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The "progressives" you're referring to aren't progressive. They're reactionary authoritarians, hijacking the ideals and preferences of whatever group they're at
by inopinatus 6y ago
The "progressives" you're referring to aren't progressive. They're reactionary authoritarians, hijacking the ideals and preferences of whatever group they're attached to. You can find them in all forms of debased public discourse and lowbrow populism, with a history going back millennia, and uniformly distributed across the political spectrum. No-one called the Spanish Inquisition progressive.
I hold a very special loathing of anyone that weaponizes process in order to control others.
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst, Are full of passionate intensity".
- textgel 6y agoThis is a a good point; and one I wish I could give you a decent response to as this problem is such a big one and one that I've seen hit plenty of groups I once subscribed to, and evidently from history quite an old one too however I'm at a loss on what the correct response to the phenomenon is. The cheap response is to whine about "no true scotsman" but I'd love to see ideas on how to prevent groups actually getting corrupted in this way; it's probably in the "how do we create world peace" level of problems but the cycle is getting very wearing!
- colechristensen 6y agoIt’s not as hard as you make it up to be, you simply have to instill values in the population which promote diversity of thought, independent thought, and recognition of moral signaling behavior. The major problem with the left leaning political spectrum in america is a somewhat blind authoritarian “respect” for “diversity” where what counts as diverse is rather restricted and generally doesn’t include disagreement on the subject. The key missing ability is getting people to empathize with each other and not to confuse radical ideas which one finds abhorant and moderate ideas one finds disagreeable. A cheap way to make this much easier is to ban labels like political party, gender, etc. If you stop sorting people (and yourself) into bins it becomes a whole lot more difficult to be so polarized as you aren’t dividing the world into us and them by dealing with a new human one by one.
- will4274 6y agoTomato tomato. The members of the inquisition called themselves the inquisition, so we call them the inquisition. Today's progressives call themselves progressives so we call them progressives.
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- inopinatus 6y agoConflating an organisation with an adjective is a fascinating category error and not one I'd previously considered working into my offerings of puns and satire. No doubt Tom Lehrer was already aware of the possibilities. Thanks for bringing this novelty to my attention!