Which we should see as an excellent radicalization and growth opportunity!
It can be exhausting explaining ourselves again and again, always met with the same accusations and assumptions born from the mythos spun by our enemies.
However, we must remember these people are people, and many people change their minds given enough information, delivered with firm respect. For every belligerent person who appears like they wouldn't change their mind for anything, there are 10 people quietly lurking who are more on-the-fence. Even those who regurgitate insults and contempt may change their mind when the stars align!
These people are not our enemies, they are victims to the greatest campaign of dishonesty in human history! It is our duty to draw out the poison and deliver the medicine!
I know many comrades here have very difficult lives and do not have the patience or energy to deal with such people. Please do not exhaust yourself interacting with liberals, and allow comrades with more energy to deal with them.
Radicalizing online is not the end-all be-all, but at this point in the psychological war for those within the Anglosphere, every victory is invaluable!!!
Hey this is about me!
I probably don't know the right words to use and I don't know my history or theory and couldn't hold my own in a real debate but I sure am learning a lot from you all when I find your posts on All and your comments all over the place.
Realizing that, I don't exactly know where I fall politically. Previously I would say I am left, but seeing conversations I realize that I don't even know where Left-land is. At the moment I don't see myself agreeing with a lot of stuff posted by hexbear/lemmygrad users, but I'm open to learn, and, more importantly, have a fuller understanding of your perspective(s).
Coming from Reddit I'm not used to the incredibly in-depth dialectic with a non-/anti-Western point of view, nor the intense levels of trolling/sarcasm/dunking that you all seem to love so much. So it's hard to navigate conversations sometimes, and figure out what is a joke and what is serious. And even if I personally don't engage in the conversation, usually someone with a similar mindset to me will do so, and I appreciate it when you folks take the time to soften your words/message to ~~actually~~ (edit to cross out judgy word) explain your position.
Additionally I hope we can see and treat each other as individuals and not our instance names when traversing the fediverse (honestly this is more about non-hexbear/lemmygrad users, but felt I should say it anyway). It certainly is a shame that some instances choose to defed you. I hope mine doesn't, but I'm prepared to move if mine gets overly censor-y, though my understanding is that sdf is unlikely to do so.
Anyway, keep it up, there are absolutely people out there lurking and reading what you all write, and occasionally learning something.
Stuff like this is why I loved the internet so much long ago (near 30 years, wow) and I'm really happy to see it hasn't gone anywhere, I just lost track of it.
Cheers!
Honestly, if nothing else, I hope liberals are learning how to actually phrase questions in a good faith manner. As a former liberal myself, so many of my questions in the beginning were phrased in such an anglocentric way that just assumed Western ideals as the default and it put everyone else on the defensive. So of course I got dunked on or people assumed I was trolling. Really, I was just ignorant af.
Me too, but it did help me learn. Though I would imagine some might double down due to the insult, learning that some ideas people in the west just take for granted have their roots in anglocentrism and white supremacy does help some people really reflect on everything they've just assumed about the world for most of their life.
I recently hung out with friends that I hadnt seen in a while and they were saying some of the most ignorant, chauvanistic shit. Really nice people who consider themselves progressive. They just lack the information to understand why a thought of theirs is just a racist regurgitation that they picked up from a source they can't even remember. They can't remember the context of how those beliefs entered their worldview.
It was a startling reminder of just how big the task is of educating people out of a colonizers mindset. We can't get tired of it.