It has recently come to my attention that the website and safe space I've come to know and love has become plagued with far left dogma and divisive rhetoric. What was once a site fostering civil political discourse grounded in evidence, reason and mutual respect has become plagued by the very ideological rigidity it was meant to resist. I am here to say we should stand together against the growing tendency to frame every political disagreement as some genocidal conspiracy. This rhetoric doesn't bring clarity, it breeds fear, shuts down dialogue, and turns every discussion into a moral dick measuring contest where no one actually wins. There's a difference between holding strong values and believing that your worldview is the only moral one. The far left has devolved into a corrosive pseudointellectual popularity contest where everyone is expected to subscribe to the same dogma, recite the same nonsense and display the same outrage on command. What’s especially ironic is that these are the very things the far left claims to fight against. Groupthink. Authoritarianism. Blind allegiance to a belief system that punishes dissent and rewards outrage. They’ll denounce cult like loyalty in others while demanding total submission to their own worldview no questions, no nuance, no room for disagreement. The hypocrisy is hard to ignore in "The Problem with Online Politics" The same person who's lamenting the collapse of rational political discourse is now blindly charging into emotional hysteria. You criticize social media for promoting sensationalism and outrage and turn around and spin a wild narrative about genocide and authoritarianism. Give me a break. You cant build a website on the principles of civil debate and evidence based conversation only to immediately abandon those principles the moment someone disagrees with you. You preach about the dangers of locking yourself in an echo chamber and literally turn this place into one. You don't get to wrap yourself in the virtues of science and reason just to regress into the exact same rhetoric you just claimed to oppose. I have higher standards for you and the left as a whole. You think you're brave and "fighting fascism" by turning every opposing idea into an existential threat? You're not dismantling oppression you're fostering a culture where doubt is heresy and debate is betrayal. The boundary's you claim to be pushing are guise for control. Instead of challenging power, you've become obsessed with policing thought, rejecting dissent, and curating ideological purity at all costs. The Problem with Online Politics is you. You frame yourself as the enlightened observer and write a manifesto that reads like a sermon. You don't invite discussion, and speak down on those reading it. Your promotion of reason and mutual understanding is in reality, just you jerking yourself off for being morally superior and painting anyone who disagrees as stupid scared or selfish. You genuinely believe your worldview deserves the final word. That isn't reason. That isn't humility. And it most certainly isn't discourse. What's most disappointing is I think you know better you've clearly spent a lot of time making sense of the world around you. It seems somewhere along the way you lost track of the things that matter and became fixated on being right, righteous and always in control. You need to do some self reflection, because behind the veil of ideological vanity, there's still a thoughtful person. Someone who wants better, knows better, and who is capable of living up to the ideals he claims to believe in.
Jackson (April 19, 2025, 5:52 p.m.)
Trash talking and intellectual conversation are not mutually exclusive. I take issue when political conversation collapses solely into meaningless fighting. I post on here exclusively to invite discussion and conversation. Do you see me silencing my dissenters? And yes, I will continue to jerk myself off morally until I see a reason not to. If you think you can prove me wrong, I invite your attempts. I try to have as few rules on here as possible. Cultivating intelligent conversation is de facto rather than something I intend to strictly enforce.