When one can no longer own the libs

I spent a good chunk of today and a good chunk on Friday cleaning my dryer vent pipes. Newspaper advice suggests doing this once a year as a way to prepare for winter. I doubt it had been done for at least two decades, likely three. Online advice says it should take about an hour. The actual cleaning took little time. Getting the pieces apart and getting them back together again took a lot longer. I sent several emails to Brother with photos and asking him how I might solve this or that problem. He replied with some help and much encouragement. Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter and rebranded it as X there have been alternate sites hoping enough people would shift to them to be the place one needed to be as Twitter had been. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos reported since the election Bluesky is becoming that online place. In the last three weeks their user base has passed 20 million (what it was before isn’t reported). Of course, there are growing pains and it doesn’t yet have all the features users want. One would think liberals leaving a conservative playground would be a good thing. Conservatives could express their most extreme thoughts with plenty of support and no pushback. But they’re whining and fuming that liberals fled.

Over the last decade-plus, conservatism has adopted a culture best described as “owning the libs.” The overriding drive behind this is to publicly demonstrate some sort of dominance over liberals as a way (they think) of exhibiting the superiority of conservatism. One would think that if conservative ideas are so great that they could merely win any argument—cutting taxes for the wealthy, deregulating big business, supporting discrimination, what’s not to like? For the right, it’s a lot easier to try and point and laugh, eternally arguing that conservative ideas and memes are so good, so powerful, so correct that liberals are constantly “triggered” and having “meltdowns.” The way conservatives seek to demonstrate this is through cruelty... Conservatives on the social network, taking their lead from Musk and his troll army of devoted followers, live to “own the libs.” Bluesky has said they value community over harassment and have put in tools and functions that—while flawed—are more in line with the tools available on Twitter before Musk took over. So if the “libs” move somewhere else, like Bluesky, there aren’t any liberals to own. ... Not having the libs to own, after making the behavior such a big part of their lives, has created a vacuum for the right. In that way, the libs have now owned them.

To me this sounds like classic hierarchical behavior. They are claiming a high position in the social hierarchy and using it to oppress those they claim are below them. And they’re mighty annoyed at the refusal to be oppressed. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a few quotes of interest. EJ Dionne, in advertising his article in the Washington Post, tweeted:

Progressives won the argument on abortion rights & same-sex marriage. How do you know? Trump & the GOP abandoned both issues, switching to trans rights. The hidden liberal victories of 2024, the limits of Trumpism & the path to long-term progress.

I’m not a subscriber to WaPo, so I don’t know what other hidden victories may be on the list. Robert Reich tweeted:

What's behind Trump’s gonzo cabinet noms? Flood the zone? Yes, but it's deeper than that. Trump wants to deflect our attention while he and his fellow billionaires loot America. He's on his way to creating a government of billionaires, by billionaires, for billionaires.

Dworkin quoted a New York Times article that reported the nasty guy has not agreed to disclose the donors paying for his transition. We should know who is giving and how much and what they expect in return. Tom Nichols tweeted the results of a YouGov poll. Nichols says this is what demographic panic looks like. This is not good for democracy. If this is what many believe no wonder they are freaking out. The poll asked “What percentage of Americans do you think are ___” The results were way off. Here are some of the results. Americans think their fellow citizens are: + Transgender: 21% + Muslim: 27% + Jewish: 30% + Black: 41% + Live in New York City: 30% + Gay or Lesbian: 30% Yes, the numbers are absurd. Muslims and Jews do not make up more than half of the country – do you see more mosques and synagogues than churches? NYC does not contain 90 million. And if 30% are gay or lesbian where are all the kids coming from? These are my answers off the top of my head: + Transgender: 2% + Muslim: 5% + Jewish: 5% + Black: 13% + Live in NYC: 5% + Gay or Lesbian: 4% The actual percentages were not included in the tweet I have access to and I didn’t easily find the survey online. I did some online research to see group populations based on 2024 numbers. I was off by a bit. + Transgender: 0.6% + Muslim: 1% + Jewish: 2% + Black: 14% + Live in NYC: 2.5% + Gay or Lesbian – 3.1% bisexual, 1.4% gay, 0.7% lesbian for a total of about 5%