Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like things have been getting kind of unpleasant around here lately, a lot more arguments, a lot more “I’m right, you’re wrong, fuck you, now bend the knee” kind of discussions rather than actually explaining a position or trying to convince someone to change their mind.
I know tensions are high for a lot of people right now, but I really don’t want to see this place turn into yet another dead online leftist forum where the dozen or so remaining members declare themselves the One True Leftists after having chased everyone else away through their toxicity.
Just because you think you’re right about something doesn’t give you the right to be an asshole about it.
Yeah, I’ve already ranted about that a lot so I didn’t want to just reproduce my spiel yet again, but I do think that this is based on a dynamic of forming a new ingroup that is just as emotionally dependent on basically exercising sadism toward an outgroup, even if it’s not fully equivalent in other respects. When you get together a bunch of people under the banner of “bullying works,” slowly but surely you’ll find that you’ve made a group of bullies, and the fact that many were bullied in the past does not necessarily mitigate this and can even heighten it instead as people re-enact their trauma.