Perhaps I didn't emphasise that enough.
In Australian political terms I'm far-left. In US political terms there isn't even a place on the map for me unless it's "lunatic fringe left". I'm in favour of affirmative action along racial and sexual lines, social security, expanded public health services, free mental health care, equal legal rights for all regardless of sexuality, you name it.
I'm also a committed atheist rationalist.
All of this is in my posting history - if I'm faking being a leftist rationalist, I've put one hell of a lot of effort over one hell of a long time into my fake persona.
In political terms I should be a natural ally of A+, right?
But in practice because I don't absolutely toe the A+ line, I'm seen as 100% committed to the enemy. I "lack any empathy whatsoever" as one poster put it. I'm just as much a bad guy as a Klansman or a wife-beater or Satan with a Hitler moustache.
This.
I'm very left wing politically. I support single payer healthcare, a kind of Medicare-for-all. I support taxing the rich to pay for social services such as public transportation and schools. I support gay people having each and every right that straight people have. I support abortion being available just like any other medical procedure, without any additional restrictions whatsoever. I support legalizing marijuana and ending the war on drugs. I support ending the death penalty.
But I also support some other things, and I think that's where I differ from the A+ group.
For starters, I support using a skeptical approach when it comes to fighting various injustices. If an activist wants to tackle a certain issue, for example, what are the causes and effects of that problem? Will a specific action help to fight this problem, and if so, how? Is that action the most effective use of time, money, and other resources? Are there any negative consequences of that action, and if so, is the tradeoff worth it? A skeptical perspective allows an activist to find the right answers to these questions, and thus to be more effective in their activism.
But A+ rejects all of this. A+ argues that if you disagree with someone, particularly a marginalized person, you're being offensive/silencing/erasing, and that this is more important than whether or not you're actually right. My concern with activism is getting the right answers so I can be effective at my goals. Their concern is getting the same answer they've already gotten so they can feel validated. And thus you end up with situations like Setar saying completely wrong things about that set of mental health policies in Vancouver, and the person objecting to him (and being completely correct in his criticisms) was shut down, because he was disagreeing with Setar and that's more important than actually determining what the best way to address mental health concerns in Vancouver is.
More insidiously, this approach also means they're more likely to do harm in their activism than a skeptic. Let's say another activist wants to work on the issue of GMO crops. A skeptic would consider the pros and cons of GMOs, for instance: how many people are fed with them? Are GMOs killing off non-GMO crops? Is there a serious threat of over-homoginizing our crops such that one bug kills all our plants and starves us? And so forth. A skeptic would get as precise a picture as possible of the current situation and how any given action (e.g., lobbying to ban GMO crops, or a certain crop, or subsidizing non-GMOs, etc.) would effect the world. A complete ban, for instance, might result in people starving because GMO crops can often produce more food than others. But on the A+ boards, no one cares. And so you have Ellie Murasaki criticizing anyone who disagrees with her about GMOs being evil as being oppressive or silencing or what have you instead of disagreeing with their facts or analysis. If she ever does anything with GMO activism, her approaches are likely to hurt, not help, the people she's ostensibly acting in favor of.
I also support honesty in activism. I want politicians and corporations to be honest with us, and I think our activists should be honest too. A+ rejects this. I'm not only talking about things like 'secret private board? What secret private board?', although those are important. But there's also things like whether or not the tone argument is valid. If a moderator there, or a sufficiently important member, fires invective at someone and they respond with a 'hey, please cut it out,' that's the tone argument and not allowed. But if that newbie fires invective at the longtime board members, that's disrespectful or harassing and that's also not allowed. So either they're lying when they say tone arguments are invalid, or they're lying when they say certain tones are disrespectful. And these are over message board comments. Is there any reason to think they'd be honest if they did something in meatspace, something that might influence the rest of us outside their board?
I support efficacy in activism, even if it requires compromise and pragmatism. David Silverman got in hot water recently for saying that atheists need to stand together to make change; this was interpreted as him saying that the good atheists have to stand by misogynistic slimeballs. But David Silverman, love him or hate him, is out there and pushing to change the culture to make things better for atheists, skeptics, humanists, and ultimately all those who support pluralism. It's easy to disdain compromise when the sum total of your activism is limited to writing on the Internet, since you don't need to go along with anyone else to write them. Going out into the world, pushing for causes, you might need to partner with people whom you don't agree with on everything. You might need to give up something to get something else. Now, the point at which you're giving up too much and compromising too many ideals can be different for everyone, and activists can disagree in good faith over where that point is. But the A+ people see any compromise or deviation from their pure ideals as tantamount to treason. And so they don't do anything, because there are not enough people who agree with them on everything to get anything done. They just heap abuse on those who do actually do things.
I support universal rights; for example, I think even those who have depraved and evil ideologies (e.g., Nazis) should be allowed to speak, assemble, and have the same constitutional protections and rights that other groups do. The A+ crew does not. PZ Myers recently posed about a quartet of Native American women who stole some Nazi's flag and burned it. Myers opposed the theft and burning but many commenters did not, and Caine even said that all Nazi flags should be burned, neo-Nazis suppressed, and that those who disagreed with him were actually supporting the Nazis. I was tempted to post, mention that I am ethnically Jewish, and then say that I completely disagreed with him, as do the ACLU and other civil liberties organizations, but I decided it wasn't worth the headache.
There's a lot more, but I think this covers the gist of it. I do support most of their ostensible causes; I want misogyny, racism, homophobia etc to be destroyed, and the sooner the better. I want a more equal society. But while the A+ crew claims to want that, they prioritize keeping the hugbox environment and saying whatever they need to say to keep their pretenses of superiority over actual change. If what they wanted was just their own clubhouse, then I wouldn't care overmuch.
But they claim to be activists, fighting oppression and fixing the world's problems.
And I expect better conduct from an activist group.
