I once got into an all-out argument about grapes, which was actually an argument about morality, and I think about it almost every day!
My apartment was watching tv together, and a character who was food shopping walked past a display of grapes and grabbed one.
My friend went, "I can't believe she just took a grape!"
To which my partner and I responded, "Like you've never eaten a grape while you were grocery shopping? Everyone does that!"
But apparently "everyone," did not do that, because my friend had never, and she was concerned.
Basically she felt that if we were ok with taking a grape (or even 2, or several!) at the grocery store, there was no saying what other chaos we'd be willing to wreak on society. We could feed plastic to turtles! We could jaywalk! We could kill!
(She did mention that if we NEEDED to take a grape in order to eat she'd more than understand, capitalist dystopia and all, but we were all living together and she knew we were fortunate enough to not be dealing with "this stolen grape is my dinner"-level financial constraints.)
But the idea that we would take a grape just because we felt like it was ominous. She assumed it meant that we had made a unilateral decision about rules.
We weren't taking a grape because we wanted one and felt that the grocery store would survive despite us—
We were taking a grape to signal our larger moral philosophy, roughly summarized as "WE WILL NOT BE CONSTRAINED BY THE FOOLISH RULES OF MAN, ALL RULES AND SOCIAL CONTRACTS ARE EQUALLY EMPTY AND VOID IN OUR DEVIL-RED EYES!"
Which I think is where this kind of take comes in, where this person compares 2 statements with the apparent purpose of highlighting a damning inconsistency:
This idea that because someone (in this case, AOC) is opposed to censorship in one case, they should also a) see the blacklisting of Parler by Apple after it's been used to organize an insurrection as equivalent censorship, and b) be opposed to it with equivalent verve.
This idea that having varying views based on the specifics of a situation is actually hypocrisy, because worldviews should be one size fits all.
Not only is it just simplistic, it's also a convenient way to use whataboutisms to make inequality into policy by acting like the words are what matter, instead of the consequences.
It also works to the great benefit of white supremacist groups and indoctrinators et al, who excel at finding the idea they hold most closely aligned with yours, and then expanding it into a framework through which you can and must view the whole world (or you're a hypocrite).
I feel like this seems kind of obvious, but it's also a disagreement that I had with someone I consider quite smart, and I think it can also be easy to forget at moments like this.
Anyway my point is you can have multiple nuanced opinions, each tailored to the situation at hand! You can make individual choices instead of having One Philosophy!
You can take a grape without fomenting fascism and, actually, you should!
You can follow @lindsaylwallace.
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