I wasted way too much time arguing with liberals on the internet and I just need to vent my frustrations. They turned inaction into a virtue: they call it “pragmatism”. Vote for Biden, don’t question the genocide. They reject the “idealism” of action, critique or even the simple act of imagining the alternative. They consider themselves to be the adults in the room while they are nothing more than reactionaries themselves enabling the worst perversions of this capitalist-realist system.
It’s so frustrating to see this, to see their smug self-sanctification when they just follow the line of the least resistance, when all the effort they put is into retaining their own comfort. They talk about “saving democracy” while attempting to squash any dissent, while being hostile to any alternative that is not a liberal democracy.
They react violently to anything that could imaginably threaten the system exactly because they are comfortable in it. They know that they sit atop the piles of corpses of those murdered for their baubles, the oil for their cars and gas for heating their suburban homes. And they find it unimaginable to ever sacrifice even the smallest of those comforts.
They wear slogans of human rights on their chests but whenever it’s the time to walk the walk, they melt into the thin air, always finding an excuse why it’s not the right time. Why Biden can actually violate the Geneva Convention, why all they can do in a face of the genocide is to shrug.
As it goes in Disco Elysium:
“KINGDOM OF CONSCIENCE – Moralists don’t really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn’t change – not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.”
I can assure you that after years of active engagement in politics in various forms I can differentiate between arguing and what is just using the privilege of entrenchment in the system to dismiss any opposing view as illegitimate.
Those people almost never engage with presented points. They prefer to construct their own strawman because then they can attack it with the well-hammered propaganda slogans. And if all else fails, there’s invariably someone to accuse anyone who is to the left of them as being either a trumpist or russian troll for a thunderous applause.
My experience has been the exact opposite. If I see a conversation where one side is using strawmen or talking points, it’s almost universally the pro-Gaza anti-Biden side (edit: I (over)simplified and made less inflammatory).
I won’t say this has never happened to you from the other side, just saying my experience. For what it’s worth, I can only speak to my own behavior and I try to make a serious effort not to do this – so like here’s an example. This is me having one of the discussions you’re talking about, and I think my interlocutor was speaking in perfectly good faith and I don’t think they were a shill, I was pretty happy with the conversation overall, but still he kept repeatedly telling me that I wasn’t willing to support the cause of Gaza by giving opposition to Biden, even as I kept repeatedly explaining to him that that wasn’t accurate, and where I actually stood on it. I won’t say that’s a strawman; like I say I think it was genuine misunderstanding / persistent assumption on his part instead of anything bad-faith. But it definitely stood out to me as “like bro how can you not get this, we went over this so many times.” And that’s like a 90th percentile result; almost everyone I talk to about it is way less open-to-listening-to-me than that.