chapotraphouse

Agreed on both fronts.

There are people like Socialism For All who call out people on the left but it's not about drama at all.

I'm sure there are people who engage in drama farming for clout in a principled way (idk any examples because I honestly do not care for it).

But then there's BE who really seem to relish in drama farming and use it to chase clout for its own sake and I have a strong distaste for all that.

I went a bit easy on BM above because I don't want to stir up drama here but there are a few archetypes of characters you see that end up following particular paths and tbh he's the kind of person that I could absolutely imagine taking a "How I left the left" arc sometime in the future. Not saying that it's guaranteed or that I'm accusing him of being a rank opportunist but I've seen people who bounce between ideologies or who rapidly cycle through them and it's not unusual for them to settle on a position that makes outsiders go "Huh??" while jaded people like me go "Yeah, they were never truly grounded in radical theory/principles in a deep way so I'm really not surprised to see this new development..."

For me, I was an anarchist for basically all of my adult life until fairly recently and, if I'm being completely honest, it pains me to talk about it because I still grieve for the loss of my old politics (and it really was pretty life-shattering, like you said) and so I look at people who cycle the way that BM has and I simply cannot fathom doing that myself. If I was going to put an analogy to it, I'd say that I approach my politics like it's a marriage whereas people like BM seem to approach politics like it's a hookup app.