I step out of Hexbear and into another instance for once and immediately get this shit lmao
I was letting off some steam about how sick and tired I am about working a shit job to make some asshole rich, and I made an off hand remark about how my employer probably belongs in a gulag. Further down the reply chain, this lemmitor asshole shows up to send me a whole tirade full of faux concern, breaking out the psychoanalysis to say I'm just an extremist full of unjustified hatred because I must be a bitter loser. Somehow they come up with this nuclear hot take comparing my anger at the capitalist class to a Christian fundamentalist hating gay people.
But the fucking cherry on the top here is sending me this comment as their very first interaction with me and proceeding to instantly block me to deny me the chance to reply at all. I've seen others use the block feature as a means of getting the last word in, but never to get both the first and last word in at the same time. And in the end, this self-unaware lib ends up calling me the overly self righteous one. Perfect.
Tbh, what gets me is that they were so fucking close to getting it. They almost came to an accurate understanding of the fact that my material conditions as a poor person getting fucked over day in and day out by my employer stealing my labor will heavily inform my politics. But of course they never quite reach that point, instead bizarrely veering off into psychologizing me, and acting like this is all just some sort of character flaw on my part.
Rule one: https://hexbear.net/comment/4738025
This really jumps out at me and seems to be a trend with libs and fash. Neither libs nor fash, painted with very broad strokes, seem to believe that the other side holds the convictions they claim to. The Fash, at least in the US, have long used terms like "bleeding heart" and "politically correct" to accuse Libs of pretending to care about social issues in bad faith so they can use social issues as a weapon to bludgeon the GOP. Libs, in turn, seem to broadly believe that the Fash are stupid or igniorant. The Libs cannot or will not accept that the Fash are different from them and have different goals and desires. Trying to explain to Libs that Fash want to hurt other people because they enjoy it, and will hurt people they hate or fear even if it causes harm to themselves, is like trying to explain particle physics to a duck. The idea that anyone doesn't share their weird civility fetish and commitment to triangulation can't break through their ideological bias.
Fash seem to believe us to some extent. As Parenti said, they still think we're lying and just using our concern for social justice as a weapon against them, but they do seem to believe we'll do what we say we'll do. Libs seem to mostly dismiss us as deluded children, idiots, or sadists because they have such a warped view of revolutionary violence. The idea that we're painfully, pathetically sincere and disagree with them in good faith, ie our disagreement is sincere and earnest and doesn't have anything to do with them and their politics as team sport, can't land in their heads.
They can't see what we believe as anything but ego, sadism, or foolishness. They can't imagine that many of us are motivated by kindness and love, and our intense hatred grows from the cruelty that we perceive in the world, and in capitalism. To them the system is normal, natural, and sacred. "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism." All they can really see us as is deluded agents of chaos and destruction because they can't imagine anything better than what exists.
RE: later on, where they're talking about wider and wider targets.
It's really something that they cannot imagine any political action outside the narrow confines of their own self imposed rules of civility. You cannot take any action without rapidly becoming a Voltron robot of Pinochet, Hitler, Pol Pot, and their distorted idea of who Stalin and Mao were. If you use violence in any way for any reason you're going to turn in to a frothing monster who just kills people for the sadistic joy of it.
And then thoughtlessly, effortlessly, carelessly, most libs support whatever imperial massacre is being committed right now, they treat the police as a legitimate force that has become corrupt but can be fixed through policy change, they completely support the warmongering of NATO, they ignore or deny western genocides.
It's such a bizarre set of contradictions and many of them either have no awareness of it or see no contradictions. Our violence is normal. Our violence is legitimate. Our violence is morally good or at least neutral. Our actions are never genocide. Even while they're decrying their own leaders for war crimes they have no intention of taking action or doing anything to stop the killing. Their role is merely to state their distaste as an individual for some of the killing, then go back to their normal lives. And anyone who does even float the idea of taking direct action, of opposing the regime, of even identifying the regimes crimes as a feature of the system rather than a deviation caused by corrupt individuals, is denounced as a monster and a sadist.
Also boy howdy do they love comparing us to Christian Fascists and insisting that we believe a world wide workers revolution is just going to magically spring in to existence one day with no effort and no action. I've tried telling them there are honest to god communist, leftist, and anarchist revolutions and movements happening in the world right now but it never seems to land. Again, they cannot and will not consider a position outside their own skewed preconceptions. Their system is perfect, eternal, and unquestionable, marred only by a few corrupt people. Anyone who thinks it could be challenged, that the invincible armies of America might be fallible (despite them being terrified of Jan 6), that America's civic institutions might be cruel by design and inherently unfixable, is simply delusional, an unreasoning fanatic. Never mind that leftist revolutions of all kinds have happened in the past in all sorts of circumstances, never mind that many of them were successful in holding power for decades, never mind that several communist states still persist despite everything, we clearly believe that a magical event will carry us to a magical utopia.
Its also interesting from a literary standpoint when the soyjak tries to cynically fit OP venting about their boss (rightfully so) to some depoliticized pathological template (since history ended and thus only interpersonal problems remain), but can't, since he can't empathize with anyone who is working class, so he just runs up against his own genocidal liberal hysteria again and again, projecting it onto OP while shitting everywhere and crying.
The comparison to Christian fascists is interesting. I grew up in an evangelical cult and follow a lot of ex Christians on TikTok. A lot of these people, when they delve into politics, are unable to see anything but echoes of their own experiences with Christian fascists when talking about any kind of extremism. It’s understandable but I also don’t wanna dismiss people excusing structural violence under capitalism just because they have religious trauma. It’s something I empathize with a lot and simultaneously have no patience for because trying to get through to them often involves retraumatizing myself, too. Shit sucks, especially when I’ve put more energy than your average western leftist into deconstructing all the aspects of Christianity that are just baked into the culture here.
average leftist meme
It's long been the case that liberals and chuds in America believe leftist politics are a trick. They claim making demands of a state will in turn cause the state to strip something away and that's simply a function of the universe, rather than simply how capitalist America operates.