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?
That’s not the argument. Leftists are fine with incremental change and improvements, they just do not believe continuing Capitalism counts as an incremental improvement. If a country isn’t moving towards Socialism, concessions are nice, but insufficient to count as meaningful change.
I think a lot of this whole “liberal vs leftist” stuff here roots in defederation, creating 2 large echo chambers with some bleedover but no actual crossing over. This results in a lot of (usually incorrect) assumptions and good-faith misreadings of original points and takes.
Additionally, Leftists are usually very confident in their views and takes, because usually they have at least read some theory, whether that be Marx, Goldman, Lenin, Kropotkin, or so forth, while Liberals usually form their world views based on their personal experiences and view of the world. Some leftists are very aggressive in confronting liberal views, which in turn can push liberals away, instead of learning more.