Memo to Moral Scolds: SHUT UP AND LET ME HAVE MY NUANCED FUN.
It didn’t take long. Hours after it was reported that Derek Chauvin was seriously injured in an inmate-involved stabbing, I was being informed on social media that, well, actually, prison violence is bad and prison conditions are awful and we shouldn’t be celebrating it.
When you see a post about Joe Manchin not running for re-election, remember ths.
Joe Manchin’s entire career was built around either being the reason for, or the excuse for, Democrats HAVING power without ever USING that power.
So when you see a post that is, essentially, “good fucking riddance, asshole”, that person values the second thing more than the first thing. Posts about “but.. but.. but… HIS SEAT!” are from people who value the first more than the second.
Good fucking riddance, asshole.
Been seeing a lot of this this week, and I wonder if all the people on social media insisting “there must have been a tunnel under it” even realize they’re giving off big “I’m sure the officer feared for his life” energy.
Haven’t checked in on social media in about six hours. Sure hope everyone didn’t decide who’s solely responsible for the Gaza war and also figure out how to resolve it without me!
“They war crimed us first.:”
“What’s your non-war-crime solution, smart guy?”
“If they didn’t want to be war crimed they should have overthrown their government.”
“If they didn’t want to be war crimed they should have heeded the logistically impossible warning.”
“They created the conditions under which a war crime is the easiest solution. It’s their fault.:”
“If they just complied, they wouldn’t be war crimed.”
I don’t know, it kind of seems like you have a boner for war crimes. Or at least some of them.
This is not a commentary on the things that have happened, but something that’s important to note when perusing the discourse around the things that have happened.
For a few decades now, some of the absolute worst people in the world have been demonizing Hamas. They weren’t doing this in a good-faith attempt to warn us about how bad Hamas was and is. They were spelling it Hamas, but they were pronouncing it, to varying degrees, “Palestinians”, “Arabs”, Muslims”, and “brown people”. They were running a playbook built on disingenuousness to enhance their own power, influence, and geopolitical agendas.
The fact that they were technically correct doesn’t change this.
One of the things these people do is they take a thing that should be fine for everyone, and they poison it so that you have to qualify it. For example, you can’t just make an “OK” symbol anymore, you have to say “And I mean this in the traditional sense, not the white power sense that also now exists because white nationalists have co-opted the hand gesture.”
Similarly, the very simple, true statement “Hamas are monsters who need to be stopped” now carries with it a metric ton of extra baggage, because even now, people are using “Hamas” to mean the terrorist organization, people who voted for them 17 years ago, people who live next door to people who voted for them 17 years ago, and the children of people who lived next door to people who voted for them 17 years ago.
There’s been a lot of clumsy navigating of these waters. And a certain amount of wildly inappropriate tribalist “Bad people hate them so they must be good” splashing around in those waters too. None of that negates the fact that the waters started choppy as fuck to begin with, and how and why they got choppy in the first place.
The most common, most terrifying viewpoint I’ve been seeing on the socials in the past few days is “well, they were attacked, and now they’re at war, and when you’re at war, you have no choice but to do war crimes. That’s what war is all about.” I suppose 9/11 is 22 years old and was long overdue for a reboot. But I don’t have to like it
In case you were curious, I’ve been in Italy for four days and I’m still only thinking about the Roman Empire when I’m directly being confronted by it.