I like this and it is concise. But I'd say, as I recognize myself in some of it ("Social Justice Skeptic" I am though as a couple of others here) that it's a common set of views if you're an individualist and a materialist, I'd reckon. Everything is a spectrum and a question of degrees, probably... I think the mistake is thinking maturity and clear headedness ends there when it's really just the starting point.
but the repose just is the point for the south park centrist. they arent interested in weighing evidence or argument, they’re trying to find a way out of (really: above) partisan cut and thrust. they want smug withdrawal above the mess of political contestation, and they purchase that by either appealing to some nebulous common sense and/or deflating the bite of the moralizer by exposing the psychological makeup of the moralizer as merely self-regarding.
but this dollar store cynicism’s ‘maturity’ is just as underthought and naive as the straw positions it’s trying to pillory. we dont have any more reason to think, or at least we arent ever given any by the centrist/reactionary, that people are reducibly selfish than that altruism is possible*. it ends up being a (excuse the expression) moral-stance argument. an argument whose persuasive force lies not in its demonstration -viz. its validity or its correspondence with reality- but in the kind of moral stance it necessarily implies for its adherent. the south park centrist might just be attracted to the idea of them living in a world that’s disinterested or unforgiving (because then they’d get to self-aggrandize wrt their own station/accomplishments and they’d get to posture as the adults in the room towards the people who don’t think the world’s disinterested or unforgiving), and that’s where the reductive cynicism argument finds traction.
*in practice, the reactionary is never actually consistent in applying this principle; for them, there’s always a select group of people who manage to be genuinely altruistic, and they just so happen to be the people the reactionary identifies with
re: social justice skepticism, whomst amongst us cant admit that the
crowd could or has been guilty of excesses? the line to hold here would be to not see these excesses, whatever their frequency or importance, as giving the lie to the claims of injustice or to the capacity to rectify those injustices. because that’s what the south park centrist and reactionary do, and that’s what makes them clowns.
