Joshua Citarella

This is my position and I'm doing that.

There's some stuff that I like hold really, really strongly, but for the most part, I'm just like,

Trying to ask good questions, the I'm just asking questions excuse I'm aware is a difficult one, but I think that that became a meme because people who said I'm just asking questions were asking questions with an agenda as opposed to just genuinely following their curiosity.

Sure.

The problem is that you can't ever tell whether somebody is doing it with an ulterior motive or whether they're doing it in a genuine manner.

Well, there's a – especially if I was to give advice to the left, I think –

the purity spiral thing is just so self-defeating.

To bind your group together over the mutual scapegoating and shaving off of people who are insufficiently pure to be a part of it, it's a self-destructive, inherently self-destructive.

You're reducing your coalition

The way that you bind your coalition together is by reducing it, which can only last until the one purest person left on planet Earth.

Yeah, I don't fully understand how that would work.

So the purity thing, because think about how many people do the why I left the left pivot, right?

Lots of people that used to be on one side will go, can you name anybody that's done a why I left the right pivot?

I think, again, with that, it's not particularly welcoming.

It doesn't seem very welcoming, right?

Forget what the policies are, but it's like if you're unprepared to accept somebody who maybe has a fetid past or you would consider to be a fetid past, that would be a pretty bad idea.

And yeah, look, I don't think, at no point have I ever claimed, thankfully, to be an expert on really anything.

But after you do a thousand conversations, you end up

being able to ask people questions that they maybe haven't thought of before because you're starting to draw together 20 similar conversations that you've had in the past.

And you go, huh, isn't that interesting?