General Discussion

Stupid, idiotic, foolish, unreasonable, irrational, insane, crazy. Seem to be favorite terms used on those to the left of us. These are terms that immediately discount what the other has to say. You can’t reason with someone who has these qualities. Ideology, radical, theoretical, but used as pejoratives designed to erase decades of intellectual thought. Words for ideas not as sensible as ours. It reminds me of sitcom dads who have to talk some sense into their wives and children but don’t need to resort to anything as strenuous as reason or argumentation. This is how many households were run in my youth. I had a distaste for it then and now. It’s not just that the burden of persuasion rests on anyone to the left, there’s a prevalence of pedantic paternalism that’s designed to shut down engagement akin to saying go to your room. We aren’t mature enough, wise enough, manly enough, or pragmatic enough to understand. We just need to know we are being foolish and things are fine the way they are.
The “purity test” criticism is a variation of this tactic where we are told that we are foolish to hold a principle as essential to our worldview. We must either concede or try to argue for both our rationality and our point of view. I’m sure we all have purity tests as to some right or privilege that we could not abide giving up, but it seems the ones we hold dear are sensible and those that others hold are less so, even if those are more germane to their existence. I’m probably in the minority, but I believe consistent challenges to accepted worldviews are what moves humans forward, at least when civil rights are concerned. Much of the worldview most here agree on was once thought radical. We don’t have to blindly except it, but we infantilize radical thought at our peril. I don’t think it is an accident that it took this long for humanity to get where it is now on civil rights issues.