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?
The graphs and studies and comment elaborate on why liberal democracy is authoritarian.
Specifically the point I was making was that liberal democracy under capitalism is only democratic for the ruling class. It is an authoritarian dictatorship because it gives one class full authority to dictate the actions of another.
I understand how this can be difficult to grasp immediately if you don't have an understanding of class dynamics and the history of labor. I don't expect you to get it because of some comment on lemmy but do think about who really has power in capitalist neoliberal society.
This video is a decent entry point to my line of thinking here
I think this is the problem, you're using "liberal" and "neoliberal" pretty interchangeably, right? Most people do not think 'protect the rights of individuals and don't tell them what to do' and 'let business and the ultra-rich do whatever they want' are the same philosophy!
The purpose of a system is what it does
They work out to be pretty similar in practice, though. Like, you can see how private property (not personal property important distinction) as a right encourages the buying up and scalping of pretty much anything that can be qualified as private property by, basically, random chance as according to the free market, right? So, the first one creates the second one. I.E. 9 times outta 10 they boil down to effectively being the same philosophy in practice.