I’ve been seeing a worrying number of these people on Lemmy lately, sharing enlightened takes including but not limited to “voting for Biden is tantamount to fascism” and “the concept of an assigned gender, or even an assigned name, at birth is transphobic” and none of them seem to be interested in reading more than the first sentence of any of my comments before writing a reply.
More often than not they reply with a concern I addressed in the comment they’re replying to, without any explanation of why my argument was invalid. Some of them cannot even state their own position, instead simply repeatedly calling mine oppressive in some way.
It occurred to me just now that these interactions reminded me of nothing so much as an evangelical Christian I got into an argument with on Matrix a while ago, in which I met him 95% of the way, conceded that God might well be real and that being trans was sinful and tried to convince him not to tell that to every trans person he passed, and failed. I am 100% convinced he was trolling – in retrospect I’m pretty sure I could’ve built a municipal transport system by letting people ride on top of his goalposts (that’s what I get for picking a fight with a Christian at 2AM) – and the only reason I’m not convinced these leftists on Lemmy are trolls is the sheer fucking number of them.
I made this post and what felt like half the responses fell into this category. Am I going insane?
You seem to be mistaken. I don’t want to have a discussion with you.
I put up with a lot of pedantry and perscriptivist bullshit and you ignoring my boundries as you came at me like you were on some kind of witchhunt before I snapped. You want to prove I am some sort of pure strain socialist on the word of a guy who idolized Henri de Saint-Simon and Robert Owens then expanded his take into more extreme violent simplistic work that got popular with angry disenfranchised people. Now we have idiots listening to nothing but readers digest condensed YouTube summaries and screaming at each other like fucking howler monkeys fighting for territory and masterbating over over split hairs rather than discussing actual politics and action while the world burns and I’m fucking done.
You treat libralism as a dirty word with hard boundries… and it’s not relevant. I am not interested because it doesn’t DO anything. You just want to feel righteous by holding my feet to the fire and really - fucking shame on you. I don’t care if you agree. We don’t have to. I do not need your validation O mighty gatekeeper of all things political philosophy! I don’t care about your take. If you are incapable of giving benefit of the doubt and being civil to people who ARE liberals then you are not fit to have these discussions. Civility in debate and consideration of the other are paramount to actually having peaceful changes to the world instead of stoking the fires of one more violent revolution that puts some new authoritarian in charge. You burnt this bridge and I am walking away.
You haven’t actually read anything I just said.
I don’t think liberalism is a word with hard boundaries. In fact I spent some time covering the fact that you are more-or-less a radical liberal and not a socialist.
You can’t accept that a word has a real definition that doesn’t suit your agenda. You want to say incorrect, misleading things without getting called out and can’t handle a discussion. You talk about civility in debate while doing the exact opposite. Shame on you.