Yes, I do. And I don't view it as a "left" vs. "right" false bifurcation either. (The Americas need to grow up and realize there's more than two directions!) There are policies that match however, the phrase and, although usually originating from the so-called "right" in the west are not universal to it and are the product of a very specific subset of that right. (And can be found in other cultures on what would be called the "left" by simplistic-minded western political thought.)
These policies cannot be meaningfully interpreted as attempting something and being cruel as a byproduct since it's trivial to show they don't actually accomplish their purported aims. You have to look elsewhere for the goal, and the one consistent thing across all of them is that they hurt an "out" group.
So you don't believe this "the cruelty is the point" exists?
Tell me, then, what the point of this was if it wasn't the cruelty? (And be glad I picked a mild example. There are some truly horrific photos of this horrifically cruel institution out there.) Lynching was a cultural backlash of people resentful of having lost mastery—of having lost power over a group they considered (and still do!) subhuman—lashing out to cause that group misery and to inculcate fear in that group.
I could find similar kinds of photographs (including far worse ones) from Nazis ("right"), Maoists ("left"), Islamists (left and right begins to break down here), criminal gangs (even more ridiculous to label with left or right), the Japanese in Nanjing ("right"... I guess?), etc. etc. etc. In all such cases the cruelty is, in fact, the very point of the action or policy
It's terrorism, to put it into a single word, and in all terrorism the cruelty is, in fact, the very point.
And right now in the USA in particular there's a single group prone to lashing out at perceived (and actual) loss of standing, power, and influence. A group prone to wearing red baseball caps. (Yes, I'm talking about MAGAts here.) A group that is noted for instituting policies simply to be cruel to an out group that they perceive as somehow "replacing" them. (Yes, I'm alluding to the Great Replacement bullshit that festers in MAGAt circles.)
So yes, indeed, the cruelty is very much the point.
Is it true / false in some or all scenarios?
The statement "it is true in some situations, not true in others" can be made about literally any philosophy, political slogan, or pithy expression.
Is it with certain groups or regarding certain things?
"The cruelty is the point"-style politics are likely older than civilization. You can see "the cruelty is the point" policies and actions in the very first things ever written down. So it is, yes, tied to a certain group: humanity.
As to what it typically applies to, well, that is also a sad fact of human nature: it is an exercise of power. To many people you don't have power unless you are making other people feel misery. This isn't universal across humans, but there is a large chunk of humanity that believes this. We call them "sociopaths" or "psychopaths" or other such terms, and they are alarmingly common in human society. Some estimates place them at about 1 in 20 people. And by their nature they crave positions of power and thus strive for them, leading them to be over-represented in the corridors of power. Hence policies that appeal to sociopaths and psychopaths being so common.
Do you feel that speech like this is conducive to fixing societal issues?
Yes.
If you believe that policies are enacted to accomplish goal X and set out to prove that it fails to accomplish goal X, the argument is ineffective if the real goal is goal Y. For any value of goals X and Y. Even if goal Y is "cause suffering".
To combat something and effect change, you have to know what that something really is, not the polite lies told about what it is.
Is what is considered “kind” always the best course of action?
No. And yes.
To an individual sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind to society at large. For an extreme example, I'm sure that being tossed in the slammer with the key thrown away is unkind to the "kicks" murderer, but it is kind to society at large to stop more people from dying and more people from mourning their losses. For a less extreme example, sending that hedge fund guy who ran a Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of people of their life savings off to jail would be viewed as "unkind" to him. But it would be far less kind to society to let that kind of sociopath run free to do more fraud to more people.
Labeling non-cruel policies as "leftist" and "liberal" defeats any attempt at a Neutral Point of View. You see, those are often centrist policies, and one's reference point can be inferred.
As to whether cruelty is a goal, I would not suggest people actually exercising a plan we'd all consider to be cruel see it as cruelty: they may realize some cruelty in their plan, but would insist the cruelty is merely an acceptable by-product of their plan and not the goal.
I usually see such phrases when talking politics, and usually then about more conservative viewpoints. As those can be seen as perpetuating a status quo that made rich people richer or enabled very anti-consumer policies, the accidental victimization of non-rich people and consumers in the process of benefiting businesses and the upper class can be seen as cruel, for example.
Just as a rising tide lifts all boats, the ebbing tide will strand the last boats out of port.
I don't and would never label non-cruel policies as leftist or liberal, but the phrase is commonly used by those groups. I feel that nearly every group thinks their policies aren't cruel, however.
"Cruelty" is not always unwarranted, nor is it the same things to every person.
Remember that German guy that had himself eaten by another years back? That'd seem cruel to me, but it was a fetish for both of them and they didn't think it was cruel at all. It's a moral definition and changes for every person.
Some people would call me cruel for having a cat.
More would call me cruel for keeping it indoors permanently.
But many others would yell at me for allowing outside.
Some would give me hell for drinking a glass of milk.
And all of them can justify their reasons.
People are quite poor at context and misusing and exaggerating words. I absolutely hate it and feel it's one of our worst traits which is not an exaggeration.
I don't really believe this is ever true, except insofar as the cruelty accomplishes some goal. Anti-homeless spikes are, in my opinion, cruel- I would prefer we found some way to address homelessness directly instead of hiding the homeless. But the people who installed them, approved the installation, and came up with the idea aren't trying to be cruel, they're trying to keep the homeless from being visible in public spaces.
The cruelty isn't the point, it's a means of reaching the point.
During the Nanjing Massacre, two officers got into a contest to see who could kill more people with just their swords. They went on a rampage against captured civilians, executing them by sword in a bid to see who would reach a higher body count. This was reported upon in dispatches with all the glee of a sporting match.
What was the "real point" that this cruelty was the means to reaching?
I can find hundreds or thousands of things like this in reading history. Can you find the "real point" behind all of them? Really?
That is an accurate example, but I don't feel it's true in every case (or even the majority) where the phrase is used.
For example, many right-wing policies (that I dislike very much) have the phrase in question used in discussions below them. More often than not it's an ineptness, stupidity, lack of knowledge, or something else cause them to feel that the result would be beneficial. Maybe the intended result is power, or something economic, but it's NOT them just trying to be mean.
I know you know it, but for anyone reading this... Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I've spoken to plenty of limited-understanding people all over the world. Many of them are broadly kind and well-meaning and brutally misguided people. Many express regret at any cruelty they "had to" do, but felt their goal justified it.
Dismissing it as just being shitty to be shitty is stopping people from addressing the underlying issues in the same way that some would dismiss a drug addict as "just an addict" without thinking about addressing underlying issues.
"He wants to be high because he likes being high." Well, maybe? But probably not, or at very least there's way more to it.
Oh, every epithet gets misapplied. "Misgendering is literally violence!" "<insert person mildly conservative> is a literal Nazi!" "<insert ever so slightly social policy> is literally communism!" It is not even slightly surprising to hear that people are misusing "the cruelty is the point".
I know it does, and that's a massive pet peeve of mine (if you couldn't tell from other threads). To be clear pre mini-rant, this isn't aimed at you, it's just something that bothers me and I wanted to get it out.
I think clarity and unity of terms use is one of the major issues that need to be addressed, especially now. It's also one of the reasons I often will add the definition of a term being used in our weekly threads, because I don't like people claiming to be correct because their "personal definition" obscures the truth. We have words. They are effective, powerful, and can be wielded to great effect. Changing what they mean in order to shock with a worse term is a horrible thing to do and is a dumbing-down that serves to undermine the original definition. It makes communication worse.
I despise forced political movement of words and don't like turning words into the personal equivalent of morality.
Probably not, although I think Ace is correct that even in the extreme historical examples there is often a "real point". I probably should have been more clear, but I meant something like "in all the examples I've heard of people using this phrase, it didn't seem true to me."
"Real point" sounds very … "no true Scotsman"-ish. It sounds like the kind of diversion you use which can be applied to literally every situation. It sounds, in fact, very similar to the COVID-19 deniers saying "they didn't die of COVID-19, they died with COVID-19". It's intrinsically impossible to prove after the fact and is thus a perfect diversion.
When the "real point" from a body of people seems to always, with almost no exception, include cruelty to some target—doubly so when it's always the same target!—that whole "real point" thing starts to wear thin. It sounds very much like a diversion of a particularly ugly sort: the kind of diversion that people with no skin in the game make while treating human lives as just a data point in an intellectual exercise.
Is my language strong here? Yes. Because I'm in several of the fucking target demographics of much of the "not the real point" cruelty: female, (half-)Asian, and bi. It's not some hypothetical mental exercise for me when I see one policy after another whose "real point" seems to always be aimed "by coincidence" at me and mine. At women. At visible minorities (Asians—especially the perceived-Chinese—in my case). At the queer community. And I can't help but be amazed at how these "real points" always seem to have one of a small set of sub-groups in the cross-hairs. But it's all by coincidence, of course.
The cruelty isn't the point. It's just coincidentally always the outcome. Aimed at the same targets. Of course.
Any "tough on crime" bills that seem to always wind up aimed mostly at black and Hispanic people. (Quite by "coincidence" I'm sure!)
Any anti-terrorism laws that always seem to sweep up "terrorist speech" of minorities (esp. "Muslims") yet somehow completely misses the terrorist speech of actual white terrorists who then proceed to do mass shootings (of minorities, natch!) or who blow up federal buildings.
"War on Drugs" laws that seem to always go after the crack users, but hardly ever apply to the coke heads in Wall Street (or in fucking Congress for that matter!); laws that throw black and Hispanic people into jail (often for life after the "tough on crime" bills nail them for "three strikes") while barely slapping the hand of middle-class suburban white dudes who are doing exactly the same thing: smoking a bit of weed.
Oh, and, naturally, of course:
every single fucking time an old white dude decides to legislate a woman's uterus.
"By their fruits shall ye know them," as the Bible says. You can claim that every one of this (very small sample) list of policies and laws has a "real point" ... yet that real point is almost always held to the throat of an out group. Women are too uppity for the modern conservative, so practical biological enslavement is introduced. Not to stop termination of unwanted pregnancies (sex education has been proven time and time and time again to be far more effective at this!, not to mention that the support for the life of the child ends the moment the baby pops out of the mother…), but to keep women where "they belong": under the thumb of powerful white men. You can claim that all the crime and drug bills are aimed at reducing crime, but the numbers show that these are quite thoroughly debunked as a way of actually reducing crime, and they also show that they're disproportionately aimed at minorities that, get this, conservative assholes hate, even if the laws' wording is "neutral". We've seen the "real point" of all these laws and many more, and it points not to "law and order" as the real goal, but rather the control of out-group people through terror. The cruelty is, in fact, the actual point.
It's all very nice for a white dude to sit there, look at the wording, and treat this as an intellectual exercise. White brodudes hardly ever feel the consequences of these nice intellectual puzzles, after all. Their skin isn't in the game. "The law's wording doesn't reference hatred of minorities or of women, so it must have another point." But those of us who get that point shoved deep into our body politic while watching it completely bypass white folk and especially white men get the intended message: "fear us and don't step out of line".
I'll concede on the lynchings and Jim Crow. If the goal is to torture and kill someone then cruelty is obviously the point.
Regarding the rest, and specifically abortion, I think you could still say that it's not accurate to claim that the cruelty is the point. No (or few) anti-abortion people are anti-abortion specifically to hurt women. They're trying to stop abortions from happening. Mostly because they think it's murder, but partially because they think that the risk of pregnancy will stop people from having sex.
If there were a way to stop abortions from happening that (somehow) didn't place constraints on what women could or couldn't do with their bodies, and it didn't conflict with any other beliefs of the anti-abortion people (like sex ed does with Christian morality), they would probably be for it.
The phrase "the cruelty is the point", to me, implies that the cruelty is the goal. If the people advocating for cruelty would take a non-cruel option that accomplishes the same goal, then the goal wasn't cruelty.
Again, I say "by their fruits shall ye know them".
There is always an excuse. There is always a reason. But it's a staggering coincidence that these excuses and reasons are almost invariably pointed at and/or applied to subgroups who are not in favour: visible minorities, women, LGBTQ+, etc. Where are the policies that accidentally hurt, say, white men? Where are the policies that accidentally inconvenience wealthy people?
No, sorry, I don't believe in that much coincidence. I know they don't use the language of hurting visible minorities, women, the queer community, etc. but it completely beggars belief that they don't a) know what the impact is, and b) want that very impact.
But again, what do I know? I'm just someone with skin in the game. I guess I should defer to the white dude who is my better because he has the clearer view from his purely theoretical stance.
I'll probably be using this as next weeks weekly thread, but I would argue that current immigration policies hurt the non-wealthy which would include any white men who aren't wealthy. It's one of the few policies where I don't agree with any political party.
Not to break into my Econ schooling, but also DEI initiatives, social assistance policies, scholarships, grant funding, many hiring initiatives, and almost everything I experienced in many predominantly non-white countries overseas could be framed as "hurting white men" in the same way the policies you listed above. It really depends on the lens you use to view things.
Most of these (including things you mentioned) are put into place by the wealthy to maintain things as they are, and yes, some white men are wealthy. I'd remove race and sex from things though and draw the battle lines elsewhere, say "gross and abusive amassing of wealth."
It's easy to remove race and sex from things when you're not in the group that's taking it in the neck.
The Tulsa Race Massacre wasn't done by people performing "gross and abusive amassing of wealth". It was done by ordinary white folk who didn't like black folk enriching themselves in Greenwood (the so-called "Black Wall Street"). Again the cruelty was the point. It was specifically used to destroy hope for black folk. You can pontificate all day about the "real point" but at the end of the day all these "real points" are directed at specific people and cause cruel suffering to those specific people.
I wanted to make sure I came back to this when I had the time in real life. For what I state, you should know that I was an extremely meek child and hardly a troublemaker.
When I lived in Saudi Arabia as a white 14-year old male. I was held at assault rifle point multiple times and robbed.
When I lived in Thailand at 15, I was sexually assaulted by a trans-woman.
When I lived in Cincinnati at 16, I was beaten by a group of African American kids I went to school with.
When I lived near Edmonton at 17, I was beaten by a teacher for missing my homework.
When I lived in Medicine Hat at 10, I was punched in the face by a teacher for sitting in the wrong spot.
None of these are made up or exaggerated experiences. Cruelty wasn't the point of any of these. The point was (in order) robbery, sexual gratification, power, power, and power.
Misassigning motive is harmful because it stops you from addressing the issues presented and assumes that people are "lost causes." I don't believe that to be the case. You can't fix something where the point is cruelty, because people can't get a fix of cruelty in other ways. You can try to repair other issues however.
We want the same outcome, but I want to find out how to get there without pushing people out of the solution.
I... Am kinda taken aback here and legit don't know what you're referring to. I could delete my posts if it would help?
I'm sorry if I pushed buttons I should not have, but I genuinely do not grasp the friction here and would very much like to. I was enjoying the discussion and was happy that a thread actually took off for us for once.
If this is a touchy subject that you would rather move on from, then we will.
I'm not disputing that minorities and women have been the target of discrimination, but the question is whether the phrase "the cruelty is the point" is accurate. There are obviously times when it is, as in some of the cases you've described, but most of the time when I see someone saying "the cruelty is the point", they're referring to conservative policies on things like immigration or abortion, which have goals aside from cruelty.
I think that the phrase is often used to demonize conservatives. If the cruelty is the point, then everyone who supports the policy is knowingly cruel and malicious.
Again you utterly fail to address the point I've repeated at least four times now.
Please come back when you're willing to address the elephant in the room I keep pointing to. Until then I'm not going to bother responding because you are not listening.
I'm so absolutely and thoroughly weary of the detached attitude of those who are in no way meaningfully impacted by the policies in question and who can thus treat it as an intellectual exercise where it's mere symbol manipulation.
Your point, as I understand it, is that lots of policies both past and present are cruel to or unfairly impact women and minorities, and this suggests that the cruelty is the intended outcome, rather than whatever the stated goals were of any individual policy.
There's a key word: invariably. It's a staggering coincidence that EVERY FUCKING TIME the policies hit visible minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ community.
EVERY FUCKING TIME.
If I picked up a gun and pretended to fire randomly and happened to hit a bullseye each time you'd likely suspect I'm aiming for the bullseye. Yet for some reason when the bullet hits visible minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ community EVERY FUCKING TIME you think it's firing randomly.
That's my point.
This is not an accident. After literally hundreds of times the bullet hitting the bullseye you still think the aim wasn't to hit that bullseye. Because you aren't the target. You can afford to pretend it's all happenstance and a side effect of some other factor, treating this as a harmless little intellectual exercise. But those of us with that bullseye painted on us? We can't afford that shit. Because the bullets keep ripping into us left, right, and centre while, mysteriously, the white, middle class left in particular pretends there's nothing to see here. (And the right just continues being the blind man shooting at the world ... and somehow having the bullets repeatedly strike the body politic of visible minorities, women, and the LGBQT+ community.)
The cruelty is very much the point. The cruelty is how they intend to control those they don't approve of. You just can't see it because you're not the target of it.
And I'm out of this conversation. I'm oh-so-fucking-weary of talking to the dispassionate observers tut-tutting from the sideline.
I just quit my job to start a business with a friend and I thought the reaction I received from my coworkers was interesting. Most were genuinely confused, didn't understand why I would want to quit, and were surprised that I would do so without any guarantee of employment somewhere else (somewhere that isn't a non-funded startup).
One manager, at a loss for words, just asked (in a weirdly childlike way) "why?" And I didn't have a good answer for him. Because I can't imagine staying at this job until I'm middle management? Because I hate the internal corporate pressure to produce crappy software? Because I want to set my own schedule and have a shot at wealth that will give me freedom from the 9-5 before I'm in my 60's?
I want to be free, and I want my son to be free.
I think many people have a deep aversion to being unemployed, or are scared of being in an untenable financial situation. If I have an unexpected expense in the next three months, I'm screwed, and that's a scary place to be in. It's not a place that most of my coworkers have ever been in. It's been a while since I've been in that place, but I have been there, and rolling the dice with your home or vehicle on the line is easier when you have had the experience of doing so, failing, and recovering from that failure. If you were raised middle class or in stable poverty of some sort, you may never have found yourself with all of your belongings in a rucksack and then come back from it.
I quit my job (working marketing for a tech firm) and then-career in very late 1999 without any parachute or soft landing zone. I just couldn't pedal lies for a living any longer and had to get out. I then spent a year burning through my (stock-option inflated) savings as I thought about what I could do instead.
In early 2001 I made my choice. I would sell almost everything I owned, I would burn all my career bridges behind me, and I would go to China to teach "for a year or two" and get in touch with half of my family roots. EVERYBODY thought I was crazy making that choice, and my mother in particular was frantic because she'd spent her youth trying to escape China.
I'm now in my 23rd year of my stay "for a year or two", 16 of which I spent teaching before stepping back into marketing for a firm run by a guy I love working for. (Officially on paper I'm his PA, but in reality I'm the de facto head of market research for our little consulting firm.)
That's two major career changes, one at age 36, and one at age 52, that I've made in my life after leaving school. And in that first one I not only left without a safety net, I'd also very carefully burned all my career options behind me just to make sure that I didn't get tempted to go back to working in Hell.
So congratulations! You did what I did, only with even MORE guts involved. Kudos!
Is it with certain groups or regarding certain things?
These three go together for me, as the phrase is frequently used to highlight the fact that the policies or practices are based on people who are 'other' and serve no beneficial purpose to society in general while also negatively impacting people. Things like banning stuff like LGBTQ+ events or activities, banning DEI, creating laws that punish people for seeking out healthcare are all things that only exist to punish someone for being different or making choices for themselves. The vast majority of the time I see the phrase it is about some conservative initiative to rile their base by targeting the minority group of the week with laws and policies that actively harm people.
It is sometimes used incorrectly because any terminology gets used incorrectly.
Do you feel that speech like this is conducive to fixing societal issues?
Yes, because it is a response that stresses the fact that a lot of actions taken that sound like they could be a mistake are actually intentionally harmful to a subset of the population. The war on drugs for example is on record as being promoted to put minorities and hippies in jail for example. Language that opposes harm doesn't need to be calm, it should be forceful and provoke a response because it both promotes action from those that agree because there is a strong front and it can sway people who might not be aware of the negative impacts of whatever is being criticized.
It does not matter if it doesn't sway the people who are in favor of the harm because it isn't framed in a nice way. They are already on board with harm.
Yes, some people go overboard but that doesn't invalidate the message any more than someone who takes anything too far.
Is what is considered “kind” always the best course of action?
Pointing out something is harmful doesn't mean the opposite is kind. In most cases not doing anything at all would be the opposite of the harmful actions, and not doing anything is not kind any more than not punching someone in the stomach isn't being kind.
Honestly, there's a lot of writing about this sentiment already which explains it in great depth. To understand it, that would be a good place to start.
But, yes, I absolutely believe it's true in many cases. For example, the criminal justice system, from police brutality to prisons. There are many proven alternative methods to rehabilitate, reduce crime, and make society safer, and a certain political persuasion utterly refuses to consider any of it. Digging into their arguments, the only internally consistent explanation is that they want people to punish. It doesn't matter if crime could be prevented and everybody made better off. In short, the cruelty of the punishment is the point, even if it means that we have more crime victims as a result.
I beleave your are correct here. however, I do want to point out that humans can have some very strange derivitive goals (goals that are formed to accomplish other goals).
Hatrid of The Other can be created by capitalism's built-in hunger for human blood. Phrases like "we need to kill or deport X or we will become unemployed, run out of money and starve." If you dont consistantly sacrifice human lives, you enter an Overproduction Crisis (literally meaning not enough scarsity) and the money becomes viscous. Anyone who is selfish or scared will treat the world like its kill or be killed. Any mechonism to make the process look and more importantly feel legitimate (civil, humane, "he was a criminal anyway", a just war, slautering of unwanted "livestock", killing of "hostile beasts", etc...) is embraced with passion.
I generally disagree with the phrase. In some cases, it is true-- any human behavior is true for someone out there, or maybe even a large group of someones-- but generally I think the truth is far more underwhelming: the people who are being cruel simply do not care. They will cause cruelty if it makes their own lives more convenient in the slightest. That being said, for some topics (generally relating to identity politics), the ratio of people who are simply cruel because they want to make other people miserable is higher imo.
Do you feel that speech like this is conducive to fixing societal issues?
I think accurately identifying the nature of peoples' beliefs and intentions is conducive to helping fix societal issues. In this case, that means identifying intentional cruelty where it truly is, so we can combat it more aggressively in regards to the perpetrators, and identifying indifference where that truly is, so that we can take a smarter/softer approach of changing incentives to discourage the undesirable behavior. If people aren't actually being cruel on purpose, it's more effective to make them not want to do the thing with cruel side effects than it is to convince them to change their cruel actions, or even to convince them that they are being cruel in the first place, since it can be unintentional.
Is what is considered “kind” always the best course of action?
No, but I'm not sure how much that's because actions that are unkind to a small class of abusive people and kind to a large class of victims are often still considered "unkind". I do think that considering kindness in the approach is useful, and often leads to superior outcomes (ie. providing housing and food to lower crime rates).
No, I do not personally believe this. I believe that this phrase is one of the shortest-form strawman "arguments" that exist and is usually spoken by itself with zero justification or understanding of the issue referenced.
And beside that, it should be obvious that it is very often not true. Most of the time with issues "the point" is cost-saving, stubbornness, cause & effect disagreements, or difference of opinion on how to carry things out. If there is cruelty involved, it is a side-effect, not the point. Even then, the side being accused may feel the cruelty lay on the opposing side because cruelty is a moral argument, and you can not apply morals universally.
The phrase is like saying "the point of drinking water is to touch your genitals while peeing." It actively avoids the real point in order to make the entire act seem absurd and is a bad faith argument from the jump.
A good way to find out if "cruelty is the point" is to do a thought experiment.
"If they could do / remove the crux of the issue and the perceived oppressed group would still be happy some other way, would this still be an issue?"
For example (and I am not passing a value judgment here, I'm simply doing the thought experiment with a real-world example), if a state passed an anti-transitioning law, but found a single pain-free pill to remove all dysphoria from the affected group, would they allow that pill? If yes, then the cruelty didn't factor into the decision - the issue and how to deal with it did.
To be absurdist, if you feel they wouldn't allow the "pill fix", and cruelty is still the point, then why have they not made the suffering worse? They could say "you can have whatever treatment you want, but only if you allow us to torture you for 6 hours per day!"
If a person eats meat, but is grossed out by factory farming and avoids it, is the point the cruelty or the ease, nutrients, and flavour of a standard omnivorous diet? Rationally, do you really feel that their first thought before biting into a burger is "Fuck this cow, I hope it died screaming."
No. That would be insane.
Thinking and speaking in this fashion only removes the ability to deal with difficult situations in a meaningful or rational way and simply shows others that you can't even pretend to fathom other people. It shows that the speaker is not empathetic in the slightest, but sure would like to be perceived as such by their in-group.
Most of the time with issues “the point” is cost-saving, stubbornness, cause & effect disagreements, or difference of opinion on how to carry things out
Part of the reason for the phrase I'd say is that said policies aren't even effective at what they aim to do. It often costs more and makes their perceived problem worse (or at very least, hurts their own side in some other way), and it's even worse for the original problem. When this continuously occurs it doesn't seem like a good-faith action.
Cruelty is the only thing that they can consistently get right. Could it be that they're just that incompetent? Maybe, but it sure seems like they're happy with the result.
I agree that things done for an many reasons including ineptness, nonscientific views, fear, reactionary politics, poor training, or even doing things from a detached perspective can seem cruel, but the cruelty is not the point. The cruelty is a byproduct, not the goal. It's a bad and oversimplified phrase and in nearly every serves to obfuscates issues.
For example, knocking down a big tree can seem cruel if you're a squirrel and live there. But if you're a human, maybe you know that that tree was damaged in a storm and is about to fall over and destroy a few homes and potentially kill someone.
A serial killer torturing a victim? Maybe the power is the goal. Maybe the rush is the goal. The cruelty? It's a means to an end. Understanding goals is how we stop people. Hand-waving away true reasons behind things doesn't help us understand and therefore stop them.
You can handily cherry-pick examples throughout history of people being outwardly psychotic, and I'd agree with you. However, when used in modern-day political contexts, most of the time it's used in reference to the things I mentioned. Ineptness, fear, nonscientific views, etc.
I have a shitload of leftist beliefs, but I really hate this phrase and have never seen it used by someone who wasn't left-leaning.
I have corrected my initial statement (which is intended to be completely neutral and non-leading) to specify that this is solely my experience with it.
In my experience arguments that broadly characterize groups of people aren't make in good faith. No matter how that sentiment is reworded.
In my opinion the cruelty is the point is a coping sort of term. When faced with something uncomfortable or even unconscionable I try to understand the situation.
Why does police violence disproportionately affect minorities, for example? It isn't new. This shit was around long before Rodney King. The only thing that changed recently was that the killer went to jail.
When I ask myself how I live with a society and a law enforcement system that allows these things to happen I try to understand why. It seems to me that either one of two things could be true. Either it is incompetence, or that the cruelty is the point.
Seems to me that the cruelty is the point. I don't think every cop is a bastard, for example. See my first point about generalizing. I do think there is a voting bloc that's never encountered the law enforcement arm of our society and they'll continue to vote and act in ways that lack empathy.
Because to them, the cruelty is the point. A deterrent to crime. Don't steal anything if you don't want to get cornholed or shivved in prison. Don't have a criminal history, because if you do then it's okay for someone to kneel on your neck for 10m.
I could very much see how, by not being able to understand certain situations, someone might assume that cruelty was the point, but it dismisses the reasons a person or group might attempt something. Cruelty is rarely the point.
The only way we can stop abuses is by doing away with simplistic "chant"-like phrasing and finding the real issues behind things.
To use your example, policing. It's a complex one, but I can assure you that in no police training ever tells the trainees to be massive dicks and injure every minority they see. The point can be power. The point can be maintaining the letter of the law, and at their sole discretion. The point can be self-preservation out of fear for themselves. We can't know all of them, and they change in the moment depending on the situation.
If cruelty was the point, then we could just appoint non-cruel people to be officers and the problem is solved, but that isn't the case. We have to address the underlying issues which are different for every officer. That's why it's complex. We can start with systemic corrections such as de-escalation policies being the default, choosing different response teams for different issues, removal of lethal weapons, and harsher punishments for missteps. Those have been found to be effective. But simply hand-waving away things as "cruelty is the point" doesn't help fix the situation, it dismisses it. We must come at bad situations with ways to stop them, not simply be angry at them.
Why were they acquitted? I have no idea as I was too young at the time to be following trials, but it doesn't mean anything about my previous statement was incorrect.
People can be cruel, but the goal is not often cruelty. In this instance, the goal for the officers was most likely to regain a feeling of power in my best estimation - a "how dare you not do what I say" attitude and they used cruelty to get it.
Again, their motivation doesn't explain why they got off, however. I disagree with that decision wholeheartedly.
In high school I was a solitary non-conformist. (I didn't feel like conforming in my non-conformance, so I couldn't join the various "non-conformist" cliques.) I had a punkette stage, but while I admired the DIY attitude of the punk movement (and really liked the music), I found it was basically "sound and fury, signifying nothing". So aside from a period of questionable hair coloration (which my mother just FLIPPED THE FUCK OUT over!) I didn't really get into anything protesty.
This changed when I hit university. In university I campaigned for an NDP candidate I believed in (until he got outed making a deal by a hot mic and I realized he was just as much a scumball as any other politician), I participated in "Take Back the Night" marches, and with my little flare for drama I partook of things that today would be called "flash mobs" where we enacted scenarios that illustrated injustices near and dear to our hearts.
There was also a HUGE protest when there was a strike mid-semester that threatened to fuck up a lot of people's educations since for safety reasons the university had to be closed.
What protests have you felt have been effective or ineffective?
Of these, the "Take Back the Night" ones were the only ones that had any measurable impact, in that the ideals ("Hey, guys? How 'bout you don't rape or assault women, pls K thx?") seemed to catch on and take root to the point that the normalization of (mostly engineering students') "No means she hasn't had enough to drink yet!" (an actual slogan used in the engineering paper!) fell by the wayside and most people decided that "no" did actually mean "no" by the end of my stay there.
The instant dramas tended to just bewilder people; the messages were lost in the odd delivery. Artistically they worked—people liked them—but the message was never quite catching on. Now, as I close in on the end of my life spent in a marketing career mostly, I can see a hundred ways that we could have done better, but ... hindsight is 20/20.
The counter-strike protest was very effective. The staff who were striking were likely very, very, very concerned with ten thousand angry students descending on their picket line and shouting so loudly from across the street that it drowned out all their noisemakers (air horns, etc.) put together. They were back at the bargaining table within 48 hours and the strike was over after only two weeks, causing only a bit of minor disruption (administratively handled) at the end of the term for some people who had jobs lined up already. It was a huge change from what seemed to be a strike that would end a term.
If you feel they are not effective in general, what would you rather people do?
I don't feel protests are ineffective in general, but I think protests are largely ineffective because people making them don't think. Activists tend to live in echo chambers and they lack, typically, the empathy it takes to put themselves in the shoes of those with whom they disagree so can't see how their protests are really being taken. So you get frankly idiotic ideas like "let's destroy works of art to protest oil!" Or "let's hold 10-20,000 students hostage whose lives are about to be utterly fucked-up without meaningfully impacting people with comfortable six figure incomes they get whether the strike lasts a semester or not". (If they'd chosen "work to rule" I'd have been right alongside them helping them along, but they chose instead "hold children hostage", so fuck 'em.)
So while I think protests are good, and often entirely valuable, the majority of them are ineffective not because the cause isn't just, and not because it's impossible to implement them, but rather because the messaging wasn't properly planned and focused. (For an example of bad focus leading to ineffective protests: Occupy Wall Street had no coherent demands and, indeed, when one sub-group came up with a list, the list was all over the fucking place and it wasn't agreed to by practically every other sub-group.)
So what would I rather people do? Learn communications. Then based on that make useful, focused protests that actually effect change. Otherwise you're wasting time and energy (and often damaging your cause ... I still wince at "Pride Day" shenanigans, despite being in the community supposedly proud of it, because I think a lot of the displays are counter-productive and call the LGBTQ+ community into disrepute).
Have you ever had your opinion swayed by any form of protest?
In the '80s in Germany there were huge student housing protests. Often very violent ones. My opinion (as a late teen) was swayed by them big-time. I felt that universities had waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many students if they had the free time to go out and trash city blocks and steal things in orgies of violence. My solution to the student housing problem was to reduce the number of students. I'm pretty sure that's not what they wanted...
I used to have a very huge anti-native (Canadian indigenous peoples) bias because ... well, let's just say living in the high arctic among several indigenous groups in a majority, while I was in a minority smaller than even the white populace there, led to a lot of bullying that scarred me for decades. It was a protest at university organized by the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College that woke me up to perhaps why the natives in the arctic were lashing out and led me to investigate and ... well, it took another decade, but now I am firmly on-side of the natives in most things where they get in conflict with companies and government.
How would you try to ensure a successful protest?
Laser-sharp focus.
Bouncing the idea past people not in my activist echo chamber.
Policing the crazies harshly. ("Police your crazies or be judged by them." If anybody commits acts of violence against civilians, opportunistically performs property crimes, etc. hand them over to the fucking police ideally with the press there taking photos!)
Keep an eye open for unintended impact that could negate any benefits from the protest, and mitigate upon appearance.
Do you feel that violent protest is mostly uncalled for?
Mostly, but not always. If the target of your protest commits violence against you, defensive violence is acceptable as long as you don't turn into your enemy. And of course violence against the property of your target is sometimes necessary: breaking gates, sabotaging construction equipment that's being used to tear down old-growth forest, etc. The key is to be very conservative in deciding when to use violence and how much, and to make sure that it's done in a way that shows the real target. A good protest makes people afraid of the status quo, not of you. Violence is a thing that has a very strong tendency toward making people afraid of you so it must be used sparingly and with care.
Just for fun, what is the absolute worst protest you’ve ever heard of?
The aforementioned German student riots. They accomplished absolutely nothing but getting a bunch of students criminal records and making most of the populace think "you know, fuck those guys".
I didn't mention it in my post, but you mentioned it. I'm not quite settled on the violence aspect. For the most part, no, violence isn't needed.
But... what else do you do when the government won't stop putting your future in danger? I truly don't know how else to affect environmental policy because right now they're backsliding on their goals and promises. I dunno. I'm definitely okay with any group who mass-sabotages big polluters.
We agree here. Violence is mostly uncalled for, but sometimes it is, in fact, truly called for. Though again it needs to be laser-focused and well-communicated what the targets are and why they're the targets. And it is absolutely essential that the violence not strike the uninvolved or your protest will fuel the opposition, not you.
I've done some some protesting in high school, but it was mostly dumb school decisions and most of the seniors joined in. It's easy to protest when that basically means a ditch day. Hell, people that didn't care at all joined in just to bail on class, so I don't really think it counts.
Other than that, I've just done some for local politics which are often more effective than business or federal protests because the local people need to live near you and pissing off your neighbours is a lot more stupid than pissing off a nebulous "them" located elsewhere.
That being said, I feel most modern protesting is done poorly and doesn't do much currently beyond being a 30-second blip on the 24 / 7 media machine.
I've spoken about it before, but the currently popular street- or bridge-blocking protests I feel are among some of the most misguided - mostly because they don't target. Please note that I'm not talking about things like French protests where they happen to organize and there's so many people present that they have to block off streets in front of government buildings. Not at all. Those people know how to fucking protest.
For example, if you're protesting a war (like several recent ones), why wouldn’t you, say, protest the factories where the weapons are made or buildings where executives meet? I don't mean they should just hold up some signs outside, but blockade those businesses in. Stop the parkades from functioning.
Maybe find out who their major shareholders are and publicly shame them. Dig up dirt on them. Harangue them online. Hacktivism. Do anything you can to stop them. Hell, find the neighbourhoods that those shareholders live in and blockade those. If it's a war protest, protest at the schools that their children go to letting them know their rich parents are murdering people overseas.
You have to stay pissed off, and not let them wear you out because protesting like this is fucking hard and isn't just a fun afternoon outside with friends like some of these other ones.
And, again, the targets are wrong because there is no target.
A street- or bridge-blocking protest is like protesting the food in a prison cafeteria by beating the shit out of your cellmate, and then calling them complicit because they ate food yesterday. What the hell are they supposed to do about it? And do you think a recently beaten cellmate will be more or less receptive to your cause after?
Bridge / street blocks are not creative, don't get people present on your side (quite literally the opposite), presents safety risks, may delay emergency vehicles, wastes natural resources, and don't change minds of those who hear about it on the news. Same with the stupid "pour soup / oil on a piece of art" shit I saw repeatedly. A throw-away headline seems to be the goal, but it accomplishes next to nothing.
... which just means you have to get creative. Target. Those. In. Power. Make life fucking hard for them.
Protest threads on Lemmy often reek of this attitude I see frequently of "It's a deeply stupid and astoundingly flawed thing to do, but I'll defend it to the death because it agrees with my politics!" Great. You support them. In some cases, I do too.
Politics is inevitable since it is literally making decisions in groups (along with all the other baggage attached to that including power structures, etc.). If you have a group of people you have politics. End of story. Anybody saying "keep politics out of my <whatever>" is exercising politics: specifically the power structure elements of it. They are being oxymoronic (as well as the same minus 'oxy').
So it's not politics that's objectionable, I'm going to guess, but rather ...
... drum roll ...
PARTISAN politics.
And "partisan" doesn't mean "left/right". It means any kind of politics that separates and generates an in-group and an out-group. (The root "part" is in partisan as well as political party for a reason.) Partisans by their very nature automatically hate the political opinions of their non-partisans—their "out-group". (And people like me hate all partisans for being that way.) This is true if you're "left" (by whatever definition you use), "right" (ditto), feminist, religious, plutocratic, anti-religious, liberal (in the non-American sense of the term), progressive, racist, etc. etc. etc. If you're dividing society into parts, some of whom are deemed "not one of us" you're a partisan.
It is partisanship that is toxic for the most part. Partisanship is what gives you "the party of 'NO'" in most democracies (especially the USA, but not exclusively): you can't, as a partisan, admit that the "other team" did something good or has a good idea. This gives us ridiculous situations like the most memorable one to me: Pierre Trudeau lambasting Lester Pearson's plan to introduce wage and price controls, getting elected on a platform against that, then promptly introducing wage and price controls. It turns out Pearson's plan was a good one, but for reasons of partisanship Trudeau couldn't admit it. He was a "Liberal" (read: center-left by American standards) not a "Conservative" (read: center-slightly-left by American standards—keeping in mind that the American "left" party is a center-right party in almost any other country).
And indeed, I'll go a step farther: political parties are explicitly anti-democratic. They are specifically there to undermine democracy. In Canada, for example, you in theory vote in your riding to send a representative to speak on your interests to Parliament. Political parties subverted this, however, and now you vote for a party to provide a representative that represents the party's views to you. Your views don't matter.
So politics is inevitable. You can't avoid it. But partisanship doesn't have to be, and it's partisanship that is destructive, even when it's for a "good cause".
What is the ideal work / life balance? Right now, the worldwide average is 5 days per week, 8-5 PM. Is this too much / too little / just right?
The ideal work/life balance is the one that works for your circumstances and temperament. A "one size fits all" solution is doomed to failure because people are radically different not only from person to person, but within a single person's life.
With productivity skyrocketing and wages falling, what would you like to see to fix things?
Greedy CEOs beheaded and their heads placed on pikes outside their company headquarters as a warning to those who come afterwards.
No, I'm not joking. Much.
The fact that the ratio of mean CEO salary to mean employee salary is closing on on 400:1 right now¹, vs. 20:1 in 1965, is laughable. As someone who has lived through part of the '60s, and all of the '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, '10s, and up until now, I can guarantee you that things are not 20 times better now for society than they were 50 years ago. Indeed starting in the early '80s (about 1983, give or take) things have been taking a steady downward turn that is accelerating for most people.
In 1978 my neighbours had a nice bungalow in a decent suburb of Edmonton, all paid for by a single income: specifically a milkman's income. A single, lower-end blue-collar income was enough to have a family of four live quite comfortably in a three-bedroom home with a finished basement and a decent-sized yard. (My own family of three had two incomes, both white-collar, so we were living high off the hog in comparison—but our neighbours were by no means impoverished; not even slightly!)
Today, that same family, presuming you can even find a blue-collar job of roughly that calibre of income (most of them have been destroyed, see), there is absolutely no way that family could live in the house they did. They'd be relegated to some crappy one-bedroom apartment in a mediocre neighbourhood (or maybe a two-bedroom apartment in a shithole slum). And my two-white-collar-income family with only one child? We could likely barely manage to pay for the house we lived in at the time, but it would be really spartan inside and we'd have little to no disposable income after food, shelter, and clothing.
Would you accept less money and shorter hours?
No. I accepted the same money for shorter hours. When CEOs are making 300× (or greater!) my salary for visibly doing far less work, they can fuck off and hand over the share that I contribute to their bottom line, or they can let me work less. Anything else and I'm just warming up the guillotine.
Of course I have that privilege. I'm good enough that I can set my terms in my job and if they don't like it, I change my employer and set my terms there. Sadly not all my fellow labourers have that ability.
What would you feel minimum wage should do to adjust?
I don't think there should be a minimum wage. I think there should be a universal basic income that covers the essentials of life (food, shelter, clothing, all at basic levels)² and then if people want more than that they can find jobs. With a UBI companies have to contend with the fact that they can't literally threaten the lives of their employees any longer to force them to work for less than they think they're worth. If the basics are all adequately covered, the salaries paid by companies will have to be high enough to motivate people to work for them. Which may mean that CEOs will have to return only earning 20 times as much as the average worker again. This is my sad-for-the-CEOs face: 😐
Do you feel that the current resurgence of Unions is positive or negative?
Absolutely a positive. When one side of an "agreement" has a monopolistic amount of power over wealth, the other side needs monopolistic amount of power over labour to combat it. Anything else is indentured servitude, not employment.
If the CEO can literally threaten my life to accept unpleasant jobs for inadequate pay, I should be able to literally threaten his ability to earn enough to make that power. If CEOs can destroy lives, labour should be able to destroy companies.
Until we get UBI and have companies finding out that they need to pay people to motivate them.
I agree with you that one size doesn't fit all, but I feel there has to be some kind of baseline standard. When I was looking around, I was unable to find when the current standard in North America changed from 9-5 to 8-5, but that shit needs to stop. A large amount of work is now decentralized due to computer and data storage, so there's no reason hours have to be (with in-person requirement exceptions like restaurants and stores). Given the productivity increases of the last 50 years, we could work one day a week and still be more productive than equivalent work week 50 years past.
Greedy CEOs
I strongly believe that income ratios would be one of the most impactful things we could do. No person working full-time at a company deserves more than, say, 5 times more than any other full-time employee and should factor in "perks" like dividends and such. This kind of thing should be legally mandated.
UBI
I adore the idea of UBI, but we have to make sure the implementation is solid. I love some of the ideas I've seen from economists for them (and no, economists are not interested in growing bottom lines, they're interested in how economic systems function). I also feel the economy has to be made more cyclical which would assist in this.
Unions
I like the resurgence as well, but I'm wary of power and sway over things not related to the unions. The leaders of these unions need to be kept honest just like corporate leaders should be because the ability to abuse the power is also possible (see many union leaders in the 1970s). Open books to members of the union should be the minimum required.
... I’m wary of power and sway over things not related to the unions
I'm wary of power. Period. Anybody's: government, management, union, whatever. All people in positions of power should be carefully scrutinized and all books should be open.
I also feel the economy has to be made more cyclical which would assist in this.
We have to get away from the whole "line goes up" mentality. Eternal growth is not sustainable. It is literally physically impossible.
I feel like the whole world should just have a big giant job internet where there's just.. if something needs to be done you post it on the job internet and somebody who can do it can go do it... if they fail, they don't get accepted for that type of job again until they get trained.. if they're really good at something and they want to keep doing that thing, then maybe a contract can be signed.. if somebody is exploiting the job internet and taking the good jobs over and over and over again maybe there can be some kind of cap on how many times you can accept a certain job without a contract.. I don't know, but I feel like we should be able to get up and go to a job if we want to, but also not have to get up and go to a job.
I have never ever ever wanted to work in my life and the fact that everyone around me expects that I will have to work is infuriating.
And it's not like it's laziness, when I enjoy something, I just do it.. it's not work or labor, it's just doing something. But I don't want to be forced to do things on planet Earth .....I didn't ask to be here, I don't agree with the system, I don't agree with money, and I feel like if everybody has free will, we should be able to choose to never work. That should also be a legitimate choice.
As for unions, I can understand how they can be good for achieving things from corporate bosses or whatever.. but I once worked at a place there was a union, and because I wasn't a 40-year-old Islander gossiping with the rest of them and I actually did my job and we were over quota everyday when I was working and I was bei ng too efficient, I ended up being fired by the union because they didn't want me around.. they wanted to be lazy and sit around and gossip instead of do their jobs and be efficient. So that wasn't very fun, I had no recourse.... I couldn't ask to be not fired because nobody was representing me because I was on probationary....... I don't really have a positive opinion on unions anymore because according to the experience,, I will never be able to even join a union because they're going to fire me before my probationary period is up.
The question you have to ask yourself here is why you felt compelled to be so productive for an employer who literally holds you in lower regard than they likely hold office furniture.
You may think this is a rhetorical exaggeration for effect.
I assure you it is not.
In one (tech, naturally!) firm I worked for (in marketing) we had a huge crush of workload over a period of about six months (because management fucked up, but that's neither here nor there: we all fuck up sometimes). There were twelve of us working long hours six days a week to get everything that needed to come together to do so on time for a product launch. Some of our work was specialist work that required our unique skills. About half of it, though, was stupid drudge work: making copies, filing papers, etc. Stuff that was time-consuming and could literally be done by anybody who had about two days' training.
We were running ourselves ragged. There were health issues (mental and physical both) from the extended high workload. The team shrunk by two people over that time, increasing the workload on the ten remaining. And that's when I memoed my boss with a recommendation we hire a temp for the duration of the crisis to take the drudge work off of our shoulders so we could concentrate on the productive work, get it done faster and not have to work overtime. (A single temp dedicated to those tasks could easily have taken the extra non-productive work off of the shoulders of 10-12 people, yes, just by economies of scale.)
Sadly, though, my boss had, shortly before my memo, broken his "manager chair". And he had money in the budget either for replacing the manager chair or for hiring a temp. (That should give you an idea of just how overblown that chair was.)
So he was faced with a choice:
Use an "engineer chair" for a few months to keep his workers happy and productive; or,
Continue to let his workers suffer, burn out, and eventually quit—making things worse on those left behind—so he could sit in a fancy chair.
Guess which one he chose. (Hint: I told you the answer in the first sentence.)
That's when I realized just how little corporate types care for their workers on average. A dozen people suffering was better than him sitting in a less grandiloquent chair.
I was productive because I like work and I like putting the little wires into the little thingy and make it work good.. I liked every single station they put me on I like the one where I had to test the circuit boards, I like the one where I had to put all the little pieces together and make the stuff float, I like the little wire part, I like the work. And I liked that I could go to a work, do the work, and then leave the work at work and go home at the end of the day.. it was fulfilling... it also paid me more than I had been paid to that point.
I was perfectly happy, and the stupid Union thought that I was not good enough for them so that's great.
I understand that jobs are shitty and that's why I don't work now at all. but I miss that job because it was the most productive I have ever felt. And a union fucking ripped it away from me.
Oh, I've also been a temp worker hired as temporary work.. you know what they do to Temporary workers when the job is done? They fire them.. that shit fucking sucks too, by the way. I'd rather see your shitty manager get an office chair then hire me for a couple months and then fire me because I am temporary labor. Being a temporary laborer sucks. And even though we're lightning workloads and all that, we still get treated like shit by the actual long-term workers too so there's also that.
So I guess my perspective is, fuck all work. fuck work entirely. Fuck managers fuck presidents fuck CEOs fuck unions fuck laborers fuck everything that has to do with work at all lol it's all a damn waste of time
UBI would change the face of employment: you'd work only if you felt like it was something you wanted to do. Or you'd live frugally a while and try to learn things, or start your own business (knowing that if it fails you didn't just kill your family) or …
Myself? I like working. But I don't like working for pennies so the owner can make millions. I don't like being threatened with starvation if I choose not to work 60+-hour work weeks.
I have always felt that the arguments are always rather skewed on this every time they're trucked out.
The North-American Right-wing will say "Keep politics out of my (games / movies / music / hardcore porn)..."
The unspoken end part is "that I don't like."
The Left will often say "Everything is political..."
While the unspoken part is "but only if looked at through an astoundingly specific and personal lens. Oh, and also a large majority of the media is on my side and therefore producing content for me."
And both arguments are goofy and hand-wave each other away with the same amount of shitty dismissiveness.
Yes, politics could theoretically be in everything... to you. You can interpret anything any way you like.
But also no, your interpretation does not make neutral media "political" to the large majority of people all of a sudden. Your interpretation is not law, it is opinion and the intent of the creator trumps your interpretation.
Yes, politically-charged media can be done VERY well.
But also no, it doesn't need to be ONLY directly speaking about / parables of current events. This is lazy, hacky writing.
Yes, sometimes things need to be said in a piece if that's what the art is about.
But also no, do we need ten thousand pieces on the exact same thing, all saying the same message, and bringing nothing new to the table.
You can set up interesting "What If" scenarios where one side isn't generically stupid, evil warmongers and the other side isn't all noble, selfless underdog do-gooders bravely fighting The Man.
Bad guys can do good. Good guys can do bad. The world is a lot greyer than people want to have to face up to, and I wish our media was smarter and more challenging.
I fear that people don't want that, however. They want their media to cater to them as much as their online social media. That fucking terrifies me.
This is what I remain unsure of, I think some may want what you're worried about, but I also think there may be as many that want less catering in the sense of reinforcing messaging, and more in a lower overall volume. That comes with its own sort of problems depending on how that's accomplished, however I think if the approach is to focus political discussion towards constructive ends rather than fueling despair and disengagement, it might prove better.
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