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A leftist talking point between 2017 and 2019 was that if someone seems to deny someone else their rights, then they forfeit their own rights. Therefore, it is okay to "punch Nazis".
Now, I'm hearing a lot of the opposite, that queers and feminists stand with Palestine because homophobic transmisogynists are human too.
It's hard to know for certain what happened. My hunch is that these are largely the same people, and that they've never been interested in meta level principles. But it's possible that these are totally different people who've replaced the leftist activists of a few years ago. That's certainly a more charitable explanation.
(I'm not posting this in the Israel/Gaza thread because it's not directly about that conflict.)
I think this is incomplete. The standard framing of this is "if a person in a position of power denies someone else their rights, then they forfeit their own rights, therefore it's okay to punch Nazis."
It's the same reasoning that underlines "you can't be racist against white people" - racism = prejudice + power, ergo it isn't racist for a black person to say "if it was up to me I'd send all those fuckin crackers to the gas chamber" in the way it would be if the boot was on the other foot. The debate about "punching up" vs. "punching down" in standup comedy may seem innocuous and trivial, but it leads directly to people defending Hamas for gang-raping Israeli women.
So we aren't entitled to punch Richard Spencer in the face because of the things he said: we're entitled to punch him in the face because of the things he said and because he has power.
"What do you mean Richard Spencer has power? He's never been elected to public office, the membership in the organisation he founded is vanishingly small, he was so broke he had to move back in with his parents." Well, who has "power" and who doesn't (who's punching up and who's punching down) are intentionally defined in a manner which is fuzzy, opaque and prone to being gamed. It's practically a defining characteristic of leftists/woke people that they see themselves as always and forever supporting the oppressed and downtrodden, which means that whenever a leftist/woke person supports Alice over Bob, they must find (or invent) a reason that Alice is disempowered relative to Bob.
Israel and Palestine is a relatively straightforward case, in that it's hard to deny that Israel is the stronger of the two belligerents - technologically, economically and militarily superior, backed by the US, nukes etc. - but you will often find murkier cases, wherein the claim that Alice is disempowered relative to Bob seems a lot more contrived than this. For example, I've seen woke people argue that wealthy black people making fun of homeless white people is "punching up", because the homeless people are still beneficiaries of "white privilege". The whole "punching up" vs. "punching down" framework has so many degrees of freedom that it will almost always be possible to find some reason why the person you like is actually disempowered relative to the person you don't.
If it was done in a systemic way, we would aggregate all of the relevant characteristics of the two individuals or parties ("Alice makes €50k, is myopic, is a lesbian, speaks English as a second language and is a recent migrant; Bob makes €40k, wears hearing aids, is straight and suffers from pronounced PTSD") and then make a determination of who is allowed to crack jokes at the other's expense/beat the other one up/steal the other's shit. (This was probably the idea behind "privilege walks", in which you take a group of people, a series of statements are read out, and each person moves one step forward if the statement applies to them and one step back if it doesn't. I haven't heard much about them for years, probably because the technique's objectivity meant that it could easily show that a female person is more privileged than a male, or a POC more privileged than a white person - and we can't have that, can we?) In practice, all you need to do is find one axis on which Alice is considered to be worse off than Bob, and then claim that her position on this axis negates whatever positions she might occupy on any other axes which might be relevant to the debate over who has more power in an interpersonal or political debate. (Hillary Clinton may be white, cis, straight, fabulously wealthy, well-educated and extremely powerful in the literal sense of having held numerous high-ranking government positions in a career spanning decades - but she is a WOMAN, therefore all criticism and jokes directed at her are unacceptable punching down.)
This is one reason woke people get so hostile and defensive when people bring up class, education and income as axes of privilege: on some level they are well aware that almost all woke people are well-educated middle-to-upper-class people whose salaries are well above the national average, and that many anti-woke people are none of those things. It must be profoundly discomforting to simultaneously think of yourself as someone who always sticks up for the little guy, while also being aware that you routinely express sneering contempt for people who are poorer and less educated than you. Their preferred strategy for defusing this cognitive dissonance is to insist that they don't hate poor white people because they're poor but rather because they're racist and sexist and etc.; that race matters more than class; that if you're white and poor in a white supremacist society then that means you must have squandered your white privilege ("why can't you just pull yourself up by your Klanstraps?").
As a person who thinks, fundamentally, that what's good for the goose is good for the gander, I was never going to feel at home in woke spaces. I've read tens of thousands of words trying to justify the claim that it's okay for black people to express seething hatred for white people but not vice versa (and by extension that it's okay for Palestinians to gang rape Israelis but not vice versa). Dozens of people have tried to explain to me in person why they believe it to be so, or treated it as so self-evident that they're honestly baffled why I don't accept it face value (like I didn't understand why 2+2=4). It's obviously an assertion that makes a great deal of intuitive sense for a large proportion of the population - I'm just not one of those people and I don't think I ever will be.
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