"They persuaded Scott Weiner but remain furious that they had to work so hard to persuade him."
Because it increasingly seems like a huge chunk of the modern progressive left hates and resents the idea that they might have to persuade people to accept their ideas and get on board with their proposals. Perhaps because it implies that at least some of their ideas are not so self-evidently brilliant and correct that everyone will / should just immediately accept them, meaning that there is in turn a chance that they are actually not On The Right Side Of History (which in itself speaks volumes -- they're less interested in doing the right thing as in making sure that posterity records that they were on the side of the right thing). It's harder to feel morally righteous if you have to debate your ideas, thus risking the discovery that you might actually not be morally righteous, or at least that the issue might be more complicated than you acknowledge.
One could argue that their actual major project over the last decade and change -- more than climate change, more than police abolition, more than racial equality, more than trans rights, more than Palestinian liberation -- has actually been to find ways of ensuring that they can 'win' arguments without actually having to have the argument. Just look at many of their favoured rhetorical devices, many of which are all about shutting people down and instantly dismissing their positions without actually having to engage with them. He's "mansplaining". She's "bothsidesing". You need to "stay in your lane". "It's not my job to educate you". And if that doesn't work, then just hit them with the good ol' ad hominems.
So yeah, not even changing your mind is good enough to satisfy these people. Because in their world having to be persuaded to change your mind in the first place is the ultimate insult.
I really enjoyed this comment, there are some great insights here. I would like to add something to your line "it's harder to feel morally righteous if you have to debate your ideas".
I think one reason people do not want to debate is because it implies equal status between the two sides. Of course you think your position is correct but debating opponents shows respect. I'm sure we can all imagine people we wouldn't debate. For example, I would not debate a Flat Earther on the shape of the Earth or Hasan Piker on the morality of shoplifting. While part of this is due to the fact that it would not be a good use of my time, I also don't see these as worthy debate opponents. Their positions are obviously wrong and debating them shows more respect than I want to give them. I think this is how social justice activists often feel about debating their opponents.
This is true, but on the flip-side, in this case it's also one of those "if everyone you meet's an asshole" situations. Like, yes, sure, there are people who I would not dignify with an argument (or at least would try not to; I've admittedly gotten locked into plenty of ill-advised internet arguments in the past). I get not wanting to debate the shape of the world with the flat-Earthers. But if someone's in a mindset where everyone to the right of, I dunno, Hasan Piker is a dumb-dumb who isn't worth arguing with, maybe the problem isn't that they've reached enlightenment, just saying.
There actually is a well known Flat Earther who changed his mind after going to Antarctica and seeing a 24 hour sun. He has turned his YouTube channel into a Flat Earth debunking channel.
I would like to add to your list "I shouldn't have to need to convince you to do the right thing", a phrase that blatantly smuggles in the assumption that we all agree on what the right thing is.
I appreciate the criticism of this group of “progressives.” But let’s be clear, this does not represent a “huge chunk” of the left. Moreover, the idea of condemning those who are not 100% on board with one’s wacky ideas is not entirely the province of progressives. Spend any time on right wing message boards and you will learn that unless you believe this country is run by a minority of left-wing nuts who want to prevent you from eating beef, allow Sharia law to be instituted, and oppress Christians, you are a traitor.
1. I specifically said "*seems like* a huge chunk", not "I've done the research and it's quantifiably and demonstrably a huge chunk".
2. I never claimed that this was a trait limited solely to the progressive left: it's just that, well, they're the subject of this particular discussion.
What we can all agree on is that it's an extremely loud chunk, which makes them seem like there are more of them than there are. It's the same way NIMBYs get excessive clout in planning board meetings- they show up and loudly state their opinions and the normal people don't.
Exactly. There is a clear explanation for people that do this. It is in fact a personality disorder. It derives from low self-esteem with their human ego fulfillment need sitting too close empty. Thus, they cannot tolerate any hit to their ego that derives from having to admit that they had been wrong. We all know these types of people. We have them in our family and as friends and coworkers. They are fragile. They are easily triggered. They are on constant lookout for any indication of criticism to snap at. They are more often female.
Because accepting criticism and admitting that they are wrong does cause them psychological pain, they work on walls of defense to prevent from having to experience it. They say words are weapons because they can be hurt by them. So they use words to attempt to cause hurt to others... but don't seem to understand that the rest of us have thick skin and don't turn into melty snowflakes over constructive criticism.
These people always exist as a percentage of the population. Some develop coping skills and improve their self-confidence and shift from avoiding criticism to seeking it out to help with their self-improvement. The US military experience reprograms young people this way. However, seeing these fragile people rise to positions of power and influence was never any design of working evolutionary biology. It is our modern technological existence that has corrupted that dominance hierarchy and basically allowed the insane to be running the asylum.
THAT is the problem. Somehow, I think because of the success and changes to our economy, these people that would generally not rise to the top of the human dominance hierarchy got a booter chair so they could set at the head of the table and throw their tantrums while in charge.
One of my favorite retorts from this group is "show me your research" or "evidence or it didn't happen" or something of that ilk. I just tell them that if they're old enough to mouthe off on the internet, they're old enough to Google something.
There's also the goalpost moving tactic of "it's not happening you're infected by Fox News" to "it's totally happening and it's awesome", sometimes in the same response. Also "it's weird that you care about this {{X ISSUE}}" (but not weird that "we" obviously care about it), or the pretending to be confused by the question/semantic gaming "CRT is only taught at university level not in elementary schools you dummy" (well yes if one applies a very literal definition of "Critical Race Theory" as a college level course and not that the ideas and principles espoused by the same academics involved in creating and teaching that academic theory are present in a lot of the racial education curriculum distributed throughout public and private school systems), etc. And look, I'm to the left on many cultural issues but it has become hard not to notice that these "debate" tactics favored by so many liberals and progressives in particularly the post-Trump era have become almost a default stance in those spaces. Like few want/can intelligently argue why post-pubescent trans females should be allowed to play in female sports from a scientific or social fairness perspective, it's "why do you care it's just a tiny few" (well ok but that same argument works both ways, bans on that would also just affect a tiny few then so why rewrite Title X around to protect a "literal handful" of trans athletes ??). Also, the "tiny handful" argument might have actually been accurate in say 2015 (aroudn the time of the First Bathroom Wars), when the visible presence of actual transgendered individuals was miniscule and most people went about their entire lives never encountering a transgendered individual, to just a short decade later when, particularly parents of school aged kids, encountered multiple trans identified kids in their schools, often several in the same social groups, and that encountering a sports team or game that had a trans athlete participant has become a LOT more common that it was, again just a short decade ago. And intellectually consistent progressives would say "this is good, this means social and institutional acceptance of trans identities has improved so more are feeling safe and comfortable to come out", but instead it's still insisting this is a practically invisible minority that yet requires a lot of social and institutional adjustments to accommodate.
FWIW I do think the abdication of "debate" by much of the left on a lot of topics just legitimizes the right wing opposition - "crime is down compared to 1993 you bigot" is a terrible response to public disorder and decay that people can see with their own eyes. "There is no migrant surge at the border" was the Biden Administration's refrain for about the first three years until the stance became politically untenable by 2024 and then suddenly it was "we need to pass this immigration reform bill ASAP but we can't because Republicans suck". Kamala Harris's refusal to even discuss (let alone defend/deny/revise whatever) her 2020 positions around taxpayer funded gender affirming care for illegal alien prisoners (lol) when her recorded response from less than 4 years ago was on record is also in that vein, refusing to discuss an issue is not the same as voters believing you don't have a position on the issue and that if put in power, you won't act on it! Biden's Day One Executive Orders around trans issues, "the Civil Rights issue of our time" as he phrased it, were not really lost on those who do pay attention to this issue and those who more felt the "vibe" of the the past 4 years of Biden and Democratic policies and rhetoric around that they do in fact support (and will turn into policy) those various positions if given the opportunity, even if they didn't campaign specifically for those policies in public, now OR then (Biden sure didn't campaign on the Number One Civil Rights Issue Of Our Time in 2020 to my recall). I think Democrats are also going to be put in the same position when it comes to the unfortunate D'Arliza and the ascendant DSA now, many will believe the "right" tactic will be to not talk about it at all and focus on "affordability" and opposing Trump - unfortunately I don't think that will suffice in a nationalized political environment and when the views espoused will seem a lot more extreme than maybe even MAGA views may be, as tends to be the burden of left of center politics in a right of center polity (even if on an issue by issue basis polling at least indicates better favorability for left of center policy, it's the PR problem of the selected representatives and the baggage they attach to say, support for universal health care that has to be accompanied by "decolonization" rhetoric that makes a lot of voters who might support the former say "no thank you" if it requires the latter).
"less interested in doing the right thing as in making sure that posterity records that they were on the side of the right thing"
...is there really a difference between these two things? Like, they are okay with fooling future generations into thinking they were right, or something?
I think a better critique is that they would much rather say the "right thing" than do anything that would actually move the world towards their vision (i.e. actually participate in persuasive politics - strategic messaging, issue prioritization rather than omnicause, standing up to fringier groups, etc). And a lot of that is probably just driven by in-group pressure, sadly.
I would say that the difference is that the former is concerned with actual action in the here and now, and the latter merely with the judgement of posterity. You do not need to actually do anything now to be on "the right side of history"; you need only to make sure that you are recorded saying the correct things.
So essentially, honestly, I'm saying (or at least intending to say) the same thing as your last paragraph: that they are seemingly more concerned with being seen to be on the right side rather than actually doing the right thing.
Ah - so they'd rather be the pacifist abolitionist who wrote the sick-ass pamphlet in 1800 and not the badass abolitionists who went and shot Southerners until slavery ended. 😂
Though I suppose in total fairness to the pamphleteer, actually publishing and distributing their pamphlet was probably not super-easy back in the early nineteenth century, and in doing so they may have actually persuaded someone else to join their movement. As opposed to the people in the video linked above, who are apparently more concerned with keeping the wrong people out of it.
If these idiots are going to make the Israel/Palestine conflict their Spanish Civil War, I really wish they'd go all the way, fly to Gaza, and join the fighting.
Cute...but we know the real reason. He's very visibly Jewish and San Francisco just isn't the place for that now. He could have been the original ally and those leftists would have picked him out as a "Zionist" by his look.
I'm guessing Wiener's last bill in the CA legislature will be: Force insurance companies to pay for Gentile-ization surgeries?
Seriously, this was a bad thing that happened to him but on the other hand, it couldn't have happened to a nicer misogynistic, self-hating homophobic weasel.
Wiener was responsible for the law that puts men into women’s prisons. And the law that fast-tracks transing gay kids - he KNOWS that at least 80% of these “gender-nonconforming” kids are gay or would be, and he doesn’t care.
I'm not the first to point this out, but today's Jew hatred really is a throwback to the Middle Ages. A Jew can "repent," "convert," throw other Jews under the bus to the greatest extent possible, but will never stop being an object of suspicion. These so-called activists/modern-day Inquisitors WILL find, or invent, some last remaining drop of blood to justify your expulsion.
As you intelligent, sexy, erudite people know, the UAE has been a well documented funder of the RSF militant group and their well documented and very successful efforts to exterminate hundreds of thousands of Black Africans in Sudan these past few years. I get we can hardly stop our lives every case of misfortune on the planet, but you if have enough time to chase after a random dude for only agreeing 99% with you maybe go disrupt a UAE funded New York City FC soccer game or something.
Yeah...I will guarantee that if you told the guy in this video about that, at best he would ask, out of genuine confusion and ignorance, "Wait, what? There's a war in Sudan? Where even is Sudan? Is that a real country?," but would more likely go into a spittle-flecked rant about how you're trying to distract from the nefarious activities of the Zionist entity.
Conflict in Sudan has been going on long enough and is well-known enough that they would know enough to acknowledge it as another problem, before coming up with some reason why it's a bigger problem when the Jews are the bad guys.
think they would argue that the US is an active supplier and funder of Israel's policies than they are of the UAE's policies. Although - that last part is probably not true, at least in the post-Abraham Accord and Trumpian "diplomacy" in the Saudi/UAE region. It's just probably the case that there's not a visible large and powerful lobbying group organized specifically around supporting the UAE as there is for Israel (AIPAC) and not a visible group in the US that would be associated with it, at least not that has come to the attention of the left. US support for "bad" governments that commit all kinds of atrocities has been a fact of US foreign policy since WWII but for "some reason" it's the US-Israel relationship that gets singled out, and again, maybe because the dynamics of that relationship appear different that more covert sort of support for Middle East oil baron dictatorships that comes in a lot of forms versus from a single well known lobbyist group and organization makes the latter harder to see and thus target? Or it is simply the case that underlying a lot of this is a combination of pure anti-Semitism mixed in with the simplistic view of the conflict as being that of "colonizers" and "oppressors" whereas left leaning progressives have a harder time seeing power and ethnic dynamics between variations of non-European societies in conflict with each other...
Yeah, the people who chased Scott Wiener out of the pride event remind me of the democratic socialists who have been winning primaries: they are more interested in showing their commitment to The Cause than actually gaining any policy wins in furtherance of The Cause. Darializa Chevalier takes her positions in democratic socialism not as an avenue to win anything for democratic socialism so much as to signal that nobody is more into democratic socialism than she is (libertarians do this as well; if I was to say "taxation is theft" some other libertarian will have to one-up me and say "well, I believe in privatizing the judiciary").
Of course chasing Scott Wiener from a pride event does literally nothing to help The Cause as it relates to Gaza, but it sure does show how committed some people are to The Cause. Subconsciously, those people were thinking "I will prove nobody hates Israel and loves Gaza more than me by kicking a gay man out of a pride event." They have to demonstrate exclusion to prove how committed they are to inclusion and intersectionality.
This is the biazarro-world version of calling those who spoke out (or fought) against Hitler and Mussolini before the U. S. entered WWII “premature anti-fascists.”
It is also Michael Kinsley’s remark "Conservatives are always looking for converts, whereas liberals are always looking for heretics” on steroids.
Can we please make the cause what it's really about? These people hate anybody/thing that is deemed the powerful "oppressor". Some may say Jews are at the top of that pyramid, but most will say it's America. Make them explicitly tell us that they hate America and want to see a complete revolution. I'd love nothing more than for that to be their explicit platform, so every normie American can look at that and say "yeah no thanks I'm not touching that or supporting anybody that is openly associating with those nutbags."
“Make them explicitly tell us that they hate America and want to see a complete revolution.”
Due respect, many of them already do just this.
Including Mamdani-backed, about to be Congressperson Darializa Chevalier, who only two years ago cofounded a group dedicated to the “total eradication of Western civilization.”
Totally fair. I want more of them to say it loudly, explicitly, to a degree where journalists have to confront and question this anti-Americanism, politicians have to choose whether they're with or against these anti-Americans, and then citizens will decide which candidates on this critical binary issue they're willing to support.
I agree that most journalists won't say/do anything, but just a handful could get the clips that will give enough evidence to many Americans which side these people are on.
It's so weird how miserable misanthropic people on either side of the horseshoe think they are promoting their style of politics and thought with this kind of unfocused angst. Buddy, nobody wants to feel the way you do!
A subplot to this not immediately visible to those without housing policy brainworms like me is that Scott has found himself the subject of harassment covering for people who hate his housing work. He's far and away the biggest and most successful YIMBY politician and almost every pro-housing move in the last ten years in California has been off his back. This has made him a lot of enemies in California. A few years ago, California Republicans (an endangered species scientists assure me exist) and the granola lefties united to heavily imply Scott was a pedophile because they disliked his housing takes and he had seperately sponsored a bill to make gay and straight statutory rape treated equally (shockingly, the law had not been updated in 40 years and gay sex was treated much worse). The end goal of this movement was to get a generic Progressive Leftist elected who also hated building housing. I would not be shocked if insufficiently pro-palestine is just the latest way to opposing new housing and "gentrification".
God, I cannot wait to vote for our boring, reasonably popular lib incumbent Governor (Ned Lamont of Connecticut) in the primary over his pointless and divisive lefty challenger, whose grievances I don't even understand.
It probably goes without saying that I do not advertise this enthusiasm to, say, the people I do theater with...
Back at the height of the BLM movement, protesters marched into a DC restaurant and demanded that patrons stand up and chant “Black Lives Matter in Unison.” One table refused to do so and was harassed mercilessly.
Five years later and Democratic progressives are ironing out their latest litmus test. Whatever the exact wording, the Democratic candidate for president in 2028 will certainly be required to declare themselves anti-Israel in all respects including Israel had no right to exist in the first place. Anyone who can’t see this happening hasn’t been listening to Mamdani and his cabal — all of whom are the latest, greatest saviors of the Democratic Party.
I don’t know which is worse — knowing we’re doomed to another disastrous MAGA president or watching classic liberalism morph into a religion of social justice zealots. Either way, the worst is yet to come.
"They persuaded Scott Weiner but remain furious that they had to work so hard to persuade him."
Because it increasingly seems like a huge chunk of the modern progressive left hates and resents the idea that they might have to persuade people to accept their ideas and get on board with their proposals. Perhaps because it implies that at least some of their ideas are not so self-evidently brilliant and correct that everyone will / should just immediately accept them, meaning that there is in turn a chance that they are actually not On The Right Side Of History (which in itself speaks volumes -- they're less interested in doing the right thing as in making sure that posterity records that they were on the side of the right thing). It's harder to feel morally righteous if you have to debate your ideas, thus risking the discovery that you might actually not be morally righteous, or at least that the issue might be more complicated than you acknowledge.
One could argue that their actual major project over the last decade and change -- more than climate change, more than police abolition, more than racial equality, more than trans rights, more than Palestinian liberation -- has actually been to find ways of ensuring that they can 'win' arguments without actually having to have the argument. Just look at many of their favoured rhetorical devices, many of which are all about shutting people down and instantly dismissing their positions without actually having to engage with them. He's "mansplaining". She's "bothsidesing". You need to "stay in your lane". "It's not my job to educate you". And if that doesn't work, then just hit them with the good ol' ad hominems.
So yeah, not even changing your mind is good enough to satisfy these people. Because in their world having to be persuaded to change your mind in the first place is the ultimate insult.
My pet peeve is when the left characterizes disagreement as ignorance.
No, I have heard your arguments and found them unconvincing.
This:
" ...has actually been to find ways of ensuring that they can 'win' arguments without actually having to have the argument."
I have been noticing this pattern too, but I could never communicate it this clearly and concisely. Thank you.
I really enjoyed this comment, there are some great insights here. I would like to add something to your line "it's harder to feel morally righteous if you have to debate your ideas".
I think one reason people do not want to debate is because it implies equal status between the two sides. Of course you think your position is correct but debating opponents shows respect. I'm sure we can all imagine people we wouldn't debate. For example, I would not debate a Flat Earther on the shape of the Earth or Hasan Piker on the morality of shoplifting. While part of this is due to the fact that it would not be a good use of my time, I also don't see these as worthy debate opponents. Their positions are obviously wrong and debating them shows more respect than I want to give them. I think this is how social justice activists often feel about debating their opponents.
This is true, but on the flip-side, in this case it's also one of those "if everyone you meet's an asshole" situations. Like, yes, sure, there are people who I would not dignify with an argument (or at least would try not to; I've admittedly gotten locked into plenty of ill-advised internet arguments in the past). I get not wanting to debate the shape of the world with the flat-Earthers. But if someone's in a mindset where everyone to the right of, I dunno, Hasan Piker is a dumb-dumb who isn't worth arguing with, maybe the problem isn't that they've reached enlightenment, just saying.
Totally agree. I was trying to describe how they might see things, not what’s accurate or reasonable.
But your explanation buttressed his case, rather than contradict or soften it in any way.
“Anyone who disagrees with my view on this issue is unworthy of even the ability to speak, and must be shouted down, cancelled, or worse”
There actually is a well known Flat Earther who changed his mind after going to Antarctica and seeing a 24 hour sun. He has turned his YouTube channel into a Flat Earth debunking channel.
The word for this brand of persuasion is "coercion."
I would like to add to your list "I shouldn't have to need to convince you to do the right thing", a phrase that blatantly smuggles in the assumption that we all agree on what the right thing is.
Because OBVIOUSLY there is only one correct lens and view.
Duh!
Did you *not* got to university indoctrination camp in the last 15 years somehow?
I appreciate the criticism of this group of “progressives.” But let’s be clear, this does not represent a “huge chunk” of the left. Moreover, the idea of condemning those who are not 100% on board with one’s wacky ideas is not entirely the province of progressives. Spend any time on right wing message boards and you will learn that unless you believe this country is run by a minority of left-wing nuts who want to prevent you from eating beef, allow Sharia law to be instituted, and oppress Christians, you are a traitor.
TBTF:
1. I specifically said "*seems like* a huge chunk", not "I've done the research and it's quantifiably and demonstrably a huge chunk".
2. I never claimed that this was a trait limited solely to the progressive left: it's just that, well, they're the subject of this particular discussion.
What we can all agree on is that it's an extremely loud chunk, which makes them seem like there are more of them than there are. It's the same way NIMBYs get excessive clout in planning board meetings- they show up and loudly state their opinions and the normal people don't.
Exactly. There is a clear explanation for people that do this. It is in fact a personality disorder. It derives from low self-esteem with their human ego fulfillment need sitting too close empty. Thus, they cannot tolerate any hit to their ego that derives from having to admit that they had been wrong. We all know these types of people. We have them in our family and as friends and coworkers. They are fragile. They are easily triggered. They are on constant lookout for any indication of criticism to snap at. They are more often female.
Because accepting criticism and admitting that they are wrong does cause them psychological pain, they work on walls of defense to prevent from having to experience it. They say words are weapons because they can be hurt by them. So they use words to attempt to cause hurt to others... but don't seem to understand that the rest of us have thick skin and don't turn into melty snowflakes over constructive criticism.
These people always exist as a percentage of the population. Some develop coping skills and improve their self-confidence and shift from avoiding criticism to seeking it out to help with their self-improvement. The US military experience reprograms young people this way. However, seeing these fragile people rise to positions of power and influence was never any design of working evolutionary biology. It is our modern technological existence that has corrupted that dominance hierarchy and basically allowed the insane to be running the asylum.
“These people always exist as a percentage of the population.”
Absolutely correct.
Never, however, in modern American history have they so throughly controlled the agenda of a major American political party.
THAT is the problem. Somehow, I think because of the success and changes to our economy, these people that would generally not rise to the top of the human dominance hierarchy got a booter chair so they could set at the head of the table and throw their tantrums while in charge.
One of my favorite retorts from this group is "show me your research" or "evidence or it didn't happen" or something of that ilk. I just tell them that if they're old enough to mouthe off on the internet, they're old enough to Google something.
There's also the goalpost moving tactic of "it's not happening you're infected by Fox News" to "it's totally happening and it's awesome", sometimes in the same response. Also "it's weird that you care about this {{X ISSUE}}" (but not weird that "we" obviously care about it), or the pretending to be confused by the question/semantic gaming "CRT is only taught at university level not in elementary schools you dummy" (well yes if one applies a very literal definition of "Critical Race Theory" as a college level course and not that the ideas and principles espoused by the same academics involved in creating and teaching that academic theory are present in a lot of the racial education curriculum distributed throughout public and private school systems), etc. And look, I'm to the left on many cultural issues but it has become hard not to notice that these "debate" tactics favored by so many liberals and progressives in particularly the post-Trump era have become almost a default stance in those spaces. Like few want/can intelligently argue why post-pubescent trans females should be allowed to play in female sports from a scientific or social fairness perspective, it's "why do you care it's just a tiny few" (well ok but that same argument works both ways, bans on that would also just affect a tiny few then so why rewrite Title X around to protect a "literal handful" of trans athletes ??). Also, the "tiny handful" argument might have actually been accurate in say 2015 (aroudn the time of the First Bathroom Wars), when the visible presence of actual transgendered individuals was miniscule and most people went about their entire lives never encountering a transgendered individual, to just a short decade later when, particularly parents of school aged kids, encountered multiple trans identified kids in their schools, often several in the same social groups, and that encountering a sports team or game that had a trans athlete participant has become a LOT more common that it was, again just a short decade ago. And intellectually consistent progressives would say "this is good, this means social and institutional acceptance of trans identities has improved so more are feeling safe and comfortable to come out", but instead it's still insisting this is a practically invisible minority that yet requires a lot of social and institutional adjustments to accommodate.
FWIW I do think the abdication of "debate" by much of the left on a lot of topics just legitimizes the right wing opposition - "crime is down compared to 1993 you bigot" is a terrible response to public disorder and decay that people can see with their own eyes. "There is no migrant surge at the border" was the Biden Administration's refrain for about the first three years until the stance became politically untenable by 2024 and then suddenly it was "we need to pass this immigration reform bill ASAP but we can't because Republicans suck". Kamala Harris's refusal to even discuss (let alone defend/deny/revise whatever) her 2020 positions around taxpayer funded gender affirming care for illegal alien prisoners (lol) when her recorded response from less than 4 years ago was on record is also in that vein, refusing to discuss an issue is not the same as voters believing you don't have a position on the issue and that if put in power, you won't act on it! Biden's Day One Executive Orders around trans issues, "the Civil Rights issue of our time" as he phrased it, were not really lost on those who do pay attention to this issue and those who more felt the "vibe" of the the past 4 years of Biden and Democratic policies and rhetoric around that they do in fact support (and will turn into policy) those various positions if given the opportunity, even if they didn't campaign specifically for those policies in public, now OR then (Biden sure didn't campaign on the Number One Civil Rights Issue Of Our Time in 2020 to my recall). I think Democrats are also going to be put in the same position when it comes to the unfortunate D'Arliza and the ascendant DSA now, many will believe the "right" tactic will be to not talk about it at all and focus on "affordability" and opposing Trump - unfortunately I don't think that will suffice in a nationalized political environment and when the views espoused will seem a lot more extreme than maybe even MAGA views may be, as tends to be the burden of left of center politics in a right of center polity (even if on an issue by issue basis polling at least indicates better favorability for left of center policy, it's the PR problem of the selected representatives and the baggage they attach to say, support for universal health care that has to be accompanied by "decolonization" rhetoric that makes a lot of voters who might support the former say "no thank you" if it requires the latter).
As much as these people annoy me,
"less interested in doing the right thing as in making sure that posterity records that they were on the side of the right thing"
...is there really a difference between these two things? Like, they are okay with fooling future generations into thinking they were right, or something?
I think a better critique is that they would much rather say the "right thing" than do anything that would actually move the world towards their vision (i.e. actually participate in persuasive politics - strategic messaging, issue prioritization rather than omnicause, standing up to fringier groups, etc). And a lot of that is probably just driven by in-group pressure, sadly.
I would say that the difference is that the former is concerned with actual action in the here and now, and the latter merely with the judgement of posterity. You do not need to actually do anything now to be on "the right side of history"; you need only to make sure that you are recorded saying the correct things.
So essentially, honestly, I'm saying (or at least intending to say) the same thing as your last paragraph: that they are seemingly more concerned with being seen to be on the right side rather than actually doing the right thing.
Ah - so they'd rather be the pacifist abolitionist who wrote the sick-ass pamphlet in 1800 and not the badass abolitionists who went and shot Southerners until slavery ended. 😂
Something along those lines, yes.
Though I suppose in total fairness to the pamphleteer, actually publishing and distributing their pamphlet was probably not super-easy back in the early nineteenth century, and in doing so they may have actually persuaded someone else to join their movement. As opposed to the people in the video linked above, who are apparently more concerned with keeping the wrong people out of it.
If these idiots are going to make the Israel/Palestine conflict their Spanish Civil War, I really wish they'd go all the way, fly to Gaza, and join the fighting.
I love it!
Cute...but we know the real reason. He's very visibly Jewish and San Francisco just isn't the place for that now. He could have been the original ally and those leftists would have picked him out as a "Zionist" by his look.
I'm guessing Wiener's last bill in the CA legislature will be: Force insurance companies to pay for Gentile-ization surgeries?
Seriously, this was a bad thing that happened to him but on the other hand, it couldn't have happened to a nicer misogynistic, self-hating homophobic weasel.
Huh?
Wiener was responsible for the law that puts men into women’s prisons. And the law that fast-tracks transing gay kids - he KNOWS that at least 80% of these “gender-nonconforming” kids are gay or would be, and he doesn’t care.
I'm not the first to point this out, but today's Jew hatred really is a throwback to the Middle Ages. A Jew can "repent," "convert," throw other Jews under the bus to the greatest extent possible, but will never stop being an object of suspicion. These so-called activists/modern-day Inquisitors WILL find, or invent, some last remaining drop of blood to justify your expulsion.
"Saying it's genocide" is the new conversion.
As you intelligent, sexy, erudite people know, the UAE has been a well documented funder of the RSF militant group and their well documented and very successful efforts to exterminate hundreds of thousands of Black Africans in Sudan these past few years. I get we can hardly stop our lives every case of misfortune on the planet, but you if have enough time to chase after a random dude for only agreeing 99% with you maybe go disrupt a UAE funded New York City FC soccer game or something.
Yeah...I will guarantee that if you told the guy in this video about that, at best he would ask, out of genuine confusion and ignorance, "Wait, what? There's a war in Sudan? Where even is Sudan? Is that a real country?," but would more likely go into a spittle-flecked rant about how you're trying to distract from the nefarious activities of the Zionist entity.
Conflict in Sudan has been going on long enough and is well-known enough that they would know enough to acknowledge it as another problem, before coming up with some reason why it's a bigger problem when the Jews are the bad guys.
Maybe; I have learned to never bet against the ignorance of the American public, including the activist class.
Probably you describe a few of them, sure.
Maybe you describe a minority, but I’m highly suspicious of even that claim.
No chance you’re describing even a bare majority.
think they would argue that the US is an active supplier and funder of Israel's policies than they are of the UAE's policies. Although - that last part is probably not true, at least in the post-Abraham Accord and Trumpian "diplomacy" in the Saudi/UAE region. It's just probably the case that there's not a visible large and powerful lobbying group organized specifically around supporting the UAE as there is for Israel (AIPAC) and not a visible group in the US that would be associated with it, at least not that has come to the attention of the left. US support for "bad" governments that commit all kinds of atrocities has been a fact of US foreign policy since WWII but for "some reason" it's the US-Israel relationship that gets singled out, and again, maybe because the dynamics of that relationship appear different that more covert sort of support for Middle East oil baron dictatorships that comes in a lot of forms versus from a single well known lobbyist group and organization makes the latter harder to see and thus target? Or it is simply the case that underlying a lot of this is a combination of pure anti-Semitism mixed in with the simplistic view of the conflict as being that of "colonizers" and "oppressors" whereas left leaning progressives have a harder time seeing power and ethnic dynamics between variations of non-European societies in conflict with each other...
Yeah, the people who chased Scott Wiener out of the pride event remind me of the democratic socialists who have been winning primaries: they are more interested in showing their commitment to The Cause than actually gaining any policy wins in furtherance of The Cause. Darializa Chevalier takes her positions in democratic socialism not as an avenue to win anything for democratic socialism so much as to signal that nobody is more into democratic socialism than she is (libertarians do this as well; if I was to say "taxation is theft" some other libertarian will have to one-up me and say "well, I believe in privatizing the judiciary").
Of course chasing Scott Wiener from a pride event does literally nothing to help The Cause as it relates to Gaza, but it sure does show how committed some people are to The Cause. Subconsciously, those people were thinking "I will prove nobody hates Israel and loves Gaza more than me by kicking a gay man out of a pride event." They have to demonstrate exclusion to prove how committed they are to inclusion and intersectionality.
This is the biazarro-world version of calling those who spoke out (or fought) against Hitler and Mussolini before the U. S. entered WWII “premature anti-fascists.”
It is also Michael Kinsley’s remark "Conservatives are always looking for converts, whereas liberals are always looking for heretics” on steroids.
Absolute moral certitude is a hell of a drug.
And arguably the most dangerous kind: the one that gives you license to do anything!
“The good news is that they will eventually move on to some other cause.”
Maybe, but probably not, Jew hatred is the terminal destination of conspiracies, historically.
The obsession with Israel is teleological.
Can we please make the cause what it's really about? These people hate anybody/thing that is deemed the powerful "oppressor". Some may say Jews are at the top of that pyramid, but most will say it's America. Make them explicitly tell us that they hate America and want to see a complete revolution. I'd love nothing more than for that to be their explicit platform, so every normie American can look at that and say "yeah no thanks I'm not touching that or supporting anybody that is openly associating with those nutbags."
“Make them explicitly tell us that they hate America and want to see a complete revolution.”
Due respect, many of them already do just this.
Including Mamdani-backed, about to be Congressperson Darializa Chevalier, who only two years ago cofounded a group dedicated to the “total eradication of Western civilization.”
https://x.com/CUJewsIsraelis/status/2069606102698787071
Totally fair. I want more of them to say it loudly, explicitly, to a degree where journalists have to confront and question this anti-Americanism, politicians have to choose whether they're with or against these anti-Americans, and then citizens will decide which candidates on this critical binary issue they're willing to support.
Here's how I see it playing out:
https://elevin11.substack.com/p/its-their-anti-americanism-stupid?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=si8z
https://elevin11.substack.com/p/the-great-fracture?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=si8z
“… to a degree where journalists have to confront and question this anti-Americanism.”
I’d like a lot of things too, but the odds of this happening are vanishingly low in the medium term.
Most of the “journalists” you cite are themselves low-level anti-American.
But more importantly, they are SO much “Team Blue” there is no meaningful chance they will do as you suggest.
And re: politicians, Mamdani has made his choice explicitly, and all but Fetterman have made their choice implicitly by saying nothing.
“First the came for the trade unionists…”
I agree that most journalists won't say/do anything, but just a handful could get the clips that will give enough evidence to many Americans which side these people are on.
It's so weird how miserable misanthropic people on either side of the horseshoe think they are promoting their style of politics and thought with this kind of unfocused angst. Buddy, nobody wants to feel the way you do!
“Buddy, nobody wants to feel the way you do!”
That is true of us normies, sure.
I don’t
T think you are correct that it is true of most activists. Especially his fellow leftist activists.
A subplot to this not immediately visible to those without housing policy brainworms like me is that Scott has found himself the subject of harassment covering for people who hate his housing work. He's far and away the biggest and most successful YIMBY politician and almost every pro-housing move in the last ten years in California has been off his back. This has made him a lot of enemies in California. A few years ago, California Republicans (an endangered species scientists assure me exist) and the granola lefties united to heavily imply Scott was a pedophile because they disliked his housing takes and he had seperately sponsored a bill to make gay and straight statutory rape treated equally (shockingly, the law had not been updated in 40 years and gay sex was treated much worse). The end goal of this movement was to get a generic Progressive Leftist elected who also hated building housing. I would not be shocked if insufficiently pro-palestine is just the latest way to opposing new housing and "gentrification".
Occam’s Razor, dude.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Yeah but things like this can be multicausal. Some people hate him for this reason, others for that reason, still others for yet another.
God, I cannot wait to vote for our boring, reasonably popular lib incumbent Governor (Ned Lamont of Connecticut) in the primary over his pointless and divisive lefty challenger, whose grievances I don't even understand.
It probably goes without saying that I do not advertise this enthusiasm to, say, the people I do theater with...
Should be voted as San Francisco's top official tourism video.
Back at the height of the BLM movement, protesters marched into a DC restaurant and demanded that patrons stand up and chant “Black Lives Matter in Unison.” One table refused to do so and was harassed mercilessly.
Five years later and Democratic progressives are ironing out their latest litmus test. Whatever the exact wording, the Democratic candidate for president in 2028 will certainly be required to declare themselves anti-Israel in all respects including Israel had no right to exist in the first place. Anyone who can’t see this happening hasn’t been listening to Mamdani and his cabal — all of whom are the latest, greatest saviors of the Democratic Party.
I don’t know which is worse — knowing we’re doomed to another disastrous MAGA president or watching classic liberalism morph into a religion of social justice zealots. Either way, the worst is yet to come.
I should stop being surprised at the depths of the leftist purity spiral. That's what a purity spiral is, after all. They tend to end with The Terror.
Purity spiral is a nice term for it. I’m gonna steal that 😄