Quote:
Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
I am really, really starting to despise my own side of the political spectrum. Actually, I'm starting to suspect it's been entirely hijacked at the youth level. It used to be that the conservatives were the ones obsessed with controlling the behaviours of other people - stop sleeping with certain people, stop watching violent TV or playing violent video games, enjoying sex is immoral and you should be pure and nun-like, etc. Now religious justifications for those sorts of authoritarian dicta are out of fashion, so we're going to justify our urge to control other people under the new guise of political correctness or safe spaces or whatever term you'd like to use.
Just shamefully illiberal fascistic behavior.
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You need to disentangle liberalism from the progressive left. The liberal tradition is about relentless scepticism and inquiry, carried out in an environment that tolerates the broadest possible range of expression. It sets us free from our cages of identity (class, race, gender, etc.) to contest ideas on their own merits.
The modern progressive left has a fundamentally different program. It has become just another tribal identity rooted in group-think and a Manichean us versus them outlook. In most of its essential qualities, it is indistinguishable from religion. The unchallengeable dogmas. The pieties expressed so earnestly and publicly. The savaging of unbelievers. And most of all, the comforting simplicity.
So forget about left right. Recognize that your primary allegiances are to reason and liberalism, and recognize that those values are under assault as least as strongly from the left as from the right. Challenge dogma and irrational group-think wherever you see it. Don't give sloppy or authoritarian arguments a free pass just because the person demonstrating them seems to have laudable goals like reducing sexism. And have some trust in the fundamental strength of liberal principles, which are responsible for the tremendous gains we have made in the last century, and which are still supported by the majority of people in the West, even though the ideologues who attack those principles are full of unrelenting vigour.
Mostly this is the folly of youth who want to belong to something bigger than themselves and who crave the kind of comfort and security that religion used to provide. It's distressing - especially the dismal state of free inquiry and speech in our institutions of higher learning. But I'm not convinced such infantile folly can persist for long if exposed to the cool light of reason. Science, logic, and empiricism aren't going anywhere, even though so many of even our educated today have abandoned them in favour of feels.