@ForeverModoc @JacobB75646 I don't know why you think the "left" has the monopoly on "satanic pedophiles".
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ABTejana
1.6K posts
@MbProfesora @JacobB75646 Mission: The overthrow of the communists and satanic pedophiles
KPIs: Reduced public trust in Satanic Pedophiles, Reduced market for satanic pedophile industries, mitigation of future satanic pedophiles
It certainly isn't: Find middle ground with the satanic pedophiles.
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Rufo is missing the point, though, that there is a bigger horizon he rejects and these folks don’t. There are certain acts that when you do them change the nature of your heart and soul and make you become the thing you are fighting. 1/
Wokal Distance@wokal_distance
This is not Rufo just aimlessly trying to be a dick. he is attempting to show that the methods of the Elizabeth Corey types have failed because they don't understand that the problem is not a matter of communication or persuasion. The right is having power politics done to them by the left, and Rufo's point is that you can't fight power politics with persuasion. It is impossible to reason with power politics for the exact same reason that it is impossible to reason with a punch in the face. You cannot appeal to the better nature and intellectual honesty of a person who thinks that all intellectual engagement is merely masks for power and all justifications are merely rhetorical moves in a discursive struggle for political position. Again, academics simply refuse to engage with Rufo's theory of change, what he is trying to do intellectually and politically, or his normative and strategic justifications for doing so. If academics want understanding, perhaps they could, you know, ask him (or me! we worked and work together!) about what is being done, why it is being done, and what the normative and strategic justifications for doing so are.
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@youtwitface @rclu Being willing to do anything to gain control of institutions they ultimately just offer another corrupt structure that also stifles all real free thought and questioning for the sake of maintaining power. Finally it’s kind of you to want to read something I’ve written on this 2/
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Really nice thread from @MbProfesora. To which I would only add that my own recent experiences with Rufo don’t give me much confidence that attempts at measured, civil discourse would be fruitful.
He’s welcome to take a shot at disproving that theory.
ABTejana@MbProfesora
Rufo is missing the point, though, that there is a bigger horizon he rejects and these folks don’t. There are certain acts that when you do them change the nature of your heart and soul and make you become the thing you are fighting. 1/
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@youtwitface @rclu either an accurate or complete depiction of what is happening? And I’d ask b) How do you determine which accounts of what you’re disturbed by are free of being twisted into justifications for power for political actors who oppose actors you have rightly learned to distrust?
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@youtwitface @rclu Well, first I’m sorry if I’m breaking Twitter etiquette/norms bc I don’t really use it to talk back and forth a lot. But I guess first I’d ask a) what is it that you’re troubled by that you think Rufo has the answer to b) no insult, but why do you think what troubles you is 1/
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@youtwitface @rclu I don’t really think in terms of supporters, and I think that’s part of the harm of our world’s Twitter-driven deliberation generally. People should be able to move between “friends” and “enemies” when deliberating and now we just argue by mascots.
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@MbProfesora @rclu I have zero institutionalized knowledge. I'm mostly here for fantasy football takes. I'm persuadable.....I'm just astonished at how little you care about persuasion and just want to get likes from your own supporters
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@ibmmiller I don’t think “not the left” is interchangeable with “good.”
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@MbProfesora I have often questioned the populists and Trump supporters in the Right for the past 10 years, asking if we use the exact same tactics as the Left, how are we different. Rufo, however, DOES articulate what and why he's gaining and using power to accomplish, and it is not The Left
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@youtwitface @rclu If you’re troubled by that, argue from an account that isn’t a Twitter anon so you show you have some skin in the game and institutional knowledge.
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@rclu @MbProfesora Your more troubled by Rufo's attack on Corey than you are by institutionalized discrimination in academia. Just know, some of us are troubled by that.
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@rclu @youtwitface It’s also a good example of his overconfidence. He saw your critique, got hurt, googled lazily and had no context for your credentials/skills. Then he looked ignorant in a lame attempt at character assassination instead of dealing with your arguments, so he looked weak and wrong
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@youtwitface @MbProfesora I have never "retreated" from Rufo. I merely answered his question.
If a lot of other people were entertained by the spectacle of him calling a mom of 5 a failure for leaning out... that's on him.
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I’ve spent many years trying to explain to my friends to my left what it feels like to be a conservative navigating academia. It certainly would have been easier not to be one. But based on current discourse, I guess the whole time I’ve been a secret lefty doing lefty things.
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Another thing (thinking about it more): a lot of people who believe they’re realigning themselves to strength/power end up becoming really submissive to leaders/funding that control their speech/thought tightly and let no one step out of line. That’s not very strong or powerful
ABTejana@MbProfesora
Rufo is missing the point, though, that there is a bigger horizon he rejects and these folks don’t. There are certain acts that when you do them change the nature of your heart and soul and make you become the thing you are fighting. 1/
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@JacobB75646 I guess one place to start is win what? For what? How does how you fight get you that “what”? Also why do you think justice is politeness?
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@MbProfesora A lot of words to say be a polite loser and let the left win
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@ThomasSKidd @enzoreds It’s true but do the social inferiors or the elite whites in this account ever do anything meaningful to make racial minorities lives better? Likely neither truly does. Thats the bigger problem
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Much of prestige academia entails elite whites accusing social inferiors of being white supremacists, in order to preserve their elite status.
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To play with McLuhan, “the method is the message.” If you “fight” in terms of power with no mind to justice it doesn’t matter how just you think your ends are. What you did to get power turned you and your vision into something incapable of sustaining the good or just on earth
Wokal Distance@wokal_distance
This is not Rufo just aimlessly trying to be a dick. he is attempting to show that the methods of the Elizabeth Corey types have failed because they don't understand that the problem is not a matter of communication or persuasion. The right is having power politics done to them by the left, and Rufo's point is that you can't fight power politics with persuasion. It is impossible to reason with power politics for the exact same reason that it is impossible to reason with a punch in the face. You cannot appeal to the better nature and intellectual honesty of a person who thinks that all intellectual engagement is merely masks for power and all justifications are merely rhetorical moves in a discursive struggle for political position. Again, academics simply refuse to engage with Rufo's theory of change, what he is trying to do intellectually and politically, or his normative and strategic justifications for doing so. If academics want understanding, perhaps they could, you know, ask him (or me! we worked and work together!) about what is being done, why it is being done, and what the normative and strategic justifications for doing so are.
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The only answer to that question is that you were never fighting to defend the good, you were fighting to be dominant and at the end of the day you have no justification for the preference of your dominance rather than someone else’s other than that it is yours. If that’s so, 3/
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So the question would be: why engage in a fight in a way that even when you win you have become something that was never worth fighting for? If your first thought was that you fight to defend something good, who cares if you won if what you did to win destroyed that goodness 2/
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Nailed it. He’s toxic
Kevin Vallier@kvallier
I want to clearly state where I think @christopherrufo has been harmful for American civic life. He has certainly done some good. My concern is that his tactics are a kind of civic poison. They salt the social earth, making trust hard to rebuild and polarization hard to reduce. I'm part of the Ohio civics project. I left an ordinary academic job to throw myself into the work of academic reform, building institutions that serve as a counterweight to left-wing overreach. The academy is in deep need of reform. I am not a beautiful loser asking conservatives to disarm. But this work requires being charitable to people we disagree with, and Rufo's rhetoric is not uniformly welcome among those of us doing it. Consider his own words: "We will eventually turn [critical race theory] toxic, as we put all of the 'various cultural insanities' under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something 'crazy' in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory.'" This isn't arguing that a view is false. It isn't trying to remove it from a curriculum. It's category construction. It has always read to me as engineered so the public can't distinguish thoughtful people who draw on CRT from crazy ones. That's not necessary to win the argument, and it corrodes the civic ground any future reform has to be built upon. I'm not tone-policing. I'm saying what Rufo gives with one hand, he takes with the other. Many of us are doing the hard daily work of academic reform, and we do not uniformly welcome his efforts, because his tactics are too bare-knuckled and, frankly, unkind. So to be clear: the academy needs reform. I am giving my career to that project. But I will not thank Rufo for anything as long as his rhetoric salts the earth for rebuilding trust with the left.
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