The Crowhill Journal

Smitemouth posted a comment with a link to an article about why people believe weird things and strange conspiracies. I think the article raises some good points, but it reminds me of something I’ve been wondering about.

Before the internet, you couldn’t be as choosy about your friends. Even little social circles of like-minded people were limited by geography, and they were mostly made up of people in your neighborhood, at work, or at school. This forced people into regular contact with all sorts.

If you were in a bowling league, or Boy Scouts, or swim team, or played poker with your neighbors, you were going to run into people with weird ideas. That was just the way it was, and you dealt with it.

“Yeah, Johnny has some weird ideas about the Kennedy assassination, but humor him. We need him on the team.”

That sort of an environment did two things. First, it moderated your craziness, because you had to get along with people who didn’t share your peculiar views, and second, it forced everybody to be more tolerant of crazy views when they did come up.

This is well-covered ground. Everybody knows that the internet allows you to be “friends” with a collection of 25 crazies from anywhere on the planet who share your nutty views about the Nephilim, or whatever.

I’m saying (and this might not be new either) there’s another side to it. By being somewhat forced to make friends and get along with people who are brought together for non-ideological reasons (live in the same neighborhood, go to the same school, work at the same factory, play the same sport), people learn to be tolerant.

If I go on a cruise, and they seat me at a table with ten other people, I’m not going to say outlandish things, and I’m not going to get into it with somebody who does. I’m going to try to get along.

Our problem is not only from the negative impact of the Internet. It’s from the lack of the positive impact that we used to have by being forced to get along with people.

Unfortunately, the internet has spoiled these real-life interactions as well. People are so used to surrounding themselves with like-minded people, and shunning people who transgress the limits, they bring that attitude into real-life situations. They assume everybody else believes what they believe, and when they find a dissenter they are intolerant.

And people are punching back.

A Las Vegas charter school is being sued in federal court by a family alleging the school is indoctrinating children into the view that White people are inherently racist and perpetuate their economic and political power by oppressing people of color.

“This isn’t some passing ideological trend,” said Jonathan O’Brien, a lawyer with SchoolhouseRights.org who filed the lawsuit for the family. “These people are crackpot bigots.”

There’s an important distinction to be made in the various claims we get from these “crackpot bigots.”

One is that “White privilege is … codified across all aspects of American society.” I don’t think that’s true, but the claim is not inherently racist.

The racist part is when they say that all white people are oppressors, or when they ask all white people to apologize for what some white people have done in the past. That is textbook racism.

P&C drink and review a Mexican stout, then discuss Mao’s cultural revolution. They review some of the basic history, and then explore whether there are similarities between the cultural revolution and modern wokeness. And in fact … there are.

• Weaponizing students.
• Standards that are so vague and ever-changing that you can never know if you’re in or out of favor.
• Overthrowing everything that seems outdated with no idea what you’re going to replace it with. Cancel culture.
• Rejecting everything old or traditional.
• Struggle sessions = diversity classes.
• Art exists to advance social justice messages.

It’s a scary comparison.

Arkansas man who occupied Rep. Pelosi’s office arrested by the FBI

Good. Throw the book at him and all the rest of the miscreants.

Now … they may have been lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that we’ve allowed people to riot for most of 2020 and almost nothing has been done about it, very few people have been arrested, and those who have been arrested have generally been patted on the hand and told to go home and I’ll see you tomorrow. Bring your marshmallows.

But anyone with any sense should know that invading the Capitol is a different thing and not something we can tolerate.

I hope the invaders get what they deserve, and I hope we have turned a corner in our permissive attitude towards riots.

To answer my own question, I don’t think there was a lot of thinking going on at all.

First, nothing was going to be accomplished — or could be accomplished — by storming the Capitol. Neither VP Pence nor the Senate have the authority to disqualify the electors. That was a stupid, misguided thing from the start.

Second, even if they were able to accomplish something — “we made our point” or whatever — they were sure to be arrested.

That’s how Ken Starr characterized calls to invoke the 25th amendment to remove Trump. And he’s right. Pelosi and Schumer are poor and graceless winners.