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Is this an acceptable conversation to be having in the mainstream culture? If and when the consensus shifts to "yes", what should happen then? We both agree that it's not camps, but it is religious discrimination being cemented as a cultural norm, right?
...How is this different than (((Triple Parentheses)))?
This conversation from back in the day seems relevant, and particularly this part:
Is the problem that Sanderson expressed his views poorly, or that he has them at all? Pretty clearly the latter, for GFM, and for many, perhaps most of those populating that thread. As you note, the social consensus evidently isn't there to secure her tribal preferences, quite, yet. Of course, the consensus is there to allow her to make this attack without personal consequence, and it's there to protect her from any symmetrical attack from the other side, and there's no reason to think where we are now is where we'll be in five years, or ten. And it does no good to appeal to the broad consensus of public opinion, when we have Quiet Diplomacy to shape the options presented to the public such that they don't realize what the choices available actually were.
I guess my question is, why is she wrong, really? In five years, or ten, when the social consensus has ratcheted forward another few notches and she or someone like her tries again, what will the objection be? And it's not like I'm better. I personally don't have an answer to the observation that there are some practices that I am not willing to tolerate, even though they are obviously deeply significant to their adherents. I cannot actually make an argument for universal toleration that would put me in a position to condemn GFM on principles. I don't think anyone else can either. This is why values-drift inspires such despair: because it seems obvious that it can, in fact, make people mutually intolerable to each other, that it can remove the possibility of peace from our future.
As you said way back then:
...The thing is, what does it take for her "religion" to be seen as the threat to "public harmony"? Or is that a conclusion reserved for actual religions?
The answers seem to be (1) yes, after all didn't we have for years the struggle to take religion out of schools and your rosaries off my ovaries? You are not permitted to impose your morals or your beliefs on the public square, and if the law protects minority groups and punishes hate speech, then engaging in hate speech about minority groups means you should be prosecuted; religious belief is something to do in private, not out in public where everyone can see (2) because they're Christians, silly! And Christianity is the dominant religion, so it's in the place of power and is the oppressor. Punching Christians is both punching Nazis and punching up, which gives the nice warm glow of virtue when you do it.
No, see, she is on the right side of history. Remember that? Also, remember: slopes are never slippery and all those conservative doom-mongers were just silly-billies complaining about nothing!
This helpful article from Wikipedia may explain it all to you, it certainly opened my eyes:
If Sanderson believes his church's teachings, and his church teaches that gay acts are sinful, then his church is homophobic. And being homophobic means you are far-right, which means you're the same thing as a Nazi. Doesn't matter if he never personally burned a gay or trans person at the stake, until and unless he denounces Mormonism and acknowledges his guilt and accepts he was wrong all along, he's a Nazi. And you don't tolerate Nazis, now do you?
You are drawing so much conclusions from a factual wikipedia article.
It is a fact that the nazis were homophobic. It is also a fact that the nazis were far right, and also a fact that homophobia is a view held by a lot of far-right people. Are you challenging any one of these facts? It does not mean that if you are homophobic you are far right or a nazi. You know, most people have two legs but birds aren't people. By the way, you should have noted the "and/or" in the list, which suggests that far right people hold several of those views, not just one.
"Doesn't matter if he never personally burned a gay or trans person at the stake, [...] he's a Nazi." When you do this comment, it seems to me you are saying that anyone who did not personally burned anyone cannot be a Nazi. In this case, there have been very few nazis. Hitler, for example, did not burn anyone "personally", as far as I know. At the end, the holocaust was organized in such a way that almost no one had to kill anyone directly. Not every nazi is a war criminal. Most nazis were just people like you and me that lived their lives peacefully. They just happened to vote for some nazi guy once, and to help the regime once in a while.
I'll dispute that. There's a reason PoliticalCompassMemes classes them as AuthCenter. Nazism is weird, and very clearly a mutation off of socialism. There is definitely a reasonable argument that they shed core elementals of socialist thought (like class abolition) during that mutation, but they kept others (like the framework of being a revolutionary ideology to remake all society in their own image), and that leaves in them a weird position compared to other types of "right-wing" ideologies. If just being racist and homophobic is enough, then Marx, Engels and Guevera are "far-right". If we're going to ignore the distinctions and categories enough to group Brandon Sanderson with the Nazis, then everyone to the left of Joe Manchin is Stalinist - and apparently it doesn't matter if they never sent anyone to the gulag.
The libertarians are the same, so they are some kind of socialists?
Racism and homophobia weren't particularly important in their politics. That is what matters.
I never said you should group Brandon Sanderson with the nazis because I don't know him and I'm not interested in fantasy authors anyway. That is not my point, and that is certainly not the point of the wikipedia article either.
There is no similarity there. Let me know if you ever find a self-professed libertarian group that wants to forcibly split children from their families to indoctrinate them into a new Year Zero totalizing ideology, so I can start repudiating them.
That seems like a very isolated standard that I have never seen applied to anyone before, and doesn't hold besides. Guevara had gay men sent to camps to work the gay out of them; that seems like a much more central example of political ideology and power than waffling about gay marriage.
What did you think the point of the wiki article was, if not offering institutional support to a wildly expansive definition of "far right"?
The fact that you have seen it applied or not is not very relevant. You can write an abstract of Marx writings without ever mentionning race or homosexuality and you wouldn't miss much. The same cannot be said about far right leaders or thinkers. On guevara, you are probably right, I don't know. Anyway as I stated before those things cannot be taken in isolation. Just because you are homophobic does not mean you are far right. For example, I don't think the distinction between gender and sex makes any sense (at least not as it is applied in liberal ideology). Some people would call me transphobic. But as I'm not racist and homophobic, I don't think I would qualify as far right by any reasonable standard.
As it is an article about the far right, I'd say its purpose is to inform people about what is called far right by most people in our society. I'd be very interested to read your version of a definition of the far right...
I think it's difficult to give a coherent answer. The right/left dichotomy is an imprecise arrangement at the best of times, and the right side is harder to define than the left side, especially if we're defining the right as anything other than "not leftist". The article in question seems like an absolute dumpster fire written for partisan purposes, focusing narrowly on certain social topics. Compare it to the page for far-left politics, which exclusively mentions economic topics, and doesn't even pretend to explain anything about the ideology-space, while trying to flatter their image where it can. If you dig into the talk page, you can even see editors acknowledging that "far right" is a propaganda term in use by leftist academics, while there is no comparable "wiki appropriate" propaganda source for "far left".
Far left do focus on economy because that is what far left is about. Das Kapital speaks a lot about economy, Mein Kampf not so much. It's precisely the nature of the far left ideologies to think that everything is about making the rich richer.
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