I’m sick of the far left too

[Rev. Rye]

Obviously I am sick of the far right. I can’t tolerate anything they stand for.
But I am sick of the far left too. I mean...not necessarily the far left. I would say I am far left politically. But the radical left is probably a better way of putting it. Really I’m sick of seeing hatefulness. And for people who say they hate bigots they sure do like to use the word retard like it’s not a slur. I’m just tired. I wish I could mute anyone and anything that was about politics for a while. All I see are angry people being hateful to each other and it’s exhausting. Has politics always been this way and I’m just now noticing or..?

It got way worse around the election and I think has ramped up because of midterms. For some reason the radical left attacks not just right wingers, but anyone to the right of them at all. Even saying you should be civil to right wing people is a no go. Which is crazy, I mean how do you even know that they believe what you think they do, when all your news sources are left wing, and you can't have a conversation with the other side, or even with moderates.

That leads towards zero fact checking, which is obviously happening with some of the radical left.

And then, in addition to a lack of fact checking, there's another problem of them becoming so smug and abrasive that people don't give a shit about whether you're right or not.

Take this video, which went viral a few years ago:





Watching the video, there's two things that are pretty clear:

1. Red here has some seriously good points, having gone so far as to create a list of all the legitimate points that MRAs actually have (which is really not that many) and how literally every single one falls under the purview of feminism (even though they tend to focus on their effects on women, and the prejudice+power school undermines that point when they assume that the only prejudices worth fighting are those accompanied by institutional power), and how the Patriarchy, in addition to fucking women over, also fucks over men.
   
2. She is so grating that it's actually hard to care about the points she's actually trying to make, especially when most of the video is of her telling people to shut the fuck up. In fairness, she does have to deal with people trying to shout over her, and, when the video became viral, she apparently admitted that she went a bit too far in this case. The legitimate points she tried to make were overshadowed by her angry demeanor, and she became famous as a strawwoman of the left.
   

People would do good to remember this exchange from the Rick and Morty episode "Vindicators 3: The Return of World-Ender." (Yes, I know that this is Dan Harmon's least favourite episode of the series, and one of the less popular episodes among the fans if the IMDB page is any indication, but bear with me):

Rick: It’s a miracle I ever actually destroy anything.
Morty: Oh, I don’t know, you managed to destroy just about everything today. The villains, the heroes, the lines between them, my childhood. 
Rick: Thank you. I appreciate it, Morty, I know you were sucking the Kool-Aid out of the Vindicators’. So the fact that I was right about them must be pretty hard to admit.
Morty: Yeah, it is. You know why, Rick? Because when you’re an asshole, it doesn’t matter how right you are, nobody wants to give you the satisfaction.





Why, yes, it is a difficult tightrope to walk, especially as the world (and America in particular) descends into a behavioral sink and the forces of evil triumph, but if that's what you want to do with your time, and you want to make the world a better place, that's what you have to do if you want to be effective.