Lefty Internal Politics: How to Talk About This Stuff?

[Raja]

honestly i saw that sologdin post and made myself a fresh cup of tea and settled in to read. unexpected treat on hump day.

[TrackerNeil]

On 5/23/2023 at 3:12 PM, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Similarly, the people on the left who engage in purist orthodoxy don’t have a special name for themselves, they’re just more likely to call out those who disagree with them as bigots, gatekeepers of privilege, secret conservatives, or some other type of “Other” to enforce the us vs them dynamic. It’s in their interest to use the socially accepted signifiers available to them, and so essentially they hide in plain sight, save for their actions.

Good gods, yes...this thirst for doctrine is most illiberal, in my view, and smacks of cultism. If I wanted dogma, I'd be a conservative.

I remember once being in a leftist space (which shall remain nameless) and up came the topic in local news, of a woman who had accused a once-beloved state senator of sexual misconduct that, she alleged, took place twenty years previously. Of course, it is required that we #BelieveWomen, which is why it was particularly shocking when someone pointed out that the accuser had once pleaded guilty to perjury, which might make her reliability less than reliable. I held my breath, awaiting a massacre, and I was not disappointed. These people set upon each other like velociraptors, and before you could say "clever girl" half the place was accused of being toxic, problematic, white supremacist, etc. (I don't know how the hell it was white supremacy, given that everyone involved was white, but, whatever.) I couldn't believe what I was seeing, but these days I am a little wiser about just how open-minded a segment of the left really is.

Edited May 24, 2023 by TrackerNeil

[Phylum of Alexandria]

13 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

I remember once being in a leftist space (which shall remain nameless) and up came the topic in local news, of a woman who had accused a once-beloved state senator of sexual misconduct that, she alleged, took place twenty years previously. Of course, it is required that we #BelieveWomen, which is why it was particularly shocking when someone pointed out that the accuser had once pleaded guilty to perjury, which might make her reliability less than reliable. I held my breath, awaiting an massacre, and I was not disappointed. These people set upon each other like velociraptors*, and before you could say "clever girl" half the place was accused of being toxic, problematic, white supremacist, etc. (I don't know how the hell it was white supremacy, given that everyone involved was white, but, whatever.) I couldn't believe what I was seeing, but these days I am a little wiser about just how open-minded a segment of the left really is.

It sounds like you have more face-to-face experience with this stuff than I do. Admittedly most of the insanity I've encountered has been online. Your perspectives are appreciated! Maybe you can convince those who are inclined to minimize or wave away this topic that it's actually a real problem, and that's it's worth talking about.

16 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

up came the topic in local news, of a woman who had accused a once-beloved state senator of sexual misconduct that, she alleged, took place twenty years previously. Of course, it is required that we #BelieveWomen, which is why it was particularly shocking when someone pointed out that the accuser had once pleaded guilty to perjury, which might make her reliability less than reliable. I held my breath, awaiting an massacre, and I was not disappointed. These people set upon each other like velociraptors*, and before you could say "clever girl" half the place was accused of being toxic, problematic, white supremacist, etc. (I don't know how the hell it was white supremacy, given that everyone involved was white, but, whatever.) I couldn't believe what I was seeing, but these days I am a little wiser about just how open-minded a segment of the left really is.

Yeah, that issue of BelieveWomen is really tough. That sentiment came to being because our current culture and justice system tends to disadvantage women who are victims of sexual assault or harassment. So I totally understand the reasoning behind their lack of faith in the system. And yet...at the same time, was it not obvious that such an unregulated bottom-up system of accusation could be easily abused? So what is the solution? Hopefully there is some substantial reform of the courts, so that desperate people don't feel they need to resort to kangaroo courts and vigilante justice. Because that's just nihilism dressed as idealism. And that's not even really factoring in the people shutting down or demonizing those who disagree with them.

 

 

[sologdin]

fairly simple plain English

sometimes a virtue, sometimes a liability. i suspect that little is simple or plain. it reminds me of the MAGA voter who litters casual conversation with the most coarse ideological judgments and then complains when someone brings politics into this.

 

basic language I’m experiencing trouble here, so I feel like my trying to introduce new terminology would lead to an even more fraught a process than it has been

the more usage, the more history of reception, and thus the greater likelihood of contrary abstractions accreting around a term. sometimes a new term avoids this problem. 

 

passing comments in a thread don’t seem to bad to me!

i don't think it's bad, either, to note what's annoying. but even if it were, we shouldn't jump across the author/text chasm to cancel you for it.  as a metric on which conduct on the left should be subject to discipline, however, this sort of gustatory objection should be avoided.  

discipline should probably be exercised only in concrete cases or controversies, rather than through general abstract denunciations.  the latter comes across as bit too two-minutes-hatey.  also it should likely not be exercised in representative capacity, unless the representative has been specifically retained for that purpose.  one is reminded of diderot's complaint about seneca's "defect of letting oneself be carried by the interest of the cause that one is defending beyond the limits of truth," a common defect for those who act even professionally in representative capacity; diderot, indeed, would pardon seneca for it, considering how common it is. but i'm not really inclined to pardon it, as mere commonality is not really self-warranting.  who should be adjudicating all of this is difficult--it's all market mechanisms in the recent wave, automatic coordination of grievance, hayekian leftism. gross?

 

uncritical certainty

this strikes me as a dunning-kruger problem--ready activism with more energy and principle than knowledge and circumspection. a standard vicenarian defect.  

Edited May 24, 2023 by sologdin

[Larry of the Lawn]

Well at least this got @sologdin and @Nas! out of protective custody

[Phylum of Alexandria]

37 minutes ago, sologdin said:

it reminds me of the MAGA voter who litters casual conversation with the most coarse ideological judgments and then complains when someone brings politics into this.

Wait, were you talking to my mom?

 

[Phylum of Alexandria]

47 minutes ago, sologdin said:

this strikes me as a dunning-kruger problem--ready activism with more energy and principle than knowledge and circumspection. a standard vicenarian defect.  

Certainly, youthfulness is important to consider, at least for easy certainty on the left. I'm less worried about young adults than the older adults who encourage and exacerbate such tendencies among them. The insanity that swept over Evergreen College was almost entirely engineered by certain faculty members in the early stages, and the administration that caved into every demand. The worst of the students were to blame for how the takeover played out, but in my opinion the older adults were the true fanatics, and they provoked the students into a panic.

[TrackerNeil]

5 hours ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Maybe you can convince those who are inclined to minimize or wave away this topic that it's actually a real problem, and that's it's worth talking about.

I can't remember the last time I convinced anyone of anything; I don't think most people are convinceable in general, much less on this topic. I often ask people the last topic--or any topic--on which they changed their minds, and I rarely get an answer more substantial than ice cream flavors.

The inevitable question I get when discussing this kind of leftie dogmatism is, "Do you think this is the most pressing problem in the nation?" Of course I don't; I'm more worried about the conservative capture of the Supreme Court, and the erosion of American democracy, and income inequality. However, the rise of this purity-over-politics, identity-obsessed, social-justice faction on the left makes those things worse. How can you oppose the right when the left has got the daggers out for you? 

Edited May 25, 2023 by TrackerNeil

[ThinkerX]

To the person being shot, does it matter if the person pulling the trigger is a far-right 'patriot' or a far-left adherent of ANTIFA? Both groups are quite capable of atrocities and imposing rigid dogma upon each other. 

That said, here in the far north, I am surrounded by Trump fans (many of whom proudly display assorted Trump flags as signs of tribal loyalty). Yet on some topics, quite a few of these folks are quite amiable to more 'left' notions - such as greatly expanded Medicaid and environmental regulations. This stems from their experiences with high medical costs and having to contend with things like contaminated groundwater from old dump sites. A surprising number are into solar and wind power (mostly for off-grid dwellings.) The trick is to focus on issues, especially issues they contend with directly, instead of ideology.

[Varysblackfyre321]

On 5/23/2023 at 12:12 PM, Phylum of Alexandria said:

The potentially good news is that there are at least some signs that people are getting weary of these people, or are at least grudgingly acknowledging that puritanical approaches don’t get you very far.

We may have different standards of “puritanical” but I would agree a portion  people of the left(speaking really broadly)  can be alienating in their discourse and activism.

Theres some who’ve recently started treating dumb as an ableist slur for instance.

I won’t deny for some it’s purely an ego thing and that they can be counterproductive.

Hell some in their zeal to destroy people closer to them ideologically have even enlisted the aid of the far right or unknowingly used by the far right. An example of this I learned about is some progressives trying to get Elon musk’s Twitter to deplatform a trans woman who virtually destroyed Qiwi farms, a site dedicated to terrorizing people they saw as degenerate, that being mainly trans people. Another example which I’ve seen personally that infuriates me is attacking Anneusar-busc for hiring Dylan Mulvaney to say they’re beer tastes good in one tic-tok as not someone they deemed a superior advocate for trans rights instead of focusing on condemning the right wing terror campaign waged and supporting their victims.

I do hope this demonstrates a willingness to give internal criticism

I do think often such behavior is an over-correction in response to those who fancy themselves as their sides political leaders being too eager to try cooing to hardline conservatives—even reactionaries—for political power and I do think people in some instances are too quick to blame people on the left as overly puritanical in their as being why they failed to get something.
The current leaders of  Democratic Party in New York largely blamed its progressive members of the party for its abysmal showing in the 2022 election when many adopted a “tough on crime” stance and for years put on conservative state supreme court justices who limited the democrats ability to redistrict effectively.

On 5/23/2023 at 12:12 PM, Phylum of Alexandria said:

In the past I've tried to tie it to certain labels (Woke or Critical Theory fanatics, for instance) but then most people pushed back on the ways in which those terms are misused, or the exceptions that don't fit my characterization

If there’s an instance where something you called woke doesn’t fit your previously ascribed definition isn’t the proper thing to do is to just say that thing isn’t woke or expand the definition of woke to include it?

On 5/23/2023 at 12:12 PM, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Similarly, the people on the left who engage in purist orthodoxy don’t have a special name for themselves,

Ngl this feels a bit like hand-wringing over people not wanting to adopt a label they view as an insult.  Again we may have different standards on what ‘purist orthodoxy’ looks like but what springs to mind are people who usually aren’t shy about labeling themselves.   it’s just the labels don’t provide an easy to communicate sneer. It’s easier to sneer at a person as being woke then a post-modern, anti-realist, anarchist.
To be clear I’m not into liberal civility politics. I see the value insulting people and stigmatizing them.

when I call someone a racist I’m usually not trying to change that person’s mind directly, I’m trying to help mitigate their influence and categorize them as a threat.

What you’re doing seems closer looking at a group of Christians, calling them doomsday cultists or as Baptist and then acting as if they’re being dishonest when they don’t happily accept the categorization.

On 5/23/2023 at 12:12 PM, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Right wing distortions certainly make things worse, but I think the quibbling would be there no matter what, because there's no one answer.

Okay you’ve forced me into it—I’ll pope be the pope of the left. 

On 5/23/2023 at 12:12 PM, Phylum of Alexandria said:

but at some point the predominant focus of academics and the activists inspired by them came to be changing and perfecting the culture, through language and other signifiers. Unfortunately, this approach leads to a lot of micro-managing how people express themselves, and a whole lot of performative pandering in lieu of changes that actually make people safer, better cared for, etc. And certainly the most obnoxious people on the left are the ones most obsessed with this superficial symbolic stuff, and the ones most likely to regurgitate critical theory concepts to enforce their orthodoxy.

 

I really hate to use this phrase because it comes from Breitbart but it’s actually applicable here: politics is the downstream of culture. Language, symbolism, they do help shape public thought and eventually public action or reaction to certain policy. The propensity of Evangelism in the US has helped make  even the upkeep of bare bones safety nets in the US a perversion as people see government as being a tool to punish degeneracy first and foremost.

 

[Varysblackfyre321]

8 hours ago, TrackerNeil said:

However, the rise of this purity-over-politics, identity-obsessed, social-justice faction on the left makes those things worse.

Eh, without a strong positive interest in social justice it’d be hard to get motivated in preserving democracy and reproductive rights

And it’s politically advantageous to get people to see things as directly negative for them or members of groups they ascribe to than some amorphous abstract ideal.

17 hours ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Perhaps mass boycotts can be said to be exploiting the system for your own gain, but it’s a tactic that the right wing has been using as well, since at least the 1920s. It’s a way to signal demand for the market to supply

I’m not a fan of expressly called for boycotts generally—mainly because I think it’s a too idealistic solution(let people vote with their dollar)  to dealing with addressing certain things.

17 hours ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

And when people are spending their time and energy vying for how representative a given Disney character is—rather than critiquing the film's lazy pandering, or actually promoting more worthwhile entertainment outside of the Disney stranglehold—how different is it from cultural conservative consumers who engage with the same content,

I do hope by virtue of using the word lazy you understand pandering is a given and isn’t necessarily bad for a media company to do.
If not this  unironicly feels a bit like purity getting in the way pragmatism.
it’s the first priority for any media media corp who distills entertainment to get money and that necessitates pandering to some extent. You will never find any successful entertainment venue that purely looks at entertainment as an artistic endeavor and put no stock in trying to appeal to pandering to their would be consumers biases to some extent.

It’s actually valuable for lgbt rights whenever Disney positively depicts an openly gay or trans character in even the most milktoast ways, because those are literally the only significant interactions a lot of people will ever have with trans people and sexual minorities. Cultural conservatives understand this it’s why they get so mad at it because it makes the erasure they want to do so much harder. 

 

14 hours ago, TrackerNeil said:

remember once being in a leftist space (which shall remain nameless) and up came the topic in local news, of a woman who had accused a once-beloved state senator of sexual misconduct that, she alleged, took place twenty years previously. Of course, it is required that we #BelieveWomen, which is why it was particularly shocking when someone pointed out that the accuser had once pleaded guilty to perjury, which might make her reliability less than reliable. I

I am wary of this idea of believing every accusation of sexual misconduct. But From what I’m reading from you the concern put forward there looks dangerous. If the perjury case didn’t directly have anything to do with them accusing someone of sexual assault. You can’t find any single instance of a sexual assault survivor never doing something bad or even lying in their life, the perfect victim doesn’t exist.

[TrackerNeil]

1 hour ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

I am wary of this idea of believing every accusation of sexual misconduct. But From what I’m reading from you the concern put forward there looks dangerous. If the perjury case didn’t directly have anything to do with them accusing someone of sexual assault. You can’t find any single instance of a sexual assault survivor never doing something bad or even lying in their life, the perfect victim doesn’t exist.

This wasn't about the accuser in question; it's about the ability of leftists being able to raise reasonable questions without worrying about stepping on an ideological land mine. While it's true that a person's history of perjury doesn't mean they are  currently lying, it's not unreasonable to question their trustworthiness. The reaction in that room, by many, was that the question was not only unreasonable, but sexist, racist, classist, bigoted, hateful, misogynist...the list goes on. 

If we on the left are going to treat certain ideas as sacrosanct, and immune to questioning, we're going to move slowly away from empiricism towards dogmatism. That's a road that has seen a lot of traffic, and it doesn't lead anywhere good.

[Varysblackfyre321]

28 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

If we on the left are going to treat certain ideas as sacrosanct, and immune to questioning, we're going to move slowly away from empiricism towards dogmatism.

It may be unfair to say but my eyes glazed over.

this feels like the type of moralistic rant conservatives give when disparaging talk of climate change or evolution as religious. 
 

28 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

This wasn't about the accuser in question; it's about the ability of leftists being able to raise reasonable questions

From what you’ve given it wasn’t a reasonable question.

28 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

While it's true that a person's history of perjury doesn't mean they are  currently lying, it's not unreasonable to question their trustworthiness.

It is unreasonable unless there’s some specific similarities in terms of the lies and the accusations being used.

28 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

The reaction in that room, by many, was that the question was not only unreasonable, but sexist, racist, classist, bigoted, hateful, misogynist...the list goes on. 

Such questioning can be misogyny yes.

 

Edited May 25, 2023 by Varysblackfyre321

[Phylum of Alexandria]

3 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

We may have different standards of “puritanical” but I would agree a portion  people of the left(speaking really broadly)  can be alienating in their discourse and activism.

Theres some who’ve recently started treating dumb as an ableist slur for instance.

I won’t deny for some it’s purely an ego thing and that they can be counterproductive.

Hell some in their zeal to destroy people closer to them ideologically have even enlisted the aid of the far right or unknowingly used by the far right. An example of this I learned about is some progressives trying to get Elon musk’s Twitter to deplatform a trans woman who virtually destroyed Qiwi farms, a site dedicated to terrorizing people they saw as degenerate, that being mainly trans people. Another example which I’ve seen personally that infuriates me is attacking Anneusar-busc for hiring Dylan Mulvaney to say they’re beer tastes good in one tic-tok as not someone they deemed a superior advocate for trans rights instead of focusing on condemning the right wing terror campaign waged and supporting their victims.

I do hope this demonstrates a willingness to give internal criticism

It most certainly does! Thank you for the good faith effort. It really means a lot, especially given how toxic these threads can get.

 

3 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

I do think often such behavior is an over-correction in response to those who fancy themselves as their sides political leaders being too eager to try cooing to hardline conservatives—even reactionaries—for political power and I do think people in some instances are too quick to blame people on the left as overly puritanical in their as being why they failed to get something.
The current leaders of  Democratic Party in New York largely blamed its progressive members of the party for its abysmal showing in the 2022 election when many adopted a “tough on crime” stance and for years put on conservative state supreme court justices who limited the democrats ability to redistrict effectively.

Yeah, it's important not to get too carried away with the sentiment. I think you and I had talked about that Intercept article on progressive organizational unrest, and it's true that it wasn't all ideological puritanism that was to blame. And beyond other political considerations, some of the gripes of those people contributing to the unrest were actually valid. Which makes it a tougher needle to thread.

3 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

If there’s an instance where something you called woke doesn’t fit your previously ascribed definition isn’t the proper thing to do is to just say that thing isn’t woke or expand the definition of woke to include it?

I'm not quite sure what you're asking here. If we're talking about conversations where people calibrate and argue over definitions, I'm all for that, so long as it's a prelude to an actual discussion of the matter at hand, rather than people shutting others down for using the wrong terminology.

If you're asking me why I chose Woke and still think it's not a terrible choice to use, well, the most important reason is because it's a word where most people I talk to know precisely what I mean, and when they use it I know what they mean. When I say "most people," I am talking about people I talk to face to face, who are not very online, and are mostly disengaged from political activity beyond voting (...probably). I don't quite like term "slacktivist," but it's out there in the world, in use, at least in online writing, so I used it.

Beyond its pragmatic utility, I don't mind using Woke in that sense, even though I know that the original meaning of Woke was very different. All respect to Huddie Ledbetter who brought Original Woke to Black American culture, but Twitter progressives created their own Diet Woke around 2014, and it was that lesser version that became the target of criticism and lampooning. If you ask a right winger what Woke is they might say it's drag queens hiding in library books, I dunno. But ask any person who's not very online, and the picture they paint will look a lot like those obnoxious Twitter progressives and their Diet Woke recipe. Thus, I'm fine with the name, though obviously the right wing rendering it meaningless doesn't help.

Woke or not Woke, it would be nice to have some sort of commonly understood language from which conversations can start.

3 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Ngl this feels a bit like hand-wringing over people not wanting to adopt a label they view as an insult.  Again we may have different standards on what ‘purist orthodoxy’ looks like but what springs to mind are people who usually aren’t shy about labeling themselves.   it’s just the labels don’t provide an easy to communicate sneer. It’s easier to sneer at a person as being woke then a post-modern, anti-realist, anarchist.
To be clear I’m not into liberal civility politics. I see the value insulting people and stigmatizing them.

when I call someone a racist I’m usually not trying to change that person’s mind directly, I’m trying to help mitigate their influence and categorize them as a threat.

What you’re doing seems closer looking at a group of Christians, calling them doomsday cultists or as Baptist and then acting as if they’re being dishonest when they don’t happily accept the categorization.

I see what you're saying, and I don't think it's quite was I'm trying to get at, but admittedly what I'm trying to get at is a little complicated.

In terms of the self-identity thing, perhaps a more pithy way of stating it would be: it would be convenient for the sake of distinction if there were such a thing as the ScotFal club, but instead we have to look for the people who see themselves as typical Scots telling their neighbors that they are not truly Scotsmen. 

While everyone is susceptible to this type of thinking at some point in their lives, it's also true that, these days, the most rampant and egregious No True Lefty stuff comes from what at least sometimes seems like a specific subsection of the left. But as I tried to get into originally, and as I will try to clarify below, it's not as simple as that. And so even if others want to put a label on them, there's no great label to come up with, because each attempt needlessly implicates others who did no wrong.

3 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

I really hate to use this phrase because it comes from Breitbart but it’s actually applicable here: politics is the downstream of culture. Language, symbolism, they do help shape public thought and eventually public action or reaction to certain policy. The propensity of Evangelism in the US has helped make  even the upkeep of bare bones safety nets in the US a perversion as people see government as being a tool to punish degeneracy first and foremost.

I can agree that there has been and can be some value to these efforts, but any virtue left unchecked becomes a vice, with toxic effects. 

Before I go any further though, it is important to try to clarify the different levels of the Social Left cultural milieu that I'm talking about.

So, first: the scholarly level. The seminal works of the early critical theorists and post-structuralists are really important stuff to read and consider, and collectively push back against the excesses and shortcomings of the more traditional liberal Enlightenment philosophers. Even in these early works, there is a strong sense of purism and essentialism that can be hard to take, but it's at least understandable from a historical point of view (for instance, the Frankfort scholars after fleeing Nazi Germany). Blaming Adorno for the unchecked essentialism that others took from him later on is like blaming Nirvana for Staind. It's not fair to the originator, but still the connection is there. 

The few works I've read by Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and other CRT-related scholars have all been thoughtful, incisive, powerful stuff. But a lot of this stuff is most powerful and useful when it's viewed as a corrective pushback against more sanguine takes on sociology or criminal justice. As a governing paradigm, critical theory is relentlessly bleak; either self defeating or wallowing in defeat. Plus, any academic field full of people who agree with each other and left unchallenged by other peers grow sloppy, decadent, more prone to pseudo-intellectualism. That's not true of someone like Bell, and it's not true of every scholar nowadays, but it has become more true of the field overall, there's more junk out there left unchallenged.

Then there's the broader academic climate: the teachers, the students, and the administration that panders to them. The teachers will cite Foucault and Bell and so on, and some of the more astute students will take in their names and read more and more. But generally what's being impressed upon students of Critical Studies majors is the general paradigm: the moral frameworks, the assumptions, the priorities, and the terminology. This is perhaps where the raw angst of Adorno gets processed into its Staind version, especially among the students who respond to the moral content but not the intellectual considerations. And over time, especially with internet, this broader climate gets diffused more into the general social justice climate. Misuse of the original concepts becomes more common, often by people who don't know their origin. Thus pseudo-intellectualism is through the roof among the most zealous people, as is the unchecked certainty. It probably started with a small group of weirdos on Tumblr and then Twitter, but then it spread to influence how a big swath of the left talked about and framed issues.

So is this a Critical Theory problem? In some respects, but it's misleading to castigate CRT or critical theorists.

Is it a social justice problem? Not as a whole. Terms like "SJW" impugn a lot of thoughtful people doing good work, when it's really just a certain subset who fit the stereotype worthy of criticism. 

Is it every effort related to Cultural change? No, as I said, there are some benefits to those attempts. For me, it's the singular focus, and especially when more direct or more substantive factors are de-prioritized that I find problematic. Virtues as vices and all that.

So how do I talk about it? It's still not clear. At least with Woke, there was the move to embrace it in its lamer diet Woke variety, and most people know what you mean when you say it. But I understand that it's flawed, especially when discussing it with people who are more politically engaged on the left. So, it remains challenging.

Edited May 25, 2023 by Phylum of Alexandria

[TrackerNeil]

42 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

It may be unfair to say but my eyes glazed over.

It may or may not be unfair, but it's kinda rude. I think you and I don't need to interact any more.

[James Arryn]

Just reading the OP, one immediate reaction;

Yes, both sides have extremes and both extremes can be destructive/counterproductive and can engage in some similarities in behaviour. But a big difference Left to Right is how they get there: the extreme on one side is much more likely to come from a history of oppression or at least…making up a word here, disprivilege , and the extreme of the other more from one of privilege or being an oppressor. 

So in a way it’s a difficult discussion partly because to dismiss the extremists on the left is to at least in part dismiss many who have the most first-hand experience with the kinds of dynamics/systems the left as a whole wants to eliminate. Whereas dismissing the extremes of the right is much more likely to dismiss many with the most first-hand experience of privilege and/or partaking in oppression.

So like take as an extreme, a POC trans person…they are probably more prone to seeing racism or gender bigotry everywhere, and blame any misdeed by someone as being grounded in the biases they are regularly faced with, including of course times where there may have been rational explanations for someone’s behaviour being motivated by something not related to bigotry AND there are times where bigotry is the most likely explanation, but not the specific bigotry that ‘extremist leftist’ has themselves been subjected to and therefore sees first ~ everywhere. 

Now, a clarification, I am not saying that anyone who has themselves been at the extreme in experiencing prejudice turns to the extreme in identifying it…indeed some people from the latter tend to be more acute in excluding or at least remaining open-minded about possibly bigoted behaviour being not necessarily reflective of bigotry and/or the kind they themselves have faced. But the problem is how do you address those who do when the majority of those on the left who might see it as inaccurate are speaking from a less personally experienced perspective. Do those people have the right or qualifications to ethically talk down to such extremists? I am not comfortable with any answer I can think of. 

Whereas on the right, the extremists are much more likely to be much less experienced with bigotry from any side but dishing it out. Meaning rationally and ethically their disqualification from speaking to whether bigotry is present in a given instance or as a whole is beneficial to the discussion’s level of being informed, objective and representative of the kinds of thinking that measure up to the at least professed western values of freedom, equality of opportunity and meritocracy. So while eliminating the extreme voices on the left would silence some of those best placed to speak on the issues at hand, doing so with the extremes of the right just improves the conversation and increases the (admittedly) small areas of potential common ground that might be made in order to bring things forward in American society as is. 

Caveat: like with bank robbers or pickpockets or w/e, the ‘reformed’ former criminals/bigots can actually provide some of the most productive/important insights on now the system works from the inside, how it starts, how it grows, how they communicate, etc. But they tend to be fairly rare and not easy to reliably identify. 

Anyways, to talk from my own perspective on the discussions here, there is for example one poster who shall remain nameless who themselves suffer from more than one form of bigotry in their lives but seems to often immediately identify/speak about one in particular as the most likely/destructive to society, even in instances where it seems to clearly be a lesser or even potentially irrelevant factor to most others. Or if the issue is so glaringly obviously not about their prioritized prejudice, they won’t place it front and center but instead tangentially include it in the discussion and at times still forget themselves and talk like it’s the main issue again.

To stay away from pointing fingers, I’ll randomize the forms of prejudice in order to give an illustration of what I mean. Suppose this person is a Muslim lesbian…who seems to see homophobia as the most important/relevant explanation for most questionable behaviour, even in instances where say Islamophobia or misogyny seems much more likely/relevant to the vast majority of observers. I struggle with how to address that…because I have personally experienced little to nothing of any of these prejudices. How can I tell this person they are wrong and I am right in such an instance. With the poster in question I just don’t, I never challenge their takes on issues touching on their own experiences even if I find them off or disproportionate or unhelpful to the discussion. 
 

Which is not to say I cannot perceive prejudice or at times be more accurate because of my having no skin in the game. And therefore it’s not rational to think I should have no credible voice in the discussion…but there are instances where my voice should be somewhere in the background compared with the poster in question, and I might not always know when that is or isn’t true. So I just duck it, even if I’m sometimes muttering to myself about knee-jerkism or counter-productivity or tunnel-vision or ego-centricity while ducking.  

Anyways I don’t have any answers on this, just possibly important questions. I don’t envision reconsidering my default to ducking with this poster, because there is such a gap between how much bigotry they have faced and how little I have, I just don’t feel…qualified. And I know that’s a worldview…the idea that only victims whose experience touches most on w/e their prioritized prejudice happens to be should even be speaking, even in instances where they have no more personal experience with same than I have. The worst leftist extremists also often push similar views to the most experienced, but simply out of laziness or strategically or simply to bully views contrary to their own. But how do we effectively parse these? Or if we cannot, how can we adopt a policy that would necessarily silence some of the most important and informed perspectives on the matter in question? 

 

Edited May 25, 2023 by James Arryn

[Rippounet]

I'd like to point out that even though critical theory was particularly dynamic in France (I'm thinking of Foucault, Baudrillard, Barthes or even Lacan), it did not quite beget the orthodoxy that this thread purports to criticize. Quite honestly, if I weren't tuned to US politics, I wouldn't really know what you're talking about...

I would thus like to suggest that the main driver of the phenomenon is not critical theory itself, but the culture in which it is being received.

A suggestion, which, of course, embodies the very nature of critical theory.

[Ormond]

12 hours ago, TrackerNeil said:

I can't remember the last time I convinced anyone of anything; I don't think most people are convinceable in general, much less on this topic. I often ask people the last topic--or any topic--on which they changed their minds, and I rarely get an answer more substantial than ice cream flavors.

 

I know this is a bit tangential to this thread, but this isn't necessarily a question that you'd get accurate answers on. Many people are motivated to not realize and/or not admit that they have changed their minds on important topics, because they don't want to perceive themselves or have others perceive them as having been stupid and/or morally questionable for having held the previous opinion. And we know from polling data that on at least some social issues a great many people have changed their minds -- the shift to acceptance for both interracial and same-sex marriage in the United States happened way more swiftly than can be explained just by older cohorts dying and being replaced by younger ones. Millions of people have to have really changed their minds on those issues. And I think people on the Left would be just as susceptible to not realizing or admitting it when their mind has changed as anyone else. 

[Phylum of Alexandria]

1 minute ago, Rippounet said:

I'd like to point out that even though critical theory was particularly dynamic in France (I'm thinking of Foucault, Baudrillard, Barthes or even Lacan), it did not quite beget the orthodoxy that this thread purports to criticize. Quite honestly, if I weren't tuned to US politics, I wouldn't really know what you're talking about...

I would thus like to suggest that the main driver of the phenomenon is not critical theory itself, but the culture in which it is being received.

A suggestion, which, of course, embodies the very nature of critical theory.

See my last response to VarysBlackfyre. I basically agree, and I try to get into the weeds a little bit with respect to what the US Social Left cultural milieu looks like.

[Larry of the Lawn]

18 hours ago, TrackerNeil said:

Good gods, yes...this thirst for doctrine is most illiberal, in my view, and smacks of cultism. If I wanted dogma, I'd be a conservative.

I remember once being in a leftist space (which shall remain nameless) and up came the topic in local news, of a woman who had accused a once-beloved state senator of sexual misconduct that, she alleged, took place twenty years previously. Of course, it is required that we #BelieveWomen, which is why it was particularly shocking when someone pointed out that the accuser had once pleaded guilty to perjury, which might make her reliability less than reliable. I held my breath, awaiting a massacre, and I was not disappointed. These people set upon each other like velociraptors, and before you could say "clever girl" half the place was accused of being toxic, problematic, white supremacist, etc. (I don't know how the hell it was white supremacy, given that everyone involved was white, but, whatever.) I couldn't believe what I was seeing, but these days I am a little wiser about just how open-minded a segment of the left really is.

My gf is having her children taken away from by the state because the podunk family court judge is uncritically swallowing the father of her children's story hook, line, and sinker despite plenty of evidence that she's telling the truth about him abusing her two children.  He flipped it around and said she's trying to defame and ruin him.   It's working. 

It sucks having claims not examined critically and thoroughly before forming a conclusion, but out of all the things under the umbrella of #believewomen, I can't really bring myself to care that much about people being unreasonable in a social setting when I'm seeing the legal system first-hand not only dismiss without consideration someone's claims of child abuse, but turn around and say that reporting abuse which doesn't result in a conviction is abuse itself.  

I get that this is pretty much whataboutism or someone responding to you with "well, there are bigger problems," but that's just where I'm at personally.