White Evangelical Christians opposed desegregation tooth and nail. Where pressed, they made cheap, cosmetic compromises, like Billy Graham’s concession to allow black worshipers at his crusades. Graham never made any difficult statements on race, never appeared on stage with his “black friend” Martin Luther King after 1957, and he never marched with King. When King delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech,” Graham responded with this passive-aggressive gem of Southern theology, “Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.” For white Southern evangelicals, justice and compassion belong only to the dead.
“What today we call “evangelical Christianity,” is the product of centuries of conditioning, in which religious practices were adapted to nurture a slave economy. The calloused insensitivity of modern white evangelicals was shaped by the economic and cultural priorities that forged their theology over centuries.“
When I say ‘dykes’, I mean ‘dykes’. As in: people who identify as dykes.
In the post you’re refering to I made it quite clear that I was writing about dykes I know and when I speak of these dykes I won’t erase or sanitize their identities by using a mainstream, tame, deradicalized word that denies the words they specifically chose for themselves to emphasize their identities and their struggles as queer marganilized working class proudly-perverted revolutionary DYKES.
Keep your fucking respectability politics to yourself.
Hmmm. Interesting post!
Anyway, I’ve seen some of my followers reblog from this freak, and I think it’s worth stating that you should probably unfollow me if you agree with them.
did he really just say “proudly-perverted”
Yeah, that makes no sense at all.
(to any people unfollowing me: please block me at the same time so I never have to deal with you again. bye and good riddance)
When did @comcastkills decide to become hot garbage to THIS degree like, damn.
I forget the age range on this site runs only a little past the teens most of the time because nothing said here is in any way outside of LGBTQ history.
But, you know, thats reactionary bullshit for you. Are discoursers all younger than 21 or something? Would that explain this nonsense?
The first person who welcomes me into the community as a sort of mentor proudly ID’d as a Dyke would insist that be used over lesbian or homosexual.
Comcastkills showing the same regard for people as the average school bully, I see.
It’s wild and depressing and wildly depressing for me to see this kind of stuff, because when I was a kid, any of us babygays would have literally killed to have an older queer mentor of any kind. Shockingly, there were few around, because, you know, AIDS. But now, the next generation, finally having what we lost, an older generation to teach them about their cultural history n shit… Just. Actively hates and in some cases even tries to kill them (I’ve seen kids on this hellsite try to cost grown-ass adults, sometimes parents, their jobs, kids, and lives).
Like, I feel so old to be like “back in my day” or “when I was your age” but seriously. I always thought the younger generations would be better off for having what we lost. Instead: this.
And we gotta call it by its name:
It’s not a generation gap. It’s not just ignorance (though that plays a part). It’s not just TERF manipulation against the word queer (though that plays a part).
We’re seeing a young generation of LGBT conservatism: kids who want their civil rights but who don’t want all the mess and scandalousness of actual liberation. Kids who want to hold on to what has been won for white middle class binary identified LG kids and don’t want to thing about what’s happening on the margins on the LGBT movement. Kids who want glamorous LGBT celebrities on tv, not homeless LGBT youth in their spaces. We have kids into gay nationalism. We have lesbians longing for the time when we didn’t include bisexuals and trans women in our communities. We have LGBT youth voting for Tories.
These kids aren’t shitting on their queer elders out of just ignorance, they actively reject our struggle against all oppression.
I’ve been thinking about this lately too.
The thing I created this blog to oppose is, ultimately, a right-wing reactionary movement, and if you scratch even a little bit at the veneer of leftism, you find bootstrap logic, xenophobia, militarism, anti-intellectualism, the veneration of retributive justice, disrespect for bodily autonomy, and other characteristics of right-wing politics underneath.
Let’s start calling it what it is.
I thought for the longest while that I was off-the-mark in mentally categorizing Tumblr Anti-X (anti ace/aro, anti kink, anti gender-fluidity/gender-spectrum, anti-labels-actual-queer-people-use, anti certain-kinds-of-fiction, etc) Discoursers as the social conservativesof the future, but the above lines up incredibly well with my own observations.
Years ago, someone asked me to do a portrait of the social conservatism of decades to a century in the future and at the time I predicted highly limited andconditional acceptance of white, able-bodied, very gender-conforming, white-picket-fence, cis gay men and lesbians, who vote conservative. Maaaaaaybe also a limited acceptance of transgender people who medicalize and pathologize themselves out the wazoo, performing a constant show of ‘I’m just a good person who seeks the appropriate treatment for my medically-acknowledged condition, won’t you accept me, I promise not to rock the boat?’ and whose gender-presentation after transition is also very high in conformity to what the conservative mind thinks of as acceptable + again, support for conservative politics.
Imagine how depressed I was when a large assortment of discoursers, transmedicalists and others along these lines basically confirmed a good deal of the above, here on Tumblr, decades before I thought it would ever become a thing! I started getting alarm bells in my head when I saw the vicious responses toward the concept of gender as a spectrum (and thus toward the existence of genderqueer / nonbinary, agender, genderfluid/genderfuck people), because after years of monitoring and seeking to understand social conservative communities, I knew that they consistently felt a deep, existential sense of threat from anything that challenged their rigid, binary views of gender. And here, on Tumblr, I was seeing young, so-called ‘progressives’ reacting in the same manner, as if threatened, by the concept that gender as a binary is a small and very reductive lens through which one can see the human experience. Whoever coined the phrase ‘conservatism with a gay hat’ couldn’t have been more apt.
And the thing is, this isn’t exactly something new for the community, the only thing that’s truly different is that an entire generation is now in the thrall of reactionary politics. Seeing sneers at queer people daring to (gasp!) describe ourselves as ‘proudly perverted’, as highly sexual beings, as kinky and unapologetic, reminds me what a massive impact radfems have had in shaping the Tumblr social environment and what a net contributor they’ve been to the aforementioned reactionary politics. Whenever I look at the notes of popular radfem posts, it’s always the same exceedingly telling image: usernames along the lines of ‘empress-vulvalini’ or ‘uter-person’ routinely interspersed with ‘tradcatholicnationalist’ or ‘jesus-is-my-savior’ (looking at the latter kind of blogs reveals that they’re Fundamentalist Christians to a one and I say this as a progressive Christian, lest someone accuse me of bigotry. It’s not the Christianity that’s my issue here, it’s the fundamentalism and the deep conservatism that comes with it). In the most darkly hilarious situations, I’ve found posts made by actual religious fundies (’sexual promiscuity and behavior characterized as ‘kink’ damages the inherent dignity of the person’, for one example) with the notes filled with radfems liking, reblogging and lauding the content.
It’s been noted ad-nauseam that radfems and conservative politicians have been good allies on several fronts, starting with the 1970s, but even something as simple as a Tumblr post can show how radfems share idea-space with fundamentalists. Radfems, in this case, have been the social-vector through which LGBT teens on Tumblr have been introduced to and influenced by fundamentalist thought, giving us the incredibly baffling sight of queer youngsters reacting with knee-jerky viciousness to non-normative sexual practices that hardly warranted the batting of an eye-lash in queer-dominated spaces, ten years ago.
Good additions – and, kind of off topic, but I actually teared up a little when I saw your URL in my notes, and got a case of happycry sniffles writing this, I’m just so glad you’re back. You always post with such depth of perspective and moral clarity and insight; a heartening light in the fog.
just because someone calls themselves progressive doesn’t mean they are.
yea sometimes “progressive” just means they think their politics are the exact right amount of forward thinking that people should be allowed to be. See also the weirdness of “liberal democrat” politicians
What Amazon will probably say to justify this later: “It’s so we can tell if one of our staff is stealing”
What the article says it’s for: “It vibrates or shocks employees if they sort the packaging wrong”
What Amazon’s ulterior motive probably is: “We can track the pace of their work and if they’re taking a few seconds too long or using their hands to wipe their sweaty brows, we bring it up at a performance review and will fire them for it. But remember that if you whine about this or demand better conditions/wages, we’ll just replace you with robots, so keep working you mindless and invasively-monitored drones“
what the fuck kind of dystopian bullshit
OKAY SO normally I would save my comments for the tags but I have first hand experience working at an Amazon warehouse, and I just have some feelings about this especially as a former employee. They paid decently higher than other places I had worked, so I thought it would be worth it. It is not (I made 11/hr before taxes so like not even that much tbh). On the first day of training we were shown the robots. It was presented in a way that was like “wow look how cool these are ps if you fuck up always remember that you are replaceable with one of these.” Then we were taught how to sort packages. I’m a very very petite person, and there were some boxes that I could barely lift on my own but the supervisors basically stood around and watched as I struggled several feet with a box bigger than myself. It was only the other ‘lower level’ warehouse workers who helped, and one girl was the same size as me. We had legally mandated breaks, which they would often send us late to and call us back early from. On top of all this general poor treatment, if it was seeming too slow (this happened every single day before the big package rush btw) they’d send tons of people home so that they wouldn’t have to pay them. Of course then everyone left behind was stuck dealing with the rush that inevitably happened, but again management didn’t care because it saved them money to pay less people for more work. I got scolded and yelled at on the daily for not working fast enough or because I was carrying only one box at a time, even if it was a massive one. We were judged based on number of boxes scanned per hour, and I was like super slow at maybe 100 an hour I think?? Don’t really remember but most people did 200+ and so I got in trouble a lot. Anyway, TLDR, Amazon fucking sucks and they treat employees like garbage so this is definitely believable imho as a way to further dehumanize and control their workers.
This is why we unionize.
Look, folks. I get how scary unionizing and strikes can be. I’ve both been involved in unions and refused to cross pickets in my life. Back when we had to fight this war the first time, violence regularly broke out against workers striking. Even here where I live.
But that’s what we need to do. It’s our turn to organize and fight for our rights. This is how we reclaim the country that has increasingly swung backwards to the days of moguls and dynasties.
We’ve been here before. No kidding. This? This is nothing new. Even 45, corrupt moron rich man, is nothing new in this world. Bezos, mistreatment of workers, brutal hours and poor pay is nothing new. Think industrial revolution.
The way we won then was by coming together and unionizing. It was organizing and unfortunately, it was risking too. But don’t ever forget, we outnumber them. We outnumber them even with the militarized police and even with their money, and somewhere deep down, they sure as hell know it.
Join a union. Organize your workplace. Fight back. The robots are coming anyway, we might as well organize now so we’re ready to support each other and hold our politicians feet to the fires.
I work for UPS. It is INFINITELY better than Amazon, and there’s one major reason why.
We’re fucking TEAMSTERS.
I don’t like the union and I know they’ve shafted part-timers like me but honest to god? We’re a LOT better off than anyone at Amazon.
It’s not an easy job but they’d rather get you a position where you can fit rather than force you to do one you’ll fail at.
Identity has become the axis of so much university activism because, for all the radical posturing associated with it, identity politics does not threaten the established order of society. It promotes a moralistic and self-indulgent anti-politics, where a person’s use of language and the purity of their thinking matters more than confronting collectively the material conditions and social relations under which they are forced to live. It creates a simulation of political struggle – one that doesn’t merely fail to challenge the material inequality and unfreedom of late capitalism, but fundamentally aligns with the dynamics and interests of its atomised, spectacle-driven society. It is a perfect mirror of consumerism, playing-upon the individual’s desires for real freedom, only to perpetuate and prettify the conditions of their alienation.
But naw though.
First, any critique of “Identity Politics” that ignores the fact that USian conservative politics is Entirely “identity politics” in the form of white nationalism and white supremacy just flat-out should not be taken seriously because of the enormous bad-faith it’s being made in.
And Second, that you choose to target “university activism” is telling because what is the “identity politics” you are decrying here? Antiracism activism, Academic Parity activism(Non-Anglo Studies, etc), the BDS movement, Feminism, Queer activism; this is the “university activism” commonly meant by “Identity Politics” in our political parlance. So non-whites protesting for recognition of and respect for their humanity; women fighting to end their exploitation and force our society to look at it; queers fighting for the basic fucking dignity to be allowed to live their lives in peace. That’s what you’re attacking as “radical posturing”, “moralistic”, and “self-indulgent”: people coming together as a community to pressure the rest of their society to acknowledge and respect them by extending them the same legal protections and substantive rights as those which that society centers as “normal”: the white, the wealthy, and the male.
You are taking the most fundamental, dynamic, and successful political work to establish a more egalitarian and equitable society of the last century -the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, and Queer Equality- and labeling all of it “anti-political”. Ironically your claim itself is far closer to the history of “antipolitics” in philosophy; you’re no better than Plato, looking at people he dislikes having the temerity to make their voices heard and saying it’d be better off for everyone if they just shutup and let the “Better Sort”, with the “Wisdom” to see society’s REAL problems, handle things.
Then Third, there’s the sheer breathtaking, ahistorical arrogance of the conspiratorial assertion at the center of this argument. “Identity Politics does not threaten the
established order of society”? Really? On what basis is that claim made? “Established Society” has spent and continues to spend millions of dollars and labor-hours on police suppression and
subversion of anti-racist activism; has spilled and continues to spill millions of gallons of ink and electrons on
dismissing and denouncing the feminist fight for recognition and
justice; has struggled and continues to struggle so endlessly –from the courts to the streets and from
pharmacy-counters to then legislative-bench– to keep gender and sexual
minorities labeled “deviant” and barred from the legal affirmations and
protections of its mainstream: why does the Capitalist class do this when it considers none of them nor the reforms they champion a threat to the order they have established? The claim that Capitalist States -the same States that have struggled so
mightily to suppress these movements and failed through the power of
politics- “Allow” the struggle for social justice and equality to exist
as a distraction, that the entire arc of the various Civil Rights
struggles of the 20th century are a “Simulation” planned out and put on
by Capitalists to distract people from “real politics”, and that none of it really matters is so facially facile, so tin-lined in its basic conception, that it’s quite possible even Dan Brown would blush to write it, yet somehow it is taken seriously. And what are these “real politics” “Identity Politics” distracts from? Why, the
very material conditions and social relations these “Identity” movements have been, and are actively
engaged with and dedicated to, changing in a more egalitarian direction. Imagine That.
So fundamentally this is a contradictory argument. It grants political primacy and “reality” to the very structures which “Identity” activism seeks to change, while labeling that activism a distraction from changing those structures. For some reason, you’ve chosen to deny the radical nature of 20th Century “Identity Politics”: to deny the intense connections between anti-poverty activism and Civil Rights activism; to deny that Planned Parenthood has been one of the most effective and reliable providers of general healthcare to low-income communities precisely BECAUSE of its dedication to feminist ideals and politics; to deny the central role of Queer activism and Queer politicians in liberalizing US politics; to deny the role of political racism in undermining Unions and pro-Labor politics in the US, and thus the centrality of confronting political racism with political antiracism if ever a labor-based politics is to succeed; to deny the essential intersectional nature of any political nature truly dedicated to egalitarianism and liberty.
I don’t know why you’ve chosen to something so wrong-headed and misleading, but I know that it’s wrong, and that you sound far more like Jonathan Chait and Andrew Sullivan in writing it than you do Marx or Kropotkin. Well, at least your nametag is apt.
UBI will be disastrous if implemented. Long-term idleness, which is what UBI enables, the explicit reason that UBI exists, is disastrous to the human spirit, and it will inevitable reduce a large fraction of the population to a near sub-human existence.
My preferred solution to the problem (if it is a problem) is a guaranteed jobs program.
I am somewhat inclined to agree with the second sentence, not quite as much with the first. I have a fair amount of hope for such a project, just not very much optimism.
(FALC and UBI-plus-heavy-automation combination worries me much more)
What about a guaranteed capital program? Jobs mitigate some of the long-term idleness issues but hardly attack the source.
Makework feels to me like it might not be that much better than idleness, in that it teaches you, at least on a system-1 level, that work isn’t something that’s *really necessary*, and that it’s just a pointless obligation imposed by authority figures.
Seconded, and maybe it doesn’t even go far enough. Make-work is awful. I can’t overemphasize how much resentment is generated when you’re forced to bust your ass for work that you know for a fact has no point. And to be honest, since a lot of labor in our current economy, even for the employed, is bullshit make-work and the malaise is already obvious, I’m confused as to how someone could think it’s the solution.
At least in idleness you could be playing video games. (I’ve seen the hypothesis floating around that, in utter seriousness, video games are the other half of the UBI puzzle. I don’t know if I believe it, but it’s a delightfully subversive take.)
“idleness” can also involve creating works of beauty that might not be financially sustainable in the current economic environment.
think of all the scientific discoveries and works of art and literature created by aristocrats who were technically “idle”, coasting on inherited wealth.
sure, some people may choose to spend their lives cock fighting or whatever instead, but so what.
“Idleness” can involve creating works of beauty, but honestly argumate, how many people would do that? “Somebody could paint the Mona Lisa in their UBI time” is not a serious argument, because only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population has the inclination and the skills to do that.
The people who already live entirely on gov’t support, what do they do? Does it look like “scientific discovery and works of art and literature”? Do you want to dramatically expand the number of people living under those conditions?
better round them up and send them to the sugar plantations then, for their own good
Who the hell are these fucking super villains who think idleness is bad? Fuck off and head down to the salt mines if you think hard labor is so soul-nourishing. You’ve got no business forcing it on everyone else.
there’s nothing “super” about these villains
Hey, @mailadreapta, you know what reduces people to a subhuman existence? Working fourteen hours a day. Being abused by their boss and just taking it because the alternative is starvation. Having to beg for scraps.
I think mailadreapta may be the unicorn: The actually lazy person.
When evaluating social policies, people assume other people act the way they would act. The people who think people would be lazy and do nothing are the people who would immediately stop and do nothing the moment they had subsistence-level supports, rather than seeking something to do.
Also, the point about UBI is… It’s enough to live on. It’s not necessarily enough for a comfortable life. Virtually everyone I know would trade at least some hours of time for, say, money for video games or something.
But all but one or two of them would make things. If you wouldn’t, mailadreapta, that is your fucking problem, please stop blaming everyone else for a character flaw you are projecting onto them. Find something you care about enough that you’d do it even if you didn’t have to, and grow the fuck up.
I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have been in the queer movement for 20+ years, to have studied queer theory, to have contributed to you potentially enjoying the rights you have today because I was part of a groundswell of lobbying and direct action in the 1990s….
…to have a 15 year old who’s spent maybe 8 months being political and has never inquired about queer history anonymously message me, “EXCUSE ME QU**R IS A SLUR LMAO OMG EMBARRASSSING AN aCTUAL ADULT WHO THINKS IT’S OKAY TO USE QU**R!~!!!!”
Dude, we are a slur. Queer folks are a slur to conservative straight people. Everything we are will be used as a slur by everyone who hates us. Gay is a slur. Lesbian is a slur. People will try to use all of our words against us. Don’t fucking let them get into your head to the point at which you’re telling actual queer people not to use the words we’ve used to unite ourselves and empower ourselves for decades.
yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees
The notes on this post since I first reblogged it from @asynca are a wild fucking ride.
“It was never our word, do some research.” Child do your own damn research, it’s been our word.
“If you’ve been part of the community for 20 years get off of Tumblr and go take care of your grandkids.” Man I would not want to be you in 20 years, realizing that shit, you don’t stop existing when you become a grown-up and you keep having interests. How do you think your life’s going to be between age 20 and age 80? Is it gonna be that boring to be you? And holy shit my grandkids? If Asy is anything like me, who came out at 13, how you expect me to have grandkids at 33ish? 35? Y’all. Really. And these are the same people who wail ‘respect your elders, don’t call them queer, they don’t like it,’ but out the other side of their mouth say ‘you’re not relevant, grandma, go away.’
Mmkay. Just show your hypocrisy a bit more, I guess.
“Just don’t call people things they don’t wanna be called.”
Aight, so, yeah. First off, ain’t nobody calling anybody part of the queer community who ain’t identifying as queer. Queer is, and has been, a radical political and mostly blue-collar portion of the LGBTQIPA+ community. It is defined by its rejection of Corporate Gay (white, upper-middle-class, cis gay exclusionary ‘palatable for TV’ gayness) and inclusion of the entire community, and its political activism.
Guess what, if you ain’t queer, you ain’t part of the queer community. Believe me, we don’t want you if you ain’t queer, because queers ain’t afraid to get their hands dirty and actually fight. And I am so so so tired of people thinking that we’re trying to coerce people into calling themselves queer. If you wanna be part of this community, great. Otherwise, you ain’t part of it and no one is trying to force you.
That said, it’s important to recognize that attempting to censor people’s self-identity is and has been a tactic of TERFs, “purity” culture advocates, and people who have tried to shut out bi, trans, pan, questioning, ace, non-binary, genderfluid and other ‘non-conforming’ identities. It’s not a new problem. I grew up listening to Ani DiFranco (I know she has issues, that’s another post) and the song “In or Out,” which expressly, in part, is about belonging and standards in the community was released on Imperfectly in 1992. Like, really. Little Plastic Castle addresses it, too, and that came out exactly 20 years ago in 1998.
The kids on this site are not the first group to think that they can determine who is ‘In or Out.’ This site’s would-be censors are not the first ones thinking, ‘I can just demand that you not be who you are when it makes me uncomfortable.’
Demanding that we not use our identity words to describe ourselves because it makes you uncomfortable is not acceptable. No one is accepting of the idea that ‘gay’ is a word which should simply not be used. And yet, we are meant to simply write off queer and stop using that word, instead of helping people work through their issues and/or working further on reclaiming and/or simply be left alone to our identities without having to justify them. This thought process that we should just drop the word because it’s ‘bad’ is the perfect intersection of Tumblr’s TERF-sponsored exclusionists and Tumblr’s anti-recovery culture, and it needs to stop.
Kids need to stop hiding behind the idea that ‘older people in the community don’t like queer and have trauma with it,’ because we are the older people in the community, and I’m here to tell you, my trauma was around gay and dyke. Queer is the word that gave me back my life. Stop trying to use us as your Shields Against Being Called On Your Bigotry, because we’re not interested.
People need to stop saying ‘don’t call others that,’ because we’re not talking to you if you don’t identify as queer. The community who identifies as queer is who we are addressing.
People need to stop attempting to suppress the word queer. It’s not going away. We are not going away. Or, to bring back what I grew up saying:
fun fact – the human uterus automatically rejects and flushes out/kills around 70% of all fertilized eggs, so defining life as beginning at conception essentially makes it illegal to have functional reproductive organs.
The human uterus is one of the most hostile places for an embryo to implant. Guess all of our uteruses are potential serial killers.
And it’s hostile because human pregnancy is incredibly dangerous by all accounts compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, so bear that in mind whenever someone says “Just go through with the pregnancy and give it up for adoption”
And not only is pregnancy in the US Particularly Dangerous, it’s even more so for the Poor and Rural, and even more for Black Women, most often as a result of stress-related illnesses and lack of prenatal care.
Oddly enough, the self-professed “pro-life” don’t seem to give a damn about any of this, and actively support a political party whose policies have 1)created this problem, 2)actively prevent fixing it, and 3)frequently deny it even exists.
The other part of the picture is that, once a group has “we try to hurt our enemies’ feelings” as a norm, it will attract people who want to do that, whether they share the groups’ values or not. Lots and lots of people choose political affiliations based on which ones let them behave the way they want to behave; a cost of tolerating lots of behavior from ‘your side’ is that you get a lot of people who are there for your tolerance.
I have a lot of thoughts about this but they’re all very speculative; be appropriately skeptical.
There are people who I really disagree with, but fundamentally respect. I understand where their understanding of the world diverges from mine, and I get what they’re trying to do, and I might hope that they never get political power but on a personal level I trust them and like them, and enjoy debating and discussing things with them, and I know that they feel the same way about me. And I want my communities to be ones in which they are welcome (and my friendships with them are not discouraged or treated as evidence against my commitment and trustworthiness).
This is sort of the Peak Liberal take on how to handle profound political disagreement, and by that I mean something more than “it’s something liberals say a lot and leftists think is really stupid”. Liberalism is a collection of social technologies which developed to try to sustain societies where people had deeply felt political, cultural and religious (mostly religious) disagreements. Lots and lots of the norms of liberalism are norms for maintaining societies in which these profound disagreements exist. “I don’t agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend your right to say it” is a core liberal norm; “we can respect each other without agreeing with each other” is liberalism; “we should treat each other compassionately and thoughtfully and lawfully even when we believe each others’ beliefs to be evil” is liberalism.
Leftists have a lot of critiques of this! Some of them are good critiques! For example:
In practice, no community is inclusive of everyone. Communities that are aiming for ‘inclusive of everyone’ end up being inclusive of the people with the most social power, because they’re most resilient to the inclusion of people who really hate them and like to hurt them. Norms that try to make everyone get along therefore end up being norms that make things comfortable for powerful people and Not For You at vulnerable people.
Divorcing peoples’ politics from their character like that isn’t very principled. If I think someone is a rapist, I shouldn’t ‘like them as a person but disagree with them about rape’. If I think someone supports mass murder in the form of foreign wars, I shouldn’t ‘like them as a person but disagree with them about mass murder’. Doing this requires some weird doublethink where you forget the actual consequences of peoples’ political behavior, which hurts real people, so you can relegate it to the realm where “they’re wrong about the best flavor of ice cream” and “they’re wrong about what temperature to keep their house” go.
But the core thing here is not a specific critique. Leftists, even when the specific critiques don’t apply, are deeply suspicious of “we disagree profoundly but we can respect each other”. They recognize it as the Core Liberal Thing and they are very much opposed to the core liberal thing. So leftists, when talking with people who they disagree with politically, tend to go out of their way not to do the Core Liberal Thing. They often take pride in not having respectful, positive relationships with people who they profoundly disagree with. They are often mean to people who they disagree with. They often ridicule the idea that we should be establishing common ground or agreeing to let some disagreements lie for the sake of common interests elsewhere.
And, yeah, they often are delighted about hurting liberals’ feelings. It’s an extension of the critique of collaborative-disagreement as a important core norm, and while I think some parts of the critique have merit, I’ve never seen anything productive come of a discussion between people who abandoned effort at kind and thoughtful disagreement in favor of trying to hurt their enemies’ feelings. And so I think you need it, at least a little bit sometimes on your own terms, even if you are opposed to it as a framework for how society should work.
oh shit, suddenly i understand why i’m seeing tumblr leftists talk about ‘liberals’ as The Enemy, when just last year ‘liberal’ was the opposite of ‘conservative’, and ‘conservative’ meant right-wing.
it’s because ‘conservative’ doesn’t actually mean right-wing, it just tends to coincide with it. conservative really means dogmatic and judgmental.
just moving along like everyone else 