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.
Like I get the desire to get mad at boomers as a whole
I've been guilty of this on occasion, maybe because a lot of the boomers I work with are really annoying.
Guess I've got to kill the liberal in my head.
Liberal ideology hinges on the idea that competing interests do not exist. Rather, there are people who are confused or they're malicious. The ideology proposes that liberalism is the correct political arrangement for everyone, regardless of position or status, and that falling out of the system is either a problem that can be tweaked or personal failure.
Liberals believe their worldview is like gravity. If you're not a liberal, then you're confused, stupid, or lying. They literally cannot fathom that a capitalist would have a different set of interests than the working class. They can't fathom what imperialism is.
The only thing they can fathom are personal failures or things they see as clouding a person's proper judgement. A liberal is a type of person who believes if you show enough charts and graphs to someone, they'll align themselves politically with the liberal project. If they don't, they can be written off as an aberration or a saboteur
here's my metaphysics
Liberalism is entirely predicated on the spherical cows in a vacuum trope but instead of for engineering it's for all of society
It's always personal failings. everything runs like clockwork. if you are in poverty and post about it you will have your entire life picked over, judged, and shamed.
All of reality is just a bunch of spherical cows, all just floating in this cloud of Idea Stuff. nobody is hungry and hustle-grinding is to strive for
Political life is entirely about accepting or rejecting the right color of Idea Stuff.
everyone is a being of pure conscious reason, unaffected by any external stimulus accept the Idea Stuff
Perfect thread to recommend "Empire of Normality" by Robert Chapman
This self-contradictory "mental health culture", where libs celebrate self-acceptance and the aesthetics of getting help, while at the same time they pathologize "bad" people/behaviour and reduce bad people/behaviour to diagnostic labels aligns perfectly with neoliberalism.
At a fundamental level, neoliberalism is incompatible with mentally ill/mad/neurodivergent liberation. To the masses, having a mental illness or being neurodivergent means being defective (and to the capitalist class, defective (non-exploitable) labour), so getting help means getting fixed and getting back to work. Pathologizing people and reducing them to a diagnostic label means erasing everything else about that person, particularly their social/historical context, so that being defective (at an individual level) is the sole explanation for their being or behaviour.
"Who hurt you?"ooh i hate that, i can feel the smugness drip through the screen
'My landlords, my bosses and my government hurt me and are continuing to.'
Is a good reply there. And if those same people aren't hurting them, ask why not and if they are ask what the right thing to do when someone is actively hurting you is.
It is a way for libs to avoid having to do a material analysis. Making one would make the ideological similarity between libs and chuds too apparent for their own comfort so instead they turn to all sorts of pseudo-explanations, pathologising being one of them.
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.
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
Chuds (the other flavour of liberal) do this too, they say anyone left of them is "mentally unwell" etc. etc.
Yeah they use it a lot against trans people. I'm no stranger to is as a non-binary person.
I need to start making it more clear that I use Liberal very broadly. Sorry about that.
Huh? No need to apologize I'm not scolding anyone in the comment lol
it's cope. if you're a liberal, you probably think you're the smartest person in the room with all of the correct facts and good arguments so when you see people who don't agree with you, it can't be your fault. it has to be something wrong with them, which, because the liberals think they're so smart, they go down the route of pathologizing behavior. saying someone is "mentally ill" because they disagree with you makes you look smarter than just calling them an asshole does.
i hate it. i think it both takes away agency like you pointed out and also keeps the door open for hating on trans and other queer people.
libs have been doing shit like this for a few hundred years at this point. othering those who would criticise their ideology by saying they are childish, mentally deficient, etc. i imagine since the "end of history" it has intensified a huge amount.
othering those who would criticise their ideology by saying they are childish, mentally deficient, etc.
Not even just their critics. They've done it to racial minorities, their colonial subjects, women, LGBT people, neurodiverse people, and probably a hundred others I'm forgetting. And always in the pursuit of justifying horrific crimes against those groups.
fuck I apologised unnecessarily again, didn't I?
