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?
I have a friend who has come to reflect this exact behavior to an extraordinary degree of accuracy.
It’s interesting because the near puritanical nature of their responses to nearly anything has become more extreme than even the most devoutly religions individuals. Obviously the focus of their evangelizing is very different, but it has become difficult to even have a conversation.
I’ll give you an example: I saw a new game called Pal World, which looked absurd, mentioned and was instantly met with the fact that the game was unacceptable because it supports forced labor.
Additionally, there seems to be an immense amount of hypocrisy in regards to what is good and what is bad, largely driven by what best I can refer to as their “leftist Zeitgeist.” As bad as I can tell now, according to them, I am a liberal, and apparently liberals are bad, and the only true salvation is being a leftist?
Of course, I have a much more varied and complex set of moral and political values that likely don’t fall under a singular label… But what do I know about anything.
This is kind of like saying Helldivers 2 is bad because it’s about forcefully spreading “democracy” (pretty obviously it means capitalism) to other planets.
Yeah, it is, but it’s hugely satirical and makes blatant political statements through satire.
Pal World isn’t that deep, I don’t think there’s much depth to their forced labor system other than parodying Pokémon and slightly highlighting how the Pokémon universe is full of forced labor and isn’t that kind of funny
was instantly met with the fact that the game was unacceptable because it supports forced labor.
If this is true, it should be constantly called out. You’re shrugging at slavery?
Edit: I don’t play or care about this game. Obviously I don’t give two shits if creatures are slaves in video games as long as there’s nothing about it that makes it seem like a good idea for sentient creatures
Fiction is fiction. This is the same kind of logic that adults used when I was a kid because Harry Potter promoted witchcraft, or when the country had a moral panic because Call of Duty had their children killing people. Nothing in the game literally advocates for or glorifies IRL slavery, that would be absurd.
If you can’t parse fiction from reality, then you aren’t fit for just about anything. Movies, music, video games, books, etc. Every medium frequently depicts things you shouldn’t emulate. Even the literal Bible has depictions of slavery, rape, incest, and murder.
If you consider the game slavery to make monsters work for you, then I guess. Problem is that covers a huge amount of games beyond palworld.
Yo dipshit I don’t play this game and assumed if someone called out forced labor then it was actually a real thing
Outside of the word “capitalist,” literally nothing presented in the top half of the image is even political, let alone authoritarian 🙄 it kinda seems like you’re just using popular negative words against things you dislike.
“Any attempt at actual progress makes you a liberal” isn’t political? “I have a right to tell you what media you should watch” isn’t political?
What are you talking about?
You know, “Any attempt to make actual progress makes you a lukewarm Christian” is kind of a weird and ambiguous statement and seems like someone was working backwards from the starting point of being anti-leftist.
Related: one glaring thing of note is anti-leftist sentiment routinely conflates liberal and leftist together.
I’m still confused. The Tumblr OP explicitly did not do that, and neither did I. I acknowledge the difference so that I can be left of center without having to associate myself with people who think that voting for Joe Biden instead of <insert third party candidate here> makes me a fascist.
Marxism and Christianity only share the fact that they contain frameworks for analyzing material reality(Marxism through Materialism and Christianity through representing reality as though it is divine, and thus explainable via the divine), and this post seems to not be willing to honestly engage with Marxism as a concept.
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Marxists do not oppose incremental change. Marxists believe that minor concessions under Capitalism are insufficient to actually fix the underlying problems, and this point of view is built on a thorough understanding of the Marxist critique of Capitalism.
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Marxists do not oppose reform, they just believe it is impossible to do successfully without sliding backward, because the state is built in a manner that supports Capitalism and resists change.
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Marxism is an economic critique of Capitalism, a philosophical framework, and a call to action. It is a complete set of tools to look at the world, analyze it, and how to fix it. In this manner, it can be superficially compared to Christianity, but only on the surface.
That’s really it.
I met him 95% of the way… and failed.
That’s because the people you’re picking fights with only care about being right. It’s why the American government undergoes a political ratchet toward the right: the people pushing for radical change at all costs and the people seeking compromise are not evenly distributed.
There’s this half baked idea that keeps bouncing around in my mind, let’s give it a engagement friendly name: Scam Theory.
Scam Theory, stated simply, is the idea that most of society is composed of scams. Scams, in this case, are any relationship where a large group of people come to believe lies that harm them and others, told by a small group of people who peddle those lies because they benefit from that harm.
It’s like Category Theory, where you start to see the commonality across many disparate domains of math; except in this case it’s commonality across many different social groups, and the commonality is the cycle of abuse.
Under Scam Theory, there are only minor implementation details that differentiate political zealots and religious zealots. Given some time, I could probably think of dozen more commonalities between leftist revolutionaries and christian doomsdayers. Or any other religion’s extremists for that matter. Or people that buy into get rich quick schemes. Or capitalism. Or any other type of scam.
One of the main aspects of commonality amongst all scams is that there are the in-group, who participate and get to go to heaven/live in utopia/become fabulously wealthy/find happiness/stay young forever/etc, and the out-group, who didn’t participate get to burn in hell/get walled for being counterrevolutionary/stay poor/be miserable/grow old and die alone/etc.
All you have to do to support Scam Theory is be vigilant of scams, spread this info, and don’t be like one of the easy targets who will suffer (scams) for not buying into Scam Theory
Look. A lot of people are sick of what looks an awful lot like bullshit. We’ve seen what liberal politics gets us. We see that the victories of the past were won in spite of liberal moderates, rather than with their cooperation. If you find more people taking hard line stances, maybe it is self defense against being dragged into mealy mouthed excuses about why we have to vote for leaders who support genocides.
We’ve seen what liberal politics gets us:
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Fighting to Slow and Reverse the Effects of Climate Change
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Free Libraries
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Free or Cheap Public Transit
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Free Schooling
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Free Daycare
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Free Medical Care
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Paid Sick Leave
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Paid Maternal Leave
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Border Policies That Accept Good People and More Effectively Removes The Bad
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Protections for Human Rights
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Separation of Church and State
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Right to Love Whoever You Want to Love
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Reluctance to Enter Foreign Wars
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Better Economies
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Lower Deficits
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Free Care for Chronic Mental Illnesses
But sure, BoTh sIdES baD, Vi JinPeeng the Pooh can save us! RusSiA iS wInnING thE WAr aGaInST wHiTE SuPReMaCIsT aNtI-cHrIStianS
Are you kidding? Almost none of these points are true. We have almost none of these points besides libraries which are constantly being refunded, and schools that are all but useless.
We are doing nothing more than a token effort to fight the climate collapse, no such thing as free daycare, there is not free medical care, paid maternal leave is laughably short, and so on.
