8 Comments

I try to avoid instant responses. Some inexpert people are trying to be sarcastic without explicitly marking it, which always causes trouble.

Some expert propagandists use parody as a post-hoc trick. When they say something that turns out to be wrong, they backdate it as parody. "Everything I say is ironic, unless I tell you it's true right now. But I'll probably change my mind and call it ironic tomorrow."

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Also, the best "statue account" is Cultural Tutor!

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Ooooof that Russia post is quite off-putting even in the context of the similar posts — partly because it's such a weird formulation in the first place. It's so obvious that moving to any foreign country involves plenty of challenges that asking "what's stopping you?" seems to beg for snarky answers... and then they up the ante by asking it about Putin's Russia while the dictator is on the rampage in Ukraine. 🤦🏼‍♀️ You don't need much social awareness to realize this, so it feels provocative even in context. It's just so hard to imagine one's self hitting send on that post.

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Great post. I think it is reasonable to guess that culture critic knows what will be inferred about him from this post about Russia. The context you added complicates this but at best it was a mistake. I value beautiful architecture at least as much as he does but I value opposition to tyranny higher and think this message harms the goal of beautiful architecture that we share. The ugly modern architecture has very deep ties to utopian totalitarian movements, so the opponents of culture critic's project are also not covering themselves in glory on the same point. But today there are plenty of people who love beautiful classical architecture who are sadly unattached to democracy, at best (and historically, it is just a fact that both Hitler and Stalin had more classical western taste and a particular interest in promoting it.)

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Bad faith people gonna bad faith. Just the way it is.

But I think the deeper problem is simply the nature of twitter (and also bluesky etc). Any time people are judged based solely a few words that they sent out to the entire world, without knowing anything about context or intent ... well, it can lead to big trouble.

This example is famous but really worth thinking about:

(gift link)

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nU4.L08T.h7WatVZMCEfT&smid=url-share

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I guess I don't understand how the two statements are analogous. "Why don't you move to Russia" ignores the reality of Putinism. Whereas "apartments full of DINKs are pure money for the locality" is true. It doesn't ignore reality at all, it's just blunt (arguably rude) about it. There's a large gap between the two.

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Oh no, I'm not saying the thing about apartments had a double meaning. I'm saying I mistook his straightforward argument for a slight against families because of my own wrong pre-conceived ideas about urbanists (back then!)

But that's kind of the whole thing I'm thinking about here - how do you even know when there is an implied meaning?

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I tend to follow the maxim of “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law”. He who is without bad faith every now and then would be divine. In both of the cases you mentioned, I would suspect a certain amount of double talk. Nothing wrong with that, it’s how to navigate this touchy cultural moment.

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