#im of the radical ideology that you should always say how you feel clearly so this season tickles

[sunnykeysmash]

nerd thing to say but my favorite part of today's ep was that they defined the word "sorry" as "to make better the feelings" I thought that was pretty cool

[caden]

we’ve all frequently busted out the old “I’m not debating you I’m mocking you” line and it’s always very funny and satisfying but like... im starting to be more and more skeptical of that mindset because i think it gets us into some really counterproductive habits. If you run a small personal blog its whatever but for people with more than one or two thousand followers who specifically wanna focus on politics... either debate people or ignore them. Leftism isn’t supposed to be a secret club where we just pass around inside jokes making fun of people with the wrong opinion. It’s fine to have small insular communities, but if your behavior is encouraging inaccessibility and hostility towards outsiders it makes me question what your real goals and values are, or at least how responsibly you’re handling your platform. 

Debating fascists generally just spreads their propaganda to a wider audience and doesn’t do much to sway them or their followers-- if a fascist is screaming ‘debate me, debate me!’ unless you have a very comprehensive and strong argument against the shit they’re saying, you can just ignore them. In general I think it’s good to debate when they’re spreading demonstrably false statistics and narratives, but make sure to clearly cite actual proof that what they’re saying is wrong. If you see a bigoted meme or a dogwhistle, signal boosting that stuff doesn’t help-- you’re just giving them what they want, even if you have a three paragraph long response about why it’s bad. It’s fine to ignore them.  But, like, ignore them. Spreading reactionary shit and just adding a minor burn on the OP is worse than doing nothing. It gets their propaganda out to all of your followers, and the only substantial counter-argument you’ve put there is one that will only appeal to people that are already 100% on your side. Variants of this are replying with “stfu bootlicker”, screenshotting the hentai on their blog/ their cringey blog description, just saying “learn to read” when people are misrepresenting your argument, a picture of the OP looking like a reddit fedora atheist, essentially any reaction picture but a common example would be the no-brain drooling wojak, etc. Like I know it’s fun but i also think it’s kind of shortsighted of us. Ultimately, it is necessary to educate people, to debunk false narratives, to show people why one answer is right and the other is wrong. And again I’m not saying you should be debating the fascist incel guy who’s posting bad-faith inflammatory horseshit. You’re NEVER debating that guy-- obviously you will never ever make someone over the internet directly admit that they are wrong. But you can convince the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people reading the post that your argument is the correct one. If you engage in the debate, you’re doing it for the sake of the audience, not to actually sway the other person. And posting leftist in-jokes won’t do anything to win the audience over.  Also, obviously no one post is gonna convert someone’s followers from fascism to leftism. It’s only after repeatedly seeing legitimate doubt cast on that flawed ideology that their followers will start to slowly come towards our side, or even just open their minds to the idea that there are other ways of thinking. This goes double if the person you’re debating is liberal or center-left, where they’re actually arguing in good faith and genuinely aren’t that far from being able to understand our point of view.

Smaller personal blogs don’t have a huuuuge responsibility to bother with any of this, but nowadays I pretty wholeheartedly feel that if you have a mildly to considerably large follower base it’s pretty irresponsible to have the attitude of "my goal on here is to make the people with the right opinion feel good that they’re right and the people with the wrong opinion feel bad that they’re wrong”. Just the small change of saying “my goal on here is to state the right opinion in a way that will encourage more people to have that right opinion” would make a tangible difference in what kind of content you output. I’m not trying to promote anyone making themselves less radical, or watering down their ideas to appeal to centrists-- I’m saying you should be in a constant cycle of explaining your goals and ideas in simple, honest terms, and making some effort to do so in a way that’s accessible to as many people as possible. 

PS: The one exception to the ‘in-joke memes won’t win people over’ thing is that i DO think some of the semi-coordinated bullying campaigns against right wing shitbags have worked to great effect on here. That’s not me necessarily saying I 100% approve of all of them morally, I do think using targeted harassment as a political strategy is playing with fire... but communismkills (just for example) went from being someone with genuine sway over thousands of people whose opinions were taken relatively seriously to being a TOTAL joke who now actively hams it up just to stay relevant. The “kung pow penis” campaign was slightly less successful in that it was very easy for the guy to spin into ‘the pathetic sjws are targeting me’ and therefore most of his followers quickly sided with him-- ideally, you would want the person’s followers to say ‘watching this dude humiliate himself is embarrassing, maybe i shouldn’t have ever taken him so seriously’.

Anyways, I’ve said this a bunch of times before but I’m having less and less tolerance for people who devote hundreds of hours to arguing on here but rarely say anything substantial past “I’m right because I said so, you’re wrong, the end”.

[makaturuok]

every day we hear people excuse donald’s behavior talking bout we should give him a chance, respect him, he’s president, we’ll be ok, liberals are overreacting snowflakes etc etc and every time i wish to say something i had to take a few minutes to kind of grasp what i just heard and i feel like im having an out of body experience and the words just take its time to ring and bounce around the walls of my brain and skull and into my sinking chest…..its not about opposing political ideologies…… its not about the labels of liberal and conservative…. its not black and white…. how is it so hard to be a decent fucking human being… is being decent a radical thing now…..is common sense hard….is empathy rare……ive heard the words today “how is trump sexist” with my own two ears from someone i respect and i had to pause while i recollect all those headlines of him being a misogynistic garbage…all the women he violated and called names…his party working towards defunding planned parenthood…..but all i was able to do was mumble oh my god under my breath…..how do you take in those words from someone so clearly ignorant yet older than you….how do u deal with that kind of situation… it haunts you when u say something it haunts u when u dont…..its not about experience. it IS OUT THERE. its a google away. all types of media it IS LITERALLY OUT THERE. how is TRUMP SEXIST. how is trump racist. HOW. HOW. IS. THIS. REAL. and its been real ever since my 21 year old self was still too young to understand that the worlds always been cruel to certain groups of people. ignorance is truly the worst threat to mankind.