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Or people who publicly flipflop on serious ideological issues seem more like psychotics than they do like fair minded thinkers. It often strikes me as arrogance rather than humility.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs just seem to have something off in their brains to me.
And I'm old enough to have friends who were complete shitbirds when we were 19 and who found Jesus at 30 and now won't shut up about it. And while I respect them for their change, I kind of reject their lectures. I stayed at a 5 (semi open relationship with the same girl) all along, you were at a 0 (lie to girls about your career and family to try to trick them into sex) and now you're at a 10 (premarital sex will lead to hell). Maybe take a chill pill, a touch of humility, if you were wrong then you might be wrong now.
It's super consistent behavior, though; they like attention and they found a larger audience, or they tend to follow the crowd and the crowd changed directions, or, less charitably but perhaps more accurately, they like to bully others and they found a less costly way to be horrible.
I grew up in a religious community. I was always unorthodox, and was treated poorly by a lot of people who were regarded as "upstanding" for their piety. I expressed doubts about God as a kid, so no one is surprised to hear me say such things as an adult. But the same individual people who were most likely to mete out social punishment for my little heresies are still the people most likely to mete out social punishment for my heresies, only now they're various shades of woke and my heresies are political instead of theological.
Whether they've stayed in the faith or separated from it, basically all of them are ultra-orthodox woke advocates now (mostly for LGBT issues, but depending on their circumstances also for a rainbow of disabilities, with autism--or "autism"--and obesity being common pet projects in addition to the usual vapid strains of so-called anti-racism). The ones who haven't blocked me on their social media feeds are still the same bullies they've always been (I assume the same is true for the ones who took the step of blocking me, but I can't guarantee it). No amount of hair dye or piercings can hide the fact that they are still doing everything they can to punish independent thought or questioning of the party line. That it's a different party line is irrelevant except, perhaps, as a "born again" bona fide. As the Wizard sings--"the most celebrated are the rehabilitated..."
Freddie deBoer's "Planet of Cops" tells the story well, though I don't think he ever quite twigs to the shared identity of the conservative cops he complains about, and the woke cops he sees as imitating them. When he criticizes religious conservatives as natural cops, he memorably cites William Burroughs:
And my response is: it's still the "decent church-going women" (and, often, men), they still wear mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces. Often, literally the same actual people. They just left their old church and joined your new, political not-a-church.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs are some of the most internally consistent people in the world. If feeling morally superior to others and reveling in hating and even seeking the extermination of the right people is something you enjoy, the difference between Nazis and Twitter SJWs is little more than a palette swap.
Please don’t summon him…
I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to, though it sounds like maybe asking you to explain would potentially violate your concern.
@HlynkaCG, I believe you have been summoned.
Ah. If that's what we're talking about, I will cheerfully insist that I've been saying "the only difference between the alt-right and the far-left is the approved targets of their identitarianism" for at least as long as Hlynka has been on that train.
But then how do you explain:
Opposition to medical transition in general, and especially hormone therapy for children, is an alt right position, while supporting them is a leftist position.
The alt right thinks women should be encouraged (through both informal cultural means and formal policy) to be housewives, while the left thinks that women should be encouraged to build independent careers.
Opposition to mandatory Covid vaccination is right-coded, support for mandatory Covid vaccination is left-coded.
Are these not legitimate differences? Differences that aren't reducible to the target of their identitarianism?
I'm not saying there's no difference, I'm explaining what the difference is.
One can target identities in both "pro" and "anti" ways. The problem is the targeting of identities. Liberalism historically focuses instead on individuals.
The targets of identitarian favor/disfavor in this example are transsexuals. In my experience, regular people are typically pretty horrified by the idea of adults mucking about with the sexual maturation of children, and I think the polls bear me out on this--transing the kids has been a losing proposition for the left everywhere it has managed to become a salient election issue. By singling out adult transsexuals for special identitarian recognition, the otherwise-anathema views of transsexuals become the orthodoxy of the far left, and even creep into mainstream Democrat politics under "arguments are soldiers, you must support our troops," even though a large percentage of the left sees this as too much. This is very reducible to identitarianism.
Both groups approach women as a category, rather than as individuals. The far left doesn't just think women should be encouraged through both informal cultural means and formal policy to build independent careers, the far left thinks that it is objectionable for a woman to stay at home and raise children. (Often, the far left objects to people even having children, much less raising those children themselves.)
For a lot of SJWs this was downstream of disability-as-identity. I know I read about at least one lawsuit floating the idea that employers not mandating vaccination should be considered an ADA violation (where the relevant disability might be obesity, or bad immune systems, or other risk factors). And of course, to some extent anything the far left supports, the far right automatically rejects, and vice versa--at the extremes, your place in the extreme becomes the most central identity of all.
So I would say that all of these differences between the far right and far left are reducible to identitarianism.
So, do there exist two political ideologies that are both not liberal individualism, but also differ from each other by more than a "palette swap"? Based on the way I'm reading you right now, you seem to be saying that the political universe essentially breaks down into "liberal individualism" and "everything else". The ideologies in the "everything else" bucket may have differences from each other, but they will always be superficial differences compared to the primary difference of individualism vs identitarianism. Is that your view?
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