Hugh Johnson
Member
I found these two thread on reddit, and I thought they might engender good discussion. There is a combination of ideology, academic rot, social media and nastiness discussed here, and I suspect a lot of people are suffering from these sorts of issues. Please do share and support those who need it here.
I hope this interests people.
Has anyone had any people that are close to you become increasingly mean lately?
My mother had an interaction with a woman and later someone told her that the woman supported Trump. My mother stated "I wish I would have known she was one. I would have embarrassed her right there in public."
I was taken aback. I said "That's really mean, mom."
She said "These stupid women deserve to be embarrassed if they support him after all that's happened."
I just redirected the conversation somewhere else. It would have been better if I explained that everyone has different experiences that build their world view, or that the woman might be misinformed, etc. but I was too flustered to do so.
Another time, my mother said to me "I didn't know I raised a white supremacist" when I suggested that we should focus on helping the poor, rather than minorities specifically. That the media is raising racial tensions unnecessarily.
I had never known her to be this mean before. I don't understand why people have to be so mean to each other. I think the media is severely damaging people and making them very unempathetic. I told her to stop listening to corporate media, but she still listens to NPR because it's "not corporate".
I've tried to have level headed conversations with my parents before about all that's going on but they start becoming hysterical. They've never cared about politics or much of anything this much. It produces a very strong emotional reaction from them when I try to give my stupidpol influenced views. I try to keep a calm voice but they begin speaking very angrily like they are disappointed in me and angry with me. I don't handle confrontations well so I just try to talk about something else and dropping the topic. But they don't really talk about much of anything else besides what Trump has recently done either, so it's hard to talk to them.
This is it. My father has been the same way as OP. All he talks about is Trump. He listens to the news 16 hours a day and he actually falls asleep to MSNBC most nights and leaves it on until morning. Today, he told me the best part of the last few months was Trump getting impeached again. I asked: why do you care? - not is a dismissive way or a rude way, but genuinely confused as to why he actually cared about a going-nowhere political posture of an already-defeated man. He immediately lashed out about how I’m too young (I’m ******* 30 lol) to understand and how this is a momentous occasion blah blah blah - I wouldn’t bring it up, but it’s the only thing he can talk about anymore. I ask “how was your day” and the answer is about politics. “What’s going on this weekend” and the answer is politics. It’s sad seeing him this fiery about something so pointless at the end of his life. He’s never cared about politics at all and now he says ***t about how he wishes he wasn’t white and how he wished Trump died of Covid and how the capital rioters would have been shot if they weren’t white supremacists, how trump supporters were going to round up and execute gay people if trump lost his 2020 election, etc. - really terrible takes.
A while ago, we were drinking and I asked him why he was always so wound up and why he leaves the news on for 24 hours a day on every TV in the house. He said he was scared of the future and he was alone and nervous and sad and knew that Alzheimer’s was coming like it came for his father. It broke my heart. But it hasn’t changed anything. He’s become small and scared and it kills me to see him like this. The man that held me up on his shoulders as a kid. At one point the strongest, most biggest man in the world to me. And to see him wrapped up in this and driven down to this point breaks my heart.
Yea, I’ve noticed this as well. I think it’s all part of an intersection of woke ideology and social media influence.
I can think of times in the past where I’ve seen people spurred to vile behavior by ostensibly moral causes, like religious right wingers, but it seems like woke ideology is particularly effective or better designed to empower people to ugliness. And of course everything is made worse by social media.
I had a similarly shocking revelation with my own mother when she mentioned harassing someone who had their mask down in public shamelessly. I never would have expected her to be the type who was confrontational enough to treat some stranger that poorly, but here we are.
It’s like wokeness was created in a lab or something. Other beliefs might engender similarly self righteous behavior, but it seems like there is a woke answer to excuse any behavior, no matter how bad, compared to other beliefs which get there incidentally. It’s odd how wokeness managed to incorporate a complete rejection of common ideas about social decency into its tenants without anyone really caring.
It's pretty crazy right now.
A few friends and acquaintances were celebrating some kind of Parler dox, and posted a map showing all of the Parler users from my city showing their house and all of their personal details. They shared with me that one of my neighbors was listed on it. They were deriding them and calling them dumb Nazis and white supremacists, with heavily implied undertones of violence, expecting me to join in. These people in question are ideal neighbors -- easily the nicest family on my street. Always saying hello, always working on projects with the garage open, and overall just great members of the community. Would much rather have them around than any Stasi neoliberals. Ironically, they're Latino so the white supremacist thing is just dumb.
I just had such a disgust in my mouth that I can't really engage with that kind of discourse, and I've been constantly thinking about it. You seemingly have an entire army of people that are frothing at the mouth and in a flying rage over the supposed high crime of people daring to seek out another posting platform other than the designated mainstream media approved ones. I honestly just can't believe it, and what's worse is that it seems like the Democratic base seems to be right in line with it all.
I've learned to just "hide my power level," so to speak, and nod my head and move on with my day. But damn if it doesn't concern the hell out of me, especially now that it has seeped through the Internet and is affecting relationships with real life friends and family.
9 x out of 10 the same ones that hold their purses when a black person gets in the elevator. 10 x/10 “oh my god, are you sure we can drive through here? Chadwick, look up the route”
If this year has taught me anything, it’s that the least racist people work the least hard at signaling to everyone that they aren’t.
Some highlights:
- Girl I went to high school with from white-passing Mexican aristocracy making up a story about people calling her a beaner for attention. Penchant for sh***ing on all things “ghetto”
- My academic arch-nemesis (also from high school) talking about how worried she was for her (grand total of 0) black friends and how she “feels their fear” when she sees police
- Wangster son of multimillionaire from down the block where I grew up who casually dropped the n-word into everything now calling for “fascist” Trump supporters to be shot
My MIL and SIL literally watch CNN like 14hrs a day (despite us being Canadian) literally every conversation goes into politics, it’s exhausting. My SIL was going on and on about how she hates the conservatives, I asked her why, and she literally had no response, no ideas of any of their platforms or ideas (I’m not supporting the conservatives either, but I hate blindly hating something when you clearly know nothing about it)
They’ve also made some weird racial comments and most family meals now devolve into screaming about slavery, the wage gap,privilege and black people. When I first got together with my husband 5 years ago, this was never brought up. Despite my SIL having a minimum wage ***t tier job, and being in massive debt, she goes on and on about how she learned in Uni that she actually has white privilege and how she can use her voice to make a difference, even though her black peers are wealthy immigrants from Nigeria. I tried explaining to her that it doesn’t matter what race she is, politicians don’t give a ***t about her unless she has money. As a side note, she’s in school for psychology, yet the only thing I hear about her class is them doing privilege tests or essays about race or gender, she literally never studies yet is pulling a really high grade? I feel like degrees are just useless at this point.
Edit: forgot to add, they also make constant remarks about how dumb rural/poor people are. My MIL brought up a segment on CNN that talked about common vehicles between Republicans and Democrats, and they were laughing about “of course the dumb redneck Hicks who vote republican are driving pick up trucks. Of course class doesn’t matter
I am in my first faculty meeting back of the winter semester. We started with a forty minute discussion on to how best to do a territorial acknowledgement. Free speech has been called a white bro issue. Someone lauded how Zoom meetings often end in discussions of astrology. 30 minutes on anti-racism in the vein of Kendi X and that italian lady. Now we are in an endless discussion as to what to do when a student thinks the wrong thing, or interprets a text "the wrong way." When I suggested that students need some free time to reflect on ideas, and have the freedom to accept or reject a text, someone said "my entire summer has been about educating bigots, I'm exhausted." Ok lady but we are in fact educators.
I have no idea how it got this way. Fifteen years ago when I got involved with this field, it was fun! We talked about justice some, sure, but we also talked about other ideas, and grappled with how society works. There was a sense of shared humanity. Now everything is devolved into supposedly subversive, yet mainstream liberal hogwash that seems more concerned with ideological conformity than actually learning anything, or engaging with whether an idea is useful, and why.
Pro tip kids: Don't go into academia.
The veterans for peace conference last summer was held online so they didn't know who to "acknowledge" as the rightful owner a of their land. It was supposed to be in Albuquerque, NM so they had it all planned out as a big opening event. Instead, they gave the floor to a senior Native American activist and she basically said "I don't get why you always feel the need to do that. For me it's like if you stole a car and drove it around the block and then came back rolled down the window and told me that it was really, in fact, my car and then drove away in it" I thought that metaphor was hilarious because that's actually what that whole performance does. It just rubs the historical fact in people's faces. Imagine if a white person were to open every conversation with a black person with, "my ancestors probably enslaved your ancestors". I'd be like "tell me something I don't know jackass."
I'd like to add a little something-something to this discussion. I taught in colleges/universities for three years, before I left to make more money doing minimum wage jobs.
The schools are in the shutter financially, and it's a lot worse than what's known publicly. I used to teach incoming international students; it was my job to prepare them for the linguistic demands of their classes.
Public research universities would load up on international students, because they were paying $70,000 a year in tuition alone, while local students' tuition was maybe $14,000. The students I would see were admitted to both bachelor's and graduate programs, despite struggling to write a complete sentence in English, let alone a complete essay. I remember one of my students wrote an essay for a psychology class that he asked me to look at, and the entire essay was a big block quotation, apart from his name at the top. The LA times did a great expose on this a few years ago, but even then that article only touched on things superficially, and needed to make the main character of the article a half-chinese professor in anticipation of the calls toward racism.
I used to be a regular poster on the r/highereducation subreddit, which was corporate woke beyond belief (I think they might be a bit better now, but it's still there). The other users there reminded me of the colleagues I had in real life: they were obsessed with both identity politics and DNC liberalism to the point that anything which fell outside of that spectrum needed to be corrected...with the DNC talking points of equity/acceptance or whatever.
Another user on r/highereducation (who was essentially chased out like me) brought up a point I had never thought of: the students themselves were requesting more social justice based curricula in humanities and social science classes, because that made it easy to pass the class. Just include the typical call-and-response buzzwords in assignments, and you could pass without even a mastery of the core material.
Chris Hedges, the former New York Times reporter and pulitzer prize author, writes about these things. He calls the condition the "moral absolutism of identity politics", and notes that these themes are pushed to irrelevant academic departments, like African-American studies and literature degrees. Schools don't let this nonsense touch their economics departments, or engineer
I hope this interests people.
