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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Leftist movements tend to consume themselves in escalating purity spirals.

https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...

That article goes directly from people complaining about discrimination to Mao's Great Leap Forward, but it seems like wanting to be treated with a reasonable level of dignity at work is unlike causing a major famine that kills millions of people. Politics leads to ideological thinking which generates mostly garbage.

Heh. If you replaced “leftist movements” with “human movements” then I’d be with you. Witness the ever developing criteria for identifying and excising “RINOs” from the Trump movement. Find any decently sized organization with humans in it, and you will find a subset of its members actively attempting to identify and excise inpure members. The fallacy you are demonstrating is the notion that such behavior is relegated to a particular other group, as though ostracizing behavior doesn’t predate the very concept of “left” vs “right”.

> Nor is it confined to the Left: neo-Nazi groups offer some of the clearest examples of purity spirals

Seems like your own linked article says it's not just a leftist thing?

To an extent left and right are asymmetrical---leftist groups tend to be groups organized around being leftist as their main purpose, while "rightist" groups (churches, police unions, gun enthusiasts) tend to be rightist incidentally. Neo Nazis feel like the exception that proves the rule.

I know some Quakers who put your "churches are rightist groups" to the lie. Not new either; read up on Public Universal Friend.

The quakers are today so small as to be completely irrelevant. And the existence of the quakers proves the commenters points that right wing groups tend to be right wing only incidentally. They have another main purpose. He gives churches as an example. People go to church for religion. Coincidentally, many of them also happen to be conservative. That there are churches where this is not true only emphasizes this point that right wing groups tend to form incidentally.

Doesn't saying "but you can find this on the other side" imply that it's much more common on the side you're comparing to?

Not really, it just implies that there's a common perception that may or may not reflect reality.

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