Simply naming groups has become enough to dismiss them, particularly on social media. This works par

Simply naming groups has become enough to dismiss them, particularly on social media. This works particularly well for groups the speaker/namer mostly aligns with.

An example, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren showed signs of falling out of the race for POTUS, I saw screenshot of a Tweet on Facebook by a young African-American woman saying something like: "RBG tote bag twitter is in full meltdown this morning."

This tweet was pretty effective. A sufficiently savvy person pictured exactly who she meant: young feminist white women, very likely in glasses, maybe a Bryn Mawr grad, who loved the idea of an educated woman in the White House. The funny thing about it is, it's a safe bet that you'd have a hard time finding very much that the person tweeting and RBG tote bag Twitter disagreed about at any given time except right now. The tote bag team liked Warren. The person tweeting (I presume) liked Bernie. Rather than engage on the substance it was much easier to simply diminish.

Name. Force an image. Reader laughs. Repeat.

I suppose this sounds like a critique and I guess on some level it is, but to me what's interesting is this: All it takes is a name. A name just creates two categories: that / not that. If you can picture the group named and you aren't in it, then they are "that," you are "not that" and you laugh.

It doesn't seem like people interrogate it any further than that! If you can picture it and you are "not that" it's funny. All it takes is naming.

Addendum: I can't quite explain this yet but I also submit that — for reasons I can't quite explain — the closer the group named is to your group culturally, the better it works. So it's more effective, in the example above, for one person in the broader liberal/progressive milieu to name and shame another liberal/progressive category than it is to name and shame, say, a non-urban more traditionally minded person.