I’ve been stranded in the snow on that exact stretch of I-95 (years ago) and it was legitimately traumatic. Afterwards, I was shaking for days. But I did not know or care what people were tweeting about it.
I agree that it was a douchey tweet, but also totally inconsequential. There’s no need to go to the fainting couch every time someone expresses a dumb thought. People need to grow up.
Jeff, you have become one of the substackers that I most look forward to reading when I see your name in my inbox. Your articles always come through with humor, wit, and intellect.
However, I must disagree with you yet again! Not on the substance of your article, but on the example you hinged the substance on.
That Jonathan Chait tweet did *not* work as humor, because the tweet he was lampooning wasn't a tweet bellyaching over something obviously hypocritical, or feigning being wronged.
It was, as far as I can assess, a good-faith tweet trying to help people who were seriously in need at that very moment. For those stranded on a highway in the dead of winter with no supplies, it could seriously be a dangerous situation. Any coordination I'm sure was appreciated, even from the Reagan Battalion.
I think Chait's tweet was in poor taste considering the nature of the tweet and the situation the tweet was addressing. To me, this is like a conservative making fun of a tweet from a progressive organization trying to provide immediate resources for those under attack at the Capitol Building on Jan 6. No matter what lampooning was happening, for whatever reason, it would not be considered appropriate.
Eh, from my perspective, the hit is so clearly on the ideology on hardcore Reaganites and not on their actions that day that the farthest I'd go is "a bit insensitive". Not his best, but IMHO nowhere near freaking out over. And Fox News et. al. made the most of it because they don't like Chait and viewed that tweet as a stick they could hit him with.
I think you got to a really important point in this paragraph: "I wonder if I really needed to write this column. I think that most people intuitively understand why 'I’m hurt, therefore you’re wrong' doesn’t work. It’s also true that launching a crusade to debunk every dumb idea I read on Twitter would not be a good use of my time; trying to remove the stupid from Twitter seems a bit like trying to remove the shit from a cowpie."
I would guess that most people have enough common sense (there's another phrase that has been hijacked, unfortunately) and can understand when a joke's a joke and/or why the ridiculous stance of "I'm hurt, therefore you're wrong" is invalid but the medium is a huge part of the problem. Social media, Twitter especially, is a web (pun-intended) of pitfalls and hidden meanings and unfinished thinking. Social media is part of the cause of the ridiculous stance's existence because it demands people pay next to no attention to things (or devote days to trying unravel the web).
You did need to write this and it would be good if more people thought about how the medium creates the thinking.
Contemporary work in the philosophy of emotion is helpful on this point. (See here: See here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion/#RatiEmot.) In that literature, the term of art for an emotion making sense is "fittingness." An emotional state has a particular object (the thing it's focused on) and a formal object (the property it ascribes to that thing). So if I'm afraid of a dog, the particular object of my fear is the dog, and the formal object of my fear is the property of dangerousness my emotional state ascribes to the dog. An emotion is fitting if its particular object does in fact instantiate its formal object. My fear is fitting if the dog is in fact dangerous. But we can also evaluate emotions on other normative lines, such as their prudence or their moral propriety. My fear of the dog might be imprudent, if the dog will attack if it smells fear, or immoral, say if it comes from prejudice against the dog's owner. (Amusement at a funny but offensive joke is a commonly cited example of a fitting yet arguably immoral emotion.)
Enter the moralistic fallacy: people conflate the moral propriety and the fittingness of an emotion, claiming that just because an emotion is immoral it must be unfitting as well, or that just because an emotion is moral it must be fitting. Our very online brethren who shout "I'm hurt therefore you're wrong" might be making this mistake: they feel (rightly or not) like their emotional reaction is morally righteous, or at least permissible, and assume it must be fitting as well, because they don't recognize these as different lines of evaluation of our feelings. (See here for discussion of this fallacy: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2653403.) It doesn't help that everyday English uses the same generic "should" for all different kinds of normative evaluation.
I don't think Chait was being an asswhole. I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out contractions in political philosophy, even in a snarky way.
But Chait's point was wrong. Reaganites did not "used to believe in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" to the extent that no charity should ever be offered or taken.
What they believed (and believe) is that charity should be private, not gubmint-run.
And their offer to provide private charity was entirely in keeping with this philosophy.
I think he was wrong and being an asshole. People were stranded for more than a day on I-95 and Reagan Battalion was trying to connect those needing supplies to those with supplies. But all Chait saw was "Reagan" and the opportunity to make a joke.
It would be like mocking the Cajun Navy for dressing like Larry the Cable Guy while they're rescuing flood victims.
I’ve been stranded in the snow on that exact stretch of I-95 (years ago) and it was legitimately traumatic. Afterwards, I was shaking for days. But I did not know or care what people were tweeting about it.
I agree that it was a douchey tweet, but also totally inconsequential. There’s no need to go to the fainting couch every time someone expresses a dumb thought. People need to grow up.
Jeff, you have become one of the substackers that I most look forward to reading when I see your name in my inbox. Your articles always come through with humor, wit, and intellect.
However, I must disagree with you yet again! Not on the substance of your article, but on the example you hinged the substance on.
That Jonathan Chait tweet did *not* work as humor, because the tweet he was lampooning wasn't a tweet bellyaching over something obviously hypocritical, or feigning being wronged.
It was, as far as I can assess, a good-faith tweet trying to help people who were seriously in need at that very moment. For those stranded on a highway in the dead of winter with no supplies, it could seriously be a dangerous situation. Any coordination I'm sure was appreciated, even from the Reagan Battalion.
I think Chait's tweet was in poor taste considering the nature of the tweet and the situation the tweet was addressing. To me, this is like a conservative making fun of a tweet from a progressive organization trying to provide immediate resources for those under attack at the Capitol Building on Jan 6. No matter what lampooning was happening, for whatever reason, it would not be considered appropriate.
Cheers!
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Eh, from my perspective, the hit is so clearly on the ideology on hardcore Reaganites and not on their actions that day that the farthest I'd go is "a bit insensitive". Not his best, but IMHO nowhere near freaking out over. And Fox News et. al. made the most of it because they don't like Chait and viewed that tweet as a stick they could hit him with.
I think you got to a really important point in this paragraph: "I wonder if I really needed to write this column. I think that most people intuitively understand why 'I’m hurt, therefore you’re wrong' doesn’t work. It’s also true that launching a crusade to debunk every dumb idea I read on Twitter would not be a good use of my time; trying to remove the stupid from Twitter seems a bit like trying to remove the shit from a cowpie."
I would guess that most people have enough common sense (there's another phrase that has been hijacked, unfortunately) and can understand when a joke's a joke and/or why the ridiculous stance of "I'm hurt, therefore you're wrong" is invalid but the medium is a huge part of the problem. Social media, Twitter especially, is a web (pun-intended) of pitfalls and hidden meanings and unfinished thinking. Social media is part of the cause of the ridiculous stance's existence because it demands people pay next to no attention to things (or devote days to trying unravel the web).
You did need to write this and it would be good if more people thought about how the medium creates the thinking.
If liberals want to “own” West Virginia AND make an actual different in climate change policy, they can literally embrace the nuclear option.
Contemporary work in the philosophy of emotion is helpful on this point. (See here: See here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion/#RatiEmot.) In that literature, the term of art for an emotion making sense is "fittingness." An emotional state has a particular object (the thing it's focused on) and a formal object (the property it ascribes to that thing). So if I'm afraid of a dog, the particular object of my fear is the dog, and the formal object of my fear is the property of dangerousness my emotional state ascribes to the dog. An emotion is fitting if its particular object does in fact instantiate its formal object. My fear is fitting if the dog is in fact dangerous. But we can also evaluate emotions on other normative lines, such as their prudence or their moral propriety. My fear of the dog might be imprudent, if the dog will attack if it smells fear, or immoral, say if it comes from prejudice against the dog's owner. (Amusement at a funny but offensive joke is a commonly cited example of a fitting yet arguably immoral emotion.)
Enter the moralistic fallacy: people conflate the moral propriety and the fittingness of an emotion, claiming that just because an emotion is immoral it must be unfitting as well, or that just because an emotion is moral it must be fitting. Our very online brethren who shout "I'm hurt therefore you're wrong" might be making this mistake: they feel (rightly or not) like their emotional reaction is morally righteous, or at least permissible, and assume it must be fitting as well, because they don't recognize these as different lines of evaluation of our feelings. (See here for discussion of this fallacy: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2653403.) It doesn't help that everyday English uses the same generic "should" for all different kinds of normative evaluation.
The reverse is worse:
I'm wrong, therefore you hurt.
Just look at Covid-policy in any western nation.
I don't think Chait was being an asswhole. I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out contractions in political philosophy, even in a snarky way.
But Chait's point was wrong. Reaganites did not "used to believe in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" to the extent that no charity should ever be offered or taken.
What they believed (and believe) is that charity should be private, not gubmint-run.
And their offer to provide private charity was entirely in keeping with this philosophy.
I think he was wrong and being an asshole. People were stranded for more than a day on I-95 and Reagan Battalion was trying to connect those needing supplies to those with supplies. But all Chait saw was "Reagan" and the opportunity to make a joke.
It would be like mocking the Cajun Navy for dressing like Larry the Cable Guy while they're rescuing flood victims.