Yesterday I objected to the lies being spread about Gina Carano. I hate lies in general, but I especially hate them when they’re used to tear down people in a guilt-by-association purge.
The problem with Gina Carano isn’t that she’s racist or antitrans, as those are proven lies. They problem is that she’s Red Tribe. Since everyone knows that Red Tribe is super racist and super antitrans, if you can find even a the smallest thing that is kinda cringy you don’t need anything more than that. The vast majority of people I talked to never read any of Carano’s original tweets, they simply read the summary of “anti-trans” or “anti-semitic”, believed it, and spread the narrative with outrage in their voices. Because look at that Red Triber being so typically Red Tribe! We can’t have this sort of bigotry in public society, there must be consequences for this behavior!
The Red Tribe, as it turns out, is not a monolithic group. In fact, it’s more fractured in the wake of Trump’s disasterous presidency than it’s ever been in modern history.
There is absolutley a tight knot of racists and bigots within the Red Tribe.
There are also a lot of people who are Red but are not bigots, and they dislike being lumped in with them.
Their politicians feel they have to court the bigots as well to get enough votes to win elections, and as it turns out, yeah, some of them DO have to court those people to win. It’s a fucking mess over on the Red side right now. Honestly I expect the Republican party will collapse and restructure within this decade, due to this growing divide, which Trump brought into the light. And it’s gonna suck for a lot of them. It’ll probably be better in the end, once the rotten contingent can be excised.
But crucially, this means the rest of us need to acknowledge the part of the Reds that are not Bads, and work with them. Right now what much of the Left seems to want to do is drive those decent Reds back towards the Hate Core. They reject anything short of complete repetanance and baptism within the Blue Way. Since a lot of Good Reds won’t do that, the Blues instead vilify them and drive them back towards the Bigots… and This Is Bad.
(Why is this Bad IMO? It isn’t just a “gosh this sort of thing makes me uncomfortable” problem. The last year has seen riots burning down city centers, and insurection groups declare parts of a city an independant autonomous zone. Just last month we had a failed coup in an attempt to overturn our election, that lead to five deaths. I think we’re in danger of social collapse and possible civil strife/violence if things continue to escalate.)
This sort of “Driving Good People Into The Dark Recesses” happens even to people who aren’t Red, but simply Aren’t Blue Enough. Fucking Laci Green of all people was outcast. Laci Green! It’s maddness, and I hate what it’s doing to all sides.
It just happened to Gina Carano. Now that Disney fired her, she’s teaming up with freakin’ Ben Shapiro. While I’ll admit Ben Shapiro isn’t the worst person on the right, he’s definitely in the Shitty Person camp, and having Carano pushed towards him has made everything worse. A good Red Person is being driven deeper towards the cruddy recesses, and everyone on the left celebrates? Is this really what you wanted? Has this made the world a better place?
The problem is that any who’s already drowning in the Blue Tide doesn’t see the difference between a Gina and a Ben. I’ve had people ask me how I could defend someone who’s part of a political party that sometimes courts the votes of racists with swastika tattooes. I don’t understand how such a person can consider themselves an enlightened member of the modern world. We were supposed to be the side that looked beyond what group you fell into. We looked beyond skin color, or religion, or lack of education, or accent. We judged people individually for what they themselves did. We do not believe in collective punishment or collective prejudice. We understand that all groups have many people a great nuance within them.
Or we did, at one time. Now all we need to know about someone is that they are proudly Red, and we know that they’re part of a group that includes racists, so they deserve to be outcast. If someone were to point out that some people in the Blue Tribe are violent, unapologetically racist, unapologetically sexist, promote the mass murder of demographic groups, and believe in group punishment, well… those are a small minority. They don’t speak for the Democratic Party. They’re outlier fringe groups. We are a Big Tent that has to represent many people, and we keep the most-radical in check. We are nuanced. But you… you’re a monolithic block. Get fucked.
Sadly, the Democratic Party is far from falling apart, and so unlike the Republican party, I don’t think the knot of horrible Blues will be excised any time soon. If anything, they seem to be gaining power. There’s some people trying to push against that (even little old me, with my miniscule little blog), but we appear to be losing. :/
(And yes, much like what happened to Rowling, I expect that what happened to Carano will push her further and further right, and will end up with her associating with actual bad people, and thus this post won’t age well. That’s a feature of this sort of attack though, not a bug. Good job guys. /s)
4 Responses to ““We’re Nuanced, You’re a Monolithic Block””
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I think I pretty much covered why Gina Carano is not a good person in my previous post. But just to re-iterate, repeating lies about election fraud in defense of Jim Crowe 2.0 laws and encouraging people not to wear masks, which will result in preventable deaths, is not in keeping with being a good person. At best, I would say she is a bad person who has now teamed up with an even worse person.
As for promoting the mass murder of a demographic group, your link is to an author promoting drastically higher taxes, the author explicitly states he is not calling for violence against anyone. This is not comparable to people literally shouting they want to round up every man, woman and child with jewish heritage and murder them.
But for the record, I have read statements from actual liberals who support genocide. The difference is AOC is not calling them very fine people, Ilhan Omar is not retweeting their offensive messages, House Democrats are not giving standing ovations to members who claim forest fires are caused by chirstian space lasers and Biden is not inciting crowds to storm state capitals and overthrow state legislatures with team red majorities based on lies about cheating.
I get your point about silencing and no platforming radicalizing people. But the idea that Biden is only President because of voter fraud is an evil view which is being used to support violent coups and voter disenfranchisement. Similarly, mocking people for wearing masks is literally killing people every single day. These are evil views and those who perpetuate them are not good people.
I agree people should not be spreading lies about Gina Carano, no one should be called a bigot without evidence. I would even go so far as to say doing this is also evil. Her actual posts are bad enough, the lies she spread have serious, in some cases fatal, consequences. That is ample grounds for termination.
> repeating lies about election fraud in defense of Jim Crowe 2.0 laws and encouraging people not to wear masks
From what I’ve seen (and I admit I’m not a twitteratti, so I only know what internet articles have shown me), this is not what she has done. I do object to people who do this. I also object about others claiming that someone has done this, when they have not.
> As for promoting the mass murder of a demographic group, your link is to an author promoting drastically higher taxes
Like I said, I’m not on twitter. That’s the closest I could get from my normal sources. These would be the “intellectual cover” that’s given by the leaders that gives people on the ground license to go full-murder. As you say, there are liberals who call for literal genocide.
> Biden is not inciting crowds to storm state capitals and overthrow state legislatures with team red majorities based on lies about cheating.
I’m not sure if you listen to The Bayesian Conspiracy podcast, and I’m not asking you too, but my record of being anti-Trump is laid out in detail there. I have publicly stated that, despite being incredibly anti-death-penalty, I think there is an argument to be made that the only way to truely contain the damage Trump is doing is by arresting and executing him (after a fair trail). This is the first time I’ve ever backpeddled on my anti-death-penalty stance. (And I don’t think of it as a penalty in this case, but a precaution). You don’t have to tell me about the evils of Trump. The thing is — Carano is not Trump.
> Her actual posts are bad enough, the lies she spread have serious, in some cases fatal, consequences. That is ample grounds for termination.
I haven’t seen any yet that makes me agree with this statement.
Actually, let me hedge a little bit.
When she tweets something like “Make voter fraud end in 2020” I see your point. That’s basically a claim that Biden is illegitimate due to voter fraud. In that regards, it’s simply false, as far as I can see.
However, it’s not obviously false in a way that requires we exile and isolate her to remain good people. The election process is pretty damn opaque to the average person, and there’s a lot of trust we have to put in the authorities that they aren’t just making it all up. A lot of people have been left feeling disenfranchised. There is a legit loss of faith in our system, and this is dangerous. This needs to be addressed. However saying “Shut up, everything is legit, and if you say otherwise we will take away your livelihood and many of your friends and possibly your ability to interface with society” is *not how to fix this*. It will make people lose faith even more.
Yes, there are people who are using people’s feelings of disenfranchisement to push through Jim Crow laws. Those people must be stopped. They can be stopped by addressing the fears of the people who are being misled, and showing them the integrity of our system, and fixing issues where they do arise. “Make voter fraud end” is a laudible goal, but it presupposes such fraud exists. “Make the fraud end if it’s there, and make perception of voter fraud end if it’s not” is a better goal, and one that we should be working on. And attacking and censoring anyone who says they perceive voter fraud will not do that.
So I’m not defending what she’s implying, or how some lawmakers are using the fears of people like her to do bad things. I think the things she’s repeating are factually false, yes. And those things are being used by some in defense of Jim Crow. But what I am claiming is that she’s trying to say important things that show a real problem which should be addressed. And reducing it to “shes’ repeating lies about election fraud in defense of Jim Crowe 2.0” isn’t just disengenious, it’s a harmful lie that is destroying society, because it makes her out to be an evil person trying to spread evil, rather than someone that’s wrong about something and trying to fix things.
Basically all this goes for the masks thing as well, with the details changed slightly.
I remember when all of the supposedly ‘good people’ were telling everyone not to wear masks.
I remember Nancy Pelosi saying off-hand something like ‘I don’t know why people aren’t in permanent revolt.’ and Kamala Harris said something like ‘People aren’t going to stop rioting and they shouldn’t’.
I think this is the crux of the disagreement between yourself and the author any myself. I think people are, generally, mistaken and that’s not in and of itself evil, and thus people that perpetuate ‘evil views’ are not themselves evil, let alone not good.
To me, the person that has been most heroic in confronting ‘evil views’ is Daryl Davis. He has personally helped dozens of people with actually evil views renounce those same views. And he did it by doing the opposite of what you’re condoning.