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Notes -
Some rambling on modern attitudes found generally leftward which I strongly dislike. First, an anecdote:
There was recently a shooting at a gay bar. I share an online space with some friends and some acquaintances for general purpose discussion - no specific focus other than a general lean toward our mutual shared interests, which are unrelated to the shooting or what follows.
One person posted an article about the shooting and then something roughly equivalent to "thoughts and prayers" for the victims, and a follow up note that Bigotry Is Bad. No problem, I'm on board. A second person posted that, as a sexual minority, they are now afraid to go out. They have updated based on this attack to think the world is not safe enough to enjoy. I interjected with something along the lines of "hold on, attacks like this are less likely to get you than car accidents or [insert whatever mundane thing] - yes they're flashy and scary, but you really shouldn't update based on them - they're statistically insignificant AND if you want to view them as terrorism then you living in fear is letting them win - you shouldn't do that"
The response I got was a gentle dogpile (they did start with "I know you're just trying to help, but..." and such), saying that I shouldn't be trying to tell marginalized people how to feel about things and I should let them have space to process their trauma and etc etc, much insistence on "letting the victims speak" (by which they mean indirect victims - people that share a class with the victims, not the firsthand victims) and being a good ally by listening. I pushed back for a bit saying that I'm not making any claims about the general safety of LGBTetc folks (though they are still safe enough to not feel so afraid of the world around them if they live somewhere like the US, this was left unsaid) and that I'm only saying if you previously had the courage to face the world, the shooting shouldn't have changed that and we explicitly had a person saying exactly that they were now afraid based on this event...
But eventually I got the sense they just didn't want to hear me. I gave an apology in the vein of "when people are afraid is exactly the BEST time to reassure them, but clearly I am failing to do that, so I'll back off" and they spent a few seconds talking about how important and good it is to let LGBT voices speak first (of which there were several available in the space, many of which were in the dopile). After those seconds, we have had 24+ hours of silence. Not a word on the topic from any involved or even any spectators, though they all continued talking about unrelated things in other channels of the space.
So. What happened here? I feel like insistence on sitting down and letting marginalized voices be heard is frequently insincere, as it happens even when nobody marginalized (or indeed, anybody at all) has anything to say. It is a "shut up" button, to be deployed whenever somebody says something you don't like that's adjacent to [minority issue]. Even if that isn't how they feel about it, that is functionally what is going on.
Superweapons are bad.
This isn't (just) "leftward behavior". For instance, during the time some years ago when there were a lot of Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe, if one mentioned that becoming a victim of Islamic terrorism was similarly a vanishingly rare possibility equivalent of car accidents etc., you would get chewed out - though it would rather be phrased as "naivete, not understanding the reality of Jihad, leftists loving the Muslims" etc.
I used to make that argument quite regularly, and never got chewed out, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Being against the Iraq war was bit more risky, by my estimation, but nothing compared to the sort of ostracizm you go through, if you're not on board modern progressivism.
Well, I guess that experiences simply differ here.
Of course the difference might be that when one makes the argument and simultaneously is known to occupy an explicitly left-wing position, it becomes easier for the other side to just see it as culture warring and respond to it within the framework.
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Seconded, for my experience in northeast America. Here, it was always popular to argue that terrorism wasn't that big a deal (let's say at least since 2003), and it was also always popular to argue against the Iraq war.
i feel like the reason it was popular to argue those things was because at the time it seemed like the broad consensus was that the threat of terrorism was a big deal and that the Iraq war was justified because of it. i don’t really hear those arguments much anymore cause there’s not as many people to argue about it with, but the argument described in the OP seems like it follows the same underlying logic
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