books in the first place. There is a GOP war against schools and libraries, after all.
The Satan part is entirely "creation by Marge" in that she recently said women were consorting with Satan in hopes of entrapping a man with their foul ensnarements and chemical conjurings...which is some wild Malleus Maleficarum throwback which I find fairly extraordinarily on-the-nose. And last of all, her comments regarding surgery or mutilation don't display that she understands anything about the subject at all.
But of course, people who disagree with her POV, however uninformed it might be, are the ones who are wrong. This is how a person ends up spouting weird things about Jewish space lasers--a closed system choking on its own decay. It's a fascinating thing to see so concisely within one Tweet the range from epistemic closure to entropy rapidly increasing in a thick skull.
5 comments:
What is the [first derivative of the] entropy of a runaway Diesel? That might be a more informative comparison.
Remember the First Law of Modern Politics: Nothing is about what it says it is about.
Ms. Greene knows her constituents. Most importantly, she knows that they are bullies, and, as such, what they want first above all is impunity, and preferably tacit impunity (acknowledged impunity would have a much lesser emotional reward). Then, second, what they want to use their impunity for is breaking heads. It doesn't matter which heads; the targets are always the ones that are momentarily most convenient and least expensive, and can change in a blink if the convenience or cost change.
This is what gives rise to the wholly misleading appearance of "racism". The proof that "racism" is not a thing is the pivot, occurring right now, in real time (and instantaneously on a historical scale of time), in front of our eyes, from Blacks as the preferred victim to LGBTQ. It has (for the moment) gotten a little more expensive to attack Blacks and a little more convenient to attack LGBTQ. In the immortal words of Tom Magliozzi, what time is it now?
But any effort to defend or protect any prospective victim is a threat to the bully. That is the salience of "woke", because it purports to factor up and defend all possible victims.
Plenty to agree with here. This dynamic fascinates me because the question for conservatives can be drilled finer yet: "What time is it now--for you?" which I think explicates Bonhoeffer's misunderstood poem for the people who are definitely not with the socialists and the trade unionists at the moment.
I just came across this insight reading Adam Schiff's Washington at Midnight where Schiff had implied during the first Senate impeachment hearing that Republican Senators might have been concerned about threats from the White House that there would be "heads on a pike". He said he realized that he had lost part of his audience with that and wasn't sure how he overstepped--but I got it. The moderate Republicans pushed back on that idea because Jesus jumping bleeding Christ don't give the big orange gorilla any ideas.
But Trump, and MAGAs as a whole, don't need help with those kinds of ideas--they do it automatically. It could be anyone's "turn in the barrel." To find another handy example of the impulse, I consider the snuff fantasy of The Turner Diaries where the Night of the Rope really feel like it could go on until they run out of necks or run out of rope. Moderate Republicans, and I think moderate Dems alike don't cop to the urgency or the danger of that dynamic and I never know how willingly ignorant vs really ignorant they are about it.
Or even where willingly ignorant starts to become complicit.
The missing piece is the contagiousness of performance.
Your "moderates" are obeying the Second Law of Modern Politics: Problems must not be solved, but exploited. Plenty of "moderate" Republicans saw, and see, Trump as a problem, or even as The Problem. The reason why (to such widespread bafflement) they do not/cannot do anything is that they have been conditioned to think that the only things you can do with a problem are to use it to raise money or point blame. You can't solve it; suppose you did, then you would just have to go find another.
There are still a handful of Democrats and/or liberals who believe in solving problems, but no longer a critical mass.
Frank, the fascist gop can't have a government that solves problems. as their stated goal is to topple said government, it can't be perceived as a functional force for good.
vix- i dunno, to me perjury taylor greene's rant is of a piece with the cities burnt to the ground anti-BLM/ anti-ANTIFA lie. it's the cancelling of dr seuss. space lasers and biden-as-puppet. replacement theory and (((globalism))). they swim in a SEA of lies, because their ideology is hideously unpopular and completely incapable of withstanding objective scrutiny. every election HAS to be a ginned-up culture war for them because they really can't get more than 27-30% of the country to go along with their program. wealth-worship and snarling, fascist hate 24/7 isn't terribly popular.
also, they REALLY project. she pals around with gaetz (R/funco-pop) who is an ACTUAL groomer and child molester. Q needs a goddamn mirror, but because they can't face their reflections at all, they blame us.
All part of the project to dehumanize those who disagree with her and her crowd. It's so much easier to convince your followers that violence is a reasonable response when the hated "they" are evil monsters, not people.
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