As someone who has identified as an outcast and eccentric my whole life I have a bit of mixed feelings about the new Democratic messaging about "weird people"
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As someone who has identified as an outcast and eccentric my whole life I have a bit of mixed feelings about the new Democratic messaging about "weird people"
I get where you're coming from - I do think it's pretty effective rhetoric though. Honestly, I'm just kind of glad to see a departure from the "when they go low, we go high" attitude that has plagued what passes for left-wing candidates in the US.
It's fallacious rhetoric but the thing about far-righters is that accusations of being dangerous and unkind empower them more than anything, they think that's the behavior required to incite fear and assert dominance over 'unnormals.' In my personal life the only consistent way to shut down bigoted behavior before it escalated has been to say 'it's so weird that you care about this,' even if I didn't believe the weirdness was the problem.
saw this a week or two ago or whenever the discourse was happening:
Basically, people who don’t mind being called weird are “good weird.” People who get mad when they’re called weird are “bad weird.”
and i kind of instantly knew what it was intending and could interpret it in good faith, while remaining aware that it's incredibly context dependent. so i think that's the thing about such a broad umbrella of a word, it's dragging a mountain of social context and ingroup / outgroup assumptions behind it. which makes me think it probably gets less useful the more widely it circulates, and certainly wouldn't survive passing through a language barrier.