I fully agree with your perspective, and thanks for putting it in words more succinctly than the word-vomit I'm going to put on the internets.

I've had a ton of discussions with friends who are more right-wing, some of them probably 'alt-right' (one of them overtly racist).

and one of the things that I've found hard to discuss is the 'meta' observation that they're all up in arms, outsizedly outraged, about particular, and somewhat peculiar things.

In this case it's BLM (which, sure, I am totally fine with discussing the Marxist aspects of some of this movement! It's probably true, but hey look up the history of women's and civil right's movements!), but previously it was #metoo and I forget whatever came before that. I think it was being able to point out the higher incidence of crime among minority <x>. Which was sort of taboo before that (70s or 60s, over here? but not really of course.)

In all those cases it was borderline-violent outrage that was their first go-to, is what stood out to me.

I'll never forget sitting in a car with a friend of mine, heading to my first-ever Jordan Peterson talk (which I have to admit in hindsight, was much less bad than I expected because he seemed to realize that he was a speaker at a crypto-white-supremacist forum and really seemed to try to counter that).

This was at the height of the #metoo 'craze'. I think Weinstein's transgressions had just gotten out. I didn't bring it up, because I knew what would happen, but somehow the topic came up.

His first reaction, almost reflexively, was to be negative about all of it. Strongly and emotionally. He expressed concerns of a future where men would be jailed just because they were accused of something without due process (shades of 'outrage culture' being just one step removed from gulags, which is popular on HN now?). how he had a female friend who described a situation as 'forceful' toward her and how it implicated the dude in the situation and /that/ was the bad thing. Never mind that this one particular friend was notoriously unstable and had been diagnosed with some serious mental health issues.

And I just sat there stunned, at first, because what had been on my mind was the many close female friends who had, for the first time, probably emboldened by the #metoo thing, told me avalanches of stories of harassment, and an avalanche per individual woman: overt sexual abuse, constant harassment, and the like, that I thought I was aware of but never realized was so common to them, to the point where they'd stopped mentioning it and just made dark jokes about it. overt rape was not rare in these stories.

To be clear, I think there are many issues in current-day male-female relationships that also raise concerns that might warrant empathy for said males. I mean, even if we don't care let's not it's particularly fertile ground for fascism.

I also think that some of the stories I've heard are more a sign of communication issue or projected trauma than what they claim about the males that were 'perpetrator' in these situations.

I also believe that there are aspect of current-day society where the quintessentially privileged 'young white male' pulled the short end of the stick and I think this is a real problem. I know men who have been raped and I've had my own experience that I'd describe as 'difficult' and 'not really voluntary' and that mirrors experiences that have been describes as rape. And the fact that I can't say I've been raped is problematic.

I know a shockingly large number of 'privileged white males in their early thirties' who have withdrawn from the world to stay at home and game and be basically incels. and that's not just their own stupid privileged fault, I believe, and their life is shit. I regularly wonder which one might commit suicide. That's not good!

I guess my point, peppered with perhaps incindiary or distracting stuff, is that it truly shocked me that the reaction to some particular group expressing their particular problems, and finally having an audience, whether #metoo or BLM, was met by such a virulent counter-attack. I think that's not right, and I think pointing out how that in itself means something is important.

To pull this into what seems to be the outrage of the day on HN: I think much of this whole 'cancel culture' thing is stupid, I think a lot of it is virtue signalling, and I agree with many here who describe it as such.

but I am a bit more worried about the backlash to it than I am about the disingenuous hyper-social-media people flaming it. I'm more worried by how when I click on the profile of the outraged, they show a pattern of outrage at anything that has a whiff of 'sjw'.

I'll join them in their worry when the US president is a 'sjw' and not very much in their camp. I mean, jesus fucking christ it's not like these Twitter woke people have power that truly compares to that of the president and his cronies, and it's not like a fired SV not-woke-enough dude won't find a ridiculously well-paying job somewhere else.

I'm about to but trying not to go off on the "oh but the real problem is polarization" (self-proclaimed centrist) crowd, which in our current climate strikes me as akin (but no, not quite the same) as someone arguing that perhaps we shouldn't be so mean to Hitler because his anti-semitism is just a political game. or someone arguing that somehow a US mainstream democrat is anything but right-of-center by most measures.

Well okay I did anyways and while I'd prefer no responses to this so the ramble can just be something I've wanted to ramble about and I'm not reminded of how I didn't make a concise or proper argument, here it is anyways because it feels like there might be something in there that's worth not just pasting in my personal journal like I usually do. Feel free to disregard the focal point(s) and ant-fuck the details though, that's fair game. I love y'all here and if nothing else I'll agree that being able to converse about things is well worth protecting!

EDIT: ugh holy shit is this longer than it looked in the <textarea>. if you actually read the whole thing my apologies and please keep in mind I was rambling and this does no represent my well-considered views. also, go read better stuff! if you just scrolled down to this part, keep scrolling. I said some stuff and it's probably sort of okay, by my estimation, but too long to be worth what you'd get out of it. scroll on maybe.