Likewise it is worth reading They Thought They Were Free. It describes the mental states of denial and inevitability, the rationalization of inaction, and of realizing it's "too late." If you want the quick read you can start at "Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse." Here is an excerpt: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm
People who have have made it their lives work to study the worst kinds of history have been setting off alarms because they perceive the fires of fascism to be burning here in America right now. Here you can watch such a video (5m) on NYT of world experts on the atrocities of the past warning us: https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010157022/yale-c...
The problem is that people who unknowingly support it, view these warnings as just another attack, and are desensitized to such attacks. To them, this is just another attack indistinguishable from all of the previous attacks where they feel vindicated.
They perceived that one side went too far to the extreme, so they're trying counteract it, and in the process go too far in the other direction.
I agree but have come to realize it's a rhetorical or reasoning strategy. When you criticize something as "un-American" (or un-German, or un-British, or un-Chinese, or whatever), you are dismissing the thing without having to reckon with it, and by extension, dismissing the person behind it as not worth considering. It's a way of avoiding defense of beliefs or schemas, or to avoid accomodating something other than what you want, and by extension the people challenging your egocentrism, a kind of pseudojustification.
You can't say "I don't want to defend my beliefs against this reasonable argument because I'm an intellectual coward or lazy", so you say it's un-Whatever as a way of making it seem like you're arguing against it on moral grounds. Similarly, you can't say "I don't want to bother with the human rights of these people" so you make a pseudomoral appeal that these individuals' very existence is a kind of moral offense, the offense being that they are not part of the group.
Is it dumb? Maybe, but it's also selfish.
dandanua•6h ago
hayst4ck•6h ago