this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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Your counter-example doesn't make sense.
In the picture in this post, the person who read the "down with fascism" message expressed disappointment with the person's message, thus revealing that they are associating fascism with their own political leaning.
In your example, the left-winger just mentions a name of someone else they don't like in response, which isn't even connected to the topic.
You're missing the point that certain political ideologies have very strong connections with each other. Except one side is arguably connected to many much worse terms.
You can say "down with authoritarian marxists!" and you might get a few tankies to pipe up and say "wow I can't believe you are attacking the glorious people's blah blah blah" to which you can say "aha called out your politics!" but nobody really takes tankies seriously anyway nor are they a threat to modern nation-building the same way they were a century or two ago.
It doesn't matter that we're correct that right-wingers are fascists while they're wrong that we're pedophiles. The rhetoric works exactly the same in either case.
As I responded to the other commenter, right-wingers are obviously well aware that left-wingers will call them fascists, even if they do not consider themselves fascist and hold a negative perspective of fascism. I consider pedophiles bad but I'm aware that right-wing people are going to call me one just because I'm gay.
In a flipped conversation, where the third commenter is a right-winger who says "look, you didn't deny being a pedophile!," I'm sure they would take a screenshot of the conversation and post it to twitter and get lots of upvotes since that looks like such an own. They'd probably even say they can tell by my disappointment that I was implicitly acknowledging I'm a pedophile.
If your clever comeback sounds exactly as smooth coming out of the enemy's mouth, it's not a very good comeback.
I'm arguing that your example isn't communicating your thesis very well, and I don't think I'm alone in that feeling, but I'm doing the courtesy of letting you know that it's not connecting and why.
Apparently it's not communicating it well, but your response doesn't really clear up why for me. I appreciate your trying though. I am left with the lingering feeling that it's not connecting because it's hard to picture a right-wing zinger landing well, and not because I'm fundamentally wrong about the symmetry of these scenarios. I'll concede I could be missing the point.
I appreciate the attempt, I think you can rework it to make your point, but just for the sake of keeping our minds working I will extend the conversation out to address the higher-level premise of what you're trying to communicate.
I fully agree with this point, but it's also not how we argue with/interact with our current ideological opponents. We're stuck in a loop on the left where we think crafted arguments and intellectual superiority will have any impact at all on anyone. If the right broadly cared at ALL about ideological consistency we wouldn't be in this weird situation to begin with. Our big, missing hole in our analysis here is that the left us largely about headspace arguments and logic and consistency, and the right only acts like they do because they see us arguing this way and try to use the same way we argue to score points.
Conservatives generally don't care about hypocrisy. Like, at all. They live in a world of feelings and how they feel now, and whatever story has been supplied to them about why they feel this way at this moment, so it almost doesn't matter if our arguments are bad. If we want to change hearts and minds, we need to back waaaay the fuck up and start attacking how people feel. Like on a very personal level, because they only exist in their present moment and present feelings. This is why they get so worked up about petty, superficial insults like "you're weird." It's far less satisfying because they always have bravado and hold frame, but it DOES effect them.
We like to craft expert arguments to impress other leftists, but if it had any kind of real-world impact, we'd all be swimming in socialism and equality.