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Originally Posted by someone123
The "coastal elites" or whatever you want to call them have extremely little empathy for their rural compatriots and their canonical ideological stance around gender issues, to take another example, is increasingly detached from reality.
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I disagree. I think the extreme detachment from reality is concentrated in the fringes of academia and its cast-offs. However, the so-called coastal elites are probably elided into the grouping of the 45-gender crowd because they aren't vociferously speaking out against them in the way that Milo and Jordan Peterson are.
Who, in turn, are three goblin farts from fairyland. Ever heard Jordan Peterson speak? He says much that sounds so plausible and reasonable, and then he blows it all to kingdom come with nutty claims about social justice warriors portending a new fascism (to name just one of his far-fetched ideas). Which is just...totally crazy. I mean, sure, the SJW ideologues are certainly hurting
some people with their inanities, but they're not exactly brown shirts. They're not exactly rounding people up, and they're not exactly looking to invade less politically correct countries. Etc. And that is obviously, obviously, freakin'
obviously never going to happen. I mean, c'mon.
Meanwhile, the alt-right's figurehead is throwing around reckless threats against China, North Korea and Venezuela, and his brainless minions on the ground are salivating at the prospect of fireworks.
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Originally Posted by someone123
The extreme example of neo-Nazis driving cars into crowds of people is worse but, well, the median on both sides is still extremely crazy now.
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You can't quantify it exactly, but I think it's obviously not the same on both sides. How many snarling right wing assholes on Youtube or wherever are claiming that the progressive "cuck" deserved to be killed at the rally? How much noise was there from the marchers and their supporters that they were ready for violence? How many mouth-breathers in the U.S. south are upset that the statues of military figures who fought a war explicitly and entirely to preserve their right to enslave human beings are being taken down?
What percentage of the population do these people represent? It's not huge, but it's not small.
On the other side of the equation, what percentage of the "progressive left" vociferously support the shooting of police officers by black people? They're out there on the fringe, but they're a vanishingly small number of radical elements that the vast majority of Black Lives Matter supporters decry at every turn.
Identity politics is more difficult. A lot of it really is nuts, but a lot of it is just about the dignity of people who don't fit into the standard slots in society. Gay marriage was the ultimate identity politics battle. What reasonable person in 2017 would argue against it? On the other hand, I agree that the case of the gender issue dissenter at Google really is disturbing, that there is a somewhat rigid orthodoxy in many circles about this stuff, but I foresee this kind of thing calming down as the pendulum swings. There are too many people in the mushy centre who don't fervently believe the idealistic claptrap for it to survive for very long, even if they understand that the motivations behind it are for justice and equality.