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?
Meaningful change happens through incremental progress, which is what I believe OP is advocating for. Revolutionary change usually involves a charismatic idealogue who is capable of stirring up revolt in the common populace towards their own ends.
See: Lenin refusing to concede power after losing the election following the Bolshevik revolution.
Name one large change that happened slowly over decades that wasn’t a slow build till the dam burst.
It’s be nice if you used America, but you’re not gonna find an example.
Minimum wage increase? LGBTQ rights? Hell, even segregation took a few decades to fully go away, and depending on who you ask, it still hasn’t.
Of course we should be disruptive and protest and riot. But let’s also focus on one issue at a time instead of saying “anything short of perfection in a single step is not worth fighting for at all”
…
Uh…
The federal minimum wage was last updated in 2009…
What was the campaign slogan of the president who won the 2008 election? I can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure his campaign wasn’t about sudden change was bad and we should move things slowly.
Besides, we’re talking about incremental change. And I guess “every 15 years” would be an increment, but Biden hasn’t talked about raising it, and trump won’t, so the best we can hope for is “every 20 years”?
Like, you didn’t get three words in before you started arguing my point homie.
You’re too hung up on labels and not on how most voters want the same stuff.
If you want incremental change with the federal minimum wage, neither party is giving you what you want.
The federal minimum wage in the United States when it was introduced was $0.25. Any increase since then is exactly the kind of incremental change that OP was talking about.
And, yes, we have to fight for even those incremental changes. But they are always more longstanding than the kinds of changes that result from an idealogue riling up his followers to revolt, which will be overturned as soon as the next idealogue amasses a big and angry enough following.
Lol.
Cool, I’ll buy your car for a billion dollars and make incremental payments.
I’ll pay a penny a month, and increas a penny every month. That’s an incremental rate, right? So it’s just as good as paying at sale. In about 83 million years it’ll be paid off, do t get impatient, the amount keeps increasing incrementally, you’ll be paid eventually.
Hell, I’m being generous setting the schedule now, I could make you go decades wondering if incremental change will happen at completely unknown increments
I can tell you’re young because you don’t seem to be capable of grasping decades let alone centuries as a measure of time. How long do you think human civilization has been around? How long has our current civilization been building toward today? You want everything you want now or else it’s not worth fighting for? Every luxury and right we enjoy now is the result of decades and centuries of progress.
If you’re not happy with working toward a better future for those who come after us, and you want all the benefits of the future now, you’re just selfish and don’t have the mental fortitude to cope with the real world. What you want isn’t happening in your life time. The best you can hope for is to do a little better at a time, and sometimes there’ll be setbacks, but in general we keep pushing forward.
The times when we fall several steps back are when rash idiots back a revolution that they barely understand.
Hell, even if the “revolution” happened today it would take at least a generation to recover. We’re taking years or decades without the already-inadequate food, healthcare, interstate commerce, and civil rights protection we enjoy now…and that’s best case scenario where we stay 1 country. More likely, we’d devolve into something like Europe before the EU.
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You know, when I wrote in the original post that leftists didn’t read more than the first sentence of a comment before writing a reply, I thought I was exaggerating.
What about LGBTQ rights and segregation?
It says a lot your main complaint with “leftists” online is they ignore the gold standard of Russian propaganda…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
If you can’t go a sentence before saying something false, don’t expect people to write about everything else false you said and refuting each falsehood one at a time.
Like, you’re the one saying this happens often to you, I’m just trying to help you understand why it always happens.
If you admit the first thing is wrong, most people will move on to the second. No guarantees how long their keep going
You have exactly one comment to do that before I report you for being a troll.
What?
You asked me to name one social change that had occurred over decades instead of all at once when the dam burst. I named three. The first of these, admittedly, was the least convincing. You only addressed that one.
Move on to the second, like you said.
How about any country with universal healthcare? Or do you think that the UK and Canada got our healthcare systems through violent rebellion instead of parliamentary action?
Now, go ahead and name any country that was better off after a revolution. Cuz all I can think of is China, Russia, and [ waves vaguely in the direction of America ].
Cuba. Haiti. The Chiapas. Uhh, probably brazil. I dunno, I guess my point would just be to kinda of gesture at anticolonial action more broadly, but yeah.
What?
Do you think the only sudden change is violent rebellion?
Do you think that an unconventional candidate like Bernie Sanders or even Trump winning a democratic election is a revolutionary change? Sweetie, that is change within an existing power structure, which is the antithesis to “revolutionary.”
Revolutionary change is what the MAGAts attempted on January 6th.
Have you not lread anything I’ve typed?
But the “sweetie” is enough, anyone that uses that stupid shit in 2024 isn’t worth interacting with, and it’s clear no amount of logic will ever change your mind.
Have a nice life “sweetie” I’m sure that makes you super popular in /askmen
You all just witnessed a guy who lost an argument. Merch is on the table at the back.
January 6th folks were not revolutionists. They were there to re-install the same leader (Trump) into the same power structure that already existed. Their actions were pro-government, just for their side rather than the other.
This simply isn’t true. Throughout history you will observe longs periods of stagnation followed by a period of rapid change. This pattern is noticable in many things but especially in human political arrangement. Feudalism didn’t decay capitalism and capitalism won’t decay into socialism
Incrementalists reject the idea of punctuated equilibrium.
To be fair, the Socialist Revolutionary Party split up right before the election, and the right-wing retained the name. The Internet didn’t exist, so the public largely wasn’t aware. The left wing program won the majority of votes, even though the right wing SRP, who did not support the left wing program, won the vote.
Adding onto this, there were 2 governments, the constituent assembly, and the Soviets. The constituent assembly additionally did not recognize the october revolution or the legitimacy of the Soviets.
Lenin then took the Bolsheviks, disbanded the Constituent Assembly, and took power through the Soviets, where they had the majority support.
All that to say, the constituent assembly election was largely a mess, and it can be reasonably argued that if the decision to retain the constitient assembly and retain the right wing SRP had witheld, the popular will of the people would not have been upheld and the White Army likely would have returned Russia to Monarchism under the Romanovs.
It really wasn’t a situation with a clear democratic process at any time, neither before or after, which is the reality of a revolution during war time, so we can only speculate from hindsite what might have happened.