I don’t throw that quote around often, because it’s a bit aggressive and tends to piss people off. But it comes in handy whenever somebody starts uncritically citing Jefferson.
—
I think the key point of the original thread was not “whataboutism is always good”. Instead, it was “portraying this routine rhetorical move as some sort of cunning Soviet mind-trick is rather silly, and the motivations behind promoting that meme are highly suspect”.
BTW, since we’re discussing rhetorical tricks, a demonstration from this thread:
In particular, this paragraph:
There’s a bit of sneakiness in the second sentence of that paragraph.
That sentence could have just as easily been “The roots of this go back to the Revolutionary War”, or “The roots of this go back to the country’s founding”, or many other such things.
I used “birth of the nation” in that sentence for a specific reason. I wanted to evoke some cultural history without explicitly doing so, because it supported my overall argument but would have been a bit heavy-handed to include overtly.
This history:
Rhetoric can be used to cover for the lack of a reasoned argument, but it can also be used to sharpen a valid one. As always, it comes down to how and why you use it.
These are all pretend rich people. They are doing jobs anyone out of college could (and do) do, but they are late in their careers.
Even the second list:
The only odd one out is Tom Anslow who did a lot of working class and middle class work and has the lowest rating for Trump in the group. These are all people who made good money at one point and live above their means.
Pretend rich people, but also pretend poor people. None of them are what I’d call rich, nor am I impressed by their jobs. However, they are far from poor, and have a lot of advantages and privilege.
A thriving working class is something we desperately need, but nobody is entitled to anything. These people are deluded, both about their social class and about what it takes to make America great again.
I didn’t post the original thread here before it was deleted, because I get enough accusations of promoting violence already. It’s not my preferred approach, even rhetorically.
Still: interesting, on multiple levels. The original tweet, the audience response, the Twitter shutdown, etc.
Rust belt Trumpists have mostly been presented as the “white working class”, though.
I posted it to reinforce my old point about the middle-class nature of the Trumpist base. Most of these folks are no more working class than Joe the Plumber.
Similarly, this Tweet was posted to reinforce this argument:
—
Not quite anyone.
I’m in my 40’s, and have a doctorate.
My Asperger’s somewhat limited my career options before I was really sick. Now, I’m pretty much restricted to flexible part time jobs that don’t require sustained concentration or dealing with people. If I lose my current one, I am unlikely to be able to pass a job interview for any other employment.
Well, right now we have a standard where neo-Nazis can threaten death, attack people during their marches, have the police look aside and only arrest a few of their people under public pressure, and have the police arrest some of their victims.
… meanwhile DisruptJ20 didn’t threaten death, didn’t attack people, and did get kettled and mass-arrested with prosecutors trumping up felony charges.
Right now, we are a the bottom of a very steep hill.
