There’s a disappointing irony in the fact that leftism is supposed to be a movement that’s all about people, but a lot of internet leftists are so fucking obnoxious that they push people away.
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I deliberately refer to myself as a liberal to distance myself from online leftists, even though I mostly agree with their positions. I just hate their attitude so much.
Internet leftists have a purity test issue, one misstep or misunderstanding and they toss everything out, unity goes only as far as their clicks and likes. The more outrageous and reactionary their takes, the more engagement. There are too few building communities, and doing work in said communities
Agreed. And it seems like an extension of the problem with internet discourse more generally. The general lack of nuance and the insistence that we should all think in absolutes.
That’s what the left is all about you won’t find people on the right thinking of making things better for everyone. The right is the representation of selfishness.
I think sometimes it's not just recognition they want, but also absolution. I've seen this before when I talk about something we (meaning humanity as a whole) have done, and get a reply from someone effectively saying "no, but capitalists did that, not me." It just completely misses the point.
This is the thing. And it's not about righteous anger in the face of injustice or bigotry, I'm all for that. A lot of civility discourse annoys me.
But I don't see how you can advocate for compassion, equity, peace etc if you constantly engage in lowest common denominator spite and pettiness.
Absolutely. I’ve met SO MANY people exactly like that online. And when they’re not being petty or spiteful they’re either policing other people’s behaviour or telling them to go and read some book by a dead philosopher. I honestly wonder what they think they’re trying to accomplish.
What this sort of behaviour immediately tells me is that this is someone who's never engaged in any real community organising or civic engagement before.
It's an eternal struggle session over which strain of leftist you smoke. The online left simply does not care to engage with people in real life. They want to reproduce electoral team sports but with a red pastiche.
Yeah, and it's so tiring. I've seen people who obsess about organising but can't even organise anything with the people who supposedly agree with them.
These selfish organizer types don't stop to imagine themselves as a part of an organization. They've got to be *the* organizer. But we all can't be Eugene Debs. Some of us have to be the person holding the soup ladle for hungry comrades.
Those are trolls. Some trolls only speak leftish. They're still just trolls, and aren't repping an ideology. They're just parroting leftism, badly, rudely.
I don’t call myself a leftist because that should be self-evident from the things I talk about. The people who need to tell you how very leftist they are tend to be the obnoxious ones.
I only ever hear people use the terms “leftist” and “lib(eral)” in derogatory ways and I honestly really don’t know what either term means, if anything
I don't name them, partly because it's gauche, but I think almost all of my positions on topics are ones you would take if you weren't some kind of aresehole. So people calling me names about them usually get a Paddingtonian stare.
Honestly, I’m all for people showing me a different perspective on things or suggesting a different way to look at something. But childish insults have never done that.
Leftism is incompatible with the hyper individualist American life. So there’s a lot of conflict and abrasiveness when we talk about it. “I feel like your expression of your choice is a direct accusation of me, one that demands a defense.”
Yeah, the individualism is one of those things that needs to be actively unlearned, like with implicit biases. A lot of people need to dedicate more time to doing that, I think.
Absolutely. The ideology of self sufficiency has been fed to us through media since birth and many of us are still consuming it unquestionably on the regular. Media literacy is 🔑
Basically we are all entitled and privileged and to be a PRACTICAL leftist you need to give up your privileges. People don’t like being told that which also creates conflict.
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But I don't see how you can advocate for compassion, equity, peace etc if you constantly engage in lowest common denominator spite and pettiness.