#people won't hold the exact views you believe they 'should' because of their demographics

[wild-at-mind]

It’s funny because I would actually describe my political views as pretty radical. However I don’t talk about it much online because the way it seems to be normal to talk about these things online is just utterly noxious to me. Sorry to use an old fashioned word but it fits the best. Like, physically repellant. The first thing is the very black and white thinking, it triggers a part of my brain (that maybe is the OCD or maybe the Evangelical church or a toxic combination of both) that causes me to emotionally seize up almost immediately.

Then there is the endless belittling of anyone who slightly disagrees or you just don’t like. It’s all funny online shit and memes I guess but to me it’s so toxic. It says to me ‘if you become friendly with us, this will be you if you even slightly step out of line’. Or if it’s not belittling, it’s the refusal to interpret anything other than in the absolute extreme it can possibly be, like a few weeks ago when someone told me anonymously that I must be a nationalist defender because I said it’s not nationalism for Biden to address the American people and express hope for a better US after the Capitol Hill riots. I’m not even American but I don’t feel I was wrong to say that, like, I’m so glad some people can survive on a diet of endless unadulterated misery and pessimism but as I may have expressed before, that would kill me! (Or even if the sentiment doesn’t work for you personally 1. he was addressing  an entire, gigantic country, and 2. you are still jumping to the worst possible and most extreme conclusion about what he is saying. What is the benefit here?) Meanwhile, all the funny online shit and guilletine memes goes on and on. We all tweet rat emojis at the gay politician, it’s so funny and no one has a problem with it (because we will nudge them out of our cliche if they do), and the actual specifics of what we want and what we are trying to do, to be, as leftists, are never fucking talked about! I’m going to assume in good faith that some of the people talk about it with their irl organising groups but many people are not in a place they can meet with fellow leftists on their doorstep (i.e. me) and they came online to try and learn more that way, and this is what they got. What I think I find most difficult is how easily misinformation spreads through a kind of exaggeration, that cannot be corrected because if you do you look like you are defending the action being talked about. It always goes like: ‘X politician did this really bad, awful thing!’ ‘Actually, this is misinformation. What he did was this slightly less bad thing.’ ‘Oh, I suppose you think slightly less bad thing is ok then??!!’ Like, there’s not much argument with that, is there? The 2nd person really does look like they are defending the slightly less bad thing, even if their intention was just to correct misinformation, because of a quirk of how arguments work. What I rarely see talked about is why on earth is the 1st person putting out exaggerations like this, which you often see happening over and over again in political online spaces, and should they be held accountable for that? If slightly less bad thing is very bad, surely it will stand on its own if described accurately and not exaggerated? The worst part I think is how at some point online leftists seem to have decided all discussion of racism is meaningless idpol?! Like, I fully support the movement to root out TERFish ideology in lefty online spaces, but for gods sake why is there not a similar one to boot out this kind of quasi-racists in leftism? I think it’s because it spoils the fun if someone actually says ‘that joke about a person of colour who is in power doesn’t hit the same as it does about a white person, in fact it is offensive, even if that person of colour is in a position of power. If you are white maybe avoid that kind of joke towards ANY person of colour’. I have no idea how this shift happened, I understand a lot of anti-racism blogs on here went inactive when a lot of blogs did during the drop-off in users, but that was more of a reaction to the changing userbase than the cause of it. I’ve been here a long time and it has changed so much, the way people talk about racism, it’s like people think it barely matters in their leftist ideology now. Wtf?? For the above reasons I really feel that tumblr is no longer a good place for political stuff (and twitter definitely isn’t x10000000), leftist meme culture in general is very frustrating for me on any platform (e.g. my facebook feed during the last general election) and I think the best idea for me to learn and grow at this point is to get back to the primary texts these people are doing a very bastardised version of and work from there. It’s hard because part of me kind of believes that the only reason I think this is because the truth is I really am the very essence of the liberal they all hate. But that isn’t reflected in my politics at all! So what does it even mean?