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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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I have pretty much had it with people who ranted about "trump disrespecting the troops!" now waving the flag of Hezbollah who actually killed a lot of those troops.
The next time a Democrat starts regurgitating NPR at me I'm going to end up saying something friendship-ruiningly impolite because I just can't hold in the anger at this stupidity any more. It's almost worse than 2020 because the deranged hysteria isn't happening in unique circumstances.

How do you all deal with this every day?

I don't see how the example here represents some sort of unique turning point or even a particularly good example of the set of, 'Progressives seem to hold totally contradictory values'.

They have been holding 'LGBTQ+ for Hamas' rallies since October 8th.

Trump disrespected the troops by saying stuff that a 'properly cultured' blue-triber would never say, like calling POWs losers for getting caught.

The people at protests waving flags, still don't like Trump for being uncouth in those ways. Also, I would guess less than half of them even know what Beirut is. Still, even if they did know, they mostly wouldn't care. They are perfectly happy to hold both the idea that Trump says rude things to the troops and that is bad, and also the idea that the American military-industrial-complex is a global oppressor and any and all resistance to it is justified. This isn't even a particularly contradictory pair of ideas to hold compared to their beliefs around gender.

More generally, you are making a liberal complaint to a progressive. Liberals care about being principled and consistent, creating generalizable rules, and all that other great civilization building philosophy junk that got totally abandoned as the internet and government student loans expanded the marketplace of ideas to include midwits.

They have been holding 'LGBTQ+ for Hamas' rallies since October 8th.

Very few if any leftists have expressed support for Hamas' political, religious, and social program while also being pro LGBT+ which would actually be contradictory. A portion of them will express support for Hamas insofar as they fight the IDF without supporting their social program, which is a consistent position. A greater part of them will refuse to say either way, because they view calls to condemn Hamas as bad-faith attempts at distraction (the standard line being "I'll condemn Hamas when my government sends them billions of dollars").

Entirely from the correctness or incorrectness of the political views themselves, there's no real contradiction between "I support LGBT+/feminism/whatever" and "I am against Israel's actions in Gaza."

I don't think that only 'technical' contradiction, in which it is logically impossible for two ideas to comport, get to be called contradictions. I think it is very common and normal for people to use the word contradiction to describe an apparent disconnect or incongruity between two things, that need not be completly irreconcilable.

I am not sure if you thought that my argument was, the OP's example is not contradictory, but my example is, but I was not trying to make that argument. I used words like particularly, and compared to. Also, this "'Progressives seem to hold totally contradictory values'." bit was in quotes because it was intended to describe a vibe, that I felt was central to the OP. I just felt like the example the OP happened to be upset by was a kind of weak sauce example of this kind of contradiction.

Entirely from the correctness or incorrectness of the political views themselves, there's no real contradiction between "I support LGBT+/feminism/whatever" and "I am against Israel's actions in Gaza." "I support Hamas".

So, in a very narrow technical sense, I support [Blank] and I support [Group that hates Blank and actively practices violence against Blank] are not logically impossible to hold within the same mind.

Still I am confident saying that not only would most people recognize the incongruity in those statements, if I could ask progressives about a different topic where they were not primed to view it as an attack or a gotcha, most of them would recognize the contradiction in such a statement as well. In fact, just go look at the never ending stream of "if you were really pro-life' memes/posts/articles for a live (and much worse) example.

I don’t think you can really compartmentalize to that degree with any integrity. In most governments and political parties they have openly stated platforms and they at least intend to make good on those promises. You can’t support only the good without accepting the bad. You can’t have support for a faction that kills gays and support gay rights. You can’t support the political goal without supporting the social goals because if they get their goals of defeating IDF they’ll go right back to running Gaza the way they want to.

Somebody could easily hold that a homophobic, misogynist, Islamist party ruling Gaza is a preferable to Gaza being wiped off the face of the earth.

Someone could also hold that a Gaza run by racially tolerant pacifists is better than the Islamists. Forcing a binary proposition is working backwards, justifying the current cause celebre by any tenuous means necessary.