Everyone who isn't exactly towing whatever arbitrary line of perfectionism someone personally adheres to is now "controlled opposition," don't you know how to "$(CURRENT_YEAR)" on the internet?
they don't want you dead, they want you to change you're mind.
Leftists mean "unity" and "changing your mind" like Mohammadans say "Islam" means "peace" when it actually translates to "submission."
Say it with me everyone
"WE CAN REMAIN IRRATIONAL FAR LONGER THAN YOU CAN REMAIN SOLVENT!!!!!!!!
Inb4 that reddit "private" status becomes permanent...
To Duranty's point: I have never seen such a mass of petty, vindictive, hateful monsters as the Woke when it comes to their treatment of the un-Woke. Again and again I've watched them become absolutely ecstatic about destroying the life of some transgressor (e.g. the 15-year-old girl who said the n-word), which cannot be said to come from any place of compassion, by any definition.
That can still be lumped under 'compassion,' just a very primitive, zero-sum one that applies only for the subset of people within their circle of care (the woke and the 'oppressed') because everyone beyond that sphere, either by dint of their identity or hurtful transgressions against the tribe, is literally beyond moral concern. Ergo, you can show compassion to your in group just as much by 'comforting' them as by committing evil against the out group that, in moral zero-sum fashion, is constantly out to oppress you.
This was something one of Peterson's grad students supposedly found in research; that rabid SJWs scored VERY high in 'agreeableness' which would seem to run contrary to their behavior of attacking others like feral dogs...but not if your moral personality is extended only to your in group, which has to be protected from the outgroup at whatever cost.
True there are some psychopaths out there who just love to torture others, and such a movement will attract well beyond baseline, but most of them are just moral primitives whose domain of moral concern applies ONLY to their tribe because they're too stupid or short sighted for anything beyond stark Manicheanism of in group and out group and even the most basic realization that they shouldn't do that merely because that system could turn on them (see all the former libtards who woke up, but only after the experience of being turned on).
To say nothing of being too dim for concepts of moral symmetry/universalism, veil of ignorance, etc. etc.
In the end I think there are two fundamental (stylized for brevity) approaches to modeling leftists:
- They appear to have terrible models and act in all these ways because they are fundamentally warped and twisted creatures and that's the only way they can rationalize the things they innately desire to do.
- They believe in bad/terrible/outright evil ideas because they have terrible models for understanding reality and that's all they're currently capable of (which could either happen through being indoctrinated/never educated properly [since morality is learned/developed over time not just innate] OR from being so innately deficient that they're incapable of it [be the deficiency personality/values/cognitive presets/etc]).
Psychopaths aside, I don't think the former view offers any real utility or viable explanatory power - especially since you can back out the former from the latter broader explanation.
The only real utility the former model has, which is what I'm sensing is more in line with what you've posted, is to make you feel better about purging them when reality finally comes to collect its interest on the debt we've accrued.
But the second model doesn't preclude that either, as even IF it's the case that most are warped or handicapped it hardly means they're fixable/redeemable...BUT it offers ideas on how to avoid traveling the same road we're currently on again.
Real question is though, which is the cause and which is the effect?
- Is the cause that, previously a bit more sophisticated, leftism became dominant and now it's a bunch of mediocrities coasting on rusty versions of those ideas?
- Is the cause that leftist ideas are more intuitively appealing vs more sophisticated moralities entirely dependent on abstract reasoning and non-obvious/intuitive dynamics? And thus being the harder road inclines people to go "eh fuck it I'll take the simple sugar coated option" [also see the end about why you'd make people dumber...]
While both aspects contribute, I think the latter is more prominent and fits with historical development; it has NEVER been 'obvious' to believe in individual rights and that a complex system where individuals can pursue their own interests yields a better outcome for more people than other systems...
The intuitive idea is just the "right/smart/whatever people" being "in charge" to micromanage the design to try and achieve the "obviously desirable" means AND ends - be it at the level of a tribe or into the autocracies of today.
Which is another reason leftism is so infested in education and seeks to undermine REAL learning; they know, probably not explicitly but implicitly from interactions with those who disagree with them in life, that they don't have sophisticated ideas that hold up to scrutiny...so they undermine the ability of as many people as possible to scrutinize their ideas, and ideally brainwash them into buying into them by getting them young.
Leftists don't do "fairness" or "caring" though. They are only "fair" and "caring"... to themselves. It's like an a primitive tribal/feudal concept.
No they definitely do, it's just a much more simplistic version of it that (most) people age out of over time that takes into greater account context, path dependency, iterated games etc.
The "Generic Libtard" as we'll call them for this discussion DOES value "fariness" and "care," but only very simplistic, single shot, zero sum variations of them.
For fairness it's "anyone having more than anyone else is bad/a sign of injustice" because they aren't sophisticated enough to consider the temporal dimension of HOW those inequalities arose...and/or just assumes that can be discarded as unjust...doesn't understand that "fair" depends on value and value is multidimensional with individual term weights varying from person to person... the list goes on.
Leftists "care" in the sense that they "want to stop other people from experiencing harm" but completely block out the idea that suffering is often times earned through action (or inaction), that suffering isn't just meted out by malevolent external actors and is often a default state, that some people are WILLING to suffer short term for longer term gain because of longer time horizons, etc.
The Generic Libtard defaults to the most simplistic, 0th order models for how human interaction, with other humans and the environment, occur.
That suggests that in addition to diminished Moral Foundation Dimensions, leftists also seem to be chronically underdeveloped in terms of their moral theory/reasoning. See Piaget and Kohlberg's theories of moral development or similar ideas. They are underdeveloped in the sense of applying the cognitive muscles of abstraction to moral reasoning, and it really shows if you ever try to argue with one.
Yet another factor is leftists being far more empathizing than systemitizing compared to other political groups (libertarians being the only group showing a relative preference for systemitizing...) [and women being much more/less empathizing/systemitizing than men and the so-obvious-its-forbidden-to-discuss differences that results in...].
The Generic Libtard simply DOESN'T reason abstractly about things across time in the context of iterated games [poor systemitizing ability] between agents with different value structures [because they can't conceive different valuations] being able to only focus on what distress/issues they immediately see before them [high empathizing].
Sure that makes them more vulnerable to/ultimately results in them living in a moral reality that effectively is a figment of their imagination...but the root causes are much deeper.
If you refer back to some of Jonathan Haidt's work on his Moral Foundations Theory, one of the results he found was that the more liberal/left someone was the worse they were at inferring motivation/reasoning about the opinions of centrists and conservatives. Basically, leftists score the worst on a "political Turing test" to properly model/emulate what other
His in theory explanation for this was that leftists/liberals only really operate on 2/5 moral foundations (fairness and caring) while basically having no concept of the other 3/5 (loyalty, authority, sanctity). Conservatives and moderates, having non-negligible amounts of all 5, run the gamut and so actually CAN 'emulate' the thinking patterns of liberals to a much better extent than liberals can conservatives or moderates because they're just...blind to even the concept of valuing things beyond fairness and caring.
Whether that's the primary cause, a manifestation of underlying causes, or just one of many causes (can't count out things like moral hubris or simply being generally lower conscientiousness [probably also less systemitizing...] and therefore not caring about the solidity of your arguments) it is definitely the case that leftists...can't properly model people who disagree with them.
For some of them it might be a deliberate strategy but it's just...far too widespread and consistent across contexts for that to be it. It really does seem that leftists are just mentally deficient in terms of modeling what other people think, and reality more generally [inb4 muh leftists scientists: never underestimate the powers of compartmentalization].
Which, if they can't properly model (and therefore have good faith arguments/discussions that can reach compromise) with those they disagree with...that leads to some troubling conclusions w/r/t how differences can actually be resolved...
Gonna be a fun few years...
As was the style at the time.