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Thread on the @xychelsea shitstorm. First, read this:https://mic.com/articles/187585/this-is-what-really-happened-when-chelsea-manning-partied-with-the-far-right#.KtrE1fYfi …
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It's often very startling how different these people are in private compared with their public personas. They're affable, friendly, light-hearted, they just want to chat and joke. Effectively they're breaking kayfabe to chat with who they think of as a heel.
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You CANNOT understand the Alt-Right/Lite if you only rely on what they say in public. The only way to grasp what's really going on is to go behind the curtain and figure out, as @PennyRed put it, who the "true believers" are and who are the performers.
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If you're someone who obsesses over the Alt-Right, or whose literal job it is to make sense of contemporary politics, there is an immense epistemological temptation to take these people up on their offers to hang out. Because you want to find out what they're really like.
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But if you're someone people look up to as a leftist commentator, activist, or politician, taking them on that offer carries an immense risk. Because for the most part *we actually do care.* And our followers and colleagues care.
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So we have a lot to lose when the photos surface of us smiling with the enemy. It's pretty much always taken as evidence of betrayal. Yet no right-wing figure ever seems to suffer from being photographed with a leftist.
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It often feels like the only options are to 1 seclude yourself, never mingle with the bad guys (and another problem is the category "bad guys" is sometimes inflated way beyond Alt-Right to include even centrists & liberals), and hence have no knowledge of or influence on them—
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or 2 mingle with the bad people, which is, in the eyes of lefty Twitter anyway, tantamount to becoming one of them.
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I have no idea what to do about this situation. I guess my point is I'm 100% confident
@xychelsea had good intentions going to this event and I really wish Tweeters would be more trusting in someone who has sacrificed more than almost any of us for the cause.Show this thread -
Like this is Chelsea Manning we're talking about here. Chelsea "smash the fash" Manning.
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End of conversation
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I agree that perspective taking is need to understand enemies in order to beat them—what’s unclear here is the provenance of the events at hand—the Milkshake Duck fears were too sudden & brutal but a good explanation has not been forthcoming
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I felt as though the point at which the affective projective investment people make in celebrity meets the moralistic import of new leftist movements generates inherent tendencies toward destabilization when confronted with real human beings
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But isn't the outcome the same though? Regardless of whether they for real or not, the opinions they spout have the same effect on their audience.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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