Thread by @rechelon

The sliver of truth to "horseshoe theory" is that some people are motivated primarily by power fantasies of violent revenge, a kind of ecstatic abdication of ethical consideration, and they will latch onto whatever part of the political spectrum they think will scratch this itch.

https://twitter.com/BeardedAnarchy3/status/1710839855155228921

This is why you get the most outraged reactions to "yes, severely violent resistance to an open-air prison is totally justified, but rape is not" from tankies -- because in their minds THE WHOLE POINT is an excuse to turn off the moral consideration part of their brain.

In these people's worldview the argument over ideological nonviolence isn't about straightforward consequentialist failures of liberal pacifism, but about their own need for release from the supposed "bonds" of conscience and thought itself.

Their interest in morality extends exactly as far as it can be used to justify turning off all further moral thought. So the formulation is always "X did immoral thing, which justifies our abandonment of all moral consideration whatsoever."

And their worldview collapses to a virtue ethics based in absolutist dichotomies "there are sheep and wolves, and it is virtuous to be a wolf." What's wrong with the liberals is thus not the bad consequences of their inept strategies, but the very notion of still thinking.

In anarchist circles this looks like a collapse from insurrection as "everyone a general capable of evaluating strategic opportunities and exploits for themselves" into a relatively marxist-brained notion of unthinking mass uprising based in historic forces (animal emotion).

Thus you get even some "anarchists" seething about people being like "yeah but islamic fascists raping teenage girls and parading their bodies around isn't liberation" because in their minds this can only be read as moralistic friction to revolt (as mass thoughtless emotion).

This is a kind of picture in which the entirety of politics is devolved into justifications for violence and impediments to violence: Expressing revulsion at the horrific atrocity that is Israel's existence is good but only insofar as you do not express revulsion at Hamas' rapes.

It's pure team sports campism. A politic of collapsing everything to undifferentiated mass in order to revel in unthinking violence as an affective ends in an of itself.

It's the exact opposite of antifascism's Three Way Fight and anarchism's lens of individual agency.

Anyway, Palestine will be free from the river to the sea, Israel has no right to exist, Hamas is fascist scum, fuck up every PSL march, tear down every border, run rape apologist manarchists out of the movement, and KYLR.