I've been seeing a worrying number of these people on Lemmy lately, sharing enlightened takes including but not limited to "voting for Biden is tantamount to fascism" and "the concept of an assigned gender, or even an assigned name, at birth is transphobic" and none of them seem to be interested in reading more than the first sentence of any of my comments before writing a reply.
More often than not they reply with a concern I addressed in the comment they're replying to, without any explanation of why my argument was invalid. Some of them cannot even state their own position, instead simply repeatedly calling mine oppressive in some way.
It occurred to me just now that these interactions reminded me of nothing so much as an evangelical Christian I got into an argument with on Matrix a while ago, in which I met him 95% of the way, conceded that God might well be real and that being trans was sinful and tried to convince him not to tell that to every trans person he passed, and failed. I am 100% convinced he was trolling -- in retrospect I'm pretty sure I could've built a municipal transport system by letting people ride on top of his goalposts (that's what I get for picking a fight with a Christian at 2AM) -- and the only reason I'm not convinced these leftists on Lemmy are trolls is the sheer fucking number of them.
I made this post and what felt like half the responses fell into this category. Am I going insane?
See, that's usually where the core political differences start to rear their head. The sort of like, revolutionary leftist, being so swamped in the failures of modern government, begins to see everything through this lens. Ahh, we need to replace the whole system, because any attempt to make it better is inevitably met with failure. It's relatively easy to feel totally hopeless if you start to grasp, say, the history of civil rights, right. Fight for equal voting, fight to eliminate lynchings, fight for equal economic access. But then we see white flight take place, we see redlining take place, we see the public pools get closed down and we still see huge enclaves and ghettos exist with lack of economic access, a school to prison pipeline, an inability for prisoners to vote, an a specific carve out in the constitution for slavery to basically be legal as long as it's only done with prisoners. Because you're so focused on how everything could be improved, it begins to feel as though everything is still a total failure.
I dunno. I do just kind of buy into dual power, so it's not a problem for me at all and this divide doesn't really exist, but that's where that kind of like, hopeless put upon revolutionary perspective comes from.