The less locally numerous group is always structurally more inclined to debate-me culture. Obviously the far left isn't numerous in most contexts, which is why it actually does have a debate-me affect in a lot of contexts! A mass rally for our views isn't the kind of context that encourages this, however.
Additionally, large gatherings are just unconducive to meaningful debates. Text is the medium of careful thinking, which is why coherent left-wing arguments and coherent right-wing arguments and coherent squishy liberal arguments are all found there, in blogs and books. (Tweets are too small for this, which is why Twitter has been a disaster for discourse for everybody.)
The stereotype that everybody would have been familiar with until very recently would be that the far left is a milieu of almost oppressively constant argument and scholastic debate. I think this is basically accurate as long as the milieu is more academic-y than activist-y, but note how strongly these correspond to the media in which people are communicating.
Great piece and not much I can add. No, these people and many in liberal land refuse to debate for the reasons you name (and because they suspect they are somewhat wrong but don't care).
My account was banned for a month yesterday on a progressive substack because, though being quite civil, I did make some points to contradict the preferred narratives in their cozy groupthink space. And these are very intelligent people, many academics I think, who I figured would be above that. Nope.
Isn't it obvious that even if your opponent is basically wrong, or more wrong than you anyway, he is going to raise points and offer information you aren't aware of and even if you are going to maintain your position, you need to be sure you do have a good answer to his critiques?
The famous quote "You do not understand your position until you understand your opponent's position, as stated by his most intelligent and articulate spokesperson".
I think you misunderstand their aims. Suppose, for whatever reason, you come to believe that the existence of the State of Israel is immoral. How might you act on this belief?
I suppose you could join Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but I'm not sure how easy it is to join, and more importantly, they are extraordinarily unlikely to defeat Israel.
You might petition the US government to reduce its support for Israel, but unfortunately for you, maintaining an alliance with the State of Israel happens to be one of the only issues in the entire arena of US politics over which there is strong bipartisan consensus. And even if you somewho managed to stop US funding, Israel has plenty of other rich and powerful geopolitical allies, and a GDP 10x the GDP of Palestine and Lebanon combined, so I can't imagine it's existence would be threatened.
So you, as an anti-Zionist, are powerless to stop or affect the existence of Israel, even at the margins. Note that while the probability Israel is soon defeated is probably the same as the probability the US becomes a minarchist/ancap/monarchist utopia (zero), the radical libertarian and the neoreactionary still care about persuasion and policy because they care about marginal changes. Every scrapped regulation and percentage decrease in the tax rate is a big and important win for the libertarian. Every percentage increase in the power of the executive, relative to the powers of the legistlature and the process-run bureaucratic agencies. is a big and important win for the monarchist. Despite being fringe, they are actively interested in persuading the public in pursuit of marginal changes in their favor.
The anti-Zionist cannot realize any marginal changes in her favor. So what can she do? What does any powerless child do when she realizes she can't win. Throw tantrums. Be annoying. Make unfounded accusations of genocide. Occupy public spaces. Harass Jews and further infuriate them by denying it, and retreating to the various mottes of "anti-Zionism not anti-Semitism" or "it was only the outside protestors who did it." MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD.
The protests are composed of a bunch of children realizing they are powerless to effect change, stomping their feet and throwing a hissy fit, making bizarre demands to gratify their own egos, like demanding universities divest from Jew-collaborating companies, LARPing as martyrs and relishing victomhood by purposely instigating conflict with universities and police, and engaging in virtue-signalling games with the rest of their obnoxious friends.
Worse, they are enabled by their morally confused faculty, who are only too happy to partake in the nonsense so that they can finally live out their fantasies of embodying the spirit of the 60s and "fighting the power."
I personally am so aesthetically repulsed by this movement that I plan to donate money to Friends of the IDF, not out of support for Israel (although they deserve it), but specifically out of spite for the tantrum-throwing idiots currently making nuisances of themselves on my campus and so many others across the country.
This sort of action kind of did work a few years ago with BLM. It’s not like Kendi or DiAngelo had good arguements, and your average BLM rioter had even fewer, but they had a big impact on culture and policy.
Obviously these movements are going to be less successful because they have a stronger target (Jews vs whites) and no domestic political ally (blacks are 13% of the country, Arabs are a lot less in America). But it strikes me as the same LARP.
This. And then cry "police violence" after refusing legitimate orders to leave.
I sympathize though, as John McWhorter pointed out some of these people are genuinely horrified by the carnage in Gaza. I am too, would have been better if some other response to 10/7 had been made.
But if people are going to take a one - sided anti-Israel approach, I know where I'm going to land on it.
To summarize and explain why I think it applies, the Leftists at the protest do not see you as a reasonable person that is undecided on the best way to achieve peace and can be persuaded. They see you as a person benefiting from an oppressive system that needs to be dismantled. You will never be persuaded to dismantle something you are benefiting from, so you can only be defeated.
I still cannot figure out how they think those protests will solve anything? My best guess is they think there are enough people oppressed out there that are just too scared to act, and if they can just show that they are not alone and act together, they can overthrow the oppressive system. But that is really only a guess. The only leftist I read is deBoer, and he actually believes in persuasion.
That might have something to do with it, but why would bulldog be the enemy? How is he benefiting from this oppression? If he was Israeli, or at least Jewish with a right to return, I could understand. But random passerbys are not benefiting from oppression far away.
"Not only do many on the far-left act as if they are exempt from explaining what they support, but they also roll their eyes at the claim that they should actually have something like a justification for their beliefs."
Ah yes, a tendency noticeably absent from persons of every other political tendency....
Is it normal for people to dialogue at protests? My understanding is that the rallying parties are there to build solidarity and make a public statement about an issue. But I genuinely don't know if this is true; I've never been to one because justice is a liberal psyop anyway.
It's true outside of the protests as well. Though it's weird how ubiquitous the opposition to dialogue is at protests too! Like, even at Trump ralleys Jordan Klepper can find people to interview to argue about stuff.
Because, in the parlance of the Rationalists, the left are “conflict theorists,” not “mistake theorists.” To the mistake theorist, politics is a search for truth, and discussion of ideas is an essential part of the search for truth. To the conflict theorist, politics is a fight for power, and the premise of a debate is that your opponent might have a legitimate basis for being given power, if their ideas have more truth to them. Because the conflict theorist wants to win, rather than wanting to be right, they reject this premise entirely. To the conflict theorist, ideas are tools for justifying the exercise of power, not for exploring truth, so the conflict theorist seeks an environment where they are allowed to express their own ideas and suppress the expression of competing ideas.
When you compare these protestors to libertarians or neomonarchists aren't you comparing apples and oranges. Wouldn't the group corresponding to them on the Right be the people who attend Trump rallies?
John le Carré captures this dynamic really well in The Little Drummer Girl. The title character is so passionate about her cause — supporting the Palestinians — but so ignorant about the nature of the conflict that she ends up working for the other side.
The boring answer is: by definition. We simply define people who go to this kind of protests and refuse to argue their views with normies as "Far-Left". But why do individual people arrive to this kind of attitude?
For this question replies may differ. Some people personally engaged in a lot of debates, observed their total ineffectiveness and got burned out. Some simply heard the stories of such people and accepted their lessons. Some learned the historical lessons of leftism, which managed to persuade a lot of educated people in the past but still failed to implement the political goals. Some noticed that people the most eager to debate are the ones who are approaching these debates with bad faith: Steven Crowder - the guy from Change My Mind meme - isn't exactly known as a rational, open minded and honest person. Some feel ethically appalled by the idea of respectfully conversing with supporters of genocide, while this genocide is actively going on. Some are just poor traumatized individuals.
In a way the far leftists are more consistent than the mainstream, where this is only practiced selectively on race and to a lesser extent a handful of other progressive social issues. Saying something racially insensitive or reactionary is treated with the seriousness of violence because there is an assumed systemicity between the speech and actual violence or even genocide. Far leftists apply this totalising logic to every issue from climate change to welfare to even the existence of markets, cause they see every issue as intersectional with their big stack of issues. So advocacy for free markets is tantamount to genocide, and supporting israeli bombardment of civilians is hysteria inducing because this is the genocide they have forever seen themselves in opposition to finally manifesting in its clearest form.
A yes, a classic. My first encounter with that was in my first college lit class in 1994, which was supposed to be "intro to lit and language" and then apparently the syllabus got converted into "reevaluate your values and come to the same conclusions as mine."
There was 1 gay dude in the class, he got an A, 3 girls, they got Bs, everyone else got Cs or below except for me because I dropped it before drop day.
The less locally numerous group is always structurally more inclined to debate-me culture. Obviously the far left isn't numerous in most contexts, which is why it actually does have a debate-me affect in a lot of contexts! A mass rally for our views isn't the kind of context that encourages this, however.
Additionally, large gatherings are just unconducive to meaningful debates. Text is the medium of careful thinking, which is why coherent left-wing arguments and coherent right-wing arguments and coherent squishy liberal arguments are all found there, in blogs and books. (Tweets are too small for this, which is why Twitter has been a disaster for discourse for everybody.)
The stereotype that everybody would have been familiar with until very recently would be that the far left is a milieu of almost oppressively constant argument and scholastic debate. I think this is basically accurate as long as the milieu is more academic-y than activist-y, but note how strongly these correspond to the media in which people are communicating.
Great piece and not much I can add. No, these people and many in liberal land refuse to debate for the reasons you name (and because they suspect they are somewhat wrong but don't care).
My account was banned for a month yesterday on a progressive substack because, though being quite civil, I did make some points to contradict the preferred narratives in their cozy groupthink space. And these are very intelligent people, many academics I think, who I figured would be above that. Nope.
Isn't it obvious that even if your opponent is basically wrong, or more wrong than you anyway, he is going to raise points and offer information you aren't aware of and even if you are going to maintain your position, you need to be sure you do have a good answer to his critiques?
The famous quote "You do not understand your position until you understand your opponent's position, as stated by his most intelligent and articulate spokesperson".
I think you misunderstand their aims. Suppose, for whatever reason, you come to believe that the existence of the State of Israel is immoral. How might you act on this belief?
I suppose you could join Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but I'm not sure how easy it is to join, and more importantly, they are extraordinarily unlikely to defeat Israel.
You might petition the US government to reduce its support for Israel, but unfortunately for you, maintaining an alliance with the State of Israel happens to be one of the only issues in the entire arena of US politics over which there is strong bipartisan consensus. And even if you somewho managed to stop US funding, Israel has plenty of other rich and powerful geopolitical allies, and a GDP 10x the GDP of Palestine and Lebanon combined, so I can't imagine it's existence would be threatened.
So you, as an anti-Zionist, are powerless to stop or affect the existence of Israel, even at the margins. Note that while the probability Israel is soon defeated is probably the same as the probability the US becomes a minarchist/ancap/monarchist utopia (zero), the radical libertarian and the neoreactionary still care about persuasion and policy because they care about marginal changes. Every scrapped regulation and percentage decrease in the tax rate is a big and important win for the libertarian. Every percentage increase in the power of the executive, relative to the powers of the legistlature and the process-run bureaucratic agencies. is a big and important win for the monarchist. Despite being fringe, they are actively interested in persuading the public in pursuit of marginal changes in their favor.
The anti-Zionist cannot realize any marginal changes in her favor. So what can she do? What does any powerless child do when she realizes she can't win. Throw tantrums. Be annoying. Make unfounded accusations of genocide. Occupy public spaces. Harass Jews and further infuriate them by denying it, and retreating to the various mottes of "anti-Zionism not anti-Semitism" or "it was only the outside protestors who did it." MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD.
The protests are composed of a bunch of children realizing they are powerless to effect change, stomping their feet and throwing a hissy fit, making bizarre demands to gratify their own egos, like demanding universities divest from Jew-collaborating companies, LARPing as martyrs and relishing victomhood by purposely instigating conflict with universities and police, and engaging in virtue-signalling games with the rest of their obnoxious friends.
Worse, they are enabled by their morally confused faculty, who are only too happy to partake in the nonsense so that they can finally live out their fantasies of embodying the spirit of the 60s and "fighting the power."
I personally am so aesthetically repulsed by this movement that I plan to donate money to Friends of the IDF, not out of support for Israel (although they deserve it), but specifically out of spite for the tantrum-throwing idiots currently making nuisances of themselves on my campus and so many others across the country.
Rant over.
This sort of action kind of did work a few years ago with BLM. It’s not like Kendi or DiAngelo had good arguements, and your average BLM rioter had even fewer, but they had a big impact on culture and policy.
Obviously these movements are going to be less successful because they have a stronger target (Jews vs whites) and no domestic political ally (blacks are 13% of the country, Arabs are a lot less in America). But it strikes me as the same LARP.
This. And then cry "police violence" after refusing legitimate orders to leave.
I sympathize though, as John McWhorter pointed out some of these people are genuinely horrified by the carnage in Gaza. I am too, would have been better if some other response to 10/7 had been made.
But if people are going to take a one - sided anti-Israel approach, I know where I'm going to land on it.
My best understanding of why Far Left rarely debates is Scott’s piece on Conflict vs. Mistake Theory. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
To summarize and explain why I think it applies, the Leftists at the protest do not see you as a reasonable person that is undecided on the best way to achieve peace and can be persuaded. They see you as a person benefiting from an oppressive system that needs to be dismantled. You will never be persuaded to dismantle something you are benefiting from, so you can only be defeated.
I still cannot figure out how they think those protests will solve anything? My best guess is they think there are enough people oppressed out there that are just too scared to act, and if they can just show that they are not alone and act together, they can overthrow the oppressive system. But that is really only a guess. The only leftist I read is deBoer, and he actually believes in persuasion.
That might have something to do with it, but why would bulldog be the enemy? How is he benefiting from this oppression? If he was Israeli, or at least Jewish with a right to return, I could understand. But random passerbys are not benefiting from oppression far away.
I'm Jewish.
"Not only do many on the far-left act as if they are exempt from explaining what they support, but they also roll their eyes at the claim that they should actually have something like a justification for their beliefs."
Ah yes, a tendency noticeably absent from persons of every other political tendency....
Is it normal for people to dialogue at protests? My understanding is that the rallying parties are there to build solidarity and make a public statement about an issue. But I genuinely don't know if this is true; I've never been to one because justice is a liberal psyop anyway.
It's true outside of the protests as well. Though it's weird how ubiquitous the opposition to dialogue is at protests too! Like, even at Trump ralleys Jordan Klepper can find people to interview to argue about stuff.
The Far Left won’t argue because they are religious purists. They do not communicate with blasphemers or the unelect. they simply shun them
Why would they? Their strategy has worked perfectly for decades against well-meaning Westerners.
Because, in the parlance of the Rationalists, the left are “conflict theorists,” not “mistake theorists.” To the mistake theorist, politics is a search for truth, and discussion of ideas is an essential part of the search for truth. To the conflict theorist, politics is a fight for power, and the premise of a debate is that your opponent might have a legitimate basis for being given power, if their ideas have more truth to them. Because the conflict theorist wants to win, rather than wanting to be right, they reject this premise entirely. To the conflict theorist, ideas are tools for justifying the exercise of power, not for exploring truth, so the conflict theorist seeks an environment where they are allowed to express their own ideas and suppress the expression of competing ideas.
When you compare these protestors to libertarians or neomonarchists aren't you comparing apples and oranges. Wouldn't the group corresponding to them on the Right be the people who attend Trump rallies?
John le Carré captures this dynamic really well in The Little Drummer Girl. The title character is so passionate about her cause — supporting the Palestinians — but so ignorant about the nature of the conflict that she ends up working for the other side.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/19003
The boring answer is: by definition. We simply define people who go to this kind of protests and refuse to argue their views with normies as "Far-Left". But why do individual people arrive to this kind of attitude?
For this question replies may differ. Some people personally engaged in a lot of debates, observed their total ineffectiveness and got burned out. Some simply heard the stories of such people and accepted their lessons. Some learned the historical lessons of leftism, which managed to persuade a lot of educated people in the past but still failed to implement the political goals. Some noticed that people the most eager to debate are the ones who are approaching these debates with bad faith: Steven Crowder - the guy from Change My Mind meme - isn't exactly known as a rational, open minded and honest person. Some feel ethically appalled by the idea of respectfully conversing with supporters of genocide, while this genocide is actively going on. Some are just poor traumatized individuals.
Don't you get it? Debate and reason are the reactionary, subversive tools of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie.
In a way the far leftists are more consistent than the mainstream, where this is only practiced selectively on race and to a lesser extent a handful of other progressive social issues. Saying something racially insensitive or reactionary is treated with the seriousness of violence because there is an assumed systemicity between the speech and actual violence or even genocide. Far leftists apply this totalising logic to every issue from climate change to welfare to even the existence of markets, cause they see every issue as intersectional with their big stack of issues. So advocacy for free markets is tantamount to genocide, and supporting israeli bombardment of civilians is hysteria inducing because this is the genocide they have forever seen themselves in opposition to finally manifesting in its clearest form.
I enjoyed this article. How much time did you spend with the protesters and how many of them did you converse with?
Like 20 minutes. Zero conversing occurred. They were "not engaging in that right now." It was mostly other people trying to argue though.
A yes, a classic. My first encounter with that was in my first college lit class in 1994, which was supposed to be "intro to lit and language" and then apparently the syllabus got converted into "reevaluate your values and come to the same conclusions as mine."
There was 1 gay dude in the class, he got an A, 3 girls, they got Bs, everyone else got Cs or below except for me because I dropped it before drop day.