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2023-12-11 What's Right and Left Anyways?
These things give us a very important lesson - politics is more complicated than right and left. Classical Liberalism is very different from Modern Liberalism. People on the far right and people on the far left can both be unethical. They can both justify genocide. They both can justify slavery and oppression. They both have justified homophobia and transphobia. They both can be caught up in taking strawman arguments for granted.
To me, if one is going to be serious about politics being "more complicated than right and left", they might consider refraining from hyper-overly-simplistic terminology as though it refers to the reality they claim to see, because persisting in that terminology only reinforces its being accurate - especially to two-bit (i.e. tending toward starkly dualistic) minds.
So... I happen to see value in the "ten commandments" and other statements found in "the bible", and no value in *not* believing in a singular (zero-ular, more accurately..) underlying basis for reality. I could even call the latter "God", and I'd know what *I* mean.
But throngs of two-bit minds will immediately conclude I've described a "left" and a "right" <i>and nothing more nuanced</i>, and probably also conclude that since I used the word 'God', I believe in some tyrannical white-male-ish being on an etheric throne anxious to relocate some human beings to a "heaven", and the rest to a "hell".
I think it's important to keep the two-bits in mind when bandying lingo about, because they're *easily* the majority.
(Heh... I actually believe such hyper-overly-simplistic terms (including "blacks" and "white") to be literally "god damned" in the sense that the actual underlying reality likely couldn't give a shit less about how it's being mapped/modeled/represented/divvied-into-categories by mere phenomena *of* that underlying reality... the "derivative" telling the underlying what it "is", as it were....)
So maybe it's best for those who've raised their mapping/modeling/representing/divving-into-categories game closer to 'N' to wax nuanced only with each other, and be careful to wear what I'll call "the two-bit gloves" around the two-bits, because two-bits quite simply can't operate outside starkly dualistic representational/conceptual/mental frameworks...?
If ya know what I mean....
How you view Identity Politics certainly depends on how you define it.
In fact, that's true of every word/term, and yet individuals go on pretending words "have" - i.e. contain - meaning (and, in turn, consider others "idiots" for not "getting it"... no no no, words are merely symbols *assigned* meaning in a given moment by whoever's wielding them.
That's why you may have noticed I find it difficult to take much of anything being discussed seriously, because I can't get it out of my representational framework that others participating in the discussion are using the same words, but with possibly (likely?) considerably different meanings/significances/implications for arising in much different representational contexts (i.e. minds).
In my case, it's more that I so love typing that I can't help but get *seemingly* involved in order to keep the finger flapping muscles spry.... ;-)
That said, I loved your post, but have not forgotten that I read it assigning my own individual/private meanings to the words/symbols you used.. and so in that sense what was it that I *actually* loved...? I guess it was our *collaboration*: you brought the words, I brought the meaning(s). Together we made beautiful textural music in this here reading-side mind.... :-)