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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.
The idea that this is a "left-wing phenomenon" is wildly at odds with my experience. I can go to any US city (big or small) and find a virtually bottomless supply of left-wing bars, coffee shops, and bookstores just like the one featured in this exposé. Meanwhile, when was the last time you've come across any such establishment that is as right-wing as this place is left-wing?
(Maybe you'll point to shooting/hunting clubs as the right-wing equivalent, which I'll grant, but still, there's a strange asymmetry here. Gun stuff is right-coded because that reflects the demographics of the people who own guns and use them regularly; but meanwhile, there is no particular political tilt in the demand for coffee, alcohol, or books. So where are the right-wing social spaces for those products?)
What about churches? Yes, there are right-wing churches, but there are left-wing churches as well, rainbow flags and all. Maybe not the majority, but enough to show that the "church" as a form of social organization is not the exclusive purview of right-wingers.
But political organizing is where the rubber meets the road. Any attempt to stand up something like the right-wing equivalent of the DSA or Antifa is immediately torn apart by infighting and ideological purity-spiraling. What ever happened to the "Unite the Right" movement? Last I checked, ~every organization involved in that event has fallen apart. In fact, the dominant narrative on the right is to deny that any such organization is even possible. Right-wingers talk about the "Charlottesville hoax"[1] and denounce Patriot Front and January 6 as "fed ops" or lately "SPLC infiltrators". Meanwhile I walk out my door and find no shortage of Pride parades and anti-ICE protests, all seeming to go off like clockwork, with no subsequent chorus of left-wing influencers asserting that these events are "false flags" or whatever.
[1] ICYMI: The supposed "hoax" is the claim that Trump supported the Charlottesville protesters. But if the Right were actually United, you would not find right-wingers saying this; if anything, they'd be motivated to manufacture the opposite hoax, i.e. claim that Trump supports them even if he didn't really.
An example of a fairly small, low-cost-to-entry organization is an indie game studio. These can be so small, in fact, that they can be done as one-man-bands, but then can scale up from there. Why don't we see more right-wing indies?
Five Nights At Freddie's is one of the most successful indie games of all time, and it earned him a ton of money and fame and a massive fanbase. Then it was revealed that Scott Cawthon was Red Tribe.
Strangely, harassment, death threats and literal home invasions of a popular celebrity did not draw support for that celebrity, nor condemnation of such tactics, nor broad discourse that online toxicity was a serious problem. The Dev did not receive wall-to-wall coverage portraying him as a saintly victim from a sympathetic press, who oddly failed to coordinate broad-spectrum condemnation for the internet trolls and other deplorables engaging in this horrifying behavior. The Dev was not invited to speak at the UN.
Scott Cawthon will not be making any more video games.
"political infighting" and "ideological purity spiraling" is not what I have observed killing attempts to stand up right-wing equivalents to the DSA or Antifa. Selective prosecution seems like a much larger factor. This is your reminder that posting anonymous "It's okay to be white" posters on a college campus resulted in an actual investigation by the for-real FBI.
Also riots and the occasional, wildly celebrated political murder. Mustn't forget those.
We will be fired from our jobs and beaten in the streets if we do the right-wing equivalents of these things, and the police will look the other way for those inflicting the latter. This does not mean that right-wing political action is impossible, only much, much harder, with the concomitant increased likelihood that coordinated meanness outside the standard system of procedures will ultimately prove necessary. We'll get there, don't you worry.
The prolife movement and gun rights movement have been extraordinarily successful- much more so than the DSA- in right wing organizing.
What tends to happen is that right wing ideas about race are mostly embraced by very disagreeable people who cannot cooperate. But there’s plenty of anti-LGBT orgs, gun rights orgs, anti-tax orgs, socially conservative groups, etc.
Assuming that you are referring to the notion that there are intrinsic differences in "quality" between racial groups and that these differences should be allowed to influence policy, I question the extent to which these ideas are meaningfully "right wing". At least in the context of American politics.
While I acknowledge that the experiences and perceptions of those coming from Europe and Asia will differ, the US right has never really made "blood and soil" or ethnic tribalism in general a core pillar of it's identity the way that say the German right has. If anything the opposite has been the case, with the US right espousing a peculiar form of "blank-slatism" exemplified by appeals to the Declaration of Independence, and the rhetoric of men like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Billy Graham, and Clarence Thomas.
In one of those ironic UNO reversal moments I actually kind of agree with Joe Biden when he says "if you are thinking about voting for Trump you aren't really black" but by the same token I would turn that around and say that if you're thinking about voting for a progressive in the year of our lord 2026 you aren't "white" either
It's like one of those Gian'Carlo Esposito memes...
"You want to discriminate against people on the basis of their skin color. I want to discriminate against people on the basis of their behavior. We are not the same."
If by "the US right" you mean the conservative movement and not the GOP, "never" is an exaggeration. Buckley is absolutely explicit that Jim Crow is part of what he is trying to conserve in the 1950s, and he staffs his movement with southern segregationists. The Falwell/Robertson religious right was also lousy with segregationists (including Falwell but not Robertson) and made protecting segregated Christian schools one of its core issues.
Buckley himself recanted in the 1960's, but the movement eventually got rid of the segregationists one funeral at a time. If I had to pick a date when the American conservative movement (again, not the GOP) stopped being led by segregationist dead-enders I would run with the handover to a younger generation of leadership (in particular, Gingrich) around 1994. Not coincidentally, this is also the date at which the distinction between the conservative movement in the country and the non-RINO GOP ceased to matter.
It is definitely the case that the US right has been far less prone to ethnic tribalism than right-wing movements in Continental Europe or democratic countries in Asia. It isn't obvious how it compares to right-wing traditions in the rest of the Anglosphere.
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"...not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
There is certainly a lot of behaviour on the basis of which we could use more discrimination, as long as the behaviours discriminated against aren't cherry-picked to be those more common among people of colour while ignoring equally-harmful conduct disproportionally seen in white people (or vice versa), and as long as a white person and a person of colour are met with the same consequences for the same malfeasance....
Of course, the converse is also required: when they are objective, they must be permitted to stand without critique, rather than be falsely claimed of secret cherry-picking.
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