Right-wing in-group: “So long as you be just like us in every way and fall in line, you will be accepted. Sort of.”
Left-wing in-group: “So long as you’re not an asshole, we don’t care what you believe or do.”
Right-wing out-group: Anyone not like them.
Left-wing out-group: Anyone who is an asshole.
The key being what constitutes being an asshole, and what you allow yourself to do to someone once the label can be pasted onto someone. It’s really the same thing seen through different gross stereotypes - they could literally say the same thing.
That’s not to say there aren’t very real differences between parties, but they aren’t extreme sides of a one dimensional line (or vague notions in a two dimensional mapping) which is basically a propaganda tool for the ego.
It’s funny. I have a blog post from Ken Arneson who talks about “The Right to be an Asshole” and here’s how he defines an asshole:
An asshole is a selfish person whose selfishness causes foreseeable indirect collateral damage to the people around them.
He goes on:
Assholes take risks that provide upside to themselves, but transfer the downsides of those risks to other people.
But the true test case for the limits of freedom is the asshole. Philosophically speaking, assholes walk the line between intentions and consequences. Assholes form the boundary between freedom and control.
Assholes don’t intend to do direct harm. They just don’t think about, and/or care about, and/or believe, and/or comprehend, that their actions can or will have negative consequences for other people beyond their direct intentions.
He goes on to recount the tale of COVID Patient 31 from Seoul, South Korea. Shortly after receiving her diagnosis, she decided to seek comfort at church. Hundreds of deaths and thousands of infections were traced back to her through contact tracing. So, now we come to intentions vs. consequences. Patient 31 wasn’t intending to make anyone sick or die, she was merely seeking comfort through faith. Any reasonable non-asshole could have told her and probably did tell her, that attending church while infected would cause others to be infected and possibly die. How should this asshole be judged? If we judge her by her intentions, then she’s as much a victim as anyone. But if we judge her by her consequences, then she’s a mass murderer.
So the question we have to ask as a free society is: What the fuck do we do about assholes?
Assholes have a very clever trick that allows them to keep being assholes.
If you try to stop them from being an asshole, they will declare you to be an asshole who, although perhaps intending to prevent some bad thing from happening, causes harm by denying some very fine people, who have no intention of harming anyone, their freedom. So who’s the real asshole here, anyway?
Why is he downvoted? One is not an asshole if one is just too dumb to get what they are causing. The problem is that we not educate our children good enough so that they not fail to get what makes sense and what not.
But as long as we have stupid religious fanatics in power, we are doomed. Fuck Religion!
Socialism is literally transferring all risk to other people. Nice try though.
Left-wing out-group: Everyone, especially other leftists
I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do with the ideology, but the far left is famously like that.
I don’t usually use this expression, but you might need to touch grass. I pretty regularly hang out with far left people and other than debates over personal philosophy we’re all pretty chill. The internet is not an accurate representation of any actual social dynamics.
All my liberal homies smoke weed and shoot the shit and try to vote for people who don’t want to kill outgroups. So agreed, he needs to touch grass.
to be fair, tankies arn’t left wing, they fully support the most Draconian right wing solutions to everything, but pretend that their führer isn’t evil or something.
Anarchists are in this picture too. Gatekeeping about who’s anti-authoritarian enough is one example.
Left-wing in-group: “So long as you’re not an asshole, we don’t care what you believe or do.”
Since fucking when?? The far left is famous for infighting and purity tests, has been for decades. It might even be the number one thing Leftism is known for.
Meme says far left, not left-leaning. Left-leaning is cool. Far left are fucking idiots.
Such as… ?
I mean if you need to narrow your scope to the “fAr LeFt,” in America to make your point then I can narrow my scope to the “fAr RiGht” and the difference is eco terrorism versus lynch mobs, so…
Theres a lot of nuisance in the definitions of left and right that are lost in reductive and polarizing statements like this. For instance a far left idea is an extreme belief in the philosophy of equity. When brought to its pure conclusion you end up in a communist environment where the state ends of being the dictator of exactly how much resources every individual is allowed to have. The conclusion to radical left and radical right policies is actually exactly the same. Authoritarianism.
There are plenty of ideas and philosophies on the right and left that are absolutely reasonable. Universal Healthcare on the left. Some immigration reforms or trade tariffs on the right.
These types of memes are very reductionist an unhelpful in terms of influencing people who are already woefully uneducated in the world of politics, philosophy, or trade and finance and only serves to try and convince stupid people that one very large and diverse group of people are literally evil while another very large group of diverse people are the good and virtuous.
