Quote:
Originally Posted by juan valdez
I think this is true but i think its just a tool in a larger tactic
Male aggression is obvious and well understood. Feminine aggression is different. They actually rely more on character assassination and gossip. This is a common tactic of the far left. Nobody is totally immune to this but they absolutely love it. Instead of actually arguing an idea, point, etc on its merits, you can just dismiss and avoid all of it by discrediting the source.
I think ascribing this to male or female differences or thinking that this is a unusually characteristic of the far left is inaccurate. First, rightwing conservatives are at least as likely in my experience to dismiss an idea or claim by discrediting the source. Trump is of course the most prominent current example of this, with his constant claims that we shouldn't accept something as true because it is "fake news." But this isn't new, conservatives have for years rejected mainstream sources in both science and the press because they think they are biased against them or their views.
Second, the actual left in the US - eg people like Bernie Sanders, and especially the far left, are more likely to engage with people on ideas than people in or closer to the center. People in the center have more interest in policing the boundaries of discourse, since they are the ones who benefit the most from making some ideas too extreme to be considered. You'll notice that Sam Harris, who puts himself forward as a champion of open discourse, struggles to have conversations with people who are actually on the far left because their worldview has too little in common with his, and he isn't willing to bracket so much of his own beliefs in a conversation.
Quote:
The one drop tactic is a great tool for this. You don't have to actually defend or justify your position if the person you disagree with was on an interview show that once talked to alex jones. It's obviously an alt-right platform that can be deleted from discourse.
This is different than what I meant fwiw. The guilt by association stuff is often wrong and driven by a stultified perspective on the world. Many left people online have become habituated to assuming that most people who disagree with them are dishonest about their views unless they are stating that they hate minorities, women, poor people, etc and want to start the Fourth Reich. Since they think these people aren't being honest, they don't really care about the surface meaning of what is being said, and instead look for clues to their true underlying pathologies. Obviously, in this way of doing conversation, a focus on statistical correlations can be useful for sussing out your "true" beliefs and political attitudes. And, obviously, who you associate with will generally correlate with your political beliefs.
What I meant with the one-drop analogy was different. People's views usually don't fit into a neat left-right binary. For instance, someone might hold mostly leftwing views on a topic, but be okay with gun rights. Or maybe they are very conservative, but favor single-payer. The approach above leads people to take the actual complexity in people's views as a clue to their secretly held rightwing views (at least, when it is useful to do so). So if you have a single right wing view, that is a sign that you are right wing, whatever else you might say.