Invasion of the genius brigade
They attacked the wrong building, but they totally know more about vaccines than you.
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“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.” - Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) in Men in Black
“I dunno, these people are likely as dumb and panicky individually as they are in a group.” - Damian Penny on Rigid Thinking
A group of coronavirus vaccine protesters attempted to storm the offices of British public broadcaster BBC on Monday. But they had one big problem: the wrong address.
Instead of targeting the BBC’s news operations, which some activists have blamed for helping promote coronavirus vaccines, they charged toward a former BBC building in west London that now houses upscale apartments, restaurants and studios used by another British media company to produce daytime talk shows.
“Not sure what protesters were hoping to achieve, but all they would’ve found was me, Jane, Nadia and Penny on @loosewomen talking about the menopause,” tweeted Charlene White, a host on the ITV show “Loose Women,” which was live on air when protesters attempted to enter the building.
Videos posted on social media showed protesters clashing with police as they attempted to force their way into the building, which is about four miles west of central London. Hundreds of people outside the studio building chanted “shame on you,” the Guardian newspaper reported, adding that many appeared to think they were protesting a major BBC News operation and that pre-protest material had played up the building’s links to the broadcaster.
[…]
Monday’s event is not the first coronavirus protest to meet with public derision. Demonstrators protesting a lockdown in Sydney last month provoked outrage among residents, especially when a man was arrested for attacking a police horse.
An image of the horse, named Tobruk, allegedly being struck on the nose by the man went viral after being shared on social media. The man was later arrested and charged with animal cruelty and affray. Tobruk was showered with licorice, apples and carrots from “many well-wishers across the community,” his rider told local media.
I’m optimistic about getting most of the vaccine-hesitant on side eventually, but even I have to admit that there’s a core group of defiantly stupid people you just won’t ever reach.
Some of them in Congress:
Still, at least the extreme-right wingnuts are looking for converts to join them. The extreme-left acts like it’s trying to find more and more outgroups to expel, according to Freddie de Boer:
Categorical moral claims blunt the demand for individual moral responsibility. If you’re a young white man who is politically undifferentiated, and you looked out at the world of social justice politics, why would you ever be compelled to get on board? You’re told every day that you hurt marginalized people through your very existence. Your white privilege is inherent to your body and you can’t get rid of it, and it damages POC no matter what your intentions or how you live. So what do you do? The woke assumption seems to be that you should therefore go through life feeling vaguely guilty all the time and that this alone would constitute a more just world. But most of these malleable white dudes aren’t going to do that, because carrying around pointless guilt both does nothing to help anyone and is unpleasant. Meanwhile, there’s some “intellectual dark web” dickhead on YouTube telling you that you’re actually the oppressed one and you should fight back. Which program are you going to sign up for? Yes, the IDW attitude is wrong. But it’s also designed to attract converts. The social justice attitude is designed to assign people a spot in a moral aristocracy, and you were born ineligible to be one of the elect. It’s no wonder why contemporary social justice politics have achieved literally no structural change even while enjoying total dominance in our ideas industry. What’s the basic theory of change?
I’ve called this tendency political Calvinism in the past - the way that totalizing identity critiques render individual choices and morality irrelevant.
As with white men and their guitars, people will inevitably say “nobody says white people are inherently racist, that’s not the argument.” But, first, there are in fact many people who indeed believe explicitly that all white people are racist, as rhetorically inconvenient as that might be for you. More importantly, even if the “anti-racist” conventional wisdom doesn’t go that far, its proponents speak so recklessly and with such an emphasis on dunking on people to impress their peers that the message they send is inevitably the caricatured version. I promise you, most white people who aren’t already savvy extremely-online types who go on social justice Twitter will come away with the impression that they’re saying that all white people are racist. Which of course triggers the part of the brain that says “so I’ll be a racist, then.” Similarly, mockery of the phrase “not all men” may not usually be meant to imply that all men are guilty of whatever crime, though there is a vast second-wave feminist literature that insists very explicitly that yes, all men. Either way, the average dude is most certainly going to come away from the “not all men” discourse thinking that the point is that he’s bad merely by dint of being a dude. Is that fair? Who cares?
What is the inducement that social justice politics present to people from dominant groups to get them to join the cause? How do they make their cause attractive, appeal to these people’s self-interest? What, exactly, is the political strategy? You say that white people and men have great privilege in our society. Agreed. You also complain that they have vastly disproportionate power relative to their numbers. Agreed. So the obvious question is, how do you make it attractive to them to give up some of that privilege and that power, instead of just reveling in it and fighting to keep it? In my experience most people in the social justice set will respond that it’s bigoted even to ask; they’re not supposed to get anything in return. That’s “centering” their wants and needs, don’t you know, and we can’t have that. Which again invites the essential question - are you doing all this to convince people to stop being bad, or are you doing it so that everyone knows that you’re good?
Many religions have an outgroup they deem inherently sinful and beyond salvation, but at least the Westboro Baptists don’t sit around whining that gay people seem reluctant to join them.
How it’s going: