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> Like/dislike the guy, the selective journalism/editing and the unrelated call back is: unproductive, dishonest, and is propaganda. No, it's context. You cann
by eropple 8y ago
> Like/dislike the guy, the selective journalism/editing and the unrelated call back is: unproductive, dishonest, and is propaganda.
No, it's context. You cannot reduce political action--and "political action" should be understood as any action between people or groups, there is no light switch to turn it off or on--to a single-shot prisoner's dilemma game. The game is infinite. Your history matters. The context of your actions in the body politic matters.
News organizations have a duty to place events into context, and...this is that context.
- monksy 8y agoShould we consider the time that you said the N word as an edgy teen in middle school? It's apart of your history. Different unrelated events aren't context.
- eropple 8y agoWe certainly should take into context something like that, yes. For me, that particular thing didn't happen--I was never quite so far to the right wing as to think racial slurs were anything but unacceptable--but I was a shitty libertarian know-it-all. I've never been shitty enough to out and deadname trans people like Milo fucking Yiannopoulos, and I've never been shitty enough to cape up for bad-science racists like Charles Murray, but I've been shitty. I said things that made people mad (because they made me feel superior) and hurt people (because they intellectually made sense, because I was so rational and also had never had a hard day in my life). Then I grew up, then I realized I was being shitty, and I stopped. And since I have made a point of standing up for the right things, instead, while not ducking that I too have been shitty. That's more context, and that context, eventually and with hard work, does balance the scales. It just isn't that complicated.