#discourse on social media makes my blood boil tag

[mopeing]

2017: Labour, led by Jeremy Corbyn, gets 40% of the vote and doesn't win a majority in parliament.

2024: Labour, led by Kier Starmer, gets 34% of the vote and gets a huge majority in parliament.

Person: maybe our voting system is a bit broken

/r/unitedkingdom commenter: ah the Corbyn supporters [1] are out pushing lies [2] again. Corbyn lost his election. He's a loser, that should be evidence enough he was a poor leader and shouldn't have won. [3]

1) No evidence that the person being replied to supported Corbyn. I myself didn't vote for Labour in 2017 or 2019 but I agree with them. "Corbyn supporter" here is just an ad hominem.

2) Truths

3) This is a form of circular reasoning called Begging the Question, where you prove your conclusion by using the conclusion itself as part of your reasoning. If person A says "the voting system is bad because it results in counter-intuitive outcomes. There are voting systems that don't have this problem" you can't say "but person A lost the election, therefore they weren't popular" as a counterargument because it presupposes that the outcome given by the system is correct. But the system is the thing being criticised here, so you can't use the Correctness of the system as a defence of the system itself.

[myonlypen]

Another genre of social media post that pisses me off: in response to an article about a political position they don't like someone says "the people who say this are the same people who <other thing I don't like, that would also conveniently make them hypocrites>"

They don't provide any proof of this. They just declare that it is the case. Because it's easier and more comfortable to think that everyone who disagrees with you on one thing disagrees with you on everything and are bad people and are dumb and not worthy of consideration, than to accept that nuance exists.

It pops up so much in conversations about free speech. "The people who are complaining when they are censored for saying things I don't like are the same people who celebrate when people I like are censored!"

Because it's impossible that anyone supports the idea of free speech on principle right? It's like their political belief system is so rooted in tribalism that they can't imagine that anyone else could think in any other way.

[jester-step]

everything i know about twitter i’ve learned against my will

[mopeing]

Leftism leaving the body when someone you disagree with has committed the mortal sin of being old

[mopeing]

/r/unitedkingdom commenter: um aktchually under UK law cis women can't legally rape anyone, so yes trans women are a greater rape threat to women than "cis women rapists" because the latter category doesn't exist.

Person: I wasn't using the legal definition of rape, I was using the definition any sensible person would use: non-consensual sex

/r/unitedkingdom commenter: you are being offensive to rape victims and diminishing their experiences by expanding the definition of rape to include things that aren't rape

[mopeing]

/r/unitedkingdom when a violent crime has been committed by a non cishet white man: [[+5000 upvotes, 2000 comments]] fuck Muslims/fuck brown people/fuck black people/fuck trans people/fuck women [[delete as appropriate, sometimes not even then]]

/r/unitedkingdom when a violent crime has been committed by a straight white man: [[+60 upvotes, 100 comments]]

Funny how posts like these don't get as much attention when the attacker is white [[-10 downvotes]]

Piss off and take your identity politics somewhere else [[+20 upvotes]]

[mopeing]

Another goldie from the big brains over at /r/unitedkingdom:

"Nothing would wake up the population to the problem* like a specifically Muslim political party being elected to parliament"

*They mean the great replacement. People in that subreddit sometimes don't even try to hide behind words like "problem" and outright name it and deny the fact that it's a conspiracy theory.

What astounds me about this statement is that they're getting mad about a scenario that literally hasn't happened. There isn't a specifically Muslim political party that has been elected to parliament. There is nothing stopping this from happening; there is no law against religious political parties from existing (I've been canvassed by a nutter from a Christian party before). Either one doesn't exist, or if one does it doesn't get enough votes to get into parliament.

But the fact that it doesn't happen in real life doesn't dispel this person's outrage about it. They want other people to "wake up" to the "problem" they see. But in order for that to happen they are inventing a scenario that is not true, where the "problem" is worse than in real life, but is simultaneously what they believe to be true.

See, I can do it too: nothing will make people realise the dangers of environmentalism like being arrested for not picking up every piece of litter they see.

[mopeing]

/u/unitedkingdom recently (well, not recently but it's got a million times worse in the last couple of months):

---

(on a non-white person committing a crime, nothing in the article about them being foreign or whether they're here illegally)

Person 1: Why are we letting these people into our country? (200 upvotes)

Person 2: What do you mean by "these people"? (30 upvotes)

Person 1: I think you know, we're just not allowed to talk about it. (110 upvotes)

Person 2: Sounds like a racist dogwhistle to me. (-60 downvotes)

Person 1: Calling people who disagree with you racist, classic lefties. (50 upvotes)

---

(on Israel/Palestine)

Person 3: Has anyone else noticed an increase in racism in these types of threads recently? (90 upvotes)

Person 4: I think it's because most people in this country have (finally) realised how dangerous their religion is and have had enough. There aren't more racists, people are rightfully less tolerant of backwards cultures. (130 upvotes)

Person 3: This is an article about a conflict on the other side of the continent. Even if tolerance of religion here had anything to do with this, you don't have to agree or even like them to think that it's bad when their civilians are killed in the crossfire. (-10 downvotes)

[mopeing]

/r/unitedkingdom has always been a shithole but the number of literal fascists that are taking over every thread in the subreddit recently is incredibly distressing.

[mopeing]

/r/unitedkingdom commenter: You get arrested these days for flying the British flag in London [+20 upvotes]

Reply: You're sounding exactly like that Stewart Lee standup routine mocking right-wingers for saying stupid things exactly like that [-10 downvotes]

/r/unitedkingdom commenter: Maybe that's because it's actually happening [+10 upvotes]

[mopeing]

Genius /r/unitedkingdom commenter: The fact that you have called me a fascist makes you a fascist, actually.

[mopeing]

I'm pretty sure I've written about this before but it annoys me how people use the terms left/right wing to mean "people who agree/disagree with me".

Stop calling TERFs right-wing. Maybe they are! But the whole point of the term TERF is that they consider themselves to be and present themselves as feminists. If you make it so that bigotry is something only right-wingers can do (the other group you aren't a part of) then it might hinder your ability to self-reflect on your behaviour or communicate intricacies to third-parties.

"I can't be bigoted, I'm a leftist" ; "how can feminism be right-wing?"

There are things that are bad out there that aren't right wing. And even if you believe that all right-wing thought is bad, it isn't the label "right-wing" that makes it bad.

[mopeing]

The Left: Don't use the word "retard" it's problematic!

Also The Left: uncritically let the word "degenerate" seep into their vocabulary from the far right.

[mopeing]

What people say: the law should be applied equally. Even the most evil people should have rights that are respected by the state.

What the morons of /r/unitedkingdom wilfully misinterpret it to mean: I personally support all evil. I support terrorists and rapists and child abusers. I am not shy about admitting this for some reason even though presumably it could lose me my job or my friends if I said that. There is a large enough contingent of people like me who openly admit to supporting evil that you complain about us being everywhere, but not enough that despite being a democracy nobody in parliament is arguing that these evil things are acceptable. This is not at all an inconsistent world we live in that only exists because morons are strawmanning us :)

[mopeing]

On the one hand, the far-right crying "nooo I'm not far right, I'm centrist" and accusing actual centrists of being far-left is probably a rhetorical technique to shift the overton window rightwards.

But on the other hand, I suspect some of them are just kind of dim. They don't understand that they're not the centre of the universe and that everyone exists relative to each other. That is, everyone is in the centre of where they personally think the overton window should be, but far-right idiots don't realise that when people talk about politics as a whole and not just kept inside their own head, they're talking about where they are relative to each other, relative to the political centre of mass so to speak. They might legitimately believe "nooo I'm not far-right"

[mopeing]

Utterly depressing how much the far right (and thus the commentariat or /r/unitedkingdom) have been pushing this idea that "Muslims hate gays, therefore The Left is hypocritical to be against the genocide of Palestinians"

Because of course we all know that 1) everyone belonging to a religion has the same values; 2) Christianity is famously tolerant of gays; 3) people's right to not be genocided is contingent on them agreeing with my personal politics