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Because they're not rich enough to (1) afford ubiquitous personal car transportation, (2) isolate themselves from the effects of luxury beliefs like "we should prioritize the feelings and welfare of criminals over having orderly public places"
Right, rich enough to afford personal cars for most people, and luxury beliefs allying the guilty-feeling, effeminized elites and the underclasses.
This makes a lot of sense, but I know a number of residents of SF, Oakland and other places like that, who aren't in any way rich enough to avoid the effects of the luxury beliefs, and they still largely support the policies that led to them. I mean, they're certainly not happy about people pooping on the streets or open drug markets, not to mention unending car breakins and other criminality, but somehow they never make the conclusion the policies they support are responsible for it. They just think it's "wrong Socialism" and as soon as they figure out how to make "true Socialism, that has never been tried" - which is right around the corner, we only need to tweak a couple of things and spend a couple of billions more - and it all will be fixed.
I guess my question is where do these magical beliefs come from? They seem to be ubiquitous among Reddit users but also white collar progressives in general. I'd like to blame midwit tier intelligence, but I don't think that's it. In fact, I would guess that intelligence and socialist beliefs are positively correlated.
Why is socialist worldview so appealing, even when (or especially when) it fails time and time again? And why is the more practical worldview (that people respond to incentives) so looked down upon?
This will not be a great post because I'm exhausted today, but I remember reading an author who coined the (awkward) term "indiscriminateness" to describe the fundamental principle that led to the disconnect you describe. This principle has become a cardinal virtue in our society.
The idea is that judging someone is about the worst thing you can do. You can't disparage train shitters and train masturbators as "scum" or "bad people" or "degenerate" or even "a public nuisance" because that would be cast judgement on their actions or character. And you know who does that? The hated and reviled Outgroup! Not only are you an ignorant person for negatively judging someone, but you even sound like one of The Bad Guys. And so you will do increasing complex mental gymnastics to explain Why Some People Are Like That, continue to invent ever more complex epicycles to explain social decay.
This can't be how they operate. They are very eager to judge racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, or even just people who are insufficiently zealous about combating the aforementioned groups. They have no problem judging the character of people they consider to be their outgroup.
Which, you basically acknowledge at much. But you have to take the next obvious implication of that, which is that "judging someone is the worst thing you can do" can't be an accurate model of their psychology.
It actually rings true to me, because I guess it's how I thought for a bit. And it rears its head even in interpersonal affairs. Somewhere during my youth it got instilled in me that being judgmental was an inherently negative trait - a sentiment I attribute entirely to the pop dissemination of therapy talk.
I remember expressing to a friend my concern over some obviously bad and harmful decisions they were making, and was defensively accused of being judgmental with a real finger-wagging tone. A couple other instances of things like that eventually broke the spell, but god knows why I didn't see the absurdity of that thinking earlier.
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Yes, you're right. The common thread in your examples though is that the Xphobes and Xists are all deficient in the virtue of indiscriminateness. They are guilty of some form of judgment against groups that are deemed "oppressed," and (the thinking goes) those groups wouldn't be oppressed if only the Xists and Xphobes would embrace indiscriminateness. Maybe it's better to use one of their own slogans to sum up their beliefs. I've heard some of them say that they will "tolerate anything except for intolerance." So I should qualify my above comment by saying that violations of the principle of indiscriminateness are permissible only in order to further spread the principle itself.
That's definitely a justification used a lot, but I think you were right in your first post and those people are just lying to themselves and othering their outgroup so hard they no longer register as 'people'. They were perfectly happy to judge right wingers who don't 'hate' minorities - Kavanaugh, Romney, Rogan and so on.
I had indiscriminateness beaten into me as a child by my father, who was a devout Christian - None may judge but God and all that. I think I was about 12 or 13 when I noticed how many people we knew who claimed to be non-judgemental but actually judged the shit out of people all the time. I brought this up with my dad, who smirked that I was now judging them, so who was I to talk? To which I replied, almost in despair, that that was exactly my point. Nobody is non judgemental, only God could be, because only God can know things without evaluating them first. He actually listened, thank goodness.
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