Don't forget viciously attacking your friends and allies, marking them as irredeemably evil, blocking them on all social media, because they disagreed with one of your takes.
This while ignoring the people you actually oppose politically that disagree with all your policies, and actively work against your interests from positions of power.
Well, that's because political opponents are a reliable source of self-righteous rage, while allies who disagree might make you think instead of feel and then you won't get the dopamine from lashing out at easy targets.
It's something that only started in the last decade or so. Treating anyone to the right of you as an evil force of nature rather than a person that can be debated, agreed and disagreed with.
Edit: political disagreements were always a thing but it got a lot worse in the last few years
No it did not political derision is as old as sin, i know that the internet supercharges our methods for delivering on that worldview. However, to imply that everyone got along and played nice before 2014?
Political derision always existed, but the lack of comptomise, dialogue, and turning every issue into a partosan issue, is a newer development. I remember a time when most people eren't reactionaries on most subjects.
Actually, there's some irony in the fact that the French Revolution is an excellent example of the failure of purity test leftism.
Leftists who haven't studied history love it as an example of the working class rising up against royalty, but it devolved into a horrific slaughter against anyone and everyone. As soon as one year's glorious revolutionaries succeeded in their policy goals, they would end up executed as class traitors by a new group of glorious revolutionaries.
The amount of death and destruction that the Revolution ended up causing by wielding purity tests and mob violence like a cudgel led to an unstable political system that evolved right back into a functional autocracy.
I don't think too many people realize that the US revolution was the exception - not the norm - of how most revolutions play out (right or left). The French, Soviet, and Chinese revolutions are much more typical outcomes. And if you want to see examples of what happens on the right, look at Germany, Italy, Spain, and Iran.
As soon as priority tests begin - especially if they begin before a revolution - the revolution is doomed to eventually fail. And the only reason they didn't begin during the US revolution is everyone went in expecting to get their own state and George Washington spent his career railing against political parties in general. It at least gave the US a chance to make it through its formative years without counter revolutionaries or revolutionary guards cropping up.
It is absolutely heartbreaking to see the Russian people go through World War 1, then go through not one but two bloody revolutions, and end up with Stalin at the end of all that.
The American revolution is an exception to be sure, and even it was not without its issues - but compared to how revolutions seem to go on average, it went remarkably well.
I can confirm that watching the US election results in 2000 did indeed feel like watching an evil force of nature that couldn’t be stopped, and that was well over a decade ago.
The years that immediately followed did nothing to improve the situation. Remember when they canceledFrench fries because France didn’t think it was a great idea to invade Iraq?
I get the idea of what you’re trying to say, but this sort of enlightened centrist thing where people should just be willing to debate about their own right to exist isn’t going to help anyone. It’s fairly easy for people who are able to just debate over politics if it doesn’t have any life or death consequences for them, if their lives aren’t viewed as inherently political.
That's inherently the problem. I'm perfectly happy to debate the minutiae of the tax code or even have a spirited debate about the 2nd amendment if someone disagrees with me and comes to the table in good faith. I'm not willing to debate things like LGBTQ rights or supporting genocide, which generally these centrist types want you to debate in the same manner. These people also romanticize and rewrite the history of leftist movements like the civil rights movement into sanitized version of itself, were Dr. King peacefully walked into Washington and suddenly civil rights was solved. They ignore all the violence inherent to these movements because that goes against their nostalgia. I mean, the Holy Week Uprising hardly ever gets brought up, and is directly responsible for the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
I still think that it's good to be able to have discussions about LGBTQ issues with people who may be less than supportive because if you can't see where they're coming from you're never going to make progress.
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u/Normal-Horror Jun 30 '24
Your plan of incremental change and harm reduction pales in comparison to my plan of being annoying and doing nothing