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Wednesday, May 23, 2018

When Identities and Interests Conflict or Shamelessness Is On The Rise?

Image result for trump saudi orbSaudis and Qataris hugging Islamophobic Trump?
Israelis hugging anti-semitic Trump folks?

Is this the end times depicted in Ghostbusters--cats and dogs playing together?  Or are we just hitting peak hypocrisy which, of course, has been best illustrated by the willingness of evangelicals to sell out all of their principles for the pursuit of power?

Values and interests have often conflicted, and, yes, Organized Hypocrisy has long been a thing.  But it does seem that there is now greater shamelessness than in the past and perhaps a greater divorce between what a group says it values and what it actually values.  This is clearly not just a Trump thing, but, again, the extreme nature of the Trump regime--that it is so supportive of white supremacists, xenophobes, misogynists, corruption, and on and on--makes it far clearer that folks are selling out their values for access and power.

So, what to do about this?  Call it out, of course.  The problem is that motivated bias means that people only pay attention to the hypocrisy of their adversaries and not themselves.  Minimize one's own hypocrisy?  Hmmmm, that might be hard, but I do think calling out one's own allies for violating values, such as Al Franken, is necessary if we want any values to be more than just convenient covers for the pursuit of interest/power.

But I am out of ideas, so any suggestions would be most welcome.  How should we (whoever the we is) deal with the shamelessness of people embracing those who hate them just for the convenience du jour?

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