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Notes -
Surfacing a maybe slightly more obscure reaction to the Lesbian Bar SNAFU discussed below, a comment from MetaFilter (bolding mine):
This commenter nailed one of the main points of disagreement I have with the broader left, i.e., the whole "being charitable" thing, the rejection of the arguments-as-soldiers doctrine. And of course it's good to see a comment like this being heavily upvoted in a de facto progressive space that is still worried about COVID. I'd love to ask that commenter, as well as anyone who upvoted this comment: who has been cultivating the unproductive environment you are describing?
From where I stand, almost every leftist space inevitably ends up doing witch hunts, cancelling people for benign shit (recently DHH and Ed Sheeran, and I can imagine a gorillion other examples), essentially harming their own in the name of the greater good. There's a danger that is, to me, more urgent than COVID: a large portion of people in the West have a culture that incentivizes and perpetuates the same pattern, the outcome of which will inevitably be that no one finds it worthwhile to try to create anything.
This culture is what makes people so eager to ban cops from the bar but not the Soe Noire person, who effectively nuked whatever slim chance Matellian had of keeping the business running, all because Noire paints himself as a victim. Well, cops are ontologically evil, while Noire has a lot of intersectional points in his bag so...
Care for another MetaFilter comment?
I'm not posting this comment to sneer, I just want to talk to the person who posted it. Imagine I'm talking to them, maybe on my knees, pleading.
Like, okay, the problems you described can be fairly debated. Maybe I agree with some and disagree with others, but aren't you at least a little bit curious about the batshit-insane, hostile environment that produced a situation IN YOUR OWN CAMP where NOBODY won? The owners of the bar didn't win - duh. The scarce clientele they had didn't win. I lost brain cells while reading this article, so I guess I didn't win either. People of your tribe showed how they solve problems (and I repeat, this problem appears within ALL leftist spaces; it doesn't just manifest as cancelling): they sat down for three hours and failed to hash out a simple disagreement that maybe should've been an email - or, ideally, there shouldn't have been a disagreement in the first place, because adults understand that a bar has to make money. As for all the more important problems you profess to care about, did the insanity described in the article help you solve them, or are you worse off? And are they really not behaving like "rabid Maoists"?
I don't know, folks. Maybe another one?
Of course, it's "wrecker shit"! How could I have thought that this pattern exists? It's "wrecker shit".
One person should be able to have a disagreement with another, but in leftist spaces we see, time after time, people taking disagreements personally and painting themselves as victims to get others on their side, like Soe Noire does. You did a racism is five years old. Gamergate, whose main character was a professional victim, is more than ten. Is this all "wrecker shit"? It's not - I swear, it's not. It's the same thing, it's the same cultural thing, it's the same thing as with the lesbian bar. How long can we pretend not to notice that good faith is abandoned as soon as it becomes inconvenient?
If you can't describe a problem accurately, you can't solve it. At this point, I just have to conclude that maybe they don't want to solve it.
I am a bit more sympathetic to the idea of 'wreckerism' as a distinct phenomenon. As I've seen it used thus far, it tends to refer to those personalities who cannot surrender their own ideological purity for the benefit of the group's overall mission. It has existed since at least the 1970s, if not since the dawn of time. Spend enough time in group spaces of any persuasion and this dynamic is obvious. There will always be people who join for more self-serving reasons than mission-serving reasons, and vice versa. It's very hard to screen for this.
Now, I do think hyper-leftist spaces have a unique challenge in that their ideas attract more of these personalities in part because of the general ressentiment of their politics and in part because leftists tend to be averse to commonsense social policing for fear of being 'exclusionary.' In this sense, 'wreckerism' is a sort of absurd escalation of leftist epistemology and ethics. However, there are plenty of leftists and leftish people (I've met them and perhaps you could consider me one) who are able to hold the fundamental tenets of the worldview without devolving into endless internecine conflict. There are discussions to be had about what distinguishes these types of people. I just don't think it's accurate to call it a problem of the entire camp. This is a distinct, vocal faction that everyone happens to kowtow to at the first sign of instigation. It's this kowtowing that needs to stop.
I also can't help but reiterate that they stopped enforcing their cover fee, which is the idiocy that kicked off this whole chain of events.
This is the core problem with the left. They have no ideological immune system. There's no way, within the confines of modern leftism, to rebuke or defend against someone who attacks from a more left position. And if they develop such an immune system, such a capacity for psychologically handing trade-offs or accepting that some desirable things are too costly, then they lose their most effective tool against the right.
I'd argue that it's the core problem with the Boomer right as well, that they fundamentally believe in victim culture over honor culture or dignity culture.
You have seen a lot of people on the right "troon out" as they say, completely abandoning their stated beliefs, when they see a video of a sympathetic woman being deported. Like Joe Rogan will be so persecuted by the left that he'll move to a different state. But then he sees a sad video, and he's back to voting Democrat again.
"Women's tears win in the marketplace of ideas"
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What is this "most effective tool" that risks being lost in the face of pragmatism? I'm not sure I'm following you.
The intransigence that comes with a refusal to tolerate tradeoffs. There's an endless cycle of argument that go (very simplified):
Left: We want Good Thing.
Right: Good Thing costs too much. We have Lesser Good Thing at home.
Left: You just hate Good Thing! You want Bad Thing because you are evil! Good Thing now!
If Left actually accepts the premise that there are real costs and trade-offs to consider and haggle and compromise over, then they're not really Left anymore. They're just a boring Math Liberal. Boring Math Liberal doesn't fire up passion. Boring Math Liberal has to sometimes admit he was wrong. He can't be a romantic revolutionary. He has to stop dehumanizing the outgroup. And dehumanizing the outgroup is a very, very, very powerful technique. It gives a nexus to coordinate and rally around. It creates solidarity.
That solidarity is, imo, the most effective tool. "No enemies to the left" means that attacks from the right just get ignored and shrugged off. It allows expansive motte-and-bailey tactics.
Leftists will fixate on their own intercine squabbles, but they don't accept intrusion into the "family business" from outsiders. Hasan Piker is every bit as much of a rabid, malevolent extremist as any literal National Socialist, but almost no one on the left is going to nod along to right-aligned criticisms, even while the man is wishing for the deaths of his own side's moderate faction.
Policing your extremists takes time, attention, and vulnerability. The left refuses to pay that price, so they're starting to pay a different one as the extremists eat them from the inside.
Interesting. I think you're definitely on to something and what you're identifying is important, but my gut tells me there's more to it than that. I'll chew on it and see if I can elaborate.
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