Mainstream Poison

I was in a meeting today, the way a middle aged white guy will be, with a rep from my local Chamber of Commerce. At the very beginning, he was sure to explain to all present that the the local CoC is not affiliated with the national Chamber. They’ve always been independent, he said, but it’s increasingly important to point that out, because the politics and brand of the national Chamber are increasingly toxic, especially in New England. We then discussed ways that the local business community could make greater efforts to engage with the local socialist party on issues of climate change and resilience and housing equity and transit access, and how developers could balance the needs of organized labor with a desire to recruit a diverse workforce, given that regional labor organizations are pretty white. And we discussed, the way middle-aged white guys will do, ways that we could try to bring people different from us into the conversation we wanted to have, and hear their perspectives.

And it occurred to me, in this meeting, that most of the people I interact with on a day to day basis are pretty good at reaching across divides. We don’t automatically write each other off over differences of opinion.

But there are people who aren’t worth engaging with. People whose “differences of opinion” are, in fact, reprehensible. So reprehensible, in fact, that merely associating with them taints you with their moral stain.

Like the US Chamber of Commerce.

Like mainstream conservative pundit Erik Erikson, who openly admires the way that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet used to have dissidents thrown out of helicopters into the ocean.

Like Jordan Peterson, the mainstream conservative intellectual and evolutionary pop-psych guru, who argues that Nazis were doing totally rational things at the time, so it was kind of OK.

Like Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi, beloved Republican political shitheels who knew about the DNC email hacks, and then persisted in claiming that Seth Rich stole the emails and that the Clintons murdered him for it.

Like the hardworking, well-respected law enforcement officials at ICE, who take glee in executing dehumanizing immigration policies and giving abusers free reign in tent-city concentration camps for migrant children:

The memo, obtained exclusively by The Associated Press, says the former director of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement personally signed off on sidestepping requirements for child abuse and neglect checks at the tent city in Tornillo, Texas.

Like like acting US Attorney General Matt Whitaker, who says he felt conflicted when he was asked to prosecute someone who drove his car into a women’s health clinic and tried to set it on fire.

Like people who watch this video of cops beating protesters, and blame the protesters.

Like people who persist in denying that climate change is happening (see also, Five Ways to Adapt to Climate Change, see also The Insect Apocalypse is Here).

Like people who watch American life expectancy drop two years in a row and then still scaremonger about Obamacare and Socialism and the moral laziness of people struggling with substance abuse.

In other words, the mainstream Republican party. The thirty or forty percent of Americans who think Trump is doing a bang-up job. They bring nothing to the table. They will not or cannot speak in good faith and should not be trusted with power, or granted respect.

Engaging with them simply legitimizes their terrible, terrible ideas. It makes about as much sense to ask a mainstream Republican about public policy as it does to ask a young-earth creationist how a high school ought to teach biology. It’s worse than pointless, and bordering on unethical, to legitimize these ideas by giving them the time of day.

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Profile of the illustrator behind the Great British Bakeoff.
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