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Originally Posted by PepsiFree
Nothing says "this argument has been settled for me" like repeatedly engaging in it.
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I'm saying I actually think it should be engaged in again, because it's been a while and it may be approaching dead dogma status so there's a good argument that someone raising it is performing a public service... but I'm just not personally interested in doing it all again right now.
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That far left comment though... it's funny. Is your quick dependency on categorisation any better than the same things the RL is accused of doing?
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Nope.
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Isn't this one of the huge problems that is being highlighted in the aftermath of the Trump election?
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Yup.
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Do we benefit overall by taking the individual views of someone, prescribing them a set category, and then generalising their views as being common with that entire category? Don't you reject this tactic both because it's uselessness and it's like to tribalism?
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Yup.
You're totally right, which is why I put all the caveats in about labels being generally useless, about it just being a descriptor and having no actual content, and the fact that nothing substantive turns on the descriptor. It's a difficult problem because you need to use
some sort of descriptive shorthand to describe an ideology without writing a treatise about it every time it's brought up; there's a recognizable political phenomenon, and you have to call it
something. Hence the coining of "Regressive Left" - although incidentally I'm seeing on social media now that people are moving to the term "Ctrl-left", which is downright inspired.
But you're completely right that it just creates a new tribe and encourages people to revert to tribal modes. I think I talked about this problem a few pages back. It's almost the same argument that was made by a number of atheists against the term "atheist" a few years ago.