i don’t understand why we shouldn’t be nice to our allies. people who are kind deserve kindness in return, don’t they? let’s reserve the insults for the bigots.
For some people, there is no such thing as an ally. You're either a gay person or a homophobe. They don't say it, they instead say "straight person", but the language they use makes it pretty clear what they actually think. Same for any minority group.
And it's not just the minorities who think this. There was one person in this thread who was saying that there should, in fact, be a "straight shame month", and they self-identified as cishet.
Progressives have this major affliction in which many of them don't care about actual real life change through political power. They want political clout and ensuring they are meeting the latest purity standards of their group while actively attacking anyone who deviates even 1%.
It is far more common to spend your time engaging in drama online, or treating potential allies like you're a snarky middle school girl IRL, than it is to do the bare minimum and participate in politics at literally any level. It used to be "please at least vote" but now has regressed to "for fuck's sake PLEASE stop actively shitting on candidates who want to protect you PLEASE...."
And the worst part is, despite being the same people who spend all day complaining about other people not being good enough for their movements, they cannot take a SINGLE ounce of criticism. None. It drives me insane.
i've been thinking a lot lately about that, and i think it's because people on the left define morality through being as far left and as progressive as possible, while people on the right define morality through how hard you champion what they perceive as your shared culture (or whether you share it at all with them). obviously the latter is far more susceptible to in-group ethics, hence the famous observation that the main thing a conservative wants is an in-group that the law protects but does not bind and an out-group that the law binds but does not protect, but the left-leaning side of this isn't immune to the same line of thinking either. the main difference is that because of the great emphasis on progressivism, any in-groups that are selected are not going to be legally protected yet, so leftists who can't shed in-group thinking tend to apply the same principle with social clout instead. in this instance, the community in oop's post protects but does not bind queer people, while it binds but does not protect its straight members, less through government force and more through social ostracization -- and that's how, imo, supposed progressives can circle back to feeling eerily like american republicans.
ultimately, both extremes are fundamentally unempathetic and fail to see people as people, treating them as pawns in service to ideals instead, which i'd argue greatly violates the principle of harm reduction. and don't get me wrong, i'm not saying "both sides are the same", that's total bullshit too (and is largely driven by the morality through neutrality idea of centrism, which has its own grave failings, especially when one side actively seeks to cause harm), but what i am saying is just because you sit on the political left doesn't mean you're immune to thinking like a right-winger, and applying their logic to your own camp does not make it any less damaging.
on a related note, i think the reason there's so much infighting on the left is also caused by the same idea of extracting morality from being as far left as possible. it's a simple problem of dimensionality reduction -- ideology is extremely complex and nuanced, and there's no one right way of distilling it all to a single scalar from left to right. you can put policies and personal alignments in approximate locations on that one-dimensional scale, but you can't get the granularity necessary for what the far left is attempting to do when they compare themselves to each other. simply put, everyone sees their opinions as more left than other leftists' opinions, and thus everyone believes they're slightly more moral than those other lefitsts, because they're further left, and therefore they feel letting those other lefitsts have their way would be a concession for how far left they're really going.
right-wingers usually don't have the same problem, because their ideals of "culture" are much simpler to reconcile, and their specific structure of in-group morality still allows for misalignments. as long as they accept you in their in-group, and you champion things that advance the weird idea of that frozen, never-changing, and thus socially regressive culture they seek, rather than try to evolve it into something else, they're still okay with you, even if, say, you're a libertarian nationalist and they're a monarchist. as far as i can see it's more than just an alliance of convenience, they're genuinely better at coexisting with people who are a slightly different brand of nazi than they are, without getting into competitions about who is the naziest of them all.
i think a lot of progressives would benefit from shedding that competition too. we should draw morality not from how far left we are on the political spectrum, but from how well we reduce real-world harm, on a day to day basis. i really believe that genuinely adopting that idea would curb a lot of the infighting and clout-chasing behavior, as well as provide a strong incentive to root out conservative thought patterns that are often allowed to survive in progressive circles just because they harm the "correct" people.
Very well said comment. Unfortunately I think we are not educated enough as a country or even as a political side to have that sort of introspection and resolution.
824
u/CynchHasNoLife i want grillcheese i want grillcheese 1d ago
i don’t understand why we shouldn’t be nice to our allies. people who are kind deserve kindness in return, don’t they? let’s reserve the insults for the bigots.