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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 don't think there's necessarily any contradiction or change of mind. One can think of it this way:
"In this situation, the Israelis are the bigger Nazis, which is why it's ok for Palestinians to punch them. Yes, Palestine is controlled by homophobic sexists, but that is something that can be fixed after we take care of the immediate problem, which is that Israel is violently oppressing Palestine. Palestinian women and LGBT folk are themselves the victims of the homophobic sexist culture that is perpetuated by Palestinian straight men, which is all the more reason why Israel is being barbaric by bombing Palestinian areas even though on the ground Palestinian women and LGBTs are mixed in together with the straight men who are oppressing them. Palestinian women and LGBTs are the biggest victims here and Israelis are the biggest Nazis here. Palestinian straight men are somewhere in the middle, but getting Israel to stop its genocidal attack is a more pressing issue than trying to reform Palestinian cultural norms in the middle of the war and oppression."
I'm not saying it's necessarily an accurate view of things, but I think it's more or less coherent and non-contradictory at least by the low standard of how coherent and non-contradictory the average political ideology is.
The real motivations behind these attitudes are probably much more emotional than rational, and the rational arguments are made up after the emotions in order to justify the emotions. But then, that's the case for the vast majority of political thinking everywhere, including here on The Motte. And to be technical, I don't even think it's possible to ever get rid of emotion-driven politics because a lot of politics boils down to preferences which in principle cannot be argued for or against. But that's a tangent. My main point is that even if the dominant progressive attitude toward this conflict is emotion-driven, it is not hard to come up with pretty coherent rationalizations of it.
One might as well ask why most US conservatives who support small government, social conservatism, and armed resistance to an oppressive state here in the US also support sending a bunch of my tax money to Israel's military-intelligence complex to help it fight against a rag-tag band of socially conservative resistance fighters who are using their guns to fight government oppression.
That's a good question too, why not ask it as well? And why on earth are you trying to lowest common denominator this? Holding people to the standard of average political discourse, defending emotional reasoning because it's really easy and requires no thought, boiling everything down to preferences and then giving up. "Hey, even on the motte people have shitty arguments sometimes, so may as well give in to your basest impulses and go who, whom like everyone else".
If you find yourself lowering your standards to rationalise your ideological bedfellows behaviour, doesn't that imply they aren't really your bedfellows on this issue? You don't have to become conservative instead, just hold yourself to the standards I know you prefer deep down (because your post is full of reluctant resignation.) It's the only way to raise the bar again.
I'm not defending the emotional reasoning, I'm just explaining it. Also, progressives are not my ideological bedfellows any more than conservatives are. My political views are too complex to describe succinctly, but if I had to put a simple label on them I'd say that they are probably closer to classical liberalism than to any other major political ideology.
If I come off as being full of resignation, it's probably because I have spent my entire life so far feeling like no major political movement represents my politics well and I have seen just how much more powerful emotion-driven politics usually is than reason-driven politics. However, I do not think that improvement is impossible. It clearly is possible, because modern Western societies are on average vastly different politically, and in my opinion almost in every single way better, than they were say 2000 years ago. So despite my cynical view of the political landscape, I have not given up hope, nor do I think that my efforts to make things better are meaningless.
I feel lie your political position and mine are about the same and every time an election comes up, I'm simply floored by the amount of people who actually believe and are energized by their chosen party. It really baffles me that anyone can believe any of it. I often feel like my lack of faith is my biggest failing.
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