I keep seeing people on here suggest that making fun of the neo-Nazis undermines an understanding of how dangerous they are. I disagree. I think ridiculing them is both good and necessary. A short thread:

First: ridiculing Nazis is a great American tradition: https://t.co/MiazEc22FC
Satire is a potent cultural weapon and has been utilized in a political context since ancient times. It serves several functions: in a scenario where it's used to skewer people in power, it's a way to speak truth to power.
In a context more like this, where it's used to ridicule a guy in a silly costume who demands organic food for his shaman diet, it serves a related but slightly different purpose. Everyone needs to understand how dangerous that guy is.
And his stated desire to assassinate members of Congress make that clear. But if you only understand that guy as emblematic of a visceral danger to both individuals and the republic, and only portray him as a grave threat, you run a different risk:
You unwittingly valorize him as an emblem of extraordinary evil. And he is not extraordinary. There are a million people like him who didn't end up at the Capitol. He is just a dude. People who commit heinous crimes are rarely exceptional.
Very often, they are ridiculous, stupid, otherwise seemingly normal. You can be extremely silly and dangerous at the same time. Look at our president.
And if you think someone can't be ridiculous and homicidal at the same time, you don't understand the depth of the problem, or how it manifests. So we need to communicate the danger, but we also need to point out that Party City Shaman is not a supernatural villain.
Turning these guys into emblems of extraordinary evil makes them into outliers, and they are not. They are not particularly smart or wily and this kind of radicalization can happen easily, and to unremarkable people.
Depriving them of self-importance is one of several ways to attack that inflated status. They should be held accountable, and understood as threats, *and* ridiculed, endlessly.

More from Society

We finally have the U.S. Citizenship Act Bill Text! I'm going to go through some portions of the bill right now and highlight some of the major changes and improvements that it would make to our immigration system.

Thread:


First the Bill makes a series of promises changes to the way we talk about immigrants and immigration law.

Gone would be the term "alien" and in its place is "noncitizen."

Also gone would be the term "alienage," replaced with "noncitizenship."


Now we get to the "earned path to citizenship" for all undocumented immigrants present in the United States on January 1, 2021.

Under this bill, anyone who satisfies the eligibility criteria for a new "lawful prospective immigrant status" can come out of the shadows.


So, what are the eligibility criteria for becoming a "lawful prospective immigrant status"? Those are in a new INA 245G and include:

- Payment of the appropriate fees
- Continuous presence after January 1, 2021
- Not having certain criminal record (but there's a waiver)


After a person has been in "lawful prospective immigrant status" for at least 5 years, they can apply for a green card, so long as they still pass background checks and have paid back any taxes they are required to do so by law.

However! Some groups don't have to wait 5 years.

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My top 10 tweets of the year

A thread 👇

https://t.co/xj4js6shhy


https://t.co/b81zoW6u1d


https://t.co/1147it02zs


https://t.co/A7XCU5fC2m
"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".