Go directly to Fascism. Do not pass go. Do not collect £200.
In light of recent European elections my blood runs cold remembering when Trump opened all those death camps for minorities even as my heart sings that Obama didn't build a border wall with Mexico
It's trivially not-news that
Emotions are contagious
Epistemic bubbles are comforting
Updating your beliefs requires more effort than maintaining them
Groupishness turns you into a clone but the acceptance is nice
Totalising worldviews require the ignoring of a lot of shit that goes on on your own side
The more you know, the harder it is to arrive at simple settled moral positions
Ah, wait. That last one actually is news in a world in which being formally educated is assumed to make you more open-minded and therefore likely to be better informed. Awkwardly, for 'intellectuals', the possession of more sophisticated minds can just as easily lead to development of more sophisticated cognitive filters for rejecting inconvenient information. Examples here, here and here.
It's interesting to see that this phenomenon is politically agnostic, suggesting that dogmatism isn't contingent on your particular values.
But as a refugee from professional educated managerial middle class milquetoast centre-left Twitter I'm now more sensitively attuned to the refusal of more liberal-minded people to update their beliefs than I am to that tendency in conservatives. I think this is because I expect better from 'my' people.
So it drives me nuts that 'my' people still believe that Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 on an overtly racist ticket. He did not.
So it drives me nuts that 'my' people are now perplexed (or simply ignore) that Trump's vote increased among black, asian and hispanic people in 2020 and that white men swung quite hard toward Biden. But, hey, Trump was catapulted into office by White Rage, wasn't he.
It drives me nuts that if you point these things out, 'my' people think you must actually like Trump then. Sigh.
It drives me nuts that 'my' people think that abortion was just banned in Hungary. It wasn't. It drives me nuts that pointing this out would inevitably lead to 'my' people thinking that I like the cut of Victor Orban's jib.
It drives me nuts that 'my' people aren't aware that Marx's aim of the economic emancipation of the working class was replaced in the late 1960s by a drive to achieve their cultural emancipation instead. Which seems to mean being A Good Person taking precedence over paying the bills, working reasonable hours and having enough left over for some luxuries while you generate growth and wealth for society's top tier.
It drives me nuts that 'my' people go along with ideas whose legitimacy seems mostly to boil down to 'those twats over there hate this idea so I'm going to embrace it'. It drives me nuts that not embracing said idea somehow makes you belong with those twats over there, at least according to 'my' people.
It drives me nuts that YouTube bans stupid content arguing that the 2020 US election was 'stolen' but doesn't ban stupid content arguing that the 2016 US election was stolen. Yep. That's right.
It drives me nuts that 'my' people think that Swedish voters just installed some Nazis for no better reason than that they've embraced fascism. Slow handclap for Sweden's leftish. It drives me nuts that thinking Sweden's gang violence and bombings might call into question the idea of a happy clappy cultural melting pot makes me a Nazi sympathiser. Rather than, say, someone who bothers to find out who is doing the bombing and wonders why stories like this don't mention it. It drives me nuts that ordinary people notice this and start getting their information instead from partisan idiots on the right whose entire shtick relies on fomenting racial resentment. Because those partisan idiots are the only ones who will reference certain facts.
It drives me nuts that I'd be considered a nascent fascist for preferring to see what Giorgia Meloni actually does in Italy and whether it makes life any more agreeable for the average Italian person before having any other opinion on the matter. Just to check whether I'm evil or not for taking this position I took a glance through Twitter and it looks like there's actually going to be fascism and genocide though, so maybe I am just Very Bad.
It drives me nuts that I just read a story on Sky News about a 'study' (which means scraping text from a website chat board) of the 'Incel' community by the so-called Centre for Countering Digital Hate warning of a 'war against women' which does not identify exactly what a 'war against women' entails. As far as I can tell, based on their own story, the army which is waging this war against women consists of about 400 anonymous users who form just over two per cent of visitors to the forum, saying stupid things because they're pissed off that they can't get laid.
No, no, no, this does not mean that I'm pro wankers spouting shit about women on the internet. I'm more pro proportion.
I think that shitposting online is usually just shitposting online and that I want more evidence that women in general are at risk of harm from pathetic souls on bulletin boards. Feels don't count as evidence. The vibe doesn't count as evidence. Nor, even, does a man who happened to visit such sites going on to kill people necessarily qualify as strong evidence. Never mind, though. It's always good copy. And, after all, news is just another entertainment product. And if organisations like CCDH don't claim that saying bad things online represents real world danger, who's going to fund them. It's always the economy, stupid.
What is driving me nuts is the constant hysteria among 'my' people.
Back when I was on Twitter what would drive me nuts would be hysterical posts from the right about how every asylum seeker is out to destroy their host country. Now it drives me nuts that anyone who prefers not to import people without a plan for integrating them into the host society is a xenophobic nativist and definitely inferior to 'my' people.
Inferior. This seems to be a key notion, at this point. Conversation and investigation of where propositions might intersect in mutually agreeable positions are absent. Instead we have a totalising frame of Good versus Evil. Superiority versus inferiority.
It calls to mind an anti-Brexit protest demo I attended a few years ago at which the writer Bonnie Greer gave a speech. In it she explained that she had US, British and European citizenship. As I recall, she said 'I can handle it'. Which was a curious thing to say. As if it requires some hidden strength or other quality of character to not be an ordinary citizen of one place. But of course, that's exactly what 'my' people believe. They are, in some qualitative way, superior.
One might say that I've become red-pilled. Even though I never renounced my lifelong values or shifted politically to the right, I see an entirely different world unfolding than 'my' people, who now seem to me deeply conservative. They are conservative in the sense of always conserving a particular view of the world and maintaining the concept of a certain status or hierarchy.
As a leftist it galls me to see people looked down on, but this now seems the default state for the leftish. The sneering, the dogma, the petulance, hysteria and performative values-parading have become tiresome features of social liberals. The lack of interest in material solutions to economic inequity in favour of cultural engineering for an imagined utopia seems to be the the most confused political trend of my lifetime. Handwringing over things that didn't really happen while insisting that everyone else is stupid is where the leftish always seem to end up.
I have no idea how to cut through on this, but I do have ideas on what fuels it. They can wait for another time.
Of course, you can't cut through on it, because they know what they know and they know best. Amusingly, in a recent podcast, Thomas Prosser's academic guest drops this aside about the group in which I was once so deeply immersed. The enlightened and progressive people.
Curiously enough, the most vitriolic criticism comes from the people who self-identify as liberal, cosmopolitan and tolerant. It's that side of the debate that can be the most scathing when they decide that you've said something they don't like - Anand Menon
I am very much in the same position, having been a liberal libertine my entire adult life only to watch all my friends gradually transform into dogmatic puritanical moralists who seem to have all swigged the same Jekyll & Hyde potion: with one drop the Dr Jekyll preaching about love and tolerance becomes Mr. Hyde who only wants to see all his political opponents destroyed and driven from society.
As we all have our own theories I might as well add mine:
Sometime in the past decade a toxic virus escaped from a lab in American academia, and when infected, this virus makes its carriers reductively Manichaean, paranoid and prone to fits of rage, piously convinced of their own virtue and holiness, and absolutely certain that whoever disagrees w a syllable of their dogma is a dangerous Nazi bigot. And the name of this virus is Critical Theory.
Leftist Critical Theory (aka "the ruthless criticism of all that exists") and its foundational premise—nothing exists but Power and Oppression, and all Good People spend every waking moment pointing out whatever they deem "problematic"—is designed to make its believers into constantly crusading moralists, denouncers of everything and everyone outside their tribe, and much like their w their Marxist forebears it provides a highly reductive and oversimplified view of human conflict, a dogmatic belief in the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed, and an obsession with rooting out ideological impurity and suppressing dissent.
There will be no "nice normal liberals" interested in free thought, free speech, and open good-faith debate until we somehow find a cure for this virus or until most of its bearers develop an immunity or die off.
Despite some modest quibbles here and there, the framing of this was superb...nice piece of writing and another view of the "red-pilling" so many formerly left and far-left folks that actually have a few brain cells have been undergoing -- often kicking and screaming that "what I see cannot be true" but as time goes on, realizing that it is.
Many thanks.