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?
No you didn’t, or you wouldn’t have made a show of doing it publicly after claiming to block me to get the last word in didn’t work.
You haven’t been taking any of our engagements seriously and you’re trying to manipulate “public opinion” to appear as in the right.
Just like when you came across positions about assigning sex at birth you didn’t understand and when adversarial engagement didn’t maintain for you your status of "right’ and “good” you made this whiny subpost about leftists.
If I come of as trolly, it’s because you’ve continuously shown yourself to be disingenuous and not worth the effort I could make to lay out why your preconceived notions are incorrect—you’re just going to intentionally misunderstand and dismiss anything I tell you, so why bother?
Remember when you focused on an offhand comment about names and refused to address the larger issue of categorizing people knowing full well there would be cases that categorization was wrong?
Yeah, it’s just more worth my effort to be flippant.