Rubenerd

Good morning! My post about Mr Orange generated the most email feedback I’ve had since my encrypted-ZFS on NetBSD post, all of it negative. I can only assume someone shared it among Orange supporters.

I’d publish each message in full, but they’re all just a little too tragic. One of the more civil gentleman—though we’re coming from a low baseline here—attempted to debunk everything I said, but the substance of each quote was that:

• another country was worse, which is irrelevant
• another politician was worse, which is irrelevant
• that I was mislead about $ScienceFact, without providing evidence

It spoke to the internal machinations and mental gymnastics of someone desperate to absolve their leader of culpability. All the facts cited were wrong, and only served to reinforce my original thought that his supporters have absolutely no idea how the rest of the world perceives them. This kind of transparent projection and self-ownage isn’t unique to their flavour of politics, but it does attract a disproportionate amount of it.

I do feel a responsibility to reach these people. Each Orange supporter has their reasons, and they have the same family, job security and other worries we all do. Perhaps even moreso, which is why they’re so motivated to accept any convenient excuse for why the man they support continues to brazenly abuse them. But when you’re coming from a place of bad faith to start, I have no motivation to engage with you.

And that’s the problem. We could have a reasonable discussion if we were coming from a place of honesty. When the Dear Leader regularly lies, and people like Scott Adams say it’s a political tactic, we have no basis upon which to even start. Facts are sacrosanct, just as so many far-right people ironically state on their Twitter profiles. He didn’t have the biggest turnout at his inauguration. He didn’t get Mexico to pay for his wall. America isn’t doing the best at dealing with COVID. Wind turbines don’t cause cancer. He didn’t get Kim Jong Un to do anything. We can debate the finer points of his other policies, but if people can’t even admit to these, they’re being just as dishonest as him.

(I also see this playing out to a lesser extent with Scott Morrison in Australia, who has made no secret of his admiration for the American knob-in-chief).

Thanks for taking the time to respond everyone, but your tactics to win over another supporter in your “culture war” have backfired. And unlike so many of you who still cling to him because he’s “owning lefties”, I take no pleasure whatsoever in pointing that out. The sooner they realise they’re transparently doing the work of our common enemies better than anyone else, the sooner we can begin to rebuild what we’ve all lost. Because being an outspoken friend of America has been hard these last few years.