logoalt Hacker News

wizzwizz4today at 12:17 PM2 repliesview on HN

The same statement holds for left-wing radicals on the internet, who rigidly police the boundaries of their fractious communities. I don't see this behaviour from, for instance, the local anarchists, who mostly seem focused on improving the material conditions of the downtrodden in the community, strengthening local ties, and promoting bottom-up logistics. (And, of course, there are people who seek to accomplish the same goal through right-wing methods: increasing employment, promoting local businesses, and providing grants to those who require them.)

Maybe the difference is not left versus right, but "my community" (trying to recruit people into your imagined better society) versus "the community" (acknowledging that we all live in the same world, and meeting people where they are)? Or maybe it's just that the people doing the actual boots-on-the-ground work tend to care more about doing the actual work than about fracturing over ideological disagreements. ("Leftist infighting" long predates the internet, after all: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/165.)


Replies

aleph_minus_onetoday at 12:44 PM

> Maybe the difference is not left versus right, but "my community" (trying to recruit people into your imagined better society) versus "the community" (acknowledging that we all live in the same world, and meeting people where they are)?

Both for left-wing and right-wing people, it's about who is in-group vs out-group [1]. The only difference is by which values, psychometric and socioeconomic traits, ... left-wing vs right-wing people decide who belongs to their respective in-group vs out-group.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_and_out-group

cindyllmtoday at 12:42 PM

[dead]