23 Comments

Be the change you want to see in others. Call out and applaud ethical behavior wherever, whenever, any whomever. Applaud truth telling especially. Look particularly for examples among your political opponents. Find a colleague of the opposite persuasion to do the same for your side. Take particular note of good behavior by people with whom both of you disagree.

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Easy to say, but if your opponent is caught up in a false narrative, and is motivated by that, it can often be very difficult to have a discussion at all. You say this but below in a reply you repeat this pattern in service of the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News PoV using an anecdote that you fervently believe, as it's giving you a sense of solidarity. Yet the anecdote you used wasn't actually true. How then shall I have a conversation with you?

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Lecture is not discussion.

No, I don’t watch Fox News. I didn’t watch or listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Tell me you don’t know the joke about the difference between a redneck and a good-ol-boy.

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"The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked" - Jeremiah said it best

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Aug 11, 2023·edited Aug 11, 2023

Thank you for giving voice to this. It has long been troubling me as well. Obviously schadenfreude is an ancient and natural impulse, but it seems noteworthy that it was long considered shameful enough in the English-speaking world that we still use a German word for it. What is new is the "saying the quiet part out loud" phenomenon. The quiet part is the cruelty.

Our cruelty problem has long been festering and may have its roots in the healthy and necessary process of correction which began in the 1950s and, especially, 1960s, when voices which had been traditionally suppressed under the guise of "politeness" and "civility" began to break free. This also, however, gave license to those in a position of privilege who were simply seeking to shock or give vent to their more unpleasant impulses unrestrained by the social codes which had kept them in check. There is unfortunately a thinner line than one would have expected between speaking your truth and being hurtful or cyberbullying. To quote Swift (Taylor, not Jonathan), "So casually cruel in the name of being honest."

The rise of right-wing media (hate radio, Fox, etc.) and Newt Gingrich's determination that the GOP should stop being the "nice party" made this incivility a political tool in the 1990s, but, as has been often noted, it was the internet that unleashed the floodgates of cruelty in all spheres. So much easier to be vicious when you can might never have to actually face - or even confront the humanity of - the object of your contempt.

Most of the comments here so far have pointed out that it was Trump who truly gave permission to every hater, racist, misogynist, and so forth to crawl out from whatever dark corner of the internet or society in which they were hiding and spew their cruelty from the rooftops and legislate it from the halls of power. But should liberals really be resorting to "They did it first" and "They do it more?" It was when some of my own loved ones took to Facebook to celebrate the death of Herman Caine that alarm bells went off for me. Yes, for the Trump Administration the cruelty was the point, but isn't that a key reason why it needed to be opposed and MAGA needs to be stopped from returning to power? Shouldn't those of us who oppose Trumpism support the antithesis of cruelty? Or is it now simply a matter of our cruelty vs. their cruelty in the Hobbesian conception of the world to which Trump and his followers subscribe?

I choose instead to subscribe to the Lockean liberal conception of society. It is not that I do not understand the impulse to feel smug when those who flout Covid rules die of it, or the "eat the rich" schadenfreude of people dying while spending obscene amounts of money on luxurious vacations, but I channel it by watching shows like The White Lotus or movies like The Menu, rather than publicly rejoicing over the deaths of real people. In the same way I understand the impulse to execute murderers and traitors, but support abolition of the death penalty. If we are to have a genuinely liberal, compassionate, just society, I believe there are some quiet parts that we need to keep quiet and cast, along with the rest of the impulses given rein by Trumpism, back into the shadows.

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An important piece because it is so true and, unfortunately, in some ways part of human nature. But it deserves to called out as dangerous.

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Aug 12, 2023·edited Aug 12, 2023

One of the most widespread and toxic myths of our time is that somehow human nature has changed, and that we're smarter, more moral, and overall better people than our ancestors. We're not: we just know more facts, and have better technology. Without correspondingly more care, that actually can just makes us more dangerous, and sometimes worse, than they were in ways that they could barely imagine.

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This piece goes out of its way to show "liberals are as bad as conservatives", to a fault. Anybody with a relative who has fallen into.the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News hole since.the 1990s has been on the receiving end of this kind of cruelty for at least the last 30 years. Pieces like this discount that this kind of cruelty has been fanned deliberately for a long time to emphasize the sense that anyone in this hole is good, everyone else is bad, and that if they try to convince you otherwise they are bad and must be shouted down. This has reached its logical conclusion as social media followers have amplified this.

There is not the same organized, funded apparatus on other dimensions of the political spectrum. Is there a progressive equivalent to Fox News, Breitbart, etc.? No, there is not, because the money is going the other way. If anything, the more extreme activists on the progressive end of the spectrum are used by these outlets as foils to prove how bad everyone else is.

I'm all for trying to forge a more centrist way of coming together in the US. But let's not fool ourselves why there is a populist demagogue who wants very badly to be a dictator equivalent, and could have pulled that off if things went slightly differently. And he's going to try again.

This is a direct result of this well funded effort to separate conservatives into their own world, exclusive of anyone else.

If this isn't faced head on, then forging a more centrist way of working together will come to naught.

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There are liberals, and there is the left. Don’t confuse the two. The left has never been liberal. They have always been cruel. Perhaps they once disguised it better.

By 2008 the contempt of the left for the people in “flyover country” was palpable. A candidate for POTUS could tell Joe the Plumber “You didn’t build that”, certain that he would receive no blowback.

DJT was lucky that HRC was such a bad candidate. The democrats wanted DJT nominated, sure that HRC would beat him, only she didn’t. Neither was fit for the office. I voted libertarian that year.

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This is a great illustration of the problem I'm talking about. What you're talking about didn't happen? Your outrage over it is what these Fox people want you to feel, and it appears they were lying to you. See my reply below. You heard some story about it but Obama never said that at all. Read his response below. You don't have to agree with him, but he was pretty respectful of the discussion he had with this guy.

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That "liberals disdain me in my flyover country" is part of the narrative that Fox has been spewing. It's a bunch of hooey.

As to Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, he's part of the problem:

"As harsh as this sounds—your dead kids don't trump my Constitutional rights ... We still have the Right to Bear Arms ... Any feelings you have toward my rights being taken away from me, lose those."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_the_Plumber

His interaction with Obama in 2008 is over taxes pretty well detailed in there. Obama didn't express disdain. Here's what Obama

said:

"If you're a small business, which you would qualify, first of all, you would get a 50 percent tax credit so you'd get a cut in taxes for your health care costs. So you would actually get a tax cut on that part. If your revenue is above 250, then from 250 down, your taxes are going to stay the same. It is true that, say for 250 up — from 250 to 300 or so, so for that additional amount, you'd go from 36 to 39 percent, which is what it was under Bill Clinton."

That doesn't read as disdain to me.

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Reminder that it didn't start with the pandemic: it was in 2016 that Trump publicly mocked a disabled journalist. Once upon a time that would have ended a campaign. It didn't.

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Yes, that was appalling. It convinced me beyond any reasonable doubt that Trump's temperament and character made him unfit for human company, not just the most powerful office in the country Even more worrisome is how many of our fellow Americans apparently 𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘥 such contemptible behavior.

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I'm convinced that Trump sincerely believes that life is abuse or be abused. And that so do a lot of his supporters.

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You very well may be right. And that's terrible to contemplate.

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Casual cruelty is a knee jerk emotional reaction to underlying life threatening material insecurity. As long as our society continues its descent into structural ‘winners take all’ economic iniquity, brutal scapegoating, cruelty and intolerance will continue to increase.

Where are the St Francis’s amongst our global cultural, political and business celebrities ?

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I suppose it is all in how we react to irony. A person with empathy will see the humor in irony but also a bit of sadness. A person with little or no empathy will only see the humor. People without empathy may have an advantage in reaching the top before they crash and take everyone with them to the bottom.

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There's a fundamental difference between irony and cruelty, as the author points out quite effectively.

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small correction, "to be called out"

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Trying really hard to avoid a whataboutistic attempt at moral scaling here, but it seems that the abject cruelty at our borders from Trump (child separation), Abbott (river buoys with saw blades) and DeSantis (fraudulently conning refugees into cross-country ghost trips) would be the paragon cases of cruelty for the sake of cruelty.

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Aug 12, 2023·edited Aug 12, 2023

Undoubtedly. But what makes space for that cruelty has been the consistent failure of our political institutions to implement comprehensive immigration and border control policies that are just, reasonably compassionate, and that serve the public interest of Americans. What gives the cruelty nourishment to grow is the insistence of one very vocal minority that we should allow no immigration at all, and the insistence of another equally vocal -- and seemingly equally numerous -- minority that, thanks to our supposedly fundamental "evil" as a society, we lack the right that every other nation enjoys to base our immigration policies on our own national interests, and are obliged to admit all comers.

It's not "whataboutism" or "bothsidesism" when both sides are equally wrong and equally to blame for the policy paralysis, which is how it looks to me.

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