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This is what they said. I didn't write this, they did. I don't think you're gonna convince me that this isn't pro Nazi rhetoric, I'm typically opposed to calling things "gaslighting" or "telling me to ignore what is in front of my eyes" or something, but I don't see any serious argument that "bring on the Nazis, I'd rather have Hitler than the left" is anything other than a pro Nazi sentiment. Unless he's not being serious in the comment in which case whoops!
Again, if you believe that someone saying
means "Hitlerism and Nazism is growing," then your standards of evidence show me just how much this sort of conclusion requires grasping at straws. Preferring literal Hitler brain-rot over leftist brain-rot doesn't mean that the person is either into Hitlerism or Nazism.
Personally, while I do think kitty is grasping at straws making equivalences, I do think there is smoke here. I don't think "I wouldn't care if the party I seem to support became pro-Nazi" is to a significant degree better than actual support for Nazis.
I am in the unenviable position of being anti-woke left. I am pro legal immigration; want regulated, anti-oligarchy capitalism; some gun regulation; and broadly think the the Republican party does more shitty things than the Democrats. But I hate the left's obsession with race and identity. That's why I'm here, because I'm looking for places I can talk that aren't too group-thinky one way or another.
But the popular sentiment here seems to be that because I vote left I bear some culpability for the shit leftists do because I enable them. Conversely, the right gets basically an unlimited-use free pass so long as there is some leftist act that can be deemed worse. They never cancel each other out either. The same leftist act could be used to excuse 10,000 different right leaning actions.
And here it's stated pretty much crystal clear. Right up there with MovieBob's "There are no bad tactics, only bad targets." It's a pretty flat admittance that there's no point engaging with you because you don't have any standards. It's not even "I don't care about this example," it's "I will never care."
I'm not looking to change anyone's mind on which side is worse. What I'm aiming for it consistency on whether a side is culpable for its own bad apples. Everywhere I go, left or right, it's "excuses for my side, maximum uncharitability for my opponents." I won't say I'm immune to it either, but I try to see things how the other side would see it.
The moderate left exists to provide reputational cover for the progressive left and the moderates are too cowardly to stand up to the progressives. Biden bails out the teamsters as an expensive reward but also issues communiques with language about birthing persons latinx, opens the border for millions of illegal migrants while pretending that border encounters are what people care about and threaten title ix trans compliance for school funding. The nonwoke left is now viewed (rightly) as hypocrites pretending to champion Common Sense things but actually are just going to run full tilt into progressive cause celebres immediately.
The problem for the nonwoke left is that the extreme far right is now back in play thanks to the tarring of everyone unwoke as a nazi. Partially though this can be attributed to woke tactics being employed in new battlefields where previous rules limited employment of such tactics. If wokes want to play race essentialism, then whites are happy to play that game too. Once you westerners are done with bronze league white-black racism you can play in gold league balkan racism to get your toes really wet before diving into asian ultraracism.
This sounds like the horseshoe version of the progressive complaint that centrists provide cover for the far right. But no. The moderate left exists because they have their own policy goals, and a democratic system often involves allying with people whom you don't entirely agree with but can tolerate to an extent. This is true for the right as well, which is why Mr. "Trump is unfit for our nation's highest office" is now playing second fiddle to the guy he once insulted.
But again, my point is the consistency. Does the right exist to provide reputational cover for every crazy Republican, up to and especially Trump? Do you also have to answer for everything your side does, and abandon your beliefs if someone odious holds something vaguely similar? Because that's the same argument progressives lob at me whenever I argue against wokism.
Many on this forum have said they flat-out don't care about the right's excesses but the left's are so egregious that nothing could top it. If I say I believe that I believe the right's excesses are actually pretty damn egregious, does that give me license to just dismiss any complaints about the wokies with "I don't care?" No, it wouldn't. It would just prove there's no point engaging with me, because I'm just a partisan with no principles.
Why is Trump supposed to be the crazy wing of Republican? The wokes being called crazy is a result of the moderate Democrats not wanting to be associated with them, but Trump being deemed crazy is purely the result of outgroup slander. Honestly, I'm a much better example of a crazy right-winger than anyone in the current administration, and as to whether the right exists me to provide reputational cover - I dunno no man, half of them are doing some weird "neener-neener" bit about the YR kids getting fired, can you provide a similar example from your side?
I don't know about you personally, but hasn't the majority of the left, in fact, taken that license?
Disagree. Even from a right-wing perspective, he lies habitually. Republicans may be protectionist, but his trade policy constantly changes. He's weirdly deferential to Putin (whereas the median Republican might not want to get involved in Ukraine but still admits Putin is bad), and his Ukraine policy is incoherent whether you think we should be involved or not. There's pretty much everything relating to RFK. He's pardoning corporate fraudsters. People are completely silent on his own blatant lawfare.
Sorry I'm confused what point you are making here. Could you rephrase?
The more charitable interpretation is they consider their bad apples to fall under the lizardman constant, similar to the responses I'm seeing regarding the right. But let's say yes anyway, because that is my criticism of the left. That they do so is in fact what I think is why The Motte hates the left so much. So why would you do it yourself? Yes the constant refrain is "Why should I better than my opponents, when that will only result in losing?" My point rests in how exactly one keeps score. It's relatively fine to say, "I'm keeping track of the bad things both sides do, and I think side X is worse." It's another thing to say, "I'm going to keep counting the score of my opponents, and stop counting my own." At that point you've decided you want to keep your head in the sand and have become just a rage reactionary. Your opponents are fully justified then in playing dirty, because you're saying you can be as corrupt as you want and it doesn't matter.
...and let's not forget, winning the Republican primaries with 80% of the vote.... Whatever you think of him, most Republicans either aren't all that bothered by it, or think the Neocon wing is worse, therefore it is them that are the "crazy Republicans", not Trump.
The kids from Yong Republicans got fired for making edgy jokes. If the right existed to provide cover for "crazies" like that, their messages would never get leaked in the first place, but if they did you'd see a unified front of Republicans actually covering for them. What you see instead is a significant of infighting between the "muh principles" wing of the Republican party (represented for example by James Lindsay or Seth Dillon) and the "don't do cancel culture against our own people, ffs" (for example Matt Walsh). I don't think there was an example of a similar amount of infighting on the Democratic side over one of it's subgroup saying something offensive to conservatives.
Well, I think you're wrong about who is hated and why. I don't hate the people who say "who cares" about their crazies, I hate the crazies. The people who say "who cares" only start being annoying when they acting outraged over me saying "who cares" over my side's crazies, and thus demand that I hold myself up to a standard they never followed themselves.
To be honest I don't really want to keep score for either side. Historical memory is good when someone starts acting like whatever media-invented outrage is unprecedented, but my goal in punching back isn't equalizing of scores, it's deterrence. If I'm reasonably sure I'm not going to get sucker-punched again, because I taught a belligerent a lesson that I can hold my own, I don't need to leave him with the exact same amount of stitches he originally gave me. But we're nowhere near this point, I don't even see the other acknowledging they did anything wrong, let alone incapacitating their crazies so it doesn't happen again.
All I can tell you is these are the things that seemed to make the right upset when a Democrat was doing it. To the point that from this side it looks like them being mad when a Democrat did it was outrage bait.
Point of order: it's not my view that your average Dem/Rep voter is covering for crazies. It's something that in my view gets thrown at me by members of the right when I say I vote left because I think the right is worse. That said, the left is perfectly willing to cancel its own, just not generally at the behest of the right (and yes, the right do try to cancel people for non-"turnabout" reasons). Not entirely analogous I admit, but I remember Al Franken. And yes people on the left have in fact been fired over Kirk comments. Or here's an old issue I remember about a lefty making an edgy joke about Africa.
This ties into group culpability. I had a rather long back and forth with JarJarJedi not too long ago. One of the things I'm reminded of is Trump canceling the student visas of people who protested Israel, on the logic that members of said protest harassed people. Whether the person whose visa was cancelled was one of the people harassing was irrelevant. Where I'm going with this is that many of the arguments made require group culpability in order to make sense. Someone can say "I don't believe X" and then support a policy that relies on it, and at that point I would say they're in denial about it. Note that this is a generic comment, I don't remember everything you specifically have said.
That's not how politics work. By and large it's somebody punching in your general direction because they feel someone punched in their general direction. It can hotter or colder, but it will never stop and never admit wrongdoing. They don't care whether you think they did something wrong, they only care either if they think they did or, rarely, if a critical mass of the public thinks they did.
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