“Good faith” is a lie
One of the more frustrating things about actually believing that good things can eventually happen is the overwhelming mountain of evidence to the contrary. We elected cosplay Abe Simpson on the promise of, 1) not Trump, 2) student loan forgiveness (to a degree), 3) an ape’s fever dream version of the New Green Deal, amongst other things. To date, we’ve received number 1, while being told the promise of 2 was actually not realistic after all and we were ridiculous to believe a campaign promise. That 3 couldn’t be passed and was even prison shivved by some of the Democrats own ghouls is such a uniquely Democrat self-own that it’s almost comforting to see them step on their own rakes. But anyone who has been paying attention to mainstream Democrat strategy since at least the Clinton administration could have seen this coming: ‘ol Billy Clint feigning the “man of the people” vibe and immediately enacting some of the harshest crime bills that have led to us being the most incarcerated and incarcerating country on this fucking planet. Obama’s promise of “Change” was merely a reference to moving from manned airstrikes to unmanned drone killings of civilians in the Middle East. Hell, the reason we have such an unprecedented number of El Salvadorians seeking refuge in the US was because of Hillary Clinton’s “democracy is only real if the brown people elect people we approve of” policy that ousted an elected president and installed murderous military leaders in their place. This is always done under the guise of sociopolitical stability, but we all know it’s about money and oil. That’s what America values and trying to argue with these assholes assumes accepting their rhetoric at face value when in reality they have proven time and again to be slimy ratfucks.
And this is across aisles: Ben Shapiro’s rapid-fire word attack so you have no time to respond in kind is an accepted tactic because hot, contrarian takes are so much more easily monetized than carefully considered arguments. Nobody wants to do the work of understanding nuance; we just want our opinions validated while also showing that our ideological opponents are the most inept dumbshits on the planet. We’ve accepted that there is no such thing as a “good faith” argument because we took good faith out back and bludgeoned it to death with PragerU and Joe Rogan and Turning Point USA: from podcast to non-profit to political action committee, nobody even gives a second thought to good faith. It’s just raging boner discourse all the way to oblivion and fuck you for actually thinking things could ever improve.
This is what’s so misguided with the “reform, not defund the police” movement: in order to actually reform any organization, the people within have to be willing to actually accept and enact change. Time and again police departments and police unions have shown that they have no interest in operating by the same rules as private citizens-qualified immunity is the best example of that. If I somehow injured one of my students in the classroom, I would be tried and held personally responsible for not only harming them, but doing so while on the job. Somehow, we’ve made it ok for police to be the ultimate exception and there is absolutely no fucking way they’ll ever willingly cede any ground unless its by force. Reform is impossible because it assumes that the police will operate in good faith, which we rarely ever see evidence of. Defund is the only way: each officer should have to have insurance should their actions lead to a citizen’s injury and beyond that, the public which they’re ostensibly supposed to serve should be the ones to assess their innocence or guilt. Institutions, legal, political, or otherwise, try to maximize their power because they’re run by people, and people crave power and status.
Even your escapism is riddled with this unctuous ideology; the current MLB standoff is at its very core a battle between competing discourses. On the one side, you have labor: the professional athletes doing the work that we watch and enjoy and pay money to see. On the other, the owners: either legacy profiteers or hedge fund adjacent shitheads who actually could give a shit about the product they’re ostensibly selling. But that’s not the narrative the owners would have you believe-no, they’ll say that they tried to make a deal with the players and that they put out an offer, but those mean ‘ol millionaires are being mean to us tycoons. Never mind that what they offered is obscenely cheap in light of the amount of actual work the players do. Ownership is only concerned with one thing-perceived value, and the only way Americans know how to maximize value is to fuck labor so thoroughly that it has to accept the terms foisted upon it. In this way, professional sports owners operate similar to a hedge fund: acquire a “product”, either by inheriting it or purchasing it outright, gut it of its labor in an attempt to “streamline operations”, then sell its bones off to another company for profit, each company attempting to create a bone broth of capital from less and less marrow until bankruptcy, at which point they can still make money because its a write off. Your team’s owners only care about winning insomuch as it helps increase the company’s perceived value-as long as they can win just enough or not lose enough to build goodwill on the part of both fans and speculative venture capitalists, that’s all that matters. And the Kristen Sinemas and Joe Manchins of the world could give a shit if you try to publicly shame them because their end game is being scooped up by a lobbying group once the body politic has shit them out. Good faith is dead and America is too busy fucking its rotting corpse to care.
