This place loses members faster than it gains members. No community can exist forever under such conditions.
Increasingly I find myself simply unable to discuss things here, or on many leftist communities. I'm an NDP member and have been for my entire adult life, through 10 federal and provincial elections. I think I'm further to the left than anybody else I know - so why am I always accused of being a right-winger, or worse? Because I don't respect the left, I don't respect authority, and I have absolutely no reverence for taboos. Whatever my group's sacred cows are, I want to kick them in the face, and I have absolutely no use for leaders or managers of any kind.
All the things I was sure would happen twenty years ago have come to pass - our inability to confront opposing arguments head-on has resulted in a resurgent right that we seem unable to understand. For those who disagree, I want to know - how can we frame the rise of phenomena like Donald Trump, like the alt-right, like Rebel Media, in a manner that gives us a way forward? My thinking is that you can only proceed by adopting responsibility. It has to be our fault. Any explanation that doesn't locate us at the centre of the problem leaves us powerless to proceed forward. It's easy to blame external forces, but it doesn't give us a way forward.
We have to champion the individual above all else. You are the centre of your visible universe. Individuals make decisions. Individuals, not groups, are moral agents.
Admittedly, some of this is my peculariar personality. I am not a consensus person, by nature. I prefer disunity. My feeling is that if we all agree on something, we are probably at least partly wrong about it, so I will explore the opposite position. I am not a fan of certainty, either. I want to foment doubt. If we are 100% sure about something, then we are probably at least partly wrong about it. And this goes without saying: whatever you cannot say, must be said loudly. All orthodoxies must be challenged, even if it's offensive to do so, because that's the only way we'll find out for sure if our beliefs were correct in the first place.
I want to be part of a strong, coherent, vibrant, intellectual left movement that can champion individual rights against corporate and government power and against any kind of hierarchy. The old knock on attempts to unite the left is that the left always eats itself. Isn't that kind of what has happened to Babble? What's going to happen to us in the next 20 years? As individuals?