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It's super consistent behavior, though; they like attention and they found a larger audience, or they tend to follow the crowd and the crowd changed directions, or, less charitably but perhaps more accurately, they like to bully others and they found a less costly way to be horrible.
I grew up in a religious community. I was always unorthodox, and was treated poorly by a lot of people who were regarded as "upstanding" for their piety. I expressed doubts about God as a kid, so no one is surprised to hear me say such things as an adult. But the same individual people who were most likely to mete out social punishment for my little heresies are still the people most likely to mete out social punishment for my heresies, only now they're various shades of woke and my heresies are political instead of theological.
Whether they've stayed in the faith or separated from it, basically all of them are ultra-orthodox woke advocates now (mostly for LGBT issues, but depending on their circumstances also for a rainbow of disabilities, with autism--or "autism"--and obesity being common pet projects in addition to the usual vapid strains of so-called anti-racism). The ones who haven't blocked me on their social media feeds are still the same bullies they've always been (I assume the same is true for the ones who took the step of blocking me, but I can't guarantee it). No amount of hair dye or piercings can hide the fact that they are still doing everything they can to punish independent thought or questioning of the party line. That it's a different party line is irrelevant except, perhaps, as a "born again" bona fide. As the Wizard sings--"the most celebrated are the rehabilitated..."
Freddie deBoer's "Planet of Cops" tells the story well, though I don't think he ever quite twigs to the shared identity of the conservative cops he complains about, and the woke cops he sees as imitating them. When he criticizes religious conservatives as natural cops, he memorably cites William Burroughs:
And my response is: it's still the "decent church-going women" (and, often, men), they still wear mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces. Often, literally the same actual people. They just left their old church and joined your new, political not-a-church.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs are some of the most internally consistent people in the world. If feeling morally superior to others and reveling in hating and even seeking the extermination of the right people is something you enjoy, the difference between Nazis and Twitter SJWs is little more than a palette swap.
My view on that is that it's easier to claim the "decent church-going folks" are the natural pinch-faces, because that lets you ignore the pinch-faces on your side. 'We're not religious! We're not conservative! So we can never ever be like that!'
Oh yes indeed you can be, and often are.
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Absolutely how it works on Twitter. While neither a Nazi nor an SJW (hopefully), at some point I went from having followers like Nick Land and BAP to getting a whole clique of rabidly Communist transgender Jews. Twitter is dominated by leftists, and they supply cheap attention. If I cared more about such schlock I'd have probably tailored my messaging further; and were I worse at isolating processes (or just younger), I could have had this environmental change propagate back into my own value system.
Many people are not particularly good at that.
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You know what, this makes me grateful that my outspoken atheism as early as the age of 5 never really hurt me in any way. Religion never took in me in the first place, and despite occasional efforts by my parents when I was younger to drag me to the odd temple or festival, they never really made a fuss about what I believed. Nor did anyone else I've interacted with in person.
I'd chalk it to Hinduism being unusually non-evangelist or proselytizing, including continued historical acceptance of sects that were atheist (in the sense they denied the existence of any gods, while often holding vague spiritual views). "Nastik", the Hindi/Bengali term for atheist, specifically refers to them. I'm sure that if I had relapsed from Islam, the consequences would have been much more severe, but both Hindus and Muslims just seem grateful that I don't side with either and are content to let me be.
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Please don’t summon him…
I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to, though it sounds like maybe asking you to explain would potentially violate your concern.
@HlynkaCG, I believe you have been summoned.
Ah. If that's what we're talking about, I will cheerfully insist that I've been saying "the only difference between the alt-right and the far-left is the approved targets of their identitarianism" for at least as long as Hlynka has been on that train.
But then how do you explain:
Opposition to medical transition in general, and especially hormone therapy for children, is an alt right position, while supporting them is a leftist position.
The alt right thinks women should be encouraged (through both informal cultural means and formal policy) to be housewives, while the left thinks that women should be encouraged to build independent careers.
Opposition to mandatory Covid vaccination is right-coded, support for mandatory Covid vaccination is left-coded.
Are these not legitimate differences? Differences that aren't reducible to the target of their identitarianism?
I'm not saying there's no difference, I'm explaining what the difference is.
One can target identities in both "pro" and "anti" ways. The problem is the targeting of identities. Liberalism historically focuses instead on individuals.
The targets of identitarian favor/disfavor in this example are transsexuals. In my experience, regular people are typically pretty horrified by the idea of adults mucking about with the sexual maturation of children, and I think the polls bear me out on this--transing the kids has been a losing proposition for the left everywhere it has managed to become a salient election issue. By singling out adult transsexuals for special identitarian recognition, the otherwise-anathema views of transsexuals become the orthodoxy of the far left, and even creep into mainstream Democrat politics under "arguments are soldiers, you must support our troops," even though a large percentage of the left sees this as too much. This is very reducible to identitarianism.
Both groups approach women as a category, rather than as individuals. The far left doesn't just think women should be encouraged through both informal cultural means and formal policy to build independent careers, the far left thinks that it is objectionable for a woman to stay at home and raise children. (Often, the far left objects to people even having children, much less raising those children themselves.)
For a lot of SJWs this was downstream of disability-as-identity. I know I read about at least one lawsuit floating the idea that employers not mandating vaccination should be considered an ADA violation (where the relevant disability might be obesity, or bad immune systems, or other risk factors). And of course, to some extent anything the far left supports, the far right automatically rejects, and vice versa--at the extremes, your place in the extreme becomes the most central identity of all.
So I would say that all of these differences between the far right and far left are reducible to identitarianism.
So, do there exist two political ideologies that are both not liberal individualism, but also differ from each other by more than a "palette swap"? Based on the way I'm reading you right now, you seem to be saying that the political universe essentially breaks down into "liberal individualism" and "everything else". The ideologies in the "everything else" bucket may have differences from each other, but they will always be superficial differences compared to the primary difference of individualism vs identitarianism. Is that your view?
What is it that you actually want to know? I feel like this is a very "so you're saying" comment from you. You gave three specific examples of "not-identitarian differences" and I argued that, no, those are all identitarian differences. So you conclude from this, somehow, that I think "the political universe essentially breaks down into 'liberal individualism' and 'everything else'." But what does that even mean? The whole universe does break down into 'my cell phone' and 'everything else,' but you could replace 'my cell phone' with anything else that exists and the statement would still be true. I don't regard individualism versus identitarianism as the only or even necessarily the most important way of categorizing political views, but I do think that the far left and the far right are culturally radical in the same basic way: both tend to explicitly prefer the destruction of their outgroup/elevation of their ingroup over steps toward coexistence.
I do personally endorse a strain of liberalism that rejects interest aggregation, which has some role to play here, but you do not appear to be asking me questions in an effort to really understand my position--you appear to have some objection in mind. I would prefer, and suspect you would find it more fruitful, if you would just speak plainly about what it is you want to say.
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Yeah, /r/StormfrontorSJW is almost 10 years old now.
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