The idea that liberal elites are disconnected from reality has been a major theme of post-election reflections. Nowhere is this more obvious than in academia, where Trump’s victory resulted in completely hysterical reactions.
It’s clear that this is written for people who already believe these things. The rest, unsurprisingly, confirms that. I thought LW tried to avoid politics? And, especially, pointless politically-motivated negativity. “liberal-bashing” isn’t very interesting, and I don’t think there’s a point in linking it on this site. Unfortunately downvoting is still disabled here.
I would like to remind people of some basic facts, which hopefully will bring them back to reality, although it probably won’t.
Either the author is writing for people who agree with them, in which case, petty jabs are just signaling, or they’re trying to convince people to agree with them, in which case petty jabs make them less convincing, not more.
Also, the author should probably give a source for the claim that there was unleashed a wave of hate crimes. I personally haven’t heard that said anywhere, in real life or online. “almost everyone on Facebook was apparently convinced that buckets of mostly unverified anecdotes” is useless. Sure, it’s okay to write about a phenomenon one personally observes but can’t put numbers on—but when the argument is “look how stupid these people are for a thing they did”, it’s important that everyone agrees they actually did it. Otherwise we can just invent actions for groups we don’t like and then start taking shots at them.
With an opening like
It’s clear that this is written for people who already believe these things. The rest, unsurprisingly, confirms that. I thought LW tried to avoid politics? And, especially, pointless politically-motivated negativity. “liberal-bashing” isn’t very interesting, and I don’t think there’s a point in linking it on this site. Unfortunately downvoting is still disabled here.
Either the author is writing for people who agree with them, in which case, petty jabs are just signaling, or they’re trying to convince people to agree with them, in which case petty jabs make them less convincing, not more.
Also, the author should probably give a source for the claim that there was unleashed a wave of hate crimes. I personally haven’t heard that said anywhere, in real life or online. “almost everyone on Facebook was apparently convinced that buckets of mostly unverified anecdotes” is useless. Sure, it’s okay to write about a phenomenon one personally observes but can’t put numbers on—but when the argument is “look how stupid these people are for a thing they did”, it’s important that everyone agrees they actually did it. Otherwise we can just invent actions for groups we don’t like and then start taking shots at them.