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Sunday 29 May 2016

Everyone hates me therefore I'm right!

Is an utterly retarded position I see more and more people adopting.
You are not a special snowflake.
Your beliefs, however unique, still fall loosely within a category that can be easily defined for political discussion.
If you do not understand this, it is not the fault of political philosophy. It is a fault of your personal ignorance.

First understand; There is no right and wrong.
Sensible people can and do disagree. We each have our own set of experiences, upbringing and education that informs our imperfect, incomplete perception of reality.

You can have a perfectly valid, justified and functional world view predicated broadly on left wing values or right wing values. There is a wealth of variety on both sides too.
You can even be centrist.
Centrist does not mean you disagree with both sides, so much as you cherry pick positions from both sides and are moderate. If you strongly disagree with both sides, you aren't a centrist, you're a cunt. And possibly a hipster.

Being PROUD that you are hated by everyone for public statements you make is not a sign of your independence.
It is a sign of a lack of convictions.
If people on both sides hate what you say, examine your arguments.
Ensure you are consistent.
Ensure that you are factual.
Do not use disagreement as proof of validity.

With that said, I should admit that I piss everyone off.
I'm a socialist that spends most his time arguing against the regressive left (and have done for YEARS before that term came around, I preferred my own "fauxgressives" :<)
The right hate me just for existing and not letting them get away with constant hypocrisy.
Too often I'm engaged in fights on the left that are gleefully join by right wing commenters that are every bit as guilty as those they criticise.

The thing is, I don't LIKE pissing anyone off.
I'm basically a fucking hippy.
I want everyone to get along, I think we all share more common ground than most appreciate and most of all, I think people that "like to piss both sides off" make everything worse.
This is literally the definition of a troll, and yet I hear it claimed as proof of some moral high ground, as if it is proof of being correct.
The last is even more galling.

I do not gauge the value of my ideas by the response they receive. Negative or positive, the ideas exist irrespective of opinions made about them.
If I am unable to defend my ideas, then I have bad arguments. I must either find better arguments or abandon the idea as untenable.
That is the path to being right.
Not simply declaring oneself the arbiter of truth. Not clinging to dogma.

Only by examining our beliefs and abandoning those we cant adequately defend do we ever arrive at truth.

Too often I find people excusing or justifying their opinions with the bad reactions they inspire.

If they are demonstrably incorrect, but are insulted in response, they simply cling more firmly to the self delusion. They focus on offence, rather than examining arguments.
I get it, the left are sometimes reactionary and blind to their own faults. Left wing advocacy can often include base manipulation of emotional responses. I'm a sucker for it, but I know it's happening.
The right tend to be insular and attack any deviation in thought (this has become endemic on the left VERY recently with regressives, who have apparently abandoned the lessons taken from the communist regimes as criticised by Orwell)


So yes. Both sides DO engage in ridiculous behaviour in response to being questioned or criticised.
It doesn't automatically invalidate what they're saying though.
Sometimes people can both be correct AND utter arseholes.

Totally possible.

I most often see this crap invoked by political centrists that have allied themselves with regressives in the media (who I firmly believe are also political centrists)

The "far left" and "far right" are blamed for the consequences of rhetoric and activism pushed most often by cliques of neoliberals for their own benefit.
They will claim to oppose the behaviour and cite the "extremists" as their opponents, but will generally not provide examples. Mostly because that would reveal massive hypocrisy, ignorance and most amusingly, that the culprits are their ideological peers. Not the "extremes"

I think the most clear example of this is with feminism.
Many feminists in the media and activism consider themselves moderate, centrist and reasonable.

They fail to display any of these qualities in detectable amounts.
They blame extremists for the bad name feminism has gained (both within feminism, and opponents of feminism)
Meanwhile, they engage in or excuse all of the worst behaviour, rhetoric and activism that is supposed be the fault of those extremists.

They then fall back on the classic argument of "I'm right because everyone hates me"

Now before a reader mistakes my contempt here with hate or intolerance; I routinely declare that there is nothing WRONG with any particular position. Spent the first part of this post saying as much.
Disagreements are not only inevitable, they're absolutely necessary.
More than that, people should be ALLOWED to be wrong.
The only thing that should matter is conduct.

If there is no abuse, no violence and no call to violence, we should tolerate it.
If there are shared values, those should be celebrated.
If there is (morally sound) compromise to be reached, it should be embraced.

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