It's very common to see something out of bounds and imagine it extends much further. (people be trippin') When I see this common thing Peuri is calling information laundering, I start to wonder how much of my own side is built on (accidental) lies. Is it all of it? Are we suckers with a false, and therefore unnatural and therefore evil ideology? And then my mind keeps going: were the Republicans right all along? Is Dick Cheney the good guy telling dark truths?
Which is BS. The Republicans aren't special. They do it too. And they're still bad, almost on purpose, and maybe not "almost".
I would ask my own team to not trigger my cascading paranoia with dishonest, wishful categorizing. But if it took me this long and truth and reality are what I care about, (not my identity, or acceptance in society etc, or even reconfirmation of my worldview*), it would be, dare I say ableist or privileged for me to ask such folks to cut that sh out. So then I wonder what I can do to steward the process to a better place, but I also wonder if maybe a bunch of people acting out on bad information is somehow a good thing and I'm just a blind man touching an "elephant of good" naming it bad for having a negative/mistruth part to its elephantine process.
*Of course I also do care about these things. But secondarily.
But then I remember the person who sees a mess trending towards optimal, then declaring the messiness the cause of its optimality and then actively trying to make it better by stop agents from trying to make it better, instead of taking the steps to make the mess better that actually were pulling it towards optimality in the first place which gave rise to the observation to begin with (duh). Reminds me of the time I was on a freeway protesting police shootings of unarmed black kids being pushed by an angry cop and I started telling him "it's all just a dance", you know, to chill it out, which of course backfired. Shortly after he aimed his ire at me specifically, started yelling and pushing his hands on his baton into my belly.
Which loops me back to the point of imagining things beyond what they are. If someone like me could be like "wow my own side is made up of really bad miscategorizations and I'm gaining a lot more wisdom seeing other points of view" and then, not check themselves, stay a little crazy, and then make the leap and join the other team, that would be a problem. And then I wonder how deep can it go? Republicans can gain numbers two ways: buy people (tax cuts), and let Democrats push their own out of the party with their own misbehavior. No one who isn't already there is joining them to learn to be better racists.
Do you understand?
No one joins the rightwing because the rightwing has good ideas. The join because they get bought or because there's a lot of mystery on their side, while their own side's loudest members are literally condoning and even finding ways to support violence based on lies. The Iraq War was violence built on lies. Well Saddam was WMD adjacent. Ooh, don't forget Al-Qaeda adjacent.
Andy Ngo was also doxxing people! I'm dubious. Ngo was building the brand of public figures who wanted to get read. That's not doxxing, that's advertising. Unless I'm wrong. I went off one tweet and the top reply (one of the "doxxed"), but certainly not on the analysis of the publication that linked to it.
I don't know when it happened but I thought the Republicans were bad in part because they were wrong and we were right. But if my own side can't identify true and false, and acts wrong in the name of right on truths that are false, my first instinct is to flip the script, and wonder, are we wrong and they are right?
And here's where it gets real tricky: right over on this greener grass promise are a bunch of useful actionable truths that make my life better. Right over the fence are basic wisdoms that sufficiently predictive where my own side's lenses failed me. A lesser mind would take that as proof that they finally "woke up" or found the truth, and would become a convert. I just know if you separate and survive, you will build your own useful and true knowledge and perspectives shared among your own, and that wisdom will grow and refine over time. It doesn't change that the top of their party is a racist pedophile signing off on huge buyouts that entrench and further enrich the already powerful. They do evil things on a grand scale, and use dirty tactics to achieve it. But it's so easy to go "they know so much, that which doesn't penetrate to my world, maybe I'm wrong about those bad things, maybe they a) don't do some of things, b) I'm wrong about what those things do, c) the rest aren't even bad." And then POW! You suddenly have faith. Faith that the low hanging fruits of seeing their point of view disprove your bias against their misdeeds and they're good and you're bad.
And just before I finish remembering their team is harboring the rise of hate crimes against trans-persons, separating and locking up children from parents as acts of terrorism to dissuade migrants, (related: having a labor secretary in charge of investigating human trafficking who was close to Epstein and also lost hundreds of migrant children), always writing new laws to print more money to give to already rich people, and actually fighting for catastrophic climate change, my mind wanders to the issue of the bad actors themselves. And then I think, the bad actors of my side don't invalidate my side, so then....
But aha I've already listed their crimes and it's obvious. And I know their tactics, my favorite of which is to accuse the other side of their own misdoings, which is why pizzagate was the harbinger to us "now" learning the 2016 story of the 90s Trump-Epstein connection. If they prematurely claim we're doing it, it's because they're already guilty. So no surprise. And then I go, goddamn, they really are that bad.
But I've just spent some 3 odd hours trying to detail a multiyear process I relive over and over again, because people on my own team seem to have no discipline on honest recognition of what's happening. Andy Ngo probably is not a doxxer. He didn't deserve to get attacked. And if we have bad morals (it's okay to attack people), and bad defenses of our moral stances (well it's because he is published next to bad people, plus grasping at doxxing straws), who are we to lead what's right?
I remember two things:
1) either I can agree with you, we can be immoral (pro-violence) and dishonest (pro-miscategorizing) to our ends. At which point, f-off, Democrats I'm going to cash in with the real bad guys. Let's steal some wells and sell the water back to them.
or
2) I remember that I'm to the left of all of you. My values are peace and truth, and I hope the path I clear is one you can walk later.
