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Notes -
Yes.
You could call those examples trite, and you'd be right. You can make the argument that these are sincere, and I'd have trouble taking you seriously. But they're examples I 'picked' in the sense that I can stumble across them opening my normal web feeds and leaf through a week or two of news and social circles, and I'm selecting them only in the sense that they have a shared theme and I won't dox myself. My posting history has a long array of near-monthly examples, not just of randos, but of things in fields I care about.
I've had software collaborators suddenly wax happily about the time they decked Brendan Eich; the lead dev for a game mod framework I've spent almost a decade around got canned so hard from the project that at least one collaborator got an ultimatum from their job; my desktop environment's lead dev can't submit issues or talk on forum threads for several core libraries. The tumblr ratsphere example of A Good Feminist decided that her book about dismissing perspectives of other people was actually about "dismissing perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups"; the person who introduced Serano as such an example had their significant other drop private messages from Scott into the New York Times doxxing spree.
The STEM outreach group I volunteer for keeps having flareups and schisms because of increasingly tiny culture war stuff, yada yada. A college I've run events for is in the news for overtly discriminating against people who disagree with their politics, and it's only in the news because there's a hilarious amount of documentation, and that's still vague enough that without a direct link it could be in literally any state in the country.
It's not like it's this is just a progressive thing. There's no shortage of conservative overreach already, and I expect that the list is going to get much longer faster than I could write it out.
I'd love it if there were a lot more life in liberalism, or the Peace of Westphalia, or whatever you want to call it. As I've said many times, and will say again, we're all ultimately minorities of one, and I'm there a lot sooner than the average person. It's the reason I've even tried to continue conversations with Trace, after it all, or Amadan here.
But the Litany of Grendlin matters. If it's dead, it's not a bad thing to know that it's dead.
If you seek to change the world, change your mind. And then seek to persuade other people, having seen what it took.
These aren't the only ways to get people to follow your interests! That's the problem! Progressives and (especially!) the extremes of the left and right can make a very persuasive argument that many of the biggest political successes of the progressive movement in the last two decades have revolved around non-persuasive approaches, ranging from social shaming to blocking discussion to cancellation to lawfare to literally punching out
everybody that disagrees with themnazis. Non-extremists can do it.I don't think enough conservatives want to persuade. I don't think many, if any, progressives do. I'm not even sure many centrists do.
That's a part of what makes the examples here frustrating, and why I'm linking past discussions with TW where I'm trying to come up with a response to his last twitter discussion that isn't linking to past discussions. It's not moderation that's core to liberalism. It's at least imaginable to have a world where people had very strong and very strongly disagreeing positions, but where we hash that out by words and, where hashing that out either doesn't work or takes a long time to settle, we just live with that.
It doesn't even have to be that libertarian! (although that's easier to imagine).
But we don't. Even among actual moderates.
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