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I was hoping we can get a convo about it going on here, as the rest of the internet is a bit of shitshow, and with our anti-woke bias it feels like this could be a topic that cuts right down the middle of the Motte.
I find what James is doing pretty frustrating because the concept of "woke right" feels quite coherent to me. To me, it would mean right-wing people viewing the world through the same oppressor-oppressed lens, deindivudialized to the point where any personal merits would be dismissed due to belonging to an oppressor class. I think there are people like that on the right, and they tend to spend their time putting forward theories about the Jews controlling the world. James seems to go a lot further than that, I can't find the relevant tweet, but from the firehose I saw in the last few days some of the relevant criteria were:
The problem I have here is that as far as I'm concerned these are not sufficient criteria to call the left woke. I've always said you can be socialist / communist / etc. and not be woke. Hell you could be a feminist / LGBTQ++ / black nationalist but without that distinct "uplift the voices of the oppressed over the voices of the oppressors / your opinion is invalid you cishetwhitemale" it just doesn't seem all that woke to me.
Now, if he wants to pick a fight with the illiberal right (and I think that's a better label for what he's going after) that's fair game, but the other frustrating thing is that in doing so the liberals seem to deploy cancel-culture-y tactics. For all the talk of how they are illiberal and want to limit free speech, all I see from the lib-brigade is ostracism, trying to generate a stink around people they don't like, and quarantining conversations. I could maybe understand it, if what they wanted to section off was holocaust denial or outright race-hatred, but if you're too afraid to debate a theocrat or a monarchist the very core of liberalism becomes a joke.
Carl, and a lot of 2019 liberals (myself included), had their break with liberalism so I don't know if this is completely fair.
Why are the first two things beyond the pale, but the second two aren’t?
Keep in mind I said "could maybe understand" not "they're beyond the pale". Anyway when comes to holocaust denial, or historical revisionism in general, it can happen that the topic is complicated enough you end up losing ground even if you're on the right side of the issue. I don't think it's a good idea to declare the topic haram, but I can understand the temptation. As for race-hatred... well I don't know if you can have a productive conversation on the topic of "I hate your fucking guts", especially if the feeling of hatred are a response to how someone was born, rather than anything they did.
By contrast if you're declaring any competitor to your ideology as off-limits, you're basically showing that it can't stand scrutiny. It's particularly funny in the case liberalism who's claim to legitimacy rests strongly on the whole "marketplace of ideas" thing.
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