I recently tweeted this:
@CamEdwards@robdelaney@NRA@YouLikeAaron In a debate you lead with the best you have. They have crude insults. We have SCOTUS rulings.
It was in response to this tweet from rob delaney (@robdelaney):
This is how
@NRA guys have sex. RT@YouLikeAaron:
The associated drawing is so crude I’m putting it “below the fold.”
This is entirely consistent with The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans. They are not data and logic driven. Anti-gun people are driven by emotions. They know that insulting and degrading people is what is effective on them. They therefore attempt to use this same tactic on us as their best weapon in a debate.
In a lot of ways you really can model them as not having matured beyond grade school.
Well, I’ve never heard of him but evidentally, Rob Delaney is a comedian with over a million followers.
Weighing this with that additional info, you lose this twitter war. He was making a joke and you took it seriously. There was no debate going on — but maybe you were trying to start one? (The original tweet with the illustration had to do with Mexican pizza — can’t see how that applies.)
He tweeted it to the NRA. I think that qualifies as “starting the debate”.
Although I would like to “win the Twitter war” it’s more important that we win the legal and public opinion “wars”. We are winning both of these but there is still a lot of work to do. I’m helping to accomplish that.
I think you used an inappropriate analogy. It was more of a skirmish than a war. I won’t contest that he won the skirmish but he hasn’t won the war.
If he read my response it’s unlikely he will use that particular “weapon” again. And if he does more people have been enabled to confront him and are more likely to do so. The more people so enabled the more likely we will someday win battles (in the Twitter arena as well as editorial and political arenas), and eventually the war, against people like him.
“He was making a joke and you took it seriously.”
Ah, of course. The old reliable “I was only joking” defense to bigotry. All is forgiven, then!
It’s like Jon Stewart’s “clown nose on/clown nose off” thing. It’s not quite as valid a defense as they childishly think it is. The toddler is forgiven for putting his hands over his eyes and thinking others cannot see them. That mentality (among many) among purported adults is dangerous.
So we should just practice a “Lie back and think of England” mentality when crap like this is tweeted?
If you aren’t willing to at least try and rebut this crap when it appears, then you’re giving them the culture without a fight.
Also, on top of that, his tweet was retweeted 200+ times and favorited 700+ times. Yours, not so much.
So you’re saying it’s “cool” and Joe isn’t? Or are you saying that Delaney is right and Joe is wrong, because there’s a huge difference between “cool” or “popular” or “sensational” on one hand, and “correct” on the other.
One who advocates human liberty and dignity does not do it out of a desire to be cool or popular (i.e. to garner acceptance from other people), so you can abandon that old trick. Maybe it doesn’t occur to those infected with Progressivism, that their chosen targets simply aren’t motivated by the same stimuli.
Joe states that Progressives use crude insults as one of their primary weapons, and you reply with, essentially, another insult – “You aren’t cool or popular”.
OK, I’m not cool or popular either. Cool, popular people usually look absurd, tragic and dysfunctional to me (I look at them and think; “There but for the grace of God go I”), so in my case at least, saying that I’m un-cool and unpopular is certainly not an insult, and possibly it is a rich compliment, or would be if I didn’t know how it was intended.
See how that works? The truth is a goal unto itself for some people, regardless where it leads or what other people may think or feel about it.
So try again, please, and this time try to stay on point. Joe’s thesis is that the enemies of human liberty are not only wrong, but they are usually quite ridiculous (whether intentionally, as a “comedian”, or when they think they’re trying to be “serious”). If you would like to counter that thesis, please do it directly and succinctly.
The number of “followers” one particular individual may have is entirely beside the point. We could look at the number of “followers” of the concepts of human liberty, reason and self sufficiency, compared to the number of “followers” of some form of authoritarianism, but that would only show how many people understand life and reason verses those who fail, or refuse out of fear, to understand.
In and of itself, the popularity of one view or the other says nothing about its being right or wrong. Not long ago, for example, the continental drift/plate tectonics model was very unpopular, and asserting it would get you written off as a fool. How many times have we heard, first, hopefully, from our parents, that “you don’t jump off a cliff just because your friends are doing it”?
In other words, it is a common theme of moral instruction that popularity (which usually amounts to no more than mind control or herd mentality) is no measure of right and wrong. That’s why the American founders installed so many anti-democratic measures in the constitution.
Last I checked, the SCOTUS had something like 310,000,000 followers, so I think Joe wins that one….
Word.
She’s saying it was a purile argument, and Joe had a valid point.
But she hates guns, and will take a “Victory” any way she can get it at this point.
It’s kinda the stupid troll version of Moms Demand telling anybody who will listen that Chipotle and Target “Banned Guns”.
I’m saying that his messaging is more effective since more people are retweeting/favoriting it. It’s got nothing to do with “coolness.” If we were testing “his product” versus “Joe’s product,” his product (tweet) reached more people — thus it was more effective.
Reaching more people doesn’t necessarily equate to “more effective”.
All it indicates is that his distribution is “more effective” — but that matters nothing in terms of the effectiveness of his message towards his goals. A widely distributed message that has little or no impact is less effective than a more constrained message that hits it’s target and results in desired behavior. (Which is what happened with the “Just Say No” anti drug campaign; wide distribution, but best analysis indicates they were actually counterproductive and may have INSCREASED teenage drug use. . . )
Popularity only matters in a democracy. We are a democratic republic.
Even if it DID matter, that’s still pretty pathetic. How many followers does George Takei have? How many retweets or favorites does Sarah Palin have?
Your point is not only irrelevant, but it’s also counterproductive unless considered in isolation from contrary views.
Certainly, we want the concept of human liberty to be popular. That’s a far cry from desiring popularity for ourselves as individuals.
This cannot be over-stated. In a way, it defines the very essence of the conflict between seeing individuals as free agents verses seeing them for what you can get out of them. If I were somehow able to actually convince everyone to embrace human liberty and self sufficiency fully, for all the right reasons, and never get one bit of credit for it, such that hardly anyone ever knew my name afterward, I would consider myself the most fortunate man on the planet.
friends:
who cares what they think of us?
personally, i rather like the approach that harlon carter took. he was an old bulldog. he looked like an old bulldog. there was not one single sophisticated or reasonable thing about him. he compromised, never.
he made on thing perfectly clear, always. you come after our guns, people are gonna die, and you are not gonna have fun, and i am gonna come for you. no bluff. no bluster. no change in the message to suit or please the audience, nor any attempt to gain favor, grace or understanding.
it worked pretty well during his tenure. he was not, as the current leadership of n.r.a., a politician. he was a fighter, and it was perfectly clear he meant every word he said. i liked. i wish we had a dozen of him now.
think of us as they will, but, there is one unalterable fact. we have the guns. harlon carter let them know that we would use them, and, at his call, and him at the front of the column.
john jay
p.s. he would not have paid much attention to penis jokes. he would have said, simply, so fucking what? your point, shit head?
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