However, I want to defend the idea that some right wing opinions make a lot of logical sense on their own; their being valid does not require right-wing-specific value systems.

Let's take one of the points you're criticizing.

> someone who doesn't work and doesn't contribute to society doesn't deserve govt handouts

Here's the logic: the products and services we enjoy every day are all the product of someone else's work. None appear out of thin air. If they're provided by the government, they are still funded by taxes on the fruit of someone else's work. Why would someone who does not produce anything be entitled to any of it? The basic value behind this point is plain fairness, which everybody agrees on.

That being said, I will concede the above point needs refining and nuance before it can be used as a principle to guide public policy. For instance, it makes sense that society should help people who cannot work because of some handicap. The value here is common decency, which is neither specific to the right or the left.

Another refinement: what about people who are out of work and haven't found their next position? It's probably productive to help them with unemployment benefits: we can bet they will be back on their feet faster if they worry less about immediate money problems. The value here is efficiency. Of course, these benefits should be delivered under certain conditions, because the overall point regarding fairness still stands. They are not entitled to the fruit of someone else's work if they refuse to give back.

So here's the refined point:

In a fair society, people who are able to work but willingly refuse to do so should be not entitled to the fruits of someone else's work. However, people who are unable to work, whether permanently or temporarily, are excluded from this point and may be helped through the means of redistribution.

The final point is maybe a bit centrist, but still fairly right-leaning in its position. It's very logical, and only buttressed by the shared values of fairness, efficiency and common decency.

I'm not convinced of those arguments. However, assuming I'm being charitable (which I will try to be to my utmost) and take these to be true, it's quite possible the right is correct when it comes to the worst excesses of "wokeism". Nothing about "they pick extreme examples" or "they foment a sense of grievances" means they are incorrect. Even if the problem is overstated, I still see it as a problem.

The right has similar issues, you mention you are right and you get pegged with the climate change deniers and everyone assumes you think the poor are poor because they are lazy. This is not what most in the right think but it is what gets the most press.

While I would likely be more aligned politically with you than not, I also understand that there are many on the left that bring an aggression and intolerance to the policing of ideas and discussion that seems of little benefit to the world.

It seems to me we need more advocacy for self-reflection and less for people's individual belief systems.

Do you think people shouldn’t go to jail for being homeless? Ok left extremist.

Do you feel uncomfortable with outdoor drug use? Ok right extremist.

So as a result, you get people arguing about what a centrist policy is rather than just evaluating the policy for what it is.

Would SF be better if we had a large indoor space for safe drug use (like the armory)? Maybe maybe not - but let’s talk about that rather than dividing ourselves into teams based on imagined identity.

"Yeah, saving trees and whales sounds fine, but they should stop it with all the LGBTQ, BLM, socialist stuff"

You can't have a civil discussion with those people either. In fact it's getting increasingly difficult to have civil discussions with anyone (HN is an exception because everyone is on their best behaviour, but to a large extent this results in self-censorship; you can see that the least politically correct comments are made with throw-away accounts).

I agree with him, you don't see this dynamic on the conservative side of things with anywhere near the same zealotry as the left. Leftists have turned purity spiraling into a competitive sport, which has turned into a snake eating it's own tail. The winner of the oppression olympics is still a loser overall.

The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled.

For many people who don't experience those kinds of life experiences, building relationships with those folks can be really tough and bring into question a lot of the foundations of their world view.

The argument that left-leaning people won't engage with right-leaning people often feels like it's used as an excuse for right-leaning folks to use rhetoric and hold positions that routinely disenfranchise and threaten the safety of the kind of people that left-leaning people have worked to empathize with and build relationships without consequence. That the people who continue to have right-leaning views don't seem interested in putting in the same _effort_ to empathize and build relationships with people other than themselves is both hypocritical and not surprising to me.

Finally, engaging with "challenging" opinions is all well and good as a mental exercise, but building and maintaining a relationship with someone is a project that requires continuous work (even as just a friendship) and I think it's worthwhile to be selective in the people who you put in that kind of work for.

Wanting people to be less shit to each other - and to the rest of nature - is not the same as advocating for the right of the rich to shit on everyone else.

Regardless though, my point is that there are 'sides' and 'groups' and thinking poorly about the other side isn't going to go away when someone running for president of the United States calls people basically evil.

People on the right think that people on the left are naiive and foolish. People on the left think people on the right are evil. So if anything, the left is doing what this entire thread is about.

I also think that it's unfortunate it's so easy to mistake a critique like that as an attack of the left as a whole. Leftist policy should always have the goal of materially making peoples lives better. We should ruthlessly measure and criticize whether we are in fact succeeding in that, both by the numbers and by the lived experience of the people they effect.

The current form of discourse in America is so hyper-partisan as to make that sort of critique almost impossible to do in public, as it comes off as a show of weakness rather than an opportunity for evolution. It's painful.

Should we value debate and engage with those we disagree with or ignore their arguments and ostracise them? Should we persuade those we disagree with or tell them they're horrible people? Should we address ourselves to the causes of prejudice and small-mindedness, or retributively punish those who misstep? Debate, persuasion, and opposition to retributive justice - those are scarcely values that are the monopoly of the right, and indeed, the last one runs counter to the right.

You are focusing on 'easy cases'. You write, 'you're saying that we need to welcome, broadcast and hire people who we genuinely think are vile and awful?' But that presupposes the precise crux of the debate: whether most people targeted by 'cancel culture' really are, as you say, 'vile and awful'.

You say we should encourage the firing of 'violent racists'. I think that's a reasonable option, depending on the context. But that's an easy case. The kind of problems I highlighted are found arrayed against people of all political stripes, often for minor offences or errors.

I was reading a large number of people abuse a Guardian journalist this morning for including the owner of a Pizzeria in a write-up of how working-class life has been affected by COVID - a mistake, for sure, even a humorous one, but not one that should be met by abuse. The owner in question was being doxxed, and his restaurant down-voted on review sites. To me, this kind of case is entirely typical of cancel culture, not anti-fascism.

There are plenty of counterexamples but again, not worth debating.

Rosa Parks all great and good. Not really that radical. Burning ghettos a decade later did what exactly? What we get from that? The ghettos are still there.

"meaningless", "openly supportive".

Like many of your stripe you appear to want to mostly be combative and argue and sling accusations. It's counterproductive and if I weren't in a shitty mood myself from too much time in Vim wouldn't even engage.

You can't burn everything to the ground for every perceived slight. Makes nothing better. Fortunately most people in modern society recognize this. Communism failed and will continue to fail indefinitely (at least until strong AI comes about). Better ideas don't always come from the left. Sorry.

Both sides have their share of dumb ideas. The progressive timeline in which I speculate you think you are participating, "taking up the mantel" as it were is mostly bullshit. Not that respect for basic human freedoms and respect for others and basic human decency is bullshit. But all too often leftists have forgotten about that part.

Oh, not a "rightist" in case you misunderstand.