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Footnote to post here https://www.themotte.org/post/53/the-motte-and-the-future/5620?context=8#context
I believe that "the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place" is more true than false, but because of a couple of edge cases I prefer the weaker "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil". This felt off-topic there and is long-ish (it could be shortened, but only by abandoning my motte) so I'm putting it here.
Edge case 1: There exists a minority of SJers who like dunking on people enough and believe conservatives are evil enough that they will adopt a hostile approach to conservatives even when this is net-negative for the SJ movement. This is separate from SJers who honestly believe that being hostile and censorious is the most effective way to advance the movement's goals; those people (a majority of SJers TTBOMK) do believe they are making the world a better place. Obviously, this is not especially unique to SJ (any moralistic ideology will attract these sorts) and this definitely is a relatively-small minority, but I'm a pedant.
[Citation: I have a tab open of a forum discussion in which I told someone that a non-hostile approach would be better at converting people and he replied "Yeah, but on the other hand, fuck 'em". He honestly believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil, but he is acting in a way that he admits is suboptimal for making a better world due to spite.]
Edge case 2: There are non-SJers who say or do SJ things because they are incentivised to do so in some way by SJers. These people by definition do not believe that saying/doing SJ things makes the world a better place, or that SJ is good and conservatives are evil, but they are not core members of SJ. Again, not unique to SJ (this is almost definitionally true of any powerful paradigm) but I'm a pedant.
[Citation: I turned down being a dorm RA at my university (a paid role insofar as RAs are not charged rent, and a role I was already somewhat fulfilling unpaid because our dorm had no RA) because I would have been required to recite SJ ideology to my dorm. I can imagine that another non-SJer less committed to honesty than I might have taken the job.]
What is the point of this sort of comparison? I'm sure the religious fanatics who were burning Pokémon cards and Harry Potter Books thought they were making the world a better place. People didn't send their kids to gay conversion camps to make the world worse. The Taliban think they're doing the right thing by forbidden women to learn, the Soviets and Nazis thought they were making the world better with their atrocities.
No one is a villain in their own story. Everyone thinks that their beliefs are good and result in good things. But specifically calling for generosity in regards to SJ on this seems particularly perverse, because as an ideology, SJ emphatically denies that generous goodwill to anyone else.
And it seems double-perverse given how much of SJ appears to be upper-class double-think games, e.g. the numerous times Darwin has expressed annoyed confusion that people keep trying to take SJ ideology literally and seriously, instead of just knowing that it's tribal-signaling mouth-sounds.
I generally agree with your first and second paragraphs. The context is in the link; the first quote is from Atomised.
I used to be an SJer and hang out in an SJ space; I remember believing parts of the orthodoxy (some of which I have since renounced) and other people there seemed to believe all of it. While I agree that SJ denies the Principle of Charity, I think of this mostly as an ultimately-self-destructive mistake that we shouldn't follow SJ into making rather than a defection by SJ that we should return in kind.
I am not sure which Darwin you refer to.
This guy:
https://old.reddit.com/user/darwin2500
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