(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Yes, they are indeed ‘deplorables’ [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-08-24 This won’t be a news story, but what I’d like to say is some few paragraphs long, and I’m having technical trouble positioning it in a comments thread — and I do fear it might need to be said, so I am imposing on your attention in a story; here goes: I am seeing people here objecting to members of the community’s making jokes and disparaging remarks to characterize the right — as if it’s beneath us or counterproductive. But such humorous commentary is what is known as ‘satire.’ (You know — Aristophanes, Will Rogers, Mark Twain — bad influences like that.) Free societies permit and even value satire; autocracies and totalitarians famously do not. As for ‘what good it does us’ — the answer is, a lot. What is being overlooked is that when the right goes to war to establish themselves in power by winning (enough) mass support, they aren’t crafting well-reasoned argumentation. They appeal to, gin up, and entrain high-intensity, emotional group dynamics: ridicule/shaming, rage, fear (as is well-known). That is what their followers respond to (and pretty much all they respond to). This is primal, animal pecking-order strategy and politics. Chimps don’t fight to become alphas principally by launching sudden, all-out physical attacks — they do it by forming sophisticated political alliances gradually, over time. (Check out Chimp Empire on Netflix.) The ultimate decider of who gets to be the alpha is the group; and the group wants the strongest male to win. So the alpha contenders put on displays and terrorize rivals, in an extended PR campaign. The serious fight comes only at the end, before a coup is complete. Mimicry, exaggerating an abusive and unsharing alpha’s gestures and mannerism's while his back is turned, is a part of all this. But the public opinion aspect of all this is not the whole story. It is also a battle of psychological attrition and demoralization. Animals consigned to a low pecking-order status, or who suffer humiliation, are not just precluded from access to food and mating opportunities — they also lose their sense of self-worth. They become hopeless. Eventually they can stop even trying to get any food, and, in effect, they simply lie down and die. Think we should be above all of that? The reality is, we can’t be above all of that. We’re animals, too. Enough trump-spewing, over time, tearing us down, lying about us, mischaracterizing us, utter and unremitting unfairness, a constant barrage of post-truth in political life — the area where it matters the most to get things right and to be fair to people — gets to us as well. How we’re weak; ineffectual (ad nauseam). I don’t know about you, but when our own leaders don’t speak up against it, it’s maddening and utterly disheartening. When Joe announced his candidacy by saying we are in a battle for the soul of our nation, tears came to my eyes: he was going to tell the truth — and fight for us. I felt the stirrings of hope after four years of lawlessness and poltical violation. I decided to continue fighting, too. What’s all this got to do with jokes? A lot. Political jokes — satire — are an important way to share political truth and encourage one another. The other side uses them, unfairly, all the time: both-siderism, false equivalencies — all that corrupt and/or bimble-brained malarkey. It’s pretty much all they’ve got: and they’ve used it to malign us, demoralize us, empowering their own — all the way to the White House. And we’re not supposed to avail ourselves of this potent weaponry in our own cause? Doesn’t it even matter to those casting aspersions on our side’s use of satire that the right’s jokes are complete, shallow-IQ lies, while ours are spot-on truth? Are we so in a post-truth world now that that distinction is irrelevant? The right have used ridicule to poison undereducated, mass opinion against us — and we’re not supposed to use jokes and satire to promote our own values and undermine their perverse memes and mouthings — and un-poison, and detoxify, the PR atmosphere? Where did that holier-than-thou ‘advice’ originate? The kremlin? MAGATs are thin-skinned: anything can get in to sway them — IF it’s emotion-driven enough, that is. (Whereas to reason they're largely impervious.) If we go on the psycho-moral offensive with a counter-barrage exposing the ridiculousness, inconsistency, cruelty, and deplorability of their political and moral worldview, we can deincentivize THEM for a change — get them to go crawl back under the rock they crawled out from under, stop spreading their contagion to impressionable others — and for God’s sake leave our librarians alone! But it’s not going to work to come back at them with hate (that’s what they want) — it needs to be something that feels good, that makes people, the public opinion ‘swing-vote,’ laugh. Joe defuses his opponents with face-to-face good humor all the time. He does it on camera. As activists instead of politicians, we can and need to go further. Dark Brandon is not just 1/ ‘Go, Joe!’ — it also so wonderfully succeeded because 2/ IT STUCK IT TO THEIR LiES ABOUT JOE. AND 3/ because IT’S FUNNY: IT SATIRIZED THEM. (Final benefit, 4/: it heartened all of us.) Laughing at a joke is an animal response, Guys. Can’t wish it away — it’s part of the inescapable human dimension. Why do we laugh? Because it is a release of the accumulated tension of lies and distortions that have come to dominate the public conception — lies and distortions that have gone unnoticed or uncommented on because even though a lot of thoughtful and insightful people have felt uneasy or doubtful or conflicted about them, they stayed mum because (as good people) they doubted themselves; plus it takes significant courage to speak up challenging received public opinion. (Racism lasted into the latter 20th century, virtually contested, on precisely that basis, of how hard it was to be a lone voice, in a group, speaking up against it). When we hear a well-placed joke, our cognitive circuits are resolving the conflict we felt as between what we knew society expected us to think vs what our inmost minds and hearts really did think. There is an energy discharge when we hear the truth we secretly, inwardly knew or suspected — we recognize it — and in response reflexively laugh. Also why do we laugh at jokes? Because it’s evolutionarily advantageous: our laughter reaction FORCES us to vocally, publicly acknowledge, where all the others in earshot can hear, that we are in agreement with the joke. Before the joke, we felt ambivalent and alone. Next minute after the joke and the laughter — now we know it really was true and that we were not alone after all. It’s nature’s mechanism to help us along on our political journey. And we’re supposed to disavow this gid-given, if you will, mechanism? negatively reinforce it among ourselves, and give it up? I don’t think so. Especially not since undertaking to regulate, in others, what we’re permitted to express, and how we’re permitted to express it — social policing of that sort — is what typifies authoritarian systems. NOT liberalism. (So what’s it doing surfacing on a ‘liberal’ website?) False equivalency here, Folks: we’re not pumping up insurrection if we make a joke revelatory of the truth. Our jokes are not dangerous. They’re licit. Of value. In line with true free speech. (Even the law regards satire as protected speech. But DKos?? No???? Something very wrong here.) Is it the case that published cartoonists are to be regarded as okay — but not a DKos community member who calls a MAGAT a MAGAT? You’d need to explain that one to me. ‘PC-ness’ has been called out by a number of highly respected and insightful voices as having a foot in fascism that can pretty easily go undetected. I think that the drive to police community members here could qualify as that. Flagging, banning, eager invocation of ROTR stuff — things that I vaguely understand go on here, that subtly communicate to me, anyway, that I’d better watch myself if I undertake to express something (step on a crack, break your mother’s back . . .) !— but I’m just an old lady, remembering carrying around signs in the 60s (that broke the rules and changed the world) So I tend to think in terms of the slow turn of norms and opinions, over decades. And if this ‘No Joking Allowed’ is the wave of the future — well, I’m worried about the younger generations over what that portends. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/24/2189300/-Yes-they-are-indeed-deplorables Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/