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But each can be true to different people. To a person who thinks Youtube is new fangled nonsense he can be a random Youtuber for example.
Is it the same exact people saying both? If not you're just running into the fact that the outgroup is not homogeneous and some of them hold different opinions from each other.
If its the same people then your point may stand.
The difference is moot to the person (or group, etc) under attack by different members of the coalition, and this argument sets a bar that makes addressing an enemy coalition impossible. It's asymmetric concern.
MitigatedChaos memorably described it as the distributed hypocrisy of von Wokenstein's Monster though acknowledges it can be performed by any ideology.
So too am I reminded of this chart. Are they literally the same people saying white flight and gentrification are bad, that cultural appropriation and being chauvinistic are bad?
Well, probably, but who wants to waste the time collecting receipts on hateful people? Let's assume for the sake of argument they are separate people in a big-tent coalition.
That they're separate people doesn't matter to me! What matters is that [coalition] has no acceptable state of being for outsiders.
Not at all, it's treating it as a monolith that makes it unadressable. If you target the specific elements with specific arguments/actions that's a solid method of putting a fracture in the coalition.
A libertarian, a MAGA Rust belt Red Triber and a Blue Tribe Catholic conservative may all vote for Trump but the specific concerns they have are different and may in fact be at odds.
The libertarian might want no tariffs and low taxes, but the MAGA Rust belter wants tariffs and taxes to redistribute back to the Rust Belt that was harmed by laissez faire economics, the Catholic wants to target abortion but cares much less about 2A rights and so on and so forth. Which means who says what and spends political capital on what is extremely important information if you oppose them.
The coalition doesn't want anything at all, it's an emergent entity out of all the various groups and sub-groups. So if some progressives think Kirk was just a nobody Youtuber so it was no big deal, that is a very different action space than for progressives who think he was a huge dangerous threat to democracy. If you want to try and persuade people that maybe shooting Youtubers is wrong, that's a different argument than arguing Kirk was not a huge threat to democracy.
You're assuming your conclusion. Because they are a coalition with different opinions therefore there is no space to exist. But what if it is is "Because they are a coalition with different opinions therefore there is opportunity to put wedges in place so to create space to exist." We call this a culture war for a reason, if you want to create space for outsiders you have to make it so. That's what created the progressive project in the first place. And they did that by piecing together a coalition and peeling some of them away from prior coalitions.
Coalitions are not unassailable cosmic entities that exist beyond space and time. They shift and change and break. As we have in fact seen in recent memory.
That they are separate people SHOULD matter to you. If they are fundamentally a monolithic entity then that is much more of a problem.
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I think it is a standard tactics of ideological defense in depth, where arguments are used as soldiers. You can have simultaneous and contradictionary propaganda aimed at different parts of the population. In modern information environment, you have simultaneous message for different audience. Maybe you know the "narcissistic prayer" meme:
You have a message for everybody. Loyalist can be in denial in order to prevent infohazard and keep ideological purity - everything that was said by opponents is Conspiracy Theory, just focus on our message. Moderates and apologists can be equipped with minimization arguments, which can even be linked to one another, just to flood the infospace and make truth hard to discern. And the last message can be aimed at radicals and fanatics in order to generate more of things that supposedly did not happen - with plausible deniability generated by moderates.
In a sense it is a brilliant information warfare strategy.
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