💾 Archived View for idiomdrottning.org › right-wing-politics-on-gemini captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:30:44. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Right wing politics on Gemini

The right is engaging with a straw doll of what the left is.

This is how right-wingers genuinely see the world:

Climate change is a hoax, representation is pandering, the owner class are role models.

I couldn’t fault anyone who bought into that worldview for going right wing. It doesn’t surprise me. It just breaks my heart.

Right wing politics need to be on Gemini as much as a grade school math class needs to teach that 2+2=5.

I don’t need to say anything I haven’t already said a hundred times:

There’s no need to balance true with false

We on left has enough problems with our own crappy “solutions”

I don’t want to turn philosophy and ideas to a competition

Capitalism has problems and humanity needs to solve them to survive

I try to present my ideas for everyone, not just to those already on my side

Update

Let’s have some dialectics between not affirming right wing myths and misconceptions on the one hand, but also not falling into “team sports” mentality on the other hand.

Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.

Don’t forget that the reason the controversial right-wing pundits are so dangerous is that people listen to them, get fooled by them; as obviously wrong as those ideas sound to our ears, there is an audience for them. This is evident because if no-one ever fell for it, why would these pundits and propagandists be a problem? Ergo, can we have some compassion for the people who have been taken in by their ideas, been tripped up by them?

Y’all need to realize that we’re already a minority, we who get this stuff, we who see how messed up things really are. We on the left are not gonna be able win by “killing” the right. It’s too late for that now. We need to figure out another way forward. Obviously, we do need to carve out some breathing room where we can dodge targeted harassment and bad-faith, dishonest trolling, so don’t overstate what I’m saying here, which is that while we can refute the idea, we can’t annihilate the human who’s typing it.

Can y’all honestly say you’ve never had a 180˚, a complete change of heart? The guy expected to run into name-calling and personal attacks, tried to goad you into that, and you just proved his point.

Note that I’m definitively not saying “yay right-wing stuff” or “aww right some balanced perspectives” or some other “marketplace of ideas” bull—I’m glad Antenna has filters and even outright bans, and moving into more personally curated feeds is going to be inevitable, for volume if not for tone. Wrong statements don’t become true just because they’re some sort of counterweight to true statements.

It’s just that my entire argument was that the reactionary view of us was just a straw doll and then three seconds later, here we are.