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?
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.