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Trollificus's avatar

What if the people I mean when I say "those people" is an ill-defined smorgasboard of people who lack principles and think poorly? I will confess to calling them "lefties", Marxists, progressives (and progtards, NPCs, proglodytes, and SJWs-as-insult), and other terms that usually do not carefully identify who I mean.

It's a real problem, I admit. It's like when "those people" call their opponents "rednecks", "hillbillies", fascists, alt-right, etc. etc. 99.9% of the time THOSE identifiers are less than accurate. This is not whataboutism, just identifying the problem of labelling ill-defined groups.

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DC Reade's avatar

I suggest using modifiers to narrow and focus observations like those.

If it were me, I'd call the group "the incoherent Left", "the extreme Left", "Left-wing nihilists"...something like that. Some nihilists were actually officially self-titled Nihilists- the members were a 19th century Russian anarchist faction.

I found this history book, The World That Never Was, to be a good readable overview of that era. Committed anarchist politicos (that oxymoron) would probably disagree, though.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7640470-the-world-that-never-was

I found that the ideas and philosophy of 19th century anarchist movements have a lot of resonance with present-day anarchism here in the US. It's worth pointing out that 19th century Europe experienced waves of anarchist disruption and terrorism a couple of orders of magnitude greater than anything we're seeing nowadays here in the States. Most of the terrorism of the era was assassination attempts, several of them successful.

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