One particularly gross habit I see from liberals on Reddit or YouTube or even TikTok is when faced with a person they don't like, they will accuse them of some sort of illness, mental or otherwise.
For example:
A right-winger isn't just ignorant or bigoted, he's that way because he wasn't hugged as a child or has daddy issues. The worst one I see is liberals saying things along the line of "Ah yes, the eyes are close together, I've noticed that a lot of alt-righters have the signs of fetal alcohol syndrome." Yes, I kid you not. It's some real phrenology shit.
A boomer being short tempered isn't because of them being ignorant or misunderstanding, it's because of lead poisoning. Something I see often is the phrase "lead paint stare" which is pretty messed up. Like holy shit lead poisoning was a horrific crime against their entire generation, don't use it as a punchline to dismiss them. Like I get the desire to get mad at boomers as a whole, they grew up during the hight of capitalist wealth and a lot of them don't get what the rest of us are going through. But even at the height of capitalism they were still fucked over hard. We should know how little power Westerners had to oppose capitalist will in the 70s and 80s Your average boomer has about as much to do with the housing crash as we did the COVID mishandling. The environment they grew up in produced a lot of ignorant and shitty views for sure, but to trivalise them being literally mass poisoned? Fuck off.
Accusations of narcissistic personality disorder is another one I see get thrown around a lot to explain away greedy or selfish actions. To me this takes agency away from their actual terrible actions.
And then you have the Reddit shit of "this person is lashing out at me because they are depressed or suicidal. Haha." If they disagree with them. Which is pathetic and cowardly on so many levels.
I'm okay with bullying terrible people, particularly with bullying the bullies, but they should be bullied for things that are actually bad, not things are beyond their control or are things we should actually have sympathy for.
Just gonna copy and paste my response from the thread that i'm pretty sure inspired this one:
It's cool as hell thar liberals have weaponized therapy speak in order attack others, manipulate people and avoid self reflection. It's dressed up ableism and also a more clear cut abuse tactic than what they're trying to pin on Trump here. Also they actually are doing the thing, Trump wasn't part of the taking away as far as I'm aware.
Liberals are just another Measurhead with updated lingo.
GOOD comment 👍
Yes it was partly a combination of that post, as well as stuff from lurking Reddit (I know, fuck Reddit, I use it for niche shit) and Tiktok. The final straw that's been bothering me is I've seen it here a few times from people who are clearly wreckers but avoid bans by cloaking their shit in this concerned language. It's pathetic and cowardly and I know it's hard to crack down on but I think we should be less tolerant of that shit here.
Diagnosing people should just count as ableism
The way libs do it to demonize people, for sure.
The way neurodivergent people do it when they're identifying people who have similar tendencies to them definitely isn't though. In the autistic community we call it "peer review".
That's true but I'd also say doesn't work so well on a big online web zone. At least when it's not invited. IRL I get it and have done it without knowing it had a name until now. I don't think anyone should be diagnosing strangers online for any reason unless asked for.
Depends on context. I've pointed quite a few people in the direction of discovering their neurodivergences via the internet. As long as it's in good faith IMO there's no issue with it unless you think there's something inherently wrong with being autistic, ADHD, etc. I've gotten a lot of thank yous from people for pointing them in the right direction like that. Especially because, you know how the meme goes: the thing they don't tell you about autism is that you have it.
I also disagree with the notion that online interactions are any less "real" than offline ones, but that's another conversation.
There is a difference between talking to people you know and people you don't know