It’s Not What You Believe

Almost everything I saw on the woke left that I hated — the lemming-like groupthink, the embrace and promotion of weird conspiracies, the endless waxing and waning and birthing and rebirthing of moral panics, the refusal to leave the warm embrace of the echo chamber, the collective and ramshackle rationalizations, the cognitive rigidity, the refusal to even try to understand the actual(as opposed to imagined) motivations of people on the opposing side, the constant and deliberate abuse of language and terms with specific and accepted meanings to slur opponents who do not meet the definition of those terms, the revision of history so that it conforms to current belief systems and political goals, the cartoonish stereotypes of people in the out-group, the creepy ideas about gender and sex roles, the pressure on dissenters, the repetition of memes and the copy and pasting of boilerplate as a substitute for actual thought, the primitive tribalism, the authoritarian impulses, the psychological projection, the cults of personality, the resistance to the idea of a public university as an entity that champions truly free speech and open discourse, the tolerance for and refusal to criticize extreme actors in the in-group, the development of cults of personality, the social media childishness and tantrums, the auto-formation of opinions by reflexively forming one’s views on issues by simply taking the opposite position of one’s “enemies”, the informal enforcement on group unanimity, the ideologically-motivated selective interest and disinterest in scientific findings and statistical data, the elevation to prominence of the stupidest and most toxic figures, the astonishing and depressing illiteracy on what “free speech” means in a democratic society (both as it relates to 1A and as it doesn’t relate to 1A), the questioning of the legitimacy of long-standing important institutions when they take the “wrong” position, the enthusiastic support for morally bankrupt politicians, the open and unapologetic and explicit contempt for democracy, the hypocrisy and on and on — I now see on the antiwoke right.

https://x.com/eyeslasho/status/1878815376370548979?t=rIE_wEQOiMjuk5NwhSEGEQ&s=19

Yeah, but the antiwoke right doesn’t run the Canadian Cancer Society, every institution of higher ed in the West, the FBI, Disney, etc. It runs absolutely nothing whatsoever except some social media accounts. An alt-right dude can insult me online but he can’t insult me at the doctor’s office. Or at work. He hasn’t passed any state laws that require my ritual humiliation in the workplace as a condition of me being able to make a living.

This guy I quoted is one of the best accounts on X but he doesn’t seem to understand a crucial thing. The problem isn’t what people believe. Everybody should believe what they want, including very lunatic things. If leftist people simply believed that it’s necessary to call a cervix a front hole, that would be a million times fine with me. This is America! People should expand intellectually to the very fringes of mega weirdness. If people want to get together and discuss how Putin is the savior of the West, the Holocaust never happened, and everybody who didn’t get exactly 37 COVID boosters will die immediately, they should. And if they want to call me names online for not believing all this, that’s fine, too.

Take Joyce Maynard. It’s become painfully obvious to everybody that her approach to life is the opposite of mine. But I very much want her to continue writing. She writes, I poke vicious fun, it’s all good. It’s America! What I don’t want is to be forced to proclaim at work that Joyce Maynard’s books are great or not great while my contingent workers’ contracts are held hostage.

Stereotypes, creepy ideas, insults and everything else he lists are perfectly fine. No, they are more than that. They are necessary. They are fine and even necessary as long as nobody is forced to listen, conform, and repeat. The woke left isn’t bad because it believes insane things. Everybody believes something other people find insane. There are people who think onion rings are tasty, and if that isn’t messed up, then I don’t know what is. The reason why the woke left is bad is because it’s been ramming their onion rings down everybody’s gullet with a hammer.

As I keep saying, avoid analogies. They almost never work. Except for the one with the onion rings. That one is brilliant.