I think the kindest interpretation of ultras is that they move the line of “what is an acceptable level of mistakes for a country/movement/person/etc to make” all the way to zero. IE: If you have ever done anything wrong ever in history then you are immediately “not ethical” and therefore cannot be part of the leftist movement.

It’s a really dumb way of thinking because it is absolutely impossible for any individual to be perfect for their entire existence, let alone a movement or a country. But if you know any real life ultras and talk to them about things, it always boils down to this. They do not do critical support; if there is anything to be critical of at all, then their support does not exist.

I think on some level this makes sense; why should anyone ever accept any injustice whatsoever? It’s just not practical unfortunately to live as a human being among other human beings and expect that there will be zero mistakes and zero injustices. They’re going to happen. Even in a perfectly utopian communist society mistakes are going to happen. It’s not that we should accept ALL injustices, but we cannot expect ZERO injustices. Or we have to change the definition of what it means to accept them. Can someone make a mistake and then go through a restorative justice process? Does that count as “accepting” the injustice, or does it count as working to resolve it? An ultra wouldn’t believe in restorative justice, they would say that because an injustice happened the entity that caused it cannot be redeemed and must be utterly destroyed. Ironically I personally believe that the ultra take of “restorative justice is impossible” makes them the actual perpetrators of injustice, but that’s just me.

I think the unkind interpretation of ultras is that they’re western government plants, which I’m sure at least some of them are.

It seems to attract disillusioned liberals who nominally claim to oppose class society but for whatever reason want western supremacy to somehow endure in the post-class society, it’s incoherent but it seems to be the emotional fuel that sustains alot of their hostile left bashing politics

Also despite many ultras making a talismanic fetish out of theory, most of them seem to have never actually read it, over the years I grew more suspicious of these so-called loremasters and came up with three simple questions on theory to determine whether an ultra has read Marx, and I’m not kidding after asking maybe a dozen or more online ultras over the years NONE of them have answered all the questions correctly, most couldn’t even answer ONE right

In the end I realized Matt Christman was 100% right, these aren’t political movements they’re online posting styles centered on a person’s idiosyncratic demographic priors and mediated thru online consumption