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Notes -
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.)
They have meta level principles, but those aren't it. You're reading the slogans that are meant to beat liberals into submission, not the inner thoughts of the movement. These people do not believe in rights as a concept.
Their philosophy is ultimately one of love of the weak and hatred of the strong, they are slave moralists above most things and if Hebrew and Palestinian were swapped in perceived relative power they would likely have different allegiances.
Do note that the hierarchy of power seems to have been dogmatically set and isn't mutable. If the oppressed become the oppressors they don't switch sides, it's "justice".
Your formulation makes it sound like it is intended as an attack, but as a (hopefully not too non-central) leftist, I'm fairly happy to stand by "[love the weak and] hate the strong" - more the latter than the former - as a tenet. Right-wingers who celebrate strength, in my general experience and certainly on here, are very quick to conflate strength and excellence (in the sense of being good at something that the speaker values terminally, hopefully not circularly including strength qua strength); but as I see it, the evolutionary telos of strength is the telos of evolution itself - that is, survival, domination and reproduction - and though strength makes it easier to attain excellence, it only does so reluctantly as a side effect when excellence is the least-resistance path to attain said domination. This, in turn, is actually more often the case when we do not grant strength the compound interest of celebrating it for itself, but instead denigrate it to force it to camouflage as something else.
I think many right-wingers, at least here, actually understand the difference between strength and excellence quite well; at least I do not see them, looking out to the sea as the SJ juggernaut rises, going "Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?" with sparkly eyes. What draws me to oppose the SJ movement is its strength, and to the extent any conservatives are drawn to support it on that basis, they become the "liberals who are the real authoritarians" that are only spoken about in hushed tones, whether you fear the modus ponens or the modus tollens.
Maybe this is a total failure of reading comprehension on my part, but passages such as
read as complete word salad to me. I genuinely have no idea what point you’re trying to make, or why strength is supposed to be a bad thing in this construction. Are you saying you hate strength because it’s instrumentally useful to rhetorically deploy expressions of hate toward strength, because strong people have to strive harder to achieve excellence if we don’t just let them use their strength to take the shortcut to excellence? That’s my read of what you’re saying if I squint, but honestly I’m not confident that I’m interpreting anything of value in your post.
This is how I interpreted it:
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