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KW's avatar

Once again, thank you so much for this. No one is better than you at breaking down Twitter-fueled social justice politics and why they're doomed to fail. No one.

The elitist snobs who dominate Twitter are incredibly revolting. I know the GOP is up to no good, what with the voter suppression, conspiracy theories, anti-abortion bills, etc, and I'll never vote for them.

But there are days when I hate the Twitter elites more. I spent too much time there, and those people really got in my head and made me wonder about my self-worth. And the funny thing is, THEY'RE THE ONES who say mental health is important and therapy is important and not being a toxic alpha male asshole is important, etc.

But what do they do all day? They sneer and judge and condescend and dehumanize people all day online who disagree with them. It's hypocritical in the extreme. They don't know how to actually win over people. And if they don't learn fast, they're gonna lose so many more people to the Right than ever before.

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Eria's avatar

Does anyone remember the show "Wife Swap" on ABC from about 10 years ago? No? I don't blame you. It was a shit show with a concept designed specifically to formant division. But I caught an episode purely by chance one night and had a blinding realization.

So as the name implies, the concept is that a wife/mother is swapped into a family radically different than the one she leaves behind. In this case, a shotgun owning hillbilly mom was placed with an uber liberal family in San Francisco. The conflicts were non-stop from day one. The SF "husband" could not hide his obvious disdain and contempt for this woman who was trying her best, staged or not. He berated and humiliated her, making numerous comments on their mile wide education and income level. The kids took their cue from their father and treated her like an insect. Even as I watched I realized that selective editing and staged scripts were in play, yet I knew deep down that the contempt of the SF husband had for this woman was real, because in my own circle people like that were common. The SF family portrayed were my peeps - the education, politics, interests, teaching your kids a foreign language in addition to an instrument. Utter and complete contempt for those who hold different values. All of it were the norm in my circle.

And then I suddenly had this realization - given the choice to be stranded somewhere for a length of time and hang out, I'd rather be with the person who's a nice, decent human being holding radically different beliefs than mine, than with someone who's just like me politically but can't muster basic human empathy and kindness. If this sounds obvious to you, you've never really hung around the set of TED people I'm talking about and the deep belief we hold in our moral superiority of ideology. I'll admit the seed of this realization had already been forming for a while, in the shape of a conservative co-worker who displayed true kindness to another colleague who was disliked by many, including me. I remember thinking that out of something like thirty of us, the one person who showed humanity to the disliked woman was someone known to all as a conservative (but we liked her anyway). Watching the show on TV, I realized that the people with whom I would want to be friends with often don't think like me at all.

I'm of course not saying that liberals are jerks and conservatives are the bastion of kindness, but I cannot help but notice that many in the liberal camp at the moment are entitled, and kind of jerks. They're illogical, shut down discussions, and hold themselves up as the bastion of truth and democracy while acting exactly the opposite. So when people ask what happened to Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, etc. , I have to tamp down on shouting that I know exactly what happened to them.

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