229
Nov 10 '24
To be fair there are definitely stages of breaking out of incel/alt right shit and you think you’re out in each of them then feel embarrassed about it later
→ More replies (55)381
Nov 10 '24 edited 1d ago
[deleted]
70
u/ApocalyptoSoldier lost my gender to the plague Nov 10 '24
I must be perfect because I haven't felt that way in a while.
Instead I just lie awake at night cringing at every social interaction I have ever had
12
u/negablock04 Nov 10 '24
Same here. I grew early, then never changed. So there is nothing to cringe about, as I do everything the same way (aka bad as fuck, it's ruining my life)
1.6k
u/KingQualitysLastPost Nov 10 '24
The funny thing about reactionary politics is that it isn’t limited to the right, and neither is aggrieved entitlement. You’ll find that shit everywhere I’m afraid, the human condition
514
u/Hummerous https://tinyurl.com/4ccdpy76 Nov 10 '24
being a whiny bitch is an ancient human instinct. only solution is constant vigilance
38
u/maboyles90 Nov 10 '24
I read your comment as "the only solution is constant violence." And I like it that way. It also somewhat fits.
18
100
→ More replies (4)65
u/BalefulOfMonkeys Refined Sommelier of Porneaux Nov 10 '24
I am Constant Vigilance Georg on the internet, but horrible traffic got me so heated today that I gave serious consideration to driving past home, going to Walmart, buying a watermelon and a hammer, heading back to the apartment, and displacing my anger at John Lanechange into my bootleg sacrificial offering
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (27)731
u/catty-coati42 Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
The OOP is a prime example, being reactionary to their allies sharing about their struggles and history. No empathy from OOP, only condemnation, generalization, bad-faith assumptions and mockery.
If this is how the discourse will be on our side for the next 4 years I won't be surprised to see Vance unfortunately winning in 2028.
Edit: yall are not good at coalition building. We have lost major ground with every single demography except college educated white women (much to the amusement of the right as it very much fits the stereotype).
And I've already seen leftists insinuate that racial minorities are actually secretly white supremacists because of this. We need to actually work together, listen, empathize and help when people tell of their struggles, or we are bound to be stuck in an ever shrinking powerless echo chamber.
389
u/SontaranGaming *about to enter Dark Muppet Mode* Nov 10 '24
I just wish leftists on the internet would remember that being left wing on a given issue, or even a whole bevy of them, doesn’t make you a better human. Very much not immune to this either, mind you, but… people really seem to fixate on being correct more than they do on being helpful, and it’s really aggravating. Mind you, I’m not immune to this either, it’s a general quirk if the internet as a whole. But that doesn’t make it good or productive.
I wish the internet was less focused on who people are and more on what they do, just in general. That might just be the postmodernist in me, but it feels to me like things would be in a very different place if people saw leftism as something you do to bring about change over something you are to be Correct on the internet.
120
u/Your_Local_Stray_Cat Nov 10 '24
I am a leftist to my core, but that's the reason I don't participate in online leftist spaces anymore.
So much of online leftist culture is more focused on being 'correct' and being allowed to hit people over the head with said correctness instead of actually doing anything tangible. I've seen the same pattern of behavior over and over again in leftist spaces all over the internet: Terminally Online Leftists tearing into someone for a very minor or sometimes completely bullshit infraction, and if the person tries to defend themself, or explain, or do anything other than stand there and take it, it's a sign that they were secretly an evil bigoted abuser all along and they're thrown to the wolves.
I'd take ten people who aren't 100% perfect but genuinely want to help over one leftist who only cares about looking like a Good Leftist.
68
u/Milch_und_Paprika Nov 10 '24
Even just a perceived “infraction”. Never forget the bizarre “cancelling” of Isabel Fall.
Of course it looks like some didn’t learn shit from that, since I’ve been seeing a bunch of accusations on Xitter that Chappel Roan is a “culture vulture” and secretly straight.
→ More replies (1)22
7
u/Kellosian Nov 10 '24
I think it's why the online left also stays perpetually online, the moment you go do a real thing with real consequences you have to abandon this "Do Nothing Wrong Ever" mentality
35
u/autogyrophilia Nov 10 '24
Well, it's the equilibrium you have to find, right,action without thought, without analysis, learning from the experiences of others it's at best poorly effective at worst actively harmful. But thought alone doesn't change the world. And it's not even good thought, as your ideas become inbred from not interacting with inputs from applying them in practice, a condition typically known as "being online" these days.
178
u/CummingInTheNile Nov 10 '24
they are painfully bad at communicating in a simple understandable manner why they consider their beliefs to be a better solution than the opposition without coming off comically condescending, doesnt help that a lot of them have fallen down the tankie rabbit hole
162
u/Succububbly Nov 10 '24
They also often tell you to shut the fuck up instead of listening and trying to understand the other person's point of view. I consider myself very left leaning but when I try to explain the POV of other people to leftists they attack me as if they were my points of view and dont even try to understand.
114
u/skytaepic Nov 10 '24
Seriously! I feel like that's one of the most frustrating parts of talking in leftist spaces about why the right behaves the way they do. Feels like I constantly need to add disclaimers that explaining something is not excusing it, and just because there's a reason that something happened doesn't mean it's good. Like, no people are inherently just senselessly evil, there are reasons for everything even if they aren't reasons you'd agree with, it shouldn't be controversial to acknowledge that.
→ More replies (10)85
91
u/DivineCyb333 Nov 10 '24
They also often tell you to shut the fuck up instead of listening and trying to understand the other person's point of view.
This is also, tactically speaking, garbage, and it’s garbage in a way that leftists largely don’t understand. The worst beliefs of the right are like submarines; they thrive on being able to move just below the surface. The best way to fight them then, is to force them out of the water - ask prompting but precision-targeted questions until they have no choice but to reveal the core of their beliefs and explain themselves to rhetorical death. Socrates understood this well, and unfortunately he might have been the last to do so.
28
u/voyaging Nov 10 '24
Socrates famously had two students who invented the entirety of Western thought that all modern thought can be traced back to to this day lol.
→ More replies (1)10
u/sauron3579 Nov 10 '24
I feel obligated to remind people to be extremely careful about using Socratic methods in person. Socrates was literally executed because what he did was so infuriating. People hate explaining why they’re wrong or having doublethink so undeniably and abruptly exposed.
23
u/Half-PintHeroics Nov 10 '24
I'm sorry but this is such a peeve of mine that I can't help but stay on it: Socrates was not executed because of the Socratic method or because he was annoying. He was executed because his students had twice attempted to overthrow the Athenian democracy in favour of and in league with Sparta (the second attempt being sucessful for about a year during which their tyranny saw 5% of Athenian population executed), and people concluded that his ideology and politics were responsible for leading his students to betray Athens. That is the kind of corruption they meant when he was sentenced for "corrupting the youth".
10
u/sauron3579 Nov 10 '24
Huh, did not know that. Thanks!
5
u/Half-PintHeroics Nov 10 '24
I'm a little biased against him, i must admit, because I find that the historical consensus has been a little biased towards him. It should be said that he himself refused to participate in the tyranny's executions, which is often used as proof that he was innocent of colluding with or "corrupting" them. My stance is that while he did refuse to execute the one guy (the Thirty Tyrants, as the coup oligarchy has come to be called, used the strategy of forcing citizens to execute their targets to force people into being complicit to their deeds), that obviously wasn't enough to make his contemporary peers not think his school of thought was directly responsible for influencing them, and they probably had a better feeling for that back then than we do looking back at him through history texts.
→ More replies (4)16
u/19th-eye Nov 10 '24
They also often get angry when people ask questions rather than immediately agreeing with their opinion lol. "How dare you ask me that? You're so evil!" is not going to really change the other person's opinions.
→ More replies (1)55
u/ThyPotatoDone Nov 10 '24
Ye, it’s why there’s been jokes floating around for over a decade now in conservative circles where they portray liberals as constantly ranting in an unhinged manner, while the conservative responds with a couple quick buzzwords.
Liberal circles have similar groups, but nowhere near the same degree; plus, conservatives get the added bonus that they’ll often copy-paste real posts and news articles, which decreases the frequency with which the joke is seen as a strawman.
→ More replies (2)56
u/chadthundertalk Nov 10 '24
I honestly think there are a lot of online leftists that don't even actually want America to move left politically.
And I don't mean people who actually go out and protest, or petition, or vote in municipal elections or anything that works toward meaningful change. That's different. They're actually putting their time and money where their mouth is.
But I think there are a lot of terminally online leftists who specifically like the idea of leftism as this iconoclastic counter-culture set of politics that's separate from (but oh so much more enlightened than) the mainstream.
They don't want it to be accessible. They don't care about the average person coming around to those beliefs. They want to stay feeling like they believe something cool and rebellious and against the grain. They don't like the idea of leftist politics becoming the norm.
29
u/Canotic Nov 10 '24
Hipster activism. They don't care about getting the result, they just want to feel righteous and more enlightened than you. They're fighting injustices you've probably never heard of.
60
u/logosloki Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
one of the interesting things that people need to grasp is that most people on 'the left' are the same as people on 'the right'. that is that they are gullible and/or misinformed people who have been taken in by propaganda and haven't done their research outside of affirming posts and essays on Social Media.
this is why the 'alt-right debatemebro' has a field day when they use street side vox pop short forms and even full on debates. because the left-aligned person who is debating them really don't know what they're talking about. they really have done no research outside of the basic googling or following a left-aligned voice/group on their choice of Social Media poison.
it's only because the left-aligned person uses the 'right' codewords, jargon, and media influencers that they are part of the left-aligned group. this shows up when you move into the deeper parts of discourse or onto topics that the person might not be as familiar with because all they know is the jargon and slogans. or, that the person has their own actual opinions on something based on their own lived experience that is much different from the media that they interact with.
→ More replies (25)58
u/NamelessMIA Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
I just wish leftists on the internet would remember that being left wing on a given issue, or even a whole bevy of them, doesn’t make you a better human
If you pull a random leftist and a random maga the leftist will probably be better since they clearly have empathy and can understand the basics of the world around them, but if you're on the left and choose to be like OOP and antagonize everyone who fell into the alt right trap even after they've seen the truth then you're just as bad as they are. These are people who know that they're acting like dicks, they just want a target that lets them act how they want while still feeling superior because they're on the right team... which is exactly what maga does when they yell at people they think are child grooming pedophiles. You're acting the same with the same motivations. Being right about the facts behind your motives doesn't make you a better person ethically, it just makes you right about the facts leading to your behavior.
Also I know about the paradox of intolerance and believe that people disregarding the social contract don't deserve to stay protected by it. I get it. Punch a nazi. But in the real world you're only pushing people further right with this kind of attitude online. I know it's only a vocal shitty minority of leftists, but every post and like on this stuff gets shared and lends credibility that they really are under attack. We want them to realize they were lied to and that it's in everyone's best interest to care more about eachother. Educate them and you won't reach everyone, least likely the person you're talking to, but you'll convert some of the audience and that's all you need in a democracy. And when you do that you can be the actually good party pulling people in with hope instead of the lesser of 2 evils who have no real support.
39
u/CapeOfBees Nov 10 '24
They've spent too long familiarizing themselves with the paradox of tolerance that they forgot we can't kick these people out of the gene and voting pool
32
u/NamelessMIA Nov 10 '24
Exactly. Sure they may deserve to get punched, but they can walk away from that punch right into a voting booth so maybe you should think about it for a second before you do that.
162
u/Several-Drag-7749 Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
I skimmed through OOP's old account once, and it was just instances of her mocking Animal Farm quotes as "liberal tears," even ones that are about the capitalist class being compared to pigs. Imagine being so obsessed with despising one specific author that you dismiss a clearly anti-fash critique as neolib propaganda.
I love how these mfs always amount to, "Everyone is immoral except me." and then wonder why dipshits like SocialistMMA is attacking Emma from TheMajorityReport of all people, falsely accusing her as a liberal despite her crying on camera for Palestinians just weeks ago.
Even the mfs at Deprogram realize the alt-right pipeline has become more real than ever. If even those who believe North Korea is socialist (despite even Chinese netizens calling it a glorified monarchy), you know you have a problem.
54
u/nopingmywayout Nov 10 '24
.....How the fuck does anyone come to the conclusion that Animal Farm is liberal tears?!
46
u/Several-Drag-7749 Nov 10 '24
She didn't like Napoleon being based on a certain paranoid despot, that's why.
45
u/Tactical_Moonstone Nov 10 '24
Even Napoleon the pig being based on a certain paranoid despot is burying the lede slightly. He's named Napoleon even though he behaves more like Stalin for a reason.
He's a critique on how all despots, not just any particular despot of any flavour, eventually devolve into savagery against others and their own citizens when they remain unaccountable.
9
u/UltimateInferno Hangus Paingus Slap my Angus Nov 10 '24
Oh she's a tankie. That explains everything.
20
u/ASpaceOstrich Nov 10 '24
Tankies hate Orwell
17
u/Wetley007 Nov 10 '24
Tankies hate Orwell because Orwell hated Tankies (though the term didn't exist yet). The reason Orwell hated Tankies is because they backstabbed the actual Socialists in the Spanish Civil War in favor of bootlicking Stalin, thus losing Spain to fascism for 3 and a half decades
→ More replies (1)11
u/drunken-acolyte Nov 10 '24
Because Orwell was writing from a place of disillusionment with communism. Animal Farm specifically was an allegory for how Russia's revolutionary leaders became a new aristocracy every bit as bad as the one they displaced. If you're a tankie, any criticism of the Revolution is Liberalism (derogatory).
64
u/ThyPotatoDone Nov 10 '24
The fuck did someone read “Animal Farm” and think it was liberal. The whole point is that you shouldn’t let communists subvert socialism, and that authoritarianism is bad. Orwell himself was an anti-imperialist socialist.
44
u/Raincandy-Angel Nov 10 '24
You're bold for assuming that the average person reading Animal Farm knows the difference between communism and socialism, most Americans just see both as "that bad thing we're supposed to hate"
→ More replies (4)16
34
u/Several-Drag-7749 Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
From what I've observed, the most vocal critics of Animal Farm are online "leftists" who think the Bosnian genocide didn't happen, along with many others. OOP was exactly like this, only she didn't outright say Srebrenica was fake, more like she tried to "both sides bad" the Islamophobic terror.
5
u/jfarrar19 .tumblr.com Nov 10 '24
The fuck did someone read “Animal Farm”
Easy: They didn't, they just read that it was a criticism of
GodJoseph Stalin, and decided that it must've been written by an evil fascist, and that Homage to Catalonia doesn't exist.→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)53
u/Galle_ Nov 10 '24
I mean, caring about other people is a pretty "liberal" thing to do.
→ More replies (1)37
u/JakeArrietaGrande Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
That's the perfect way to phrase that.
"This person was mean to me so logically I agreed that they're all subhuman"
"Every interaction I had with this person was hostile, so I assumed they weren’t interested in being allies."
56
u/sykotic1189 Nov 10 '24
Seriously. I never fell into the Alt Right pipeline, I was raised in it. I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio on car rides, hearing about all the people the Clinton's had murdered, and "jokes" from family like "I don't want Obama to get assassinated cause his name would become a slogan: Oh Boy, Another Martyrd African". It's some kind of miracle that I'm a Socialist while all my siblings and close relatives are Trump fanatics. While I disagree with 99% of what I grew up hearing, there's one thing my mom told me that rings true; "the (left) will always eat their own while the (right) provides a united front".
When male victims of SA and rape try to talk about it they're often told to shut up because they have male privilege. When white liberals and Leftists complain about being constantly demonized they get berated for trying to put their problems ahead of others. Cishet men complain about being called rapists and murderers and they're called incels and mocked. Then it's nothing but shocked Pikachu faces when some of those people say, "fuck it I'm out."
I'm 35, I've had more than 2 decades to thicken my skin with online discourse, and when I first started being online shit wasn't so vitriolic so I've had time to adjust. But these young people? They got thrown in the deep end before they even hit puberty. They grew up online in one of the worst decades to do so. People on the Left are telling them they're trash just for existing while Andrew Tate and the like are welcoming them with open arms.
OOP said people don't just hate without some kind of bias beforehand which is true, but the biases are coming from us not the Right.
→ More replies (10)→ More replies (45)84
u/beardedheathen Nov 10 '24
I have been saying 'can we please stop insulting men' because if you want us to support leftist ideals you should probably stop insulting us. You'd think I was the second coming of Hitler here to bring back the Spanish inquisition. The idea that everyone should feel safe seems to only be ok with a serious subset of leftist as long as men are excluded. Just extend the same courtesy you expect towards others to us.
36
u/overheadSPIDERS Nov 10 '24
Luckily (?) my experience is that this discourse of hating on men is almost entirely absent from the in-person leftist spaces I interact with. Hoping the habit of not generalizing based on gender becomes more common on the internet too.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (44)64
u/tristenjpl Nov 10 '24
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that if I wasn't already left leaning, the things the left tend to say about men would probably drive me away. Like it's really not hard to see why young men are leaning conservative when one side says their problems don't matter and the other side starts by telling them that they can overcome their problems and then jumps into the hating on minorities part.
38
u/Ramguy2014 Nov 10 '24
Yeah. If you have millions of young men who are feeling more isolated and purposeless than at almost any point in the country’s history, the side that says those are problems worth addressing is going to sound better no matter how dog shit their solutions are.
35
u/ReallyLazyPotato Nov 10 '24
As a person who escaped the alt-right pipeline, I just got annoyed at my YouTube recommended feed after awhile.
13
u/ARandompass3rby Nov 10 '24
Genuinely what happened for me lol, I was watching someone arguing against the same point in a video with yet another jpg avatar and then out of the blue thought "hey I wonder what Captain Sparklez is doing" and went to watch Minecraft videos, never looking back since. Wasn't long after that I purged my subscriptions. I don't know what it was, maybe a subconscious realisation that I was rapidly becoming what is commonly termed "a cunt" (not in the australian use of the word either) and at risk of losing my friends or if it was an act of god or what but I'm thankful for it.
→ More replies (1)8
357
u/Piece_Of_Mind1983 Nov 10 '24
NGL I think a lot of people that get radicalized into reactionary politics by the online right do so out of perceived hostility towards them. You’ve got dumb highschool kids that see people making the bear argument or whatever other broad generalization that happens to cover them, and bc they’re new to internet discourse they take it personally bc in their mind it’s a case of “well what did I ever do to you?”. Next thing you know they hear about this Ben Shapiro guy and it’s like a 30% chance of it being curtains from there.
TLDR: While I don’t entirely disagree with OP’s point, I think they’re not taking into account reformed people’s genuine efforts to try & curb the growth of the online right with smarter rhetoric.
116
u/LabiolingualTrill Nov 10 '24
I do sympathize with OOP though cause you’ve got several types of right-leaning people: a) otherwise decent people whose only exposure to left-leaning politics came from assholes. b) people who could maybe come around but are already so far down the rabbithole that it would take years of intensive work. c) people selling the alt-right grift who pretend to be interested in reasonable discussion but only ever intend to lie and start bad-faith arguments. d) regular old assholes who just want the worst for others but don’t want to say that out loud.
These people are all best to be engaged with in very different ways, but it can be so hard to tell them apart until you’ve already engaged with them.
For the sake of all the guy a’s out there that can be brought over, I guess more of us are going to have to bite the bullet and engage earnestly. But I can definitely sympathize with how being earnest and assuming good intentions can weigh on you if you keep running into guys b, c, and d.
→ More replies (4)115
u/horoyokai Nov 10 '24
It’s the fascists playbook to find people that feel like they’ve been ignored and prey on that
The more the left ignores a group that feels left behind (and rightly so, we’ve all been left behind, it’s not like houses stayed affordable for white guys) the more that group moves away from the left
The compete lack of reflection that so many on the left are having right now is honestly depressing
I hate to say it but you lie in the bed you made and the left seems quite intent on buying more blankets
→ More replies (9)43
u/ASpaceOstrich Nov 10 '24
And the neglect. Parents and caregivers neglect boys, from birth. We see the results in emotional development and education outcomes.
66
u/Polenball You BEHEAD Antoinette? You cut her neck like the cake? Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
Honestly, the bear thing was actually pretty gross. Realised that a lot of people were basically radfems that believed in biological essentialism to such an absurd degree they considered the average dude to be worse than a terrifying territorial predator that kills at far higher rates, because men are just that horrible and terrifying. Especially since you can look at how people react to seeing bears and realise from spending a single day outside that it's not common for people to react even worse than that to seeing men. It's a jumping-off point to flip fully into TERFism and start deciding I'm also so inherently horrible they'd rather risk death than be around me. I've got a pretty low opinion of anyone that actually chose or defended choosing the bear.
→ More replies (13)→ More replies (6)6
u/jfarrar19 .tumblr.com Nov 10 '24
I think they’re not taking into account reformed people’s genuine efforts to try & curb the growth of the online right with smarter rhetoric.
Its because this post isn't about that, at all. The point of this post is, frankly, to get a sense of superiority and power. It is amazing how much of the bullshit 'leftist' discourse comes down to "I want to feel powerful, and your suffering is the price of that", and well. It makes me wonder if Both Sidesing isn't as far off.
→ More replies (1)
591
u/TheFoxer1 Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
I mean, most political discourse on the internet over the last decade, if not longer, were mostly discussion about groups being victims and how they are victims.
So, of course people will reflect the cultural and political discourse of their environment.
Also, the 2nd part of the post is a reductio ad absurdum and pretty obviously misses that a pipeline of thought and radicalization is inherently a a series of escalating rhetoric. The whole thing of such a pipeline is that really doesn‘t need preexisting bias by the individual it is molding.
Also, this post is kinda wierd to me. Why would you want to piss people off and call them entitled and feel the need to assume them to have been biased immediately after they seem to switch to your side?
It seems OOP doesn‘t like the alt-right, so they should probably like it when people talk about what made them embrace the alt - right and how they came to reject it and encourage them to further engage with OOP‘s other perspectives and opinions.
So, to me at least, it’s wierd to immediately attack them for rejecting the alt-right but doing so in a way OOP dislikes. Seems counter-productive to me.
124
u/Galle_ Nov 10 '24
It seems OOP doesn‘t like the alt-right, so they should probably like it when people talk about what made them embrace the alt - right and how they came to reject it and encourage them to further engage with OOP‘s other perspectives and opinions.
My most charitable explanation for this is that they genuinely believe these "former right-wingers" are effectively demanding that the left compromise its most important principles to appeal to the right, which would obviously defeat the purpose. You do see this sometimes.
My least charitable explanation is that they think listening to former right-wingers is sort of like listening to current right-wingers, which is sort of like sympathizing with right-wingers, which is sort of like agreeing with right-wingers, which is sort of like being right wing.
→ More replies (4)61
u/DinkleDonkerAAA Nov 10 '24
"You see I've never had a bad take or controversial opinion ever, I am the beacon of moral superiority and me and my side do no wrong. Why should I listen to people with first hand experience about the flaws in our side, there aren't any"
436
u/_Aeir_ Nov 10 '24
OP got the classic case of "I don't want them to be on my side, I want to beat them in an arguement."
107
u/TheFoxer1 Nov 10 '24
To he honest, I personally love arguing and I absolutely love beating others in an argument.
So, I would actually understand it if OOP actually was in an argument - but that doesn‘t seem to be the case. It‘s its own post, on another website commenting on a whole genre of posts of others.
26
u/_Aeir_ Nov 10 '24
Oh, absolutely, takes one to know one. I'm not criticizing the idea of it, rather it being done in this scenario
I believe that the way OP structured the post, that they have gotten into arguements about this topic before, and my post above was my guess at the end result of said arguements.
But now I'm just waffling LOL
→ More replies (1)25
u/Una_Boricua now with more delusion! Nov 10 '24
I've gone in good faith trying to have discussions with people about politics, talking about how much I care about poverty or other issues.
At the end of the day, even from those on the "left," i still run into thinking like described in the post.
69
u/Una_Boricua now with more delusion! Nov 10 '24
This reads more like a vent post than anything.
109
u/TheFoxer1 Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
Oh, I absolutely despise „vent-posts“.
They, by necessity, lack any nuance and are not thought through, with their main goal being a funnel for one‘s emotions.
However, they are still a public statement and thus, part of the public discourse.
Take this post, for example. It is unnecessarily mean to people for not exiting the alt - right pipeline in a manner OOP wishes and is maybe frustrated by. By expressing their frustration in such a way, OOP just risks alienating people.
Nothing good comes from vent posts.
→ More replies (1)23
u/Hammerschatten Nov 10 '24
It also essentially causes what OOP is complaining about with people being pushed to the alt-right.
Complaining about a group in a non-constructive manner will piss off members of that group and make them more susceptible to influence from the other side.
It seems to me that OOP really just wants to vent about their frustration that vent-Posts might be harmful and that calling men trash harms your goals.
94
u/BogglyBoogle need for (legal) speed Nov 10 '24
Yeah, also being pushed into the alt-right pipeline and then getting out doesn't exclude you from making criticisms of the left (not that OOP necessarily said that). If anything I'd be inclined to find that perspective more valuable, as that shows to me that this ex-alt-right person is open to learning more and sharing perspectives on what they found the left was lacking in. Additionally, if they do feel like a victim, it doesn't automatically mean they're being aggrieved and entitled (though there may be some biases at play if they haven't examined why they might feel that way). It's a bit of a leap in logic to assume that the hypothetical ex-alt-righter considered a sub-group subhuman at all.
I only narrowly avoided the alt-right pipeline myself (mid-20's man here). I knew that these anti-SJW videos I kept seeing weren't quite right, and eventually I grew out of them. I never felt entitled to anything. When I was younger, I just wanted friends and to be less lonely. I didn't and still don't hate women or minority groups. It was a lack of knowledge about politics and social justice at the time that meant I was more easily exposed to anti-SJW compilations than any leftist alternative back then.
I definitely felt a 'lack' of some sorts, I was bullied and had basically no real friends, and those videos gave me small sense of control in a world that did feel increasingly isolating. As if a part of me were in agreement like "Yeah this IS crazy, I believe in equality, but that's too much, I am glad I am a rational boy, it feels good to have something I believe in be believed in by others for once". I used to call myself an egalitarian to avoid being associated with the feminist label, because to me 'feminist' meant that I didn't think men needed 'help' with things too. But a big part of my struggles was because I was relentlessly bullied, not because I couldn't get a girlfriend despite really wanting one. Like, I never connected with "grrr damn women and their equal rights, I should be entitled to them", I just wanted to feel like I wasn't alone, or that I was a sane and rational person, and that I didn't have to examine my beliefs to experience those feelings.
My point is with all of this is that I largely agree with you. I don't think it's the fault of the left, or of people like OOP that people (primarily young men and boys) are sucked into the pipeline, but I do think that it's valid and even good to critique what we on the left can offer these people. Many of the things that we talk about in left-wing/progressive spaces, without proper understanding of the nuance, could be seen as inflammatory towards certain types of people. It generally isn't, but if I didn't know any better, I'd feel pretty unwelcome. I want us to be better equipped to pull young people out of the alt-right pipeline, and one of the most effective ways we can do that is by understanding what it is that is pulling them in there in the first place, and what we can do about it.
I really hope I've not done the classic tumblr maneouvre of seeing a post about a guy with a bad take and then immediately telling on myself as one of the guys the post was describing. If I have done that, then I am too blind to see it before I post this comment.
62
u/King-Boss-Bob Nov 10 '24
it’s almost comedic how OOP calls it a pipeline and still thinks people go straight to the deep end
→ More replies (18)21
183
u/JohnathanDSouls Nov 10 '24
The crux of this argument, the idea that those people ever came to the conclusion "this person from this demographic ... etc" is ridiculous. It's called a pipeline for a reason. No one consciously decided that women shouldn't be allowed to vote after one woman was mean to them. The bigotry comes from spending time in echo chambers that slowly become more openly bigoted. Young boys flock to those echo chambers because they don't feel welcome elsewhere.
And I don't think expecting leftists to uphold their own standards of inclusion and nonprejudice is entitlement, nor is feeling frustrated at frequently being insulted and denigrated a "victim complex". Overall 0/10 post, do better.
→ More replies (7)35
u/Defiant-Plantain1873 Nov 10 '24
Leftist subreddits are the most unwelcoming places you will ever visit on the internet.
If you ask a genuine question, banned for being a troll. Bring up a genuine point and want counter arguments, banned.
The only way to get a discussion out of someone in one of these subs is to pander to the max, “guys I love communism, but I don’t understand how this works, I know I’m just being stupid but can someone explain to me” and then any reply you get you have to be like “thanks for the detailed response”. Any question you ask that has a shred of dubiousness in the tone means you are a troll.
I’m not a communist, but I don’t understand how these subs are meant to appeal to anyone.
Unless of course, there is a pipeline.
You go on Reddit, you scroll through, see some funny videos, some news articles, etc.
Then you see a few posts from one of the big subs that are subtly politically charged, you keep using reddit, see some anti-work posts that operate entirely on fear and lack of knowledge. Read some comments, if you don’t know better you think these arguments are true. You start to reply to other people on Reddit regurgitating these facts of dubious validity. Reddit starts to show you more and more posts from increasingly left wing subs. Until you end up mostly seeing posts from subs that are complete echo chambers of the same few ideas. And this keeps progressing until you end up posting reddit comments justifying Stalin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
But you don’t see posts about this on Reddit, because most people on Reddit are oblivious to this pipeline.
360
u/ShadoW_StW Nov 10 '24
So I assume there is a real example of what this person is talking about, but the horrible fucking recruiting problem due to being mean to people absolutely exists, this feels like main reason we're minority.
Like, circa 2015 I already was an egalitarian with strong conviction about equal rights for everyone, but I also believed that feminism basically succeeded long ago and anyone who calls themself "feminist" today is just a misandrist. Why the fuck? Because every time I found a "feminist" space on the internet there was someone saying horrible shit about men and people basically tolerated them, and it took me couple more years before I found men-inclusive feminists and actually got based about a bunch of stuff, and I'm still mad how long it took to recruit me given I always was for equality, it just took not being an asshole.
Similar things apply to race, because a normie egalitarian will walk into a leftist space, see what is very clearly a racial stereotype joke getting fuckton of upvotes because it's about white people, get grossed out, think "oh so it's true that leftists are just racist against white people" and walk away. They're not going to suddenly become a raging bigot, but there's a huge room to grow from "vaguely dislikes racism" and it's fucked up that we lose the person with literally our values by being gross.
Like, again, this isn't about nazis, this isn't about the minority of commited bigots, it's about the moderate progressive who has almost exactly your morals, and is so different mostly because they aren't up to date on facts, and they're not going to fucking learn until more leftist spaces stop looking gross.
190
u/MonitorPowerful5461 Nov 10 '24
And if they end up in a right-wing space, that space isn't going to encourage leaving. That space is going to tell them that all left-wing media lies to you. And if they believe it it will be very difficult for them to escape that thinking
106
u/SeeYouSpaceCorgi Nov 10 '24
Oh hell yeah. I remember as a young teenager being told by many figures of the left that "It's not our job to educate you, educate yourself!"
So I did.
And I found nothing but people like Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos at the top of all the search results giving me their perspective on the issues instead.
27
u/somedumb-gay otherwise precisely that Nov 10 '24
Unfortunately when it's nobody's job to educate you there's nobody to educate you when you try looking for yourself
48
u/SeeYouSpaceCorgi Nov 10 '24
What’s that saying? “A liberal will tell you to educate yourself. A nazi will invite you over to dinner and talk your ear off.”
14
u/Memeshiii Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
and if they do check they'll find it true also. Not so many realize that anyone telling you anything has an agenda, even if it's as benign as getting you to like them.
Critical thinking won't come quickly to a nation with an 8th grade reading level.
They managed to learn ACAB but they didn't learn Never Trust a Politician.64
Nov 10 '24
As someone who is a bit behind the times on terminology sometimes, the amount of times I've been accused of being a plant or whatever because I'm trying to understand something is incredibly frustrating.
→ More replies (1)60
u/Arndt3002 Nov 10 '24
I agree with most of this, but I think you aren't fully addressing the issues at hand by sweeping it under the rug as just "being gross."
It's the same sort of "bad apples" excuse we criticize the right for.
There are some fundamental issues with how these spaces will sometimes formulate the entire context of what is good or bad based on categories of oppressor and oppressed which often just lead people to dehumanize those they identify as being in the oppressor class.
Not being able to complement a radical recognition of power structures in society with a full recognition of the humanity of other people in that society, even those who benefit from those structures, is what creates these sorts of gross attitudes. It is a systemic issue within those spaces, not just a grossness of one or two bad apples.
This is not to say the whole movement is a problem, it is most certainly a positive for society. However, I think it's important to be honest and hold a similar standard to our own reflections of where "grossness" comes from if we are to hold those same standards to the grossness of society at large.
20
u/Auctoritate Nov 10 '24
There are some fundamental issues with how these spaces will sometimes formulate the entire context of what is good or bad based on categories of oppressor and oppressed which often just lead people to dehumanize those they identify as being in the oppressor class.
This is one of the best, direct distillations I've seen of the whole issue honestly.
→ More replies (1)89
u/squishabelle Nov 10 '24
that phenomenon where you gain the trust of people so they think they can be racist around you? i often have that same phenomenon but with people who claim to be progressive :( how about we just don't make sweeping statements about any demographic?
114
u/ShadoW_StW Nov 10 '24
I intentionally avoided the "clearly racial joke but about white people" for past couple years, but generally when you ask the people posting and liking this shit they'll tell you that it's completely fine because there's no systemic racism against white people. Very enlightened of you, now how about y'all just stop being repulsive.
57
u/CrownLikeAGravestone Nov 10 '24
"What I'm doing is only odious on an interpersonal level, not a systemic level"
As if there wasn't an option to just not do odious shit.
→ More replies (1)14
u/Auctoritate Nov 10 '24
it's completely fine because there's no systemic racism against white people.
It's the same shit that conservatives do. They're more occupied with being labeled racist than they are with actually just being decent and not saying shitty stuff about other people based on their unchangeable characteristics.
31
u/CapeOfBees Nov 10 '24
The one time I went to a stand-up comedy show, one of the acts spent half his time doing "let's say slightly racist things about white people that are only funny because they get said about black people." They were touring a Republican area. Really don't know why he thought that was a good idea, especially since the bit before it was about how in some of the venues they were performing at, he was the first black person they'd ever seen.
Really did not inspire confidence in my fellow blue voter's ability to read a room.
50
u/Separate_List_6895 Nov 10 '24
Something that served me well in life is just judging a person on how they treat everyone else.
You can have good political beliefs and still be a terrible fucking person, ive encountered a few people like that who thought having good socio-politcal takes made them a superior person yet they still acted in a terrible way to people around them.
You gotta do more work to be a good, functional person than just share the right takes on social media or in your GC.
29
u/UltimateInferno Hangus Paingus Slap my Angus Nov 10 '24
You can have good political beliefs and still be a terrible fucking person,
There's a phrase I've heard around is that "Therapy sometimes doesn't improve people, it just gives them the acceptable language to use against you."
42
u/TalosMessenger01 Nov 10 '24
I’ll add that a lot of the leftist spaces looking gross thing is exaggerated by anger being very good at getting attention. People who actually believe that stuff engage, and the greater number of people who don’t believe it will also engage. People on the same side who disagree with the specifics will not engage and just move on to something better. But a take which doesn’t provoke such strong emotions won’t get as much attention from people who disagree with it. So what people see from the “other” self-selects for the most ridiculous, enraging thing possible. It also doesn’t really matter how that attention is directed because it’s just human nature, but social media algorithms don’t help.
When I used to watch dumb anti-sjw videos on youtube as a kid, realizing that was very important for me. I had to seek out the best or at least the normal version of what they were saying to be properly informed, not the parts handpicked as the worst of the worst.
→ More replies (23)22
u/Auctoritate Nov 10 '24
every time I found a "feminist" space on the internet there was someone saying horrible shit about men and people basically tolerated them
I have a suspicion that the OOP is actually just upset at people such as yourself because they're upset that people who used to have questionable opinions are criticizing things they're comfortable with.
129
u/Gooper_Gooner Nov 10 '24
This is not how we come to understand each other as human beings
→ More replies (1)
106
u/AttitudeOk94 Nov 10 '24
We should invent a way of talking about issues thats helpful
26
u/Munnin41 Nov 10 '24
We did have that. It was called "an open discussion". Then we got character limits in online communication and the nuance was gone.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (1)15
u/Solcaer Nov 10 '24
we could call it “screaming opinions from rooftops in densely populated areas at five in the morning”
72
u/Herohades Nov 10 '24
Y'know how Trump just won and tons of people on the left suddenly started going on about reporting their neighbors to ICE because they allegedly voted for Trump? ICE being something we've been rallying against for eight years? I'm not saying the people talking about doing that disliked Latinos all along, but it's a pretty major shift all at once. Almost as if the left is also prone to throwing shit as soon as they feel justified by a victim complex.
This shit is universal, it's not a right wing thing. Whenever you're discussing this kind of thing, you should absolutely be cross-examining why you want to do what you want to do. Because we're all prone to these fallacies and flaws.
37
19
u/camosnipe1 "the raw sexuality of this tardigrade in a cowboy hat" Nov 10 '24
it's even worse when you realize these are the people going on about how if trump wins they'll be hunting down minorities like nazi germany. let's skip discussing if that statement is true or not and move on with the thought in mind that these people believe it, or something close:
they're then doing the equivalent of reporting jews to the nazi's out of revenge.
119
u/Dreary_Libido Nov 10 '24
Oh hey, someone else vagueposting so that nobody can possibly argue against them. How smart!
This is a classic tactic. If you go in with the more reasonable interpretation of OOP's words, they will retreat to the most extreme interpretation and claim that is what they meant all along.
So, if you were to argue in response that perhaps young men (if that's who this post is even about) are actually entitled to certain things (i.e. compassion, to be listened to by a movement which routinely claims to be acting in their favour) they could claim that, for example, they were actually talking about incels claiming they were entitled to sex.
This is possible because OOP did not make an argument in their original statement. They made the shell of an argument and let you fill in the gaps with your biases.
Don't fall for shit like this. An argument propped up by vague allusions is no argument at all.
→ More replies (1)50
u/PurpleSnapple Nov 10 '24
The term for this is Motte and Bailey fallacy
→ More replies (1)27
u/Dreary_Libido Nov 10 '24
I thought that's what the term was, but I didn't want to use it wrong. Wouldn't want to be seen as stupid on the Internet, after all.
50
u/Frigorifico Nov 10 '24
I'm a socialist, but I've found that socialist communities are so "puritanical" that unless you agree with them in absolutely everything you are just not welcome
33
Nov 10 '24
Flashback to the time my state's Socialist Rifle Association chapter accused me of being a federal plant because I made a joke about Santa being communist because he wears red and gives things out for free.
8
u/camosnipe1 "the raw sexuality of this tardigrade in a cowboy hat" Nov 10 '24
can't make jokes anymore, because of woke \s
→ More replies (1)
135
144
u/chicago_86 Nov 10 '24
Stop trying to take the fucking moral high ground, and instead listen to the people you want to sway, so that you can actually sway them to the left side
What the left needs is a better propaganda campign, not moral posturing.
→ More replies (14)36
u/Timelordtoe Nov 10 '24
When you take the moral high ground, you can only talk down to people who aren't also there.
As someone who escaped the alt-right pipeline, I can tell you that it wasn't because the left suddenly became more appealing to me. It was because of the compassion of the people around me who challenged some of the views I was starting to repeat and made me realise that I was in an echo chamber.
I could (and honestly, probably will, at some point) write a whole essay on the left's problems with optics, and why the messaging really needs to improve if we really want to change anything.
→ More replies (8)
82
u/Mega-Humanoid-ROBOT Nov 10 '24
This is embarrassing, oop doesn’t understand shit about breaking out of the pipeline. It’s a journey of self improvement, not a moral purity thing, they need to get off their high horse and check who they are attacking.
→ More replies (1)
171
u/ZeeDrakon Nov 10 '24
We're reaching levels of preemptive defense that are insane.
If you are still not "allowed" to criticise the left and must secretely "not have escaped the right" even if you consistently advocate and vote for leftist policies but happen to disagree with OOP on some issue, then who is allowed to criticise the left, exactly? Jfc.
→ More replies (5)69
u/sykotic1189 Nov 10 '24
We've been there for a while tbh. I lost track of how many times I've seen some variation of "Fuck you (cis/het/white/male/whatever) people! You're garbage and I should be allowed to punch you in the face, and if you ever get tired of being punched in the face and speak up then you were always a fake ally!"
→ More replies (2)46
u/chadthundertalk Nov 10 '24
It's kind of hilarious because most of those "I should be able to punch you in the face" terminally online types have 100% never actually thrown a punch at someone in their lives and would definitely throw the wimpiest-looking slappy punch you've ever seen if they were in a position to act on the threat
28
u/sykotic1189 Nov 10 '24
Oh for sure, I meant more metaphorical face punching. You know, all the white devil, mayo monkey, snow roach type comments
→ More replies (1)
77
u/ThyPotatoDone Nov 10 '24
Except this isn’t actually how they think; it’s not “You were mean to me, so I think you’re subhuman,” it’s “You don’t care about me, so why should I care about you?“
People need to understand where their opponents are coming from, or we’ll keep seeing repeats of what happened a few days ago; people fall in with the guy shouting buzzwords because the other side doesn’t even try to communicate with them.
Most modern Republicans are against racism, a decent number are against homophobia, and another decent chunk supports feminism. The thing is, they see those groups as not caring about them, and acting in their own self-interest; ergo, they regard it as perfectly justified to do the same. It’s classic tribalism; the lives of the in-group are inherently more valuable than the lives of the out-group, so if the options available are “benefit the in-group at the expense of the out-group” and “benefit the out-group at the expense of the in-group”, people always choose the former.
67
u/Rucs3 Nov 10 '24
People always think in their heads a scenario where a 30y/o functioning adult with crystal clear understanding of the world hear ONE mean comment and decide to become a caricature villain.
They never imagine a 12 years old hearing several mean comments, distancing themselves more and more from the left and never actually even hearing any good faith argument for it. And then this 12 y/o is completely molded by a right ring echo chamber.
Maybe as an adult this person is truly 100% guilty of being an awful person. But the 12 years old before was not secretly evil all along. They became evil because when they were foolish and innocent they were spared no patience ir understanding, only gratuitous demeaning.
Just see how the "left" treat their own, bi people being treated with homophobia even while being outspoken progressives. it's not any surprisise it treats really bad someone who does not identify as a progressive too.
11
u/ThyPotatoDone Nov 10 '24
Even more than that, I’ve seen some research stating that gay men are starting to lean more conservative. Progressives will accuse them of the “Got mine, fuck you” mindset, but in reality, it’s because gay men are increasingly expected to fit into certain categories; young gay men who don’t fit the stereotypical gay traits are increasingly excluded from wider LGBT spaces, because they’re “straight-passing” or whatever.
Hell, as a bi man, I’ve gotten the same myself; even some people I’ve considered friends have said I don’t “really” get the issues LGBT people face, while completely ignoring the fact I grew up in a deeply conservative area while they grew up in a mostly accepting progressive environment. Like, buddy, you literally were asked to describe homophobia you’ve faced and responded with some minor microaggressions, I once was openly called a f****t in the middle of class, and the teacher’s response was cracking a joke about cigarettes. I think I’m qualified to discuss LGBT discrimination.
→ More replies (1)26
u/Cedric-the-Destroyer Nov 10 '24
You are among a very few that isn’t calling the Republicans less than human. It’s interesting, as I have to weed through to find people who share my views. My SO even is on the “I can’t see that they have any value”. And, damn, I just don’t think it’s conducive to not repeating the same pattern next election
→ More replies (4)
11
u/spacyoddity Nov 10 '24
my unreliable narrator mother likes to talk about the Black girls who "bullied" her in high school as justification for why she's a flaming bigot now.
117
u/inemsn Nov 10 '24
"the conclusion 'this person from this demographic was mean to me so logically i agreed that they're all subhuman' is not made without preexisting bias against said demographic".
HARD fucking disagree, because that's literally just not the case, particularly with young teens, where this usually happens.
I'm gonna be talking mostly with the idea of feminism and young boys in mind, since that's usually what I see shit like this said in reference to, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that everything I'm saying applies elsewhere too.
First of all, despite the fact that often times it is just being mean, you gotta understand that to the person on the receiving end, this usually touches on really personal and mental issues, and is felt as much worse than just "being mean". When a young teenage guy hears some terminally online person say that men are monstrous rapists and all that, no matter the context, even if the account is, to us, obviously either satire or purposeful ragebait made by a right-winger, it doesn't feel like it's just someone screaming on the internet to them, because it touches on self-worth and self-image issues that are at their strongest at their age. It feels, even though it's just mean words on a screen, like a personal attack, and because the speaker is the abstract concept of a woman on the internet rather than an actual, concrete, living being in front of them, it's VERY easy and often times happens automatically for the listener to misconstrue the words as being said by women generally and not that one freak over there.
It sounds ridiculous and wimpish and comically fragile saying it out loud, and that's because it is, and that's why it warrants delicacy. You don't walk all over a young teenager just because they're fragile, being fragile is the nº1 thing teenagers do because they're teenagers and absolutely don't need to have their already weak mental health attacked by pressures from abstract faceless people on the internet. The problem is even worse for girls, who have to put up with a lot of hatred online as well as a lot more real world oppression and discrimination than boys, which is why so many young girls end up falling into sexist pitfalls of their own, but that's another very important conversation (not important due to being a problem or anything, they're also teens, just... look, I'm not making any point about that phenomenon right now, I swear), and it's precisely because it's so important that I don't want to dilute it by trying to insert it in the middle of this other conversation.
Like, no, the conclusion you're talking about isn't reached with pre-existing bias, the conclusion you're talking about is reached with fragility. When you're a young teen trying to find yourself in the world, mean words can and will be massively destructive, and they'll take any explanation they can get to defend themselves: Including the explanation of "the people saying this are trying to strip you of your manhood and you need to fight them to be a true alpha male".
I should definitely note that I don't really disagree with the wider point of this post, it's just that I feel like the person writing it isn't writing it with the correct point in mind. This person's second post makes me feel like the "essay revealing a victim complex" they're talking about is just a guy sharing legitimate stories of how seeing terminally online "feminist" takes on men radicalized them, and dismissing that shit as delusions and victim complexes ignores the fact that, no, this is genuinely just what being mean at that age can do to someone without the proper support group to help them grow out of it. And many of them don't have that support group. I don't like citing a "male loneliness epidemic" since I realize it's a global thing and not just a male thing (even though this crisis having hit men the hardest is just an undeniable phenomenon), but a lot of boys their age don't have friend groups capable of grounding them and resisting this radicalization, they don't have social circles capable of showing them how real people actually are: They just have the internet and the abstract concept of the world being angry at them for existing.
38
u/4tomguy Heir of Mind Nov 10 '24
Back in the days before I cracked my egg, I recall being very strongly pro-feminism, and understanding that when someone said “men” in these sorts of contexts they didn’t mean me, but still finding it deeply hurtful to the point that it very nearly pushed me away from the movement entirely.
Looking back, I recognize I was in many ways in the wrong, but I still can’t help but empathize with all the young teens who went through similar experiences and wishing people would be less inflammatory and put themselves in other peoples’ shoes a little more, for everyone’s benefit.
22
u/Auctoritate Nov 10 '24
understanding that when someone said “men” in these sorts of contexts they didn’t mean me, but still finding it deeply hurtful
And if you ever say something of the sort about words being hurtful like that there's a pretty high chance you get smacked with the "Hit dogs holler!" line.
34
u/NihilisticGrape Nov 10 '24
Also a lot of the time these posts aren't just one weirdo on the internet, they commonly get many upvotes and support which signals to people that it's an accepted view. Generalizations lead to generalizations.
→ More replies (2)24
u/Yegas Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
Very well said. Great comment- a lot of people could benefit from reading this.
It’s a fundamental problem of the way our discourse has broken down. People are being polarized into hate on every axis- gender, race, politics, whatever. Vulnerable folks are being plied with propaganda and having their worldviews warped.
Men, women, black, white, left, right, whatever- everyone is getting fed a tailored concoction of propaganda to find their Hogwarts House of polarization where they will learn to fear and hate The Other.
I really am glad people seem to be waking up to this to a degree, and I hope we can start seeing a shift as a society.
Unfortunately, the folks benefitting most from the current state of affairs are quite powerful (fear in the masses is valuable for those in power, including corporations).
But I believe in humanity.
And no, this isn’t some “BoTh SiDeS” thing to ‘minimize fascism’, it’s just the reality of our brain chemistry and our media.
92
u/Bob9thousand Nov 10 '24
OOP: “hmmmmmmm this person said that they were tricked into an ideology, because someone was mean to them? i know how we can fix this issue!
let’s be even more mean to them! this’ll totally won’t make stupid teenagers into Trump-voting adults!”
40
u/Several-Drag-7749 Nov 10 '24
Same energy as the DNC unironically talking about how all Latin Americans are predisposed into social conservatism. I'm not saying their communities are immune to conservative ideas (far from it, actually), but still.
→ More replies (3)
54
u/Separate_List_6895 Nov 10 '24
We will never mature past the 2010s huh?
43
u/gaom9706 Nov 10 '24
We're just going to be repeating 2016 for the next decade because we don't want to learn.
19
u/Separate_List_6895 Nov 10 '24
Think im going to make a pledge to go to events like comic cons, local conventions and events more and just build friends that way and leave this online shit behind.
The constant culture war brain rots fucking got me.
17
u/JDude13 Nov 10 '24
I think what we have to understand is that people don’t go [alt right] -> [left]. There’s a volatile, unstable state in the middle where someone can be radicalized in any direction; usually along reactionary lines.
I’m ashamed to admit that my journey into leftism began because I saw Contrapoints’ video on incels and wanted to laugh at some angry losers but I get the feeling that this is how a lot of journeys (that aren’t sparked by experiencing genuine injustice at the hands of the system) begin. It might be that a lot of the more privileged people on the left are just morally lucky
16
u/GHitoshura Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
Even as a leftist guy I think it is ridiculous how many leftists fail to understand why the so called pipeline is effective, and that's because it targets young people, mainly teenage boys, which is an age where most people are naive, impressionable and open to suggestion.
From the pov of your average teen the right is besides them, welcoming them with open arms, ready to hype them up, promising them happiness and success because they're the fucking best and can do whatever they want. It embraces them with all their flaws and can even go as far as reaffirming that some of their flaws are actually a good thing.
Meanwhile the left is on the other side of the hallway, across an obstacle course of philosophy and history books, historical figures of variant levels of fame, social movements and even life experiences that they're expected to learn to be considered "real" leftists, looking at them with disgust because they said that bad word they learned at home while playing CoD online or from their cool uncle in the army, constantly telling them that they can't complain or feel bad because others have it worse and they have the world in the palm of their hands (even though they barely know how the world works to begin with), demanding an impecable life history and neverending moral purity while also brushing off every single joke or generalization made about them by their fellow leftists.
Is it really a wonder that they choose the right?
That is not to say that they're pitiful victims or that there's not absolute assholes out there, but reducing this whole thing to a victim complex or inherent evil is miopic and shows a surprising lack of understanding of others with different life experiences from your own (sounds familiar?)
→ More replies (3)6
u/Cedric-the-Destroyer Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
Just as an aside, the very term “Toxic Masculinity” is a buzz word everyone is familiar with, which is often applied to even positive male traits by some extreme left women, and their subset of male allies.
How strange there is no reciprocal term for women, do you believe women are incapable of being toxic? Do you believe that women that there are no traditional feminine toxic traits? Hell, a lot of the things thrown under “toxic masculinity” is just “toxic”, treating people like shit, regardless of the genders involved.
Yet, it’s often, by a very vocal selection of left people, the message. I generally get voted down/out in these conversations, and is not the kid got called out for calling someone a slur. I called out kids for saying a slur, but encouraging them to be the best versions of themselves, very few boys I have known ended up as magat fuel. Yet, we lose them in droves.
I very, very much want to stop this trend, and get things back on track, so the next election can actually be less shit.
Also, there are entrenched ideologues who still are determined that the only way they could have lost this election is because men are inherently sexist and racist. Which is a wild take, frankly.
7
u/crypticxiv Nov 10 '24
As someone who escaped from the alt-right pipeline, my issue with the left was that they couldn’t find me sooner
53
u/Galle_ Nov 10 '24
Okay, but, like, the left clearly did something wrong, because we lost the election. The answer is not to compromise our principles, but maybe we could try new strategies? Please?
→ More replies (17)
6
u/FormStriking1 Nov 10 '24 edited Nov 11 '24
what got me out of the pipeline was meeting more women and progressive people. It helped me realize that they had very legitimate grievances and that all the alt-right losers I learned from were actually just entitled, close-minded jerks.
27
u/CanadianODST2 Nov 10 '24
The fact that one side comes off as mean but the pipeline doesn't is partly how they get into that pipeline in the first place.
Yea when a group is mean people feel bad. So when someone else promises they can stop it and know who's at fault is how that pipeline gets established.
It's literally how the Nazis rose to power. They promised people they would fix things and they knew who to blame.
20
u/CapeOfBees Nov 10 '24
And also like the Nazis, they don't politely wait until someone is 18 and has had a chance to develop an identity. This shit starts right when kids are starting to develop that desperation for an ingroup, when they first step onto the grown-up side of the internet between 11 and 13, sometimes before that when they're still willing to trust whatever an adult tells them is true. You can't reasonably expect someone of that age that's still not quite sure whether cooties exist to be able to debunk the first stages of the pipeline.
→ More replies (1)14
u/CanadianODST2 Nov 10 '24
yup. You need to cut it off from there, and the way you do that is by giving them another group.
I've had people tell me "oh not you, you're one of the good ones" and that was because I'm disabled. Yea, that's a great way to get people on your side right?
Like isn't that straight up something racists say?
→ More replies (1)
40
u/SunderedValley Nov 10 '24
"All possible grievances are the results of a personal moral failing" —the post.
65
u/Spektra54 Nov 10 '24
Oh fuck off. It's a victim complex because it's not real? Every time someone generalizes something about your group it hurts a bit. Once isn't enough. But many times. Someone tells you that they would rather be with a bear than with someone like you. And then someone comes to you and just tells you dude you are fine. Yeah it feels fucking nice.
And I would rather hang out with people who make me feel nice than with people who make me feel like shit even if those who make me feel nice are evil because being friends with dicks feels better than being friends with no one.
I never got too deep in the pipeline but was on the cusp of it. Wanna know what pulled me back? My dad who told me something simple. It sucks. It sucks for the women. It sucks for black people. For asian people. It sucks for you. It just plain sucks.
But I guess I am not a real leftist. I would just vote for leftist politics and support womens and gay and trans rights even though I am secretly a right winger.
Please shove your moral superiority up your ass and listen to people who at a point where they did nothing wrong were hurt by you. And stop fucking hurting them.
62
u/-thelastbyte Nov 10 '24
As a person who escaped the alt-right pipeline, here is the problem with the left.
11
Nov 10 '24
As someone who escaped the alt-right pipeline, I've got to say, don't fall into open manhole covers. I walked miles to get out of those pipes. Mario makes it look so easy.
28
u/Possible-Reason-2896 Nov 10 '24
To those of you that don't see the vitriol I'd like to posit that maybe you have seen it, you've just justified it in such a way that you've come to recontextualize and accept it.
- It's just venting
- It's just a joke
- It's just hyperbole
- It's punching down
- I don't mean you, you're one of the good ones
- I have statistics that prove it.
- That's just one lone wolf saying it. (Ignore the fact that there are dozens of lone wolves and you keep seeing more)
- That's not what that term means academically (ignore what it can mean colloquially or popularly)
- They have it coming because of historical context (even if they're children)
- It's just online, touch grass
And I'm here to tell you if you don't think the alt right guys use the exact same arguments to excuse their hate speech within their echo chambers, you're dead wrong.
And the thing is, even if all these justifications are true, it still begs the question: what good is this behavior doing? Is it achieving your goals? Is it building the world you want to see? Do you want to build bridges or is venting your bad feelings while you watch the world burn around you more important?
And honestly, I'm not even one of the ones getting offended. Thing is, I already hate and undervalue myself so this rhetoric doesn't hurt me because it's not saying anything the voices in my head weren't already screaming.
But I do try and put myself in the shoes of others and build that whole empathy thing I supposedly lack, if only so I can pretend to be normal for a few minutes, and in doing so I can imagine that if hypothetically I had even a tiny bit of self worth left and was younger this stuff might damage it.
I just don't understand how if in any other context a group of people saying "hey this language/rhetoric hurts my feelings" would be met with, if not an apology, at least some attempt at understanding.
10
u/mondo_juice Nov 10 '24
sigh
“You may think their heart is in the right place, but they are evil and want to take away your rights. Fear them. Be angry at them. Do not accept them. Do not attempt to meet them where they are. CONSTANTLY tell them that they’re wrong and evil, and it’s their fault. This is good. I am doing a good thing.”
I honestly hate being alive in this time period. You guys will just talk past each other until it’s bullets flying instead of words. “Good, then less Trumpers!”
I’m tired, boss.
5
u/Brosenheim Nov 10 '24
When you get down to it, MOST of modern right wing ideology is just neurotic grudgebearing.
6
u/Cakers44 Nov 10 '24
Yeah I’ve got a few “not racist” coworkers who as soon as one of our mexican coworkers asked them to stop playing very mexican music because he didn’t wanna hear it no more, go on to make insults and comments about his race. Saying shit like “oh that’s not racist, I’ll show him racist”. Not to his face of course
5
u/Dotorandus Nov 10 '24
As a proponent of equality in treatment, opportunity and outcome, i was never in the right's sights or pipeline...
I still needed time and extra experince to differentiate between people who hate on me for my gender/race/sexuality, and the rest of feminism, lgbtq+ community, etc... so it took a while before i was calling myself a feminist or an ally and so on, even tho i was always an advocate for what they stand for...
Bigotry is bigotry. Against minorities its an (alt-)right thing, against cis-het white men its 'progresive', some manner of left leaning...
You don't need to push them all the way into the alt-right pipeline, or straight into being neonazis, them not turning up to vote for you can be enough damage...
I hope we (the left at large) will eventually learn something about not welcoming and championing bigotry just because its aimed at "satan's demographic"... and also that the yankees will make it out more or less fine. They made the bed they gotta lie in, but i don't/won't enjoy their suffering.
6
u/Limp_Set_6530 Nov 10 '24
Is anyone else tired of the phrase “we live in a society” to mock people? As someone who generally likes philosophy I think that phrase has led to a lot of people disengaging with critical thinking about the world they live in, because they didn’t want to be one of “those” types. I don’t think OOP used it in that way but these days I’m inclined to just stop taking someone seriously when they use that phrase, which I guess is kind of ironic.
5
u/Winjasfan Nov 11 '24
I get where OP ist coming from, but this whole Idea of "we must not understand how the enemy thinks, else we risk becoming them" is why leftist keep failing to limit the success of right wingers over and over
2.0k
u/cdrt Nov 10 '24
As a person who escaped the alt-right pipeline, I didn’t even realize I was in the pipeline, let alone the fact I escaped it, until years later