Reading Right

I am doing something that may be dumb, but feels right.

In the same way that I will persist through bad movies, so that I might have an opinion on them, I also read some of these so-called right wing pundits, so that I might understand some of what I am facing.

When I see these people speak on TV, I am always surprised by how unintelligent they seem. The retort is always that they have been manipulated and taken out of context. It is also argued that your liberal opposition never gives their right wing counterpart a fair crack of the whip.

I am setting aside here the notion that being racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc, just de facto underlines your lack of intelligence, and playing a thought game, where we pretend that there are other things that you might be able to talk about that counterbalance your ignorance.

I read Trump’s book where the person, who pretends to be him writing, makes a bunch of promises about what they are going to do. No suggestion of how these goals might be achieved are gone into. Talking about things which people supposedly already know about that never happened in a way that the writer thinks brooks no dissent, but which lay bare the emptiness of the whole enterprise. This has been my experience.

When I have watched Charlie Kirk arguing, I see him seize on something he sees as a weakness in the other person he is “debating”, and hammers on that until the person gets upset, and says something uncivil. Kirk would then sit back and indicate how the person had both lost (on a point they were not trying to make, and due to their incivility). It is a troll tactic — not a debate tactic.

I will see what these books have to say for themselves. I am trying to bite back my presuppositions, and just take them at face value. It isn’t easy.

I have arrived at my values over my 50 years, but I am always willing to find out something new. You have to be. Who wants to be a dinosaur? Unwillingness to learn is the first step towards the tarpit.