The classic one is, of course, "ACAB," but I've already gotten into these arguments so I will spare you reading too much on it. Let it suffice to say all US cops are bastards (or, you know, they serve an especially malignant bastard function), all German cops, all UK cops, etc. But, to find a diplomatic way of getting this across, the security patrols deployed by the Panthers were also cops if that word has a non-moral meaning.
I think, and this is why I even bring ACAB up, that it gives people something to rally around and maybe even encouraged them to see things differently, and they get attached to it as essentially a dogma without seeing the analysis that produced it (or justified it, in any case). The slogan becomes the analysis. It becomes what exists in place of having reasons for what you believe, even when good reasons are out there!
I don't know how to do dividing lines
I think it's pretty funny when some asshole chud gets fired or injured or whatever and someone comments "another kkrakkka down, unlimited genocide on the first world". The humor comes from the absurdity, that there is no such genocide in the works and the subject in this case usually isn't even dead. It seems like a perfectly fine meme.
So then a huge hurricane hits Florida, we have hundreds of normal, mostly poor people dying and people are saying this and, when someone goes "Hey, that's not right" they double down. [I was busy when this was happening, this isn't me complaining about being dog piled or whatever]
The weird thing about it is that I thought it was 100% a joke, but some people got attached to the phrase in a way that reminds me of people going "ACAB means ACAB" as though it's anything other than an unhinged exclamation that is funny because it's unhinged. I don't know how this happened, but I am forced to conclude that the way the meme was treated up to this point was conditioning people in a detrimental way. Or maybe they were always bloodthirsty chauvinists, but that seems like the greater leap to me.
Of course there were a couple of pathetic, cowardly losers in the mix saying "Oh, don't take it so seriously, it's a shitposting site". Those people I direct to 4chan. Antisocial behavior is antisocial behavior, and calling it meaningless to escape that it does have a meaning and that meaning is quite negative is contemptible behavior that should be rejected by the policy of any space that claims to be leftist.
Anyway, I don't really have a call to action or anything, except perhaps: Oppose Slogan Worship.
Online discourse rewards simple, maximalist positions, and yeah I think you're right that there are plenty of people for whom those positions are the only foundation they have. The pandemic was quite depressing imo in how it exposed the paper-thin nature of so many people's politics, at least on social media. Suddenly you had vocal Maoists realizing that, actually, restrictions on individual liberty are bad when they happen to them. Or people will be 100% ACAB until sex crimes are mentioned and then that all goes out the window. The ACAB Left were completely incoherent on the Lucy Letby case too, to give a more recent, concrete example. There's no consistency to any of it, and you'll go insane trying to make it make sense
I found a lot of this thing weird. Like, I'm one of the people less affected by lockdown by virtue of my life as a shut-in, but people were getting real fucking worked-up over being told to wear a mask at the gym and other simple things like that that were in the common interest.
Yeah I felt that there were different legitimate positions one could take (I was quite pro-restrictions myself) but it was the inconsistency that pissed me off. And the mental gymnastics genuinely drove a lot of people mad imo — they were so desperate not to have their treats taken away that suddenly 'public health' itself was an insidious concept that serves only white supremacy etc etc, and there's no way back from that