![](\"http:\/\/minnesotademocratsexposed.com\/MDEMNPubliusHappyHour.png\")
<\/p>\nFirst, the plug:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It’s the first Minnesota Democrats Exposed\/MNPublius Happy Hour, at Billy’s on Grand. Hope to see you there.<\/p>\n
———-<\/p>\n
Of course, it’s not all beer and pretzels.<\/p>\n
A very smart man – a teacher of mine who’d served in Vietnam – explained the “why” of basic training.\u00a0 “The goal” he said “is to teach you to dehumanize your enemy”; to see the enemy not as a human being, but as a “Jap” or a “Kraut” or a “Gook” or whomever the enemy of the day is, a not-quite-human thing who doesn’t rate the consideration a human does.\u00a0 Someone you can kill not only with impunity, but with your country’s approval.<\/p>\n
In Citizen Soldiers<\/em>, Steven Ambrose described the moments when GIs in World War II started seeing the enemy as human – as people who really weren’t all that different from them (notwithstanding the whole “supported a regime that started a war that brought them to Europe” bit).<\/p>\n It was a huge moment for everyone involved.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n Years and years ago – when I first got a computer, actually, back before “the web” was the common synonym for the Internet – I got involved in an “E-Democracy” email discussion group on Minnesota Politics.<\/p>\n Traditionally, online discussion groups tend to fall into one of two categories, each with its own set of pathologies:<\/p>\n In the early days, the E-Democracy forums trended toward “1”, above. And it was fairly predictable stuff. They were (then as today) dominated by DFLers and Greens. I was, in fact, invited to join the forum by the chairman of the state Libertarian party (to which I then belonged) to help even things up a little bit; at the time, there were maybe two Republicans, two Libertarians, and dozens and dozens of DFL\/Green\/”Reform”-future IndyVentura party members (and a couple of typically-irritating Young Socialists).<\/p>\n And it was wild and wooly. And then the forum’s management threw a party.<\/p>\n We met at Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis.\u00a0 We brought brats and beer (and tofu, natch) and chips, and sat down at picnic tables…<\/p>\n …and talked baseball and street cleaning and movies and just a tiny little dab of politics.<\/p>\n I wrote in my wrapup on the forum the next day that it was just a tiny<\/em> bit harder to flame on people that I’d met in person.\u00a0 That I’d actually met as humans,<\/em> rather than as mere brain-damaged big-government-coddling tax-and-spend liberal drones.\u00a0 And a few of them wrote as well, saying they could maybe be a little more tolerant of uncaring, selfish conservatives now that they’d actually met some of us – something they didn’t do<\/em> much of in real life.<\/p>\n It made an impression.<\/p>\n Oh, it only lasted so long, of course.\u00a0 Soon a few of us (myself, you’ll be shocked to know, included) indulged in a few petty flames for old time’s sake. \u00a0 Other just never “got” the whole “the other guy is human too” bit.\u00a0 But things got, and stayed, just a tad more civil, because people got to see each other as just a tad less a collection of labels and more as people who believed what they did for their own reasons, but didn’t exist in vacuums.<\/p>\n Today, the email discussion group is pretty much an anachronism (and “E-Democracy” has decayed into a sad joke); blogs pretty much gutted their reason for existence.\u00a0 Everyone can write anything they want; blogs that are nothing but mindless flames tend to get ignored over time (or turn into Democratic Underground).<\/p>\n But the same pattern holds just as true; people see those across the aisles as labels to attack, pathologies to identify, threats to be counterattacked.<\/p>\n And just like E-Democracy 13 years ago, some of us thought – “Maybe the answer is a party”.<\/p>\n More tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First, the plug: It’s the first Minnesota Democrats Exposed\/MNPublius Happy Hour, at Billy’s on Grand. Hope to see you there. ———- Of course, it’s not all beer and pretzels. A very smart man – a teacher of mine who’d served in Vietnam – explained the “why” of basic training.\u00a0 “The goal” he said “is to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-culture-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Both sides<\/strike> All three or four or five sides tore into each other like hungry sharks.\u00a0 I ripped into “liberals” with gleeful abandon, and they ripped back.\u00a0 Because there’s nothing in Minnesota Politics that we detested more than each other.<\/p>\n