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?
What do you mean? It specifically says leftist, and even you quoted in reference the part that used liberal.
The original post states that any attempt at real progress makes you a liberal, as opposed to a pure leftist for whom nothing short of a perfect solution on the first go is worth fighting for.
There are several such leftists in this very thread.
The second comment has been removed, but the first one seems fair to me (I hope you won’t dismiss this out of hand as an authoritarian leftist, I’m not authoritarian at all). Trans people don’t choose to be trans, so calling them sinful just to endear yourself to a church member doesn’t seem materially different from saying to a regressive Mormon that, sure, black people bear the mark of Cain.
It just labels a vulnerable group as inherently problematic. It’s not authoritarian to be surprised or upset by that.
I elaborated more on why I conceded that point further down that thread. I would like to emphasize that I sincerely do not believe that being trans is sinful or in any way unnatural or problematic. Trans people have existed for millenia and history is rife with records of them. I realized that, since the person I was arguing with was not thinking rationally, I could not convince him with reason (plus, as stated in the post, it was really late at night for me (we lived nine timezones apart) and I really wanted the argument to be over so that I could go to bed -- at least half of it was "fine, you can have this point, since I don't have the energy to argue with you") so, since I could not get rid of his transphobia, I tried to convince him, if he must be transphobic, to at least do so in the privacy of his own head.
I apologize for the insult to the trans community, and I will stress again that that concession in no way reflects my actual beliefs, but I believe it was a necessary evil.
In cases where convincing people not to be transphobic is not an option, convincing them to keep it to themselves reduces harm more than getting into a big fight over whether it's sinful (which, since no two interpretations of the bible are the same, one cannot possibly win) and giving the transphobe ammunition with which to hate in the form of "lmao look at this snowflake".
You have your reasons, but that doesn’t make this a less surprising or upsetting thing for people. Even if it did, you didn’t provide that context in the post, so people will respond without context (edit: and that’s also been removed for me). That doesn’t make them authoritarian, just people who have different values from you.
What about it do you see as authoritarian?
That's not the argument. Leftists are fine with incremental change and improvements, they just do not believe continuing Capitalism counts as an incremental improvement. If a country isn't moving towards Socialism, concessions are nice, but insufficient to count as meaningful change.
I think a lot of this whole "liberal vs leftist" stuff here roots in defederation, creating 2 large echo chambers with some bleedover but no actual crossing over. This results in a lot of (usually incorrect) assumptions and good-faith misreadings of original points and takes.
Additionally, Leftists are usually very confident in their views and takes, because usually they have at least read some theory, whether that be Marx, Goldman, Lenin, Kropotkin, or so forth, while Liberals usually form their world views based on their personal experiences and view of the world. Some leftists are very aggressive in confronting liberal views, which in turn can push liberals away, instead of learning more.
I think it is the juxtaposition with "lukewarm christian" that belied a sense of reverse engineering to me. It indicates a view of liberals as a degree of leftist, which is usually an oppositional perspective.