this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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My take on that would be that it brings nuance and humanity to those that some auth-leftists want to hate and dehumanize. Pointing out that Biden is not a cardboard cutout of [insert chosen evil diety here] and that he has done good things makes it harder to rationalize digging in. To justify vilifying, "dunking on", and generally bullying those who would support him (even unhappily) rather than embrace accelerationiam that would load to extraordinary harm of LGBTQ+ people with no concrete data to suggest that it would cause net benefit or leftward motion, while claiming dialectics and opposition to silencing dissent, takes a good deal of cognitive dissonance as is. Being forced to acknowledge that ramps that dissonance up higher.
(Holy long sentence Batman! Sorry about that.)
Just to be clear to auth-left folks (though any state or corpo actors can get fucked), I'm not trying to be sectarian or talk shit. This is honestly how I perceive this. Dehumanizing other leftists (or people for that matter, or hell, even bourgeois dickheads) is not something that has led to positive societal changes in history. Generally, it's just used to justify unnecessary death and suffering. Suppressing or ignoring data (or lack thereof) is not conducive to making data-backed theses.
Yeah. There are people who are just straight-up evil and trying to hurt people on purpose (Trump is one), but it's actually very rare, I think, even in political leaders. Mostly I think the destructive stuff in the world comes from people who have a weird reality built up in their head where what they're doing makes sense.
I see this even in internet arguments. It's very common that two people will both be saying things that makes sense, but because they both have this caricature built up of the other person and the other viewpoint in their head, they can't even understand each other and keep talking at cross purposes.
Person A says "How DARE you say that genocide is okay, genocide is NEVER okay"
Then person B says "How DARE you say Biden and Trump are the same, Trump is obviously way worse and we need to vote for Biden"
"How DARE you vote for genocide"
"How DARE you refuse to vote against Trump's genocide"
And so on. I mean, neither one is really wrong, and yet they're all angry at each other and each seem genuinely convinced that the person they're talking to carries cartoonishly wrong views like "genocide is okay as long as it comes from my political allies," and then they get all bent out of shape arguing against those imaginary views that almost no one really actually holds. And they can't even listen to the other person for long enough to understand what they're saying, because I can't possibly sit here and listen to a pro-genocide person, when I am ANTI genocide, and I just need to fight against this pro genocide person right now.
Indeed. Very few people actively want to do what they think is wrong or "evil".