If a terrible person says something correct or true, you don't have to say "[Terrible person] was right about [X]." I mean, you can say it, but you don't have to.
The terrible person is rarely the originator of whatever it is that they said that was correct. Saying that they were right about [X] is often an attempt to give them credit for something positive. It comes from a place of wanting them to be more accepted by the public.
We should explore why the speaker wants them to be more accepted
Same with "I agree with [terrible person] on [X]." It draws power and ownership of the idea away from originators, and towards the terrible person.
Concrete example: Trump was ridiculed for saying that California should rake the forests to prevent forest fire. Because people didn't understand that "raking the forest" is a term for controlled burns.
"I agree with Trump on controlled burns."🙅🏿♂️
"Trump is right about forest fires."🙅🏿♂️
"Trump is quoting both native American and forestry experts."👍🏿
When I hear the pattern "Hitler was right about..."
Or "Trump was right about..."
Or "DeSantis was right about..."
Or "Elon was right about..."
I understand that what follows is less about the quality of the idea, and more about the speaker trying to build empathy for the issuer of the statement. This can be a good thing! Empathy is generally good, and no one is wrong 100% of the time.
But oftentimes the speaker's intent is to make the listener more palatable to the subject's other "ideas."
@mekkaokereke This is exactly how guys like Rogan, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, etc launder right wing extremist ideals for their audiences while claiming the center. There are millions and millions of people falling for it every day.
@mekkaokereke I take your point, but this can also be a way of establishing common ground with someone who (mistakenly) looks up to such a public figure. As such, it can be a useful step in the process of changing their mind.
@mekkaokereke Half the time it's not even true, like "Mussolini made the trains run on time". Maybe it's ad hominem, but anything positively attributed to a fascist triggers some maybe red flags.
(Maybe this is too glib, but there is one exception - Hitler did kill Hitler. And even that is giving him too much credit.)
@mekkaokereke Sadly, the other party sometimes expects us to outright dismiss any of these views because of their origin. It’s meant as a kind of trap (which would then „allow“ them to call us unreasonable). Therefore I usually try to say „Yeah, but X has said the same“, or „That idea originally came from…“
@mekkaokereke Sub-mediocre people like Trump have careers built on the excellence of marginalized people whose ideas and work they appropriate and rebrand as their own.
It’s a big feature of western business and the reason why so many everyday people believe that Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and Elon Musk invented the electric car, when in truth neither had any of the technical skills required to do so, and branded the work of others as their own.
@brianonbarrington@mekkaokereke They just happened to have the money and government enforced, culturally sanctioned, power to appropriate the ideas and skills of others
@carolannie@mekkaokereke Yep. When conservatives call for deregulation and getting government regulation out of business, I agree with them and say one of the first things that needs to happen is the end of limited liability, corporate licensing and associated special privileges. Make every business a proprietorship with unlimited liability and eradicate all government licensing.
Within ten seconds they respond with passionate discourse about why government is necessary 😁
@mekkaokereke Ah… so it’s sort of like “my 4 year old said [something topical, correct, and beyond his scope of knowledge]” vs saying “my 4 year old repeated something he overheard me say, as if he understood what the words meant hahah”.
@mekkaokereke I'd be shocked if former president Trump was referring to controlled burns when he said the forests in California should be raked. California is a "liberal" state, so of course he wanted to put the blame for the forest fires on the Californians. I'd also be surprised if he didn't think controlled burns were the cause of forest fires. I just don't think former president Trump completely grasps forest management. I think it's more likely he just oversimplifies things to score political points, which of course puts him in the same boat with others pushing their partisan agenda.
@mekkaokereke Wait, really? I've worked with a number of organizations that do controlled burns and I've never heard it referred to as raking the forest. (Out of curiosity -- I realized this is hardly scientific or exhaustive -- I Googled 'rake the forest' / 'raking the forest' with 'controlled burn' for the period 2006-2016 and neither returned a single result containing both phrases.) If it's a native American phrase I can believe it's been buried or not used on the internet, I'm just very surprised to hear that it might actually have been a relevant thing to say. Maybe if Trump spews enough words eventually some of them will turn out to not be nonsense, a la the monkeys with typewriters.
@mekkaokereke Has anyone provided you a citation for that usage? As an Australian and son of a forester, I have NEVER heard the term “raking the forest”. Our term for controlled burns is “controlled burns”. Less frequently we also use “hazard reduction burn” or “fuel load burn”.
I've never heard that term either, but I know that he meant using a McLeod to rake the forest litter into heaps and make fire breaks, and then do controlled burns.
Just like I knew that when he said "Steam powered aircraft carriers were better and more reliable," he was talking about steam catapults vs magnetic catapults, not steam powered ships vs nuclear powered ships.
EG he hears scientists say that UV light renders covid virions non-viable. He understands that, but then he says things like "Maybe we can get the UV light inside the body?"
He understands that in controlled Burns people use a Macleod, which is a type of rake, to make fire breaks. but then he says things like "We should rake the forest."
Also because I was thinking about a related thing earlier: just because a terrible person said something doesn't mean it should be immediately discarded and actively resisted
(this is a me thing, the tendency to knee-jerk dismiss something from a source I dislike)
Thanks for raising the point that Terrible People are often taking ideas and information that came from others, and maybe it's not contaminated or worthless just because Terrible Person repeated it
Also, without empathy and the knowledge that no one is wrong all the time it's easy to develop the habit of thinking that all dangerous people are inhuman super villains. Which then leads easily to thinking everyone is either (xor) a dangerous super villain or a good person.
But moral monsters are just normal people. Pretending otherwise feels safer but is actually less so. We can be monsters or not and to varying degrees. Caricatures can make it harder to see this.
@mekkaokereke It always seems like they're going to follow it up with "...and [serial killer] volunteered at his church and kept his yard nice and really only spent like maybe 1% of his time actually killing people."
@mekkaokereke You were in my head today. I had an internal rant about media outlets trying to normalize known white supremacists and sundry miscreants.
@mekkaokereke This, and depending on how terrible the person was, it's almost always a naked attempt to justify their ideology.
Like there's a huge difference between saying a journalist with an abrasive personality and a one-track focus on a single issue was, indeed, right about their specific focus
and giving a single bit of credit to a fascist dictator such as Hitler or Pinochet for anything
Because praising the journalist for getting, as an example, class analysis or climate change correct 20 years before anyone else isn't upholding an entire system based on their being an asshole.
Praising a fascist leader for anything (especially because they've probably violently stolen it/are a lying hypocrite about it and are taking undue credit for it anyway) is popularizing them and lending credence to their entire belief system/humanizing them when they don't and won't see others as human.
The point I disagree with both of you is the assumption that "giving credit" - that is saying somebody was right about something - is praising them.
A huge amount of my work on the left is trying to get left-leaning Americans to understand their enemies are often right about tactics and strategy. Nixon and Goldwater were right about the Southern Strategy, weren't they? Dominionist Christians were right that supporting Trump would get them the Supreme Court and the reversal of Roe v Wade. The GOP is right that rolling back the VRA is a way to consolidate their political power by greenlighting voter suppression.
There's this incredibly counterproductive trend among left-leaning Americans to scoff and sneer at the fascists' espoused plans and then be caught absolutely flat-footed by their success.
Pointing out that the fascists are right about the lay of the political landscape isn't praise. It's warning.
@siderea@mybarkingdogs@mekkaokereke I think some of the resistance comes from the overloaded meanings of "right." If we say that Nixon was correct about the effectiveness of the Southern Strategy, that's hard to argue against. But he was not on the right side of that issue in a moral sense, and even when we can distinguish between the two meanings of right, it's uncomfortable to risk blessing the rightness of wrong actions.
I think that's an astute observation. I think there's also other, less savory, explanations. Our side is not immune to equating virtue and victory. It's easy for us to roll our eyes when the Christofascists declare that they will triumph because their god is with them, but our side does similar wishful thinking.
Even worse than that is the not inconsiderable classism on the US left that leads them to consistently underestimate the intellects of anyone who reads to them as blue-collar or rural, e.g. "Surely a hick like that can't mount an effective long-game political attack.". I think there's a lot of people in the bluer regions who are emotionally invested in their enemies always being wrong about everything.
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