banalityofambiguity

Kamala Harris: *picks Tim Walz as her VP*

Is this about anything in particular?

okay so disclaimer here trump's speech patterns have always annoyed me and so i usually kinda try to avoid listening to clips of him talk. but my impression has been that even though he's always been kind of loopy, he could, like... enunciate. and express a thought, even if not very clearly.

and he seems to be having a lot more trouble with just, like, talking. and these weird idees fixes, like constantly talking about hannibal lecter. and just in general going quickly from "not super coherent" to "completely incomprehensible."

At the same time, I think it's sort of unproductive to have everyone read a set "canon" of books. Perhaps it's nice to have some overlap, a few shared touchstones to get your conversations off the ground other than rolling around in our received conceptual frameworks together. Part of a robust intellectual life, it seems to me, is being able to construct your own canon, to play with your own polemical histories of ideas, to borrow from things well-known and obscure and try to draw things together.

Does this mean we should "cancel" Plato? I've met people who think we should stop talking about these old cretins. I think Plato is important to read. Reading the Republic was worth my time. Should everyone read Plato in particular? I'm not sure; maybe not. I'm glad I've read Plato in part because he's important for other people I'm interested in. But I could probably rather well off for having read the Upanishads or Abhinava instead. More generally, I think it's important to read difficult books from time periods and cultures that you are not a part of. For one thing, seeing where ideas—the ones you see around you all the time—come from can be illuminating. It also helps to shake off the calcified layers of complacency. But it only works if you take them seriously. It doesn't work if you do that undergrad thing where you act like you're too smart for Spinoza or Kant or whatever. You have to read carefully and consider each argument and how it works, the explananda the author is trying to put together, and so on.

IMO have more faith in people's tribalism; in this framing the queers are the normal ones! They are Your Side. People on The Other Side were already calling you weirdos, and also corrupt degenerate pedophiles, for decades. This is a drop in the bucket, Dems are right to fight back and they should say it.

I mean, yes tactically it's a winning move, and all that. But hard disagree about the "we can keep this in the box" thing. It is, at best, a Faustian bargain that helps with short-term results at a cost in long-term legitimacy.

What we're seeing, in fact, are the early benefits of having selected an authoritarian-minded candidate; California's "top cop", to use her own phrase. This isn't just a random one-off tactical maneuver happening in isolation. It's a conscious choice to build a campaign on the basic narrative of "cops and robbers", with Democrats on the side of the cops. It's an obvious move, given their blatantly criminal opponent. And it comes with a whole halo of ideas and associations that are along for the ride. Order versus chaos, us versus them, and especially normal versus strange. Authoritarianism is a coherent, powerful attractor in politics! It helps you win, until you lose.

Notice how you immediately started to use the language and logic of authoritarianism. "Have more faith in tribalism," "they are on our side." Don't worry, you tell us, because it is incontrovertible that humans can be easily divided in to types, that some of these are our type and others are not our type. So long as we make sure to treat these clear divisions between different types of humans as a primary moral consideration, you tell us, there are no downsides to using this rhetoric with impunity.

The people who hate the gays already hate gays, and the people who want their politicians to stop trying to make elections referendums on God's Plan for Our Fallen Nation already hate that, and the people who are going to see basic campaigning as a dog whistle for throwing Oberlin graduates into black bags are already seeing that. Campaigning is far less about persuasion, and far more about signalling, letting people know which already-existing camp you align with. The camp that wants "normal politics" already exists, you can appeal to them or not. Sometimes politicians certainly can create movements, but calling someone a weirdo ain't it.