I’ve come to two realizations recently:
One
The sudden tankie willingness to believe that Trump cares about a cease-fire in Gaza, and got tough with the Israelis and then they capitulated which Biden could have done at any time, sheds some interesting light on how the tankies think. They accuse anyone who disagrees with them of shifting their realities around, such that anything Biden does is good, anything the State Department says is always true, even if it contradicts itself or basic common sense or reality. I always thought that this was just a lazy reality-free arguing tactic, but in retrospect, I should have realized that it’s a tell about their own thought process. Just like it’s a warning sign if someone constantly suspects their partner of cheating, or is constantly on an absurdly hypervigilant lookout for scams and people trying to cheat them out of money, this is a key revelation about the way Hexbear itself looks at reality.
Trump is a capable diplomat, if believing that lets them trash Biden. Trump cares about Palestinians, if believing that lets them trash Biden. The cart is firmly in its place in front, and everything else including the horse can follow along depending on what the cart dictates.
Two
Hexbear’s censorship, and wild hostility to anyone who comes to “their” place and tries not to toe the party line, really does do a pretty effective job of distorting the view of reality and consensus that their users are able to experience.
Take a look at these and compare:
this is a ridiculous take, just entirely forgetting the existence of anarchists, it seems. by that logic, anarchists are the enlightened center now, by virtue of being as far removed from authoritarianism (and therefore political extremism) as possible.
also, how does that form a circle? if i go even further left than left-auth, would i go over right-auth, right, right-moderate, until i end up at… where exactly?
I mean, if you want a real genuine answer, it’s that simplifying the entirety of political thought into a binary is a rediculous premise to begin with, and highlights one of the core fallacies that the human condition leads to time and time again: that of false dichotomy. Calling the political spectrum a circle is exactly as absurd as calling it a line, and taking either of these paradigms to be literal and infallible is to grossly misunderstand politics.
My point is more that both routes, left or right, have a path through extremism into authoritarianism. Try not to take the silly analogy I used to communicate this point so literally.
right, my objection came more from you making it seem like extremism=authoritarianism, as if libertarianism isnt an extremist idea.
the second paragraph was mostly me having a bit of fun, though tbh i still dont see how a cirular political model holds any merit except that it gives one the ability to say: “look at those extremists, they are all the same!”
I do believe that extremism lends itself to authoritarianism. The deeper you are rooted into your belief structure, the more likely you are to believe everyone else has gotten it wrong, and the more likely you are to think imposing your beliefs on others is in their best interests. The circular model that I proposed is simply a way of highlighting this.
While I am sure this isn’t true of all libertarians, they tend to be ogliarchs (or wannabe ogliarchs) in sheeps clothing. We may have another word for rule by the rich and economically powerful, but I do not think the gap between them and fascists is wide enough to avoid the blanket of “authoritarianism.” I do think libertarianism is an extremist idea that just leads to a different flavour of authoritarianism, thus my point.
extremism isnt an objective thing though, just like centrism, its always dependent on the overton window. thus imo trying to tie any meaning more specific than “outside the frame of common political discussion” to extremism is a fools errant.
besides that, i think we simply speak on different terms. with “libertarians” i refer to both left wing and right wing, while your last post indicates to me that you are specifically talking about right wing libertarians (i.e not anarchists) correct? in that case i agree that this form of libertarianism inevitibly leads to rule of oligarchs.