Holier-than-thou virtue-signaling on the left?

[Yukaphile]

I mean, I get so damned fed up with people judging whole groups of other people as if they are the KINGS OF THE WORLD. Look at me. Call me simplistic, but I ain't judging the 60,000,000 who voted for Trump. I feel it with sadness, but I don't consider them collective monsters like the hard left does.

[Darth Wedgius]

Much of the left doesn't even judge the right, they just imagine the right as somebody else. They don't attack people saying "Make America Great Again," they attack bogeymen saying "Make America White Again." They don't attack people fighting illegal immigration, they attack bogeymen who are anti-immigrant.

A particularly easy way to imagine yourself virtuous is to put yourself in an imaginary world where the people you disagree with are saying and doing something else.

[Yukaphile]

And yeah, a certain subset do feel that, "Make America White Again," I don't dispute it. That said, I am starting to see the dividing line in the middle between is rather gray and blurry. Ignoring my own opposition to YOUR views on immigration, I've already accepted that the VAST majority of Trump supporters are not white nationalist KKK monsters. That is a myth, the same way people like to think every German across Europe was boot-pounding party-loyal fanatic. It's how history is abused.

[AllanO]

Not so. Calling out virtue signalling isn't signalling one's own virtue any more than calling out a thief is a protestation of one's honestly. There is no logical implication of either involved.

Your right I should have said charges of virtue signaling often come off to me (ie I make an inference about the people's motives for doing it based on context [other things they say, what sorts of conversations it comes up in etc.]) as themselves virtue signalling. It is not what the term logically means or necessarily is.

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Much of the left doesn't even judge the right, they just imagine the right as somebody else. They don't attack people saying "Make America Great Again," they attack bogeymen saying "Make America White Again." They don't attack people fighting illegal immigration, they attack bogeymen who are anti-immigrant.

Some of that is just standard straw man fallacy type stuff that happens in a depressingly large number of debates on all topics. It is far too easy to argue against what you think people are saying rather than listening to what they say and actually responding to that.

On the other hand people rarely say enough to fully delineate their position in debates and it would take forever if we made absolutely sure we were not making any assumptions about anyone else before doing anything in response...


Also so the "those extremists are just the logical extension of the ideas of X" or "even those in group X who do not actually engage in such extremism are sympathetic and so aid and abet it in subtle ways" type arguments are never valid? Because I hear that form of argument from all sides also... Anyway, it seems really easy to abuse to me, but not always completely invalid.

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Oh, something about the left that annoys me occurred to me. Some left wing types will have a deep ideology about police abolition, pacifism or other systematic rejection of organized violence in terms of the necessarily oppressive and corrosive nature of violence etc., however they will also be sympathetic to violent revolutionaries who have the appropriate politics. It strikes me that the general critique of violence such people offer tends to be such that one should not expect it to be a good thing if done with the "right" motives. So the two sets of beliefs (pacifism on the one hand and revolutionary violence on the other) seem in pretty heavy tension that goes seemingly unacknowledged. There are of course plenty who just embrace pacifism completely or who happily endorse violence in general, but I know some people who embrace both and seem happily unaware of the tension, it is a little annoying and is a vice unique to the left in my experience (I can think of right wing pacifists, and right wing revolutionaries but not people who have both sympathies at once).

Although the belief that my violence (or the violence I am sympathetic to) is good and righteous, but that the violence of others is wholly bad is probably just a common fallacy of human group think. The thing I am on about is a bit more intellectually involved then that sort of thing.

[Yukaphile]

Like it or not, state will always be with us until technology changes that.

[Yukaphile]

It really is easier to condemn an image you have in your head rather than a person you meet, get to know, and find they are fundamentally no different, with hopes and dreams all their own. I really think arguing on behalf of a "strawman in your head" and the "bogeyman you think the other person is" does more damage in terms of goodwill and empathy and cooperation and diplomacy and politics than any other force on Earth.

[Admiral X]

Hell, the state is always with us in part thanks to technology making it easier for them to do so.

[Yukaphile]

I think the "state" will dissolve in the future, past the paranoid "they're watching us" mentality you have. Technology will bring us closer together, like we are seeing now, in our hyperconnected world. It is just baby steps compared to where we will someday be. That said, it's really showing off how far we have to go.

[Beastro]

Well, leftists easily insist the world is worse than it's ever been, and I laugh at that. I read about the 1940s, and that seems like the darkest period in our history, even past "it was a war situation." Things are bad, sure, but they could be a billion times worse. And crime is even going down.

Whoever is saying that is a blind idiot. Yes, modern society is still VERY flawed, but we have come a LONG way from the times of lynching a black man for wanting to read or of parents electrocuting their sons for the most terrible crime of crushing on other boys. That still happens, sadly, but not nearly as often and now you'll might actually see jail time for it.

We're not in a GREAT place, but we are in a BETTER place. Now, let's try to stay there and not get pushed backward by the dispositionally-powerful few who can not just accept that they have been rightly left behind.

I think that's the very reason why they despise things today. So many dragons have been slayed, that today's righteous crusaders no longer have any left to to kill themselves which is what they want so badly. What they supposedly champion for ultimately means nothing if they have nothing to exert power against to overcome.

It makes me wonder how how much of their behaviour is actively trying to make things worse so they have those "good" bad times back again. Basically, with things like "Bash the Fash" if there aren't any Fascists around, or of any great number or quality, then they need to be made to be defeated again.


What I do find interesting is how similar they are to the element of internet culture that produced the Alt-Right. I've been around those types since the early 2000s. Who they oppose, mock and deride ultimately doesn't matter so long as the target is the top dog and who ever moves up to take the place of the previous top dog will then get attacked. ATM they are against the Left because they look to be dominant and turn on anyone who gets too strong.

It's really amusing to me, because it's a shade of the twisted, supposed victim protecting culture that produces things like Affirmative Action, where if suddenly disadvantaged groups became too well off they'd theoretically should be discriminated against because they've become too well off compared to other groups.

I think the "state" will dissolve in the future, past the paranoid "they're watching us" mentality you have. Technology will bring us closer together, like we are seeing now, in our hyperconnected world. It is just baby steps compared to where we will someday be. That said, it's really showing off how far we have to go.

Nations are but one of the many beasts lurking within the masses that have their own desires and whims. I wouldn't underestimate them, but I fear what strength the beasts as a whole will gain from further technological development.

If you're wondering wtf I'm talking of, it's of the "People don't posses ideas; ideas posses people" kinda thing.

[Yukaphile]

Well, it puts me in mind of that quote from the Oracle in The Matrix, in that the only thing that concerned her was the future, and there's only one way to reach it, "together."