Monday, September 14, 2020

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

I got blocked today by someone whose opinion I care about, and it saddened me the way most of these fracases never do. I am in no way a paragon of morality, and if my finger is wagged too often on here it's not because I think myself any better morally or even intellectually (and I'm not even an intellectual, I just play one on the internet, and even if I in fact am smart, smart people often believe the dumbest things on the planet, and how smart am I if this is my platform...), but because that's how other people seem to present themselves without realizing it, and just as they can get incredibly annoyed, so can I. I really, genuinely do want to be an ally to people in need in the very best way I know how, but my conscience has been shouting at me for years that certain attitudes are screwing over every cause they mean to promote, and these attitudes have only been growing. From where I've stood, the impractical demands of the intersectional Left are the ultimate culprit in delivering the country to Trump and all its related maladies. Just out of living memory, there was another incarnation of the Left, for whom no amount of solidarity with class struggle and anti-imperialism was ever enough, and they scared the political center of Europe just enough to deliver the center to the right for a lifetime, and the right became so authoritarian and incompetent that it led to two world wars, and once that left-wing grew powerful enough, their demands for solidarity became an authoritarian requirement too which it took seventy-five years to shake. By no means are we there yet, but I can't deny, I won't deny, that the direction of things, the direction of the country, the direction of discourse, the direction of many friends of mine, frightens me terribly.

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