It's worrying if people are being refreshed by accusations of fascism, mercenary motivations, alt-right views, Nazism rather than reasoned disagreement with ideas genuinely held. The left has been accused of having lost the ability to make arguments & we need to fix that.https://twitter.com/BaileyNagy/status/976011723412033536 …
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Yes, I'm referring to the lumping together of a great many people under one hand-wavy word: "left". I try to be careful to assess the arguments people make on the basis of what they say, rather than the politics they espouse. And from what I've seen, so do you (mostly). (cont)
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If I can use the ghastly phrase, you "self-identify" as being on the left. And yet I don't think you've lost the ability to make arguments. Nor do I think you are either racist or sexist. So you are a counter-example to your own claim, and so am I.
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It's not my claim! My claim is that the accusation exists and we need to address it by dealing with the shit that caused it to be made.
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Well, the shit that caused it to be made is the distressing tendency of people to over-simplify by pinning oligosyllabic labels onto large groups of people so that they can deal with them *as* groups rather than as individuals. The word "left" is one such label.
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OK. I'm not sure why you seem to think I am a person who needs telling this tho. Have I not written enough pieces defending the liberal left and talking about how to distinguish it from the SocJus left and marginalise the latter?
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Helen, I don't think you need telling this. I just love arguing, especially with people on the left, because they're so good at it.
Your remark seemed to me to be identitarian, and I called you out on it - not to beat you down, but to find out what you meant.
End of conversation
New conversation -
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