Skip to main content

The Victory at The March

This past weekend, Twitter, in Twitterial fashion, erupted.

The topic of the discontent? A group of high school students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky.

Video clips made the viral rounds over the weekend, purporting to show the students harassing an elderly Native American man (Marine veteran Nathan Phillips). This event occurred at the Indigenous Peoples' March in Washington, D.C.

In particular, one video clip showed this. Twitter's "liberal" sector noticed the students wearing the popular 2016 campaign slogan: "Make America Great Again".

For the political Left, which has no interest in making America great again, this was a problem.

The narrative shifted. It was not just a generational tormenting going on; it was a racialized event.

Commentators and Twitter's #VerifiedBullies castigated the students and connected the branding of their clothes to the President's (often misinterpreted) racism.

This castigation escalated to the level of professional and death threats, against the students and their families.

This would be, unfortunately, another straightforward story of the particular lunacy of the the spin-driven media. The shift arrived shortly after the hysteria reached its peak. There was new information.

In any mob, there is a critical mass. When it's reached, it's unstoppable from the perspective of rational persuasion. Mobs are the starts of movements. These movements lead to violence. Ironically, violence is used as a means of persuasion.

Twitter mobs are just as bad, if not worse. Deindividuation separates the person from their online consequences. The results of this shift are dramatic. Even worse are mobs with righteous anger. When the purpose of the mob is justifiable, even "moral", hell hath no fury.

What changed the mob's ferocious tilt? New video released; it showed the Native American elder approached the students. A press release from the most castigated student showed that there was no malicious intent from the high schoolers. More and more of the commentators apologized. 

In other words, new information stopped the mob and changed the course of conversation.

Yes, it is not over. Not for Covington Catholic High School, which continues to face sanctions. Not for the more rabid members of the press, who are finding more creative ways to frame their attack. But the mob has dissipated.

There's a vague disappointment in the fact this is surprising. You'd think this would be common. But, we, as humans and as biased thinkers, are not prone to rationality. It takes effort to be objective, to admit fault, and to let reality be the final arbiter.

But it happened here. It could happen again. It could also be the last hope for a more sensible public discourse.

I'm not calling for perfection. I made the same mistake of jumping to conclusions. I'm not calling for apologies. People will make them, or they won't. I'm calling for a recognition and celebration of reason winning part of a lengthy fight.

Advocates of reason, of liberty, of individual rights need to look at this closely. It wasn't perfect, but it was better.

The lesson here is: keep applying pressure. Point to the victories. Encourage success. As usual, make the argument for intelligence.

And maybe, next time will be better.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Life is Not Suffering

I spent my childhood learning about God. What he wanted from us humans, and how we could give it to him. What we were saddled with from birth: sin. Like with other religious sects, I grew up believing in my inherent imperfection. I grew up with the belief that  life was suffering, and we had to make meaning from it. We would fail, constantly, and never live up to the standards God set for us, so we had to hope for the future. Through God's power alone could the world be set aright. Only through God's grace could we ever be forgiven. Jesus is the epitome of this viewpoint: His one time death was the only thing needed to release all men from sin and death. (Now, being Protestant, my birth religion  did  also focus on "works" not just "faith", but that's a separate concern.) Jesus needed to suffer for the world to be saved. And we, his spiritual descendants, had to suffer for the world to be saved.  My belief growing up, then, was that suffer...
Post a Comment
Read more

Defining Prosperity

I could take this time to write a brief post on the "Green New Deal", of recent acclaim and criticism... But I want to devote the time instead to examining what seems to be the goal of the GND: prosperity. I mean this in the sense that the proponents of the deal mean it: economic prosperity, as measured by equality between citizens and the abolition of classes. Now, we can quibble (correctly) that prosperity is not, in this sense, the real word for it. A better word may be "degradation" or "impoverishment". That is the actual aim, not the named goal. The only way to make everyone equal is not to provide maximum opportunity, but instead, maximum control. Take away the rights of an individual to make their own way in life and they will only be of value to a grand scheme - and to the schemer. Ultimately, this is why socialism is immoral: it shows a shocking, horrifying lack of regard for the individual. The goal of socialism (and specifically,...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Brief Case for Self-Respect

Of the many concepts that are ethically important, one is incredibly valuable in this age of inflated self-importance and unhealthy narcissism: genuine self-respect. What is "genuine" self-respect? It is, more correctly, just "self-respect", but needs to have the qualifier to distinguish it from fraudulent self-respect: that which is proposed by the self-help circles and certain religious traditions. These forms of fraudulent self-respect are called "self-respect", "self-esteem" "unconditional positive self-regard", etc, but amount to an unhealthy psychological concept called narcissism. Narcissism vs. self-respect is a debate which seems too muddy to consider, but can be distilled into key similarities and differences. Similarities include the focus of both concepts on what the self is, what the self does, and why the self does what it does. Differences arise from the different answers to these questions. So, while a narcis...
Post a Comment
Read more