Total net worth. No hidden assets or secret bank accounts. Every last cent that a person is worth. Also, it gets brighter/more noticeable whenever you’re advocating for something that increases your net worth.
I feel like this would be the only way to get a lot of people to connect the dots.
I fantasize about keeping a power drill in my car and when the ad starts playing I’d just drill straight into the speaker and waggle the drill bit around until the noise stops.
I almost suggested that, but the story goes that the reason he chose “Forrest” as a pseudonym when writing the book was because of Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Klan. People contain multitudes. I can’t claim to know why he did what he did, but nothing I’ve read about the man (admittedly little) indicates that he was sorry for what he’d done. Ashamed perhaps, but even that I’m just guessing based on the fact that he tried changing his identity and denied being Asa Carter.
Depends on the situation. I have an uncle who is, for his generation (boomer), fairly progressive-minded.
For years, he repeated that his favorite book was “The Education of Little Tree” which was published in 76, and to my understanding takes a pretty irreverent and sometimes satirical stance on much of society’s generally accepted social norms and formal institutions. It has an environmentalist tone and is critical of the prejudice that the indigenous protagonist faces.
The weird part is that the author, “Forrest Carter,” was actually Asa Earl Carter who was formerly a prominent Klan member and speech writer for George Wallace, one of the premiere racist ghoul politicians of the American South. Ever heard the speech that goes “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever”? Yeah, that’s a George Wallace speech that was written by Carter. It’s been known that they’re the same guy since the early 90’s, but my uncle still wasn’t aware of it in the 2010’s.
My Uncle’s a pretty reasonable guy and he’s capable of critical thinking. I don’t know why Carter went on to write a book that was critical of prejudice after spending his early life being super fucking turbo-racist, but the guy’s long dead and while it certainly recontextualizes his anti-prejudice work, it’s not like you can’t still like his books. When I shared the info with my uncle about Carter’s identity, I expected him to take it much the way I did like “Well that’s pretty weird. Wonder what the hell happened to have made the same man write such different things in his life. Sucks he was a racist,” but instead it really seemed like he took it personally. He got really defensive about something that has literally been settled fact since the 90s, suggesting it was all lies even though I was showing him the Wikipedia page for Carter. I even heard him mutter something under his breath after the conversation which is waaay more petty than I’ve ever seen him act.
If I don’t think the person I’m talking to is capable of critical thought and nuance, I’ll keep things like that to myself, but my uncle and I have had tons of interesting conversations. In my head this was just another one of those. It’s not like I was accusing my uncle of being racist. After all, he had no idea. I thought I was just sharing a bizarre detail about an author he liked.
With all these “IT can see when you connect a USB device” comments, I must ask has anyone ever actually worked for an IT department that made you micromanage/snitch on people like that? It all sounds like a bunch of hypothetical scare mongering to me. Granted, I’ve never been company IT for a fortune 500, but I’ve been outsourced IT for dozens and dozens of other companies all across the spectrum, and the notion that we were monitoring USB devices connected to each workstation is laughable. We monitor for the presence of malicious files, files with names like passwords.txt, and suspicious logins to your account. That’s pretty much it. People change mice all the time. I’ve used an arduino-based jiggler on my own work PC.
Furthermore, and this is the more important detail for myself, I’ve known many many different IT people working at every level and I don’t think I’ve ever met a single one who gives half a shit if employees aren’t being productive. Just don’t break your computer please, and if you do, for the love of God don’t try to fix it yourself. Personally, I’ve never seen any instance of any worker ever trying to circumvent arbitrary productivity metrics with easy workarounds because I’m not a fucking snitch. In IT, we also have bullshit “productivity” targets that are completely decoupled from actual productivity. We get that it’s bullshit. If there’s an IT department out there that’s full of snitches trying to catch workers slacking, that sounds like a genuinely awful place to work.
All the “best” conservative arguments are just repurposed left-wing arguments that someone ran ctrl+f and replaced each identifying term with it’s counterpart.
The infuriating part is that the reason it works is because left-wing arguments are fundamentally structured better and are more compelling. At some point in the past, a lefty made that argument to the right-winger and they could feel that they were losing the argument, so they quietly adopted the aesthetic of the same argument and later deployed it like they came up with it themselves.
It’s why every right-wing argument has to construct a fiction where their enemy already holds all the power and has been in control for decades. Everyone can intuitively feel that they’re being scammed by an unfair system that’s rigged for the benefit of the wealthy. All right-wingers have to do is convince people that the structure of society can’t be blamed on the people with the power to shape it. They just need people to blame someone they’ve already been convinced to hate. Immigrants, minorities, queers, and anyone else who would tell them who their actual enemies are.