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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?

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[-] Silverseren@kbin.social 6 points 6 months ago

Generally true, yes. In most cases, the leftists using that sort of terminology are tankies, meaning they are explicitly pro-authoritarian. They just want the dictators to be communists (or claimed communists) rather than capitalists (despite said dictatorial communism usually being about seizing all the money for themselves anyways and often results in full on capitalism regardless, China is a great example).

So you don't even need the word replacement thought experiment. Tankies are openly authoritarian.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

People really don't want to acknowledge that politics is more than one axis.

Like communism is the opposite of capitalism, not democracy. The opposite of democracy is a dictatorship.

And when a dictator calls their government Communist, it's pretty much a guarantee it's not even a communist economy anymore than when North Korea or Russia claim to be democracies.

[-] Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

Very true. Reading a lot of Socialist lit has made me very critical about the regular framework I see regularly posited as Socialism being a direct opposite of capitalism and being some kind of inevitable slippery slope toward Communism.

Like as a system it is very distinct from Communist ideologically speaking and represents a sliding scale of public ownership versus private ownership but never fully occludes private ownership, currency or the very basics of capitalism systemically and any one person's veiw of where that balance should rest is itself an end point and fully formed political belief. You can believe a mix of liberal / capitalist and socialist things that are not strictly contradictory. Capitalism is a sliding scale we are just currently dealing with it's deep unstable and predatory end. Admitting some capitalism is okay and can be made more ethical doesn't disqualify you from the left nor does it nessisarily make you "centrist". It also doesn't make you automatically a fan of everything capitalist or the status quo.

The number of "That's not Socialism! Socialism means only (posit one potential facet out of the massive cloud of policies/stances of the ideology) or " That is only the secret aim of Communists to tip the teeter-totter towards our/their goals!" is a very paternalistic view. Socialism is DEEP and diverse. There's not a central author or even a neat handful of authors one can point to. The more you read the more internal variations you find.

People generally seem to just want an enemy to point and hiss at, they don't want to look at things as a potential series of sliding scales or people of mixed ideological stances as valid in their own right.

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[-] SolNine@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 months ago

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.

[-] Cqrd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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

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[-] Ledivin@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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.

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[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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