Explaining Crazy: Random Leftist Discourse
Both the right and center love to point to online leftist discourse as a reason why the left shouldn’t be taken seriously, and '“they” (the left) spend too much time fighting with each other than joining to fight together.
However, the reality is much more simple; now that we have access to almost everyone in the world, every possible belief is out there, it’s just how big numbers work.
The current world population is around 8 billion people, with 340 million living in the U.S. and 63% of the world population using the internet. For every general belief, there will be a small number of people who have a very specific belief that may seem dumb. That’s how numbers work.
Right now, the media seems to just describe those incidents and say that they are dumb or ridiculous, instead of analyzing and explaining it to the general public. If they instead tried to zoom out of each specific leftist argument on any given topic and explain that, each incident would make a little bit more sense to people.
At the beginning of the Me Too movement, when Harvey Weinstein was arrested, a Harvard professor and lawyer named Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. joined his case. After his involvement, students on the Harvard campus protested his decision, saying he should step down from his position at Harvard due to his defending Harvey Weinstein in court. Articles were written his defense, arguing that everyone in a free society deserves a lawyer. People thought that it was crazy that they were angry at a lawyer for defending someone.
The thing is, the anger isn’t really about Harvey Weinstein being able to get a lawyer, but that poor people get screwed due to them not being able to afford good lawyers, while rich people can get the best representation that money can buy. Public defenders are overworked, while rich people get off easily. People weren’t really angry that Harvey Weinstein doesn’t deserve a lawyer, but they were angry that the justice system treats wealthy people better than poor people.
The problem is that the media is afraid of trying to explain it, in part due to their fear that people will think they are defending it, so instead they just describe what people are saying and criticize it.
Let’s go to a more “ridiculous” example.
In 2022, a Twitter user named Daisey Beaton tweeted “my husband and i wake up every morning and bring our coffee out to our garden and sit and talk for hours. every morning. it never gets old & we never run out of things to talk to. love him so much.”
Then, over the next several days, people started angrily replying to her tweet, criticizing her and calling her privileged, because she has the freedom to do that. Many people were saying that due to their work schedule and other responsibilities, they didn’t have the luxury of spending several hours in the morning relaxing.
Now obviously, it is ridiculous to be angry at someone posting an innocent tweet about being able to relax with their partner in the morning, but to zoom out, there is legitimacy in the general idea that people are upset at. People feel like they are overworked, and that they aren’t earning enough to be able to live a good life and still relax.
With hundreds of millions of Twitter users, there are bound to be some people whose stress and anger would come out for stupid, random reasons. It doesn’t mean they were right to be mad at her for posting that tweet, but people in the media have written stories just complaining about the people angryly tweeting, instead of explaining to people why people are angry.
It is understandable that people are angry that they do not have the luxery of being able to get a good nights rest, relax, and work enough to support themselves. That anger is going to manifest in a lot of different ways, many times in dumb ways.
When it comes to these examples, sometimes people just randomly bring up vague situations to complain about people on the left being annoying or proformative, without going into much detail.
In an interview with Pod Save the U.K., Ash Sarkar talks about how there was an event she was involved with where there were a bunch of speakers who were there to discuss what the left needs to be fixed. One of the speakers was Roger Halam, an environmentalist activist, who said that one of the reasons things on the left have gone wrong is that “it’s because you are all a bunch of f*cking c*nts.”
Sarkar said that afterward, people complained that “this has brought violence into this space, I've been harmed by it, this is bringing in white anger” and other complaints. Sarkar also mentioned that she had heard about an event that ended up falling apart because they were doing an icebreaker where they were pretending to be utensils, and someone mentioned that salad spinners were white supremacists and classist, which ended up making everyone fight.
Ash Sarkar claims that the reason is that there is this culture of sensitivity that is “set at this insane bar people competing over who can present themselves as a victim.”
The problem is, that there is no “one bar” that is set. Again, there are billions of people in the world, all with different experiences and sensitivities.
Zooming out from the incident with Roger Hallam, the reality is, sometimes there is this pattern of older white men complaining of being too sensitive and claiming that is the problem. And it can be pretty annoying.
Does that mean he is a terrible person who shouldn’t be listened to, or that he brought violence into the event?
Not really. But again, it tends to get annoying when older guys like that complain about people being sensitive, even if they might be right. And I understand why it may upset some people.
As for the salad spinner incident, I don’t know what happened. I tried searching for anything mentioning it, but couldn’t find any more details than Sarkar mentioning it once.
In another interview, she says that at no point does anyone say “get a grip” on these incidents.
Except, that is all they do. Every time these instances come up, there is a large amount of people complaining about these people, essentially telling them to “get a grip.”
When these things pop up, I put myself in the shoes of the leader, hearing someone say that Salad Spinners are white supremacist and classist. Zooming out, there is a point that sometimes, spaces like these can have things come up that could make people who are in the working class or living in poverty feel otherized. Was this example an instance of this? Not really.
But maybe the problem wasn’t the person who brought this up, but that people started complaining about the person bringing it up the moment it happened, and started the argument there. I don’t know, again, I wasn’t there.
But I tend to get tired of people spending so much time complaining about these instances, more than hearing about them.
I don’t think the problem is the hyper-sensitive people, but the leaders who constantly complain when they encounter hyper-sensitive people. It is on the leaders to figure out how to navigate living in a world with a huge diversity of people who all have different ideas and sensitivities.
When I see random people on the internet complain that something that messes with their sensitivities, you know what I do? Nothing. I understand in a world of over 8 billion people, every possible opinion is out there. When I am physically out in the world and I happen to do something that someone mentions is one of their “sensitivities,” I don’t complain and make them feel bad, I just slightly adjust my behavior, and then everything is fine. It’s not that hard. I barely notice it.
Most of the people who constantly complain about it, 99% of these instances don’t happen to them in their everyday life, they just see it online. And the 1% of the time that they do, it’s not going to kill them to not complain.
Do I find some of the sensitivities dumb? Sure, I just keep it to myself. Because I am sure there are some of my sensitivities that others do too.