i spent like 5 hours deep diving into the blog of some guy who self identifies as a "rationalist" and looking at the array of opinions/ideas being expressed on the blog and in the comments
made me think about how "the left" is actually really, really homogeneous in terms of beliefs that are acceptable to express and discuss, whereas with "centrist" and "the right" you see written out the internal variety and incoherence that I think characterizes most peoples beliefs and ideas
i forgot the name of the blog, i'll find it again later. basically the guy self identifies as "anti-woke" at the same time as being progressive on some aspects of society, "centrist" on others, and...definitely not fascist but kind of "reddit evo-psych" on a few, pursuing a general open-minded approach to things.
it definitely made a few things click for me in terms of right wing stereotypes of "leftists" and concern with "cancel culture." At one point he discusses his experience being ""cancelled"" for a comment that got misunderstood, and from the description, the harassment, threats of harm and isolation that ensued were genuinely traumatic.
It honestly reminded me of my experiences on Tumblr, where since I was 18 I've been writing posts about whatever I happen to be learning or thinking about at the time--- some of which were ignorant or poorly worded or offensive--- and getting hate for it.
Before I turned off asks completely and sort of walled myself off from engaging in discussions with people, I got messages constantly telling me to kill myself, or that the world would be a better place if I was dead, or that [speaker] hoped I would die, or that I was virtually every kind of bigot you could imagine, and at least some number of political bloggers on here nursed enough of a long-term hatred of me that I actively came to mind as someone they despised.
This was in fact distressing, especially the fact that I could never predict what kind of post would elicit this reaction and nothing I did would make it stop.
It's easy to dismiss this as just, like, the typical online experience, and I dismissed it myself like "yeah yeah who hasn't gotten a bunch of suicide bait for making a poorly worded joke"...but it really shouldn't be. It occurs to me now that normalizing receiving harassment also normalizes participating in it. And if my real life face and name were attached to this account, that kind of harassment would be fucking terrifying.
It also occurs to me that "the right" despite having an incomprehensible array of beliefs on non-essentials, are not constantly acting like they want to kill each other with hammers.
Jack Posobiec's Unhumans, despite being a work of fascist garbage, had a gleam of genuine insight in it: when suggesting strategies for countering the "left," it mostly recommended not directly engaging and instead waiting for the left to rip itself apart internally. It seems like multiple right-wing writers and bloggers have suggested walking back the criticisms of "cancel culture" simply because leftists harm other leftists much more with "cancel culture" than they do their actual political enemies.
I'm thoughtful about it...
