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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Even with the caveat "extreme leftists," this is a little too much boo outgroup. Where's your evidence that "extreme leftists" are just inherently less creative, more destructive, and fundamentally devoted to "subverting" things than "extreme rightists"? It's fine to complain about leftists and "converged" organizations, but do not get too comfortable talking about your outgroup as if it's a given that they are all alien invaders. This is still a place for testing shady thinking and talking as if you want everyone to be included, not for kicking up your feet and shit-talking about how your outgroup is just the worst.

Here's a citation from goofy mail prank man:

"Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.

But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred."

What's the point of being a leftist? Change society? Don't you already have the power within yourself to behave with humility and charity to help those you perceive as oppressed?

Isn't the need to change others the expression of a will to power as explained above?

Isn't the need to change others the expression of a will to power as explained above?

You can write a post expanding on that idea if you like. What you can't do is describe your outgroup in a hostile and uncharitable way as if we all accept as a given that "Yes, they are like that" even if "they" would not agree with your characterization.

Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.

It’s important to remember that the internet is a machine that takes the most hostile and unlikeable things that anybody in our outgroup has done and delivers them to our eyeballs on a daily basis.

So people on the left get a feed of angry Trumpers and religious wackos doing regrettable things in public, meanwhile you are being fed angry protesters and the most extreme things that people in your outgroup have done or said.