this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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[โ€“] LiesSlander 7 points 1 year ago

I can give it a shot. This isn't an attack, it's me doing my best to break down why people have issues with your comment history. I hope it comes across that way.

I notice in the comments people have issues with you tend to be technically correct, but that isn't really what matters in those conversations. Examples are the only way I can think to explain this.

Take oil companies, you point out that individual consumption (people filling up their cars) drives the burning of fossil fuels. This is correct, you are stating facts, but missing the bigger picture. The oil companies producing fossil fuels, lobbying governments, and spreading propoganda are a much bigger part of the problem than the individual consumer. In fact, it makes more sense for us as a society to seek large-scale solutions, instead of expecting millions of people to radically change their daily habits. Your comments, while technically correct, serve to put attention on the people doing less harm, a technique oil companies themselves use to disrupt conversations and make the idea of change harder to imagine. This is why people don't like those comments.

Another example, that supreme court case that found it wasn't discrimination to deny a specific service to a queer person, based on some reasoning that you ended up defending. Again, you are technically correct in your comments, you put a lot of effort into figuring out how to explain to others in the thread how the SC's logic works, and why it is not discriminatory. You use examples you came up with, so I know it took some thought.

But did you think about why you were making those comments? Why is it important, in a thread where people are expressing various shades of frustration, anger, sadness at the way institutions are targetting queer people, to point out how the thing they're mad at isn't all that bad?

There are social forces much bigger than ourselves, these are big and complex, but the impkrtant thing now is that they operate on the coordinated activity of many individuals. Hatred of queer people is one of those social forces. That supreme court decision you were correcting people on drives the force of queer hate forward, while being caused by it. It does not matter to the bigot if this is technically discrimination, this decision will embolden them to act in bigotted ways, do you really think the average right winger is trying to stay withing the bounds of what is legal? Will the technical differences between this decision and what you would consider bigotry stem the rising tide of violence against gender non-conforming people? People in these comment sections don't want to hear apologia for the decisions threatening their lives. That's why they call you a facist.

I would recommend thinking about why you are posting a comment, why you are forming the nareative you are, and what the likely result of posting will be. Who do you sound like when you are posting? What does your questioning add to the conversation? I believe that with some introspection you could figure out why you feel the need to make these comments, and find a better outlet. Don't tell people they're wrong about things they care about unless you understand where they're coming from, especially when those "things" are existiential threats to those peoples' lives.