who said puritanism has to be right-wing. It's also not necessarily about sexuality. It's about putting up a set of idealistic moral standards and trying to force everybody to comply or pretend to comply.
I mean, pretty much everyone associates puritanism with the right-wing, but ok my bad...
We put up sets of idealistic moral standards that some or most of a society generally agree protects vulnerable people. This is why we have age limits on alcohol, for example. This is why we have age limits on porn, too.
Everyone is forced to comply or pretend to comply with minimum drinking ages, which are pretty common throughout the world. I think all would agree.
It doesn't really seem to be puritanism that drives a society to protect its vulnerable populations. It's not out of a hatred of alcohol that drinking ages exist, it's because alcohol abuse has been proven to ruin lives. Just like porn.
Well I think at this point you're just using puritanism as short-hand for "people trying to enforce morals I disagree with".
So if you're left-wing, than in your terminology puritans will be by definition right-wingers. And the people enforcing morals you agree with cannot be called Puritan.
If you take a brief look at the history of the original Puritanism however, it was definitely a 'revolutionary' movement against tradition. Including the ones who came to America.
> pretty much everyone associates puritanism with the right-wing
That "everyone" must be old. The new phenomena are already lampooned in plenty of memes. The boomers aged pretty badly.
> It's not out of a hatred of alcohol that drinking ages exist, it's because alcohol abuse has been proven to ruin lives
If that were the case, alcohol would just be banned outright. The limits are basically virtual anyway, anybody can attest that getting alcohol is trivial once you start to really want it. Just like porn.
A lot of law is effectively performative morality, and no more so than in the area of personal pleasures. Prohibitionism always fails, eventually, because people want to feel.
> I mean, pretty much everyone associates puritanism with the right-wing, but ok my bad...
The fact that the right wing is puritan doesn't mean that puritanism entails being right-wing. This is, like, Logic 101, 'Socrates is a man'-level shit.
The Puritans weren't right-wing. They were the freaky liberals of their time, arguing that the Anglican church was too close to the conservative, traditional Roman Catholic church - ie they wanted massive social change and a break from the past.
Eh. Modern political cleavages map very poorly onto seventeenth century religious divisions.
I'm a Quaker. Early Quakers were radical (rejecting the religious authority of priests and the fighting of wars), conservative (looking backwards to a partially-imagined better, more wholesome Christianity of the past), obnoxious (turning up to Anglican churches to heckle the sermon), and disciplined (strong structures in place for the support of families of those imprisoned for their faith, and a communal discernment process that rejected 'do as thou wilt').
Puritans rejected catholic influence on the church, yes, but their focus on individual piety, and their association with the rising merchant class, puts them a long way from freaky liberalism. One of their critiques was that others were insufficiently sober and God-fearing!
I think it's pretty clear to me. Puritan aligned forces overthrew the English Monarchy and established a republic - some 150 years later left and right came about when opponents of the French monarchy would sit on the left. There's also a very clear relationship between Puritans and the Whigs - it's surely very clear that they were to the left of the Tories.
In either century, the right represents old moral values, and the left represents a fresh new source of moral values which seek to replace the old. Granted, in the 17th century those new moral sources were religious and in the 21st century they are secular - the substance of what is now left and what was then left has absolutely changed. But the overall structure is the same.
If merely being a software engineer who handled traffic for a crappy tube site, where most videos are uploaded by consenting freaky couples, gets you blacklisted from working in companies, while people who handle privacy destruction at Google and Facebook get cushy jobs - yeah, it is bad. It's not a software engineer's fault that some frat boy uploaded revenge porn and porn does not have to be bad. Plenty of feminists are also pro-porn, just when it's done in the right way and doesn't involve manipulation or coercion.
It's not the software dev's _fault_ that someone used their tool to hurt another person, but it _is_ the dev's _responsibility_ to consider how their tool might be abused and consider whether it's really a societal good to build it.
That's kind of the whole point of the original article, narrated by a guy who _ actually feels guilty_ about his role in enabling people like your hypothetical frat boy.
