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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.
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.
Lefties agree with my assessment on Twitter, therefore I'm right: https://x.com/ArmandDoma/status/2102985712509637118
(jk)
I think there's a special flavor of this thing on the left - it's hard for me to imagine a lot of people on the right hiding behind their victimhood, or how much they are oppressed.
There's plenty of outgroup-homogeneity-bias to go around. I realize that I may have been committing some of that myself in my comments here, in framing "accusing people of being government operatives" as the central example of organizational dysfunction, when in fact it is a peculiarly right-wing tendency, just as "oppression Olympics" is a peculiarly left-wing form. Each side can look at the other, see the lack of the particular type of dysfunction they're most familiar with, and assume the grass is greener.
But still, we can step back and look at concrete results. Whatever's going on behind the scenes in left-wing groups, that's not preventing them from opening up scores of retail shops in every city nationwide, whereas the right wing has a lot of catching up to do.
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Shortly after you posted that, another reply arrived doing just that. The specifics may vary, but invoking victimhood to dodge responsibility is too effective a tactic for any group to forgo.
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How would she know? Would she admit that even if it were true?
The thing is, I honestly think they did (to a fair degree, with caveats, etc). I couldn't have imagined thinking of myself as any kind of conservative 10 years. But the difference between the right now and the right pre-GamerGate is huge. They really do seem, on average, to be much more sane and reasonable and realistic than they were.
And it's really juxtaposed by the way I think most of the left went completely off the rails and untethered.
She's probably pointing to MAGA, which, honestly, I wouldn't say is all rational. And to be completely fair to her, the president of US whipped his base into frenzy. But "the right" isn't just MAGA, there are a lot of different worldviews and opinions on the right, a lot of diversity of thought.
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