The funny thing is that I myself am a leftist. Somewhere between a social Democrat and a socialist when it comes to my political views. I just absolutely detest the extremism I have noticed spreading on the left like a cancer for well over a decade now. I haven’t been able to talk about the kinds of politics I think are important and that matter for years because everything is distraction politics now. Everything is hysterical identity politics that harms minorities and marginalized people way more than it helps them or it is, as you also mentioned, all about violent revolution.
When Charlie Kirk died something in me kinda snapped. Not that I hadn’t already had my own fair share of snappenings after trump entered office a second time and I fucked off as many American owned platforms as possible. It was the reaction to Kirk’s assassination that absolutely floored me. Both in terms of how I reacted myself and how I saw everyone else reacting.
I felt nothing. I barely knew who he was because I don’t care much for people like him and don’t bother watching them. However, I used to be someone who would feel sorrow for anyone who gets murdered for their political beliefs as it goes against my core values. I was disgusted with many people on the left when the trump assassination attempt happened and people were cheering about that family father who got murdered. I was very vocal about how this is no way to have a democracy in a supposed modern, developed world.
And not even a year later I hear about Kirk and I felt nothing. I was absolutely apathetic after the 2025 Trump has given the world and how he has helps stoke the flames of hatred between people and countries too. For ever one good thing he tries to do and wants Nobel prizes for, he’s done at least five terrible deeds that has caused people and countries to fear for the future of the world. He is mirthful elephant in a china shop.
But I felt nothing for Kirk and it scared me how stripped of my compassion I have become in a year of constant strife between everybody.
The way other people reacted utterly disgusted me. Both Kirk’s supporters and the trump administration behaved like the caricatures they are, comparing him to Jesus or the apostle, they seemed to not really make their minds up on that one, and trump happily using a man’s death to further his disgusting, divisive politics.
But the extreme left? Mate. Lemmy truly showed its face during that episode. They were every bit the disgusting monsters they screech about every single day that everybody else is. I took a break from Lemmy after that. Checked in from time to time in the instances I liked, but it took me until recently, within the past week or two, to start using it again more regularly.
My boyfriend thinks that when America gets a new president and that president is hopefully someone who seeks to unite people instead of dividing them, things will calm down. I hope he is right. I certainly don’t see a platform like Lemmy naturally evolve into a positive place with productive conversations before the western world’s finds a way to become the adults in the room again. Because right now I feel like the world is being run by temperamental toddlers and that scares me.
In that sense, Lemmy is nothing more than a reflection of the infected wound that is western society today. People project all their frustration onto people who thinks differently than them, believe differnet things than them, love and look a different way from them, all when they feel trapped and helpless in their own situation. It is easier to blame and Witch hunt those whom you find fault with than to be forgiving of each other’s differences and hold on to that humanity that comes so easy during good times and is so hard to hold on to during the hard ones.
I recently read a really good memoir from a man who grew up in the brutal farmer society in Jutland, Denmark in the 1920s, 30s and 40s when the Germans came and took our country.
He puts it so brilliantly in his book, several times how hard it is to remain kind to your neighbor when your own situation is so dire. First growing up in the 20s in the aftermath of a terrible war, then the 30s where no one had any money and then the 40s with war and restrictions on everything. It shapes you. In his case it shaped a person who was forgiving of other people’s flaws. He understood hardship and had lived it always. He eas grateful for the small things and while he may not have fully appreciated it at the time in his youth when he was working as a farm boy on differnet farms where he worked himself into a hungry, tired beast that cared only for food and sleep, it later made a man who had an enormous empathy for other human beings. Even those whose opinions he didn’t care for.
I sometimes fear that many of us have grown up in too much comfort. We have been challenged too little. Then we meet a bit of hardship and we become animals immediately. It has been disheartening to see how easily people have taken to anti semitism in this day and age. We have no excuses for falling for it because we already know what it can lead to.
We do live in scary times, but what disgusts me so much is that we should know better, we have relatively the most comfort that humankind has ever had and still, we are such animalistic monsters the minute things gets a bit hard. He mentions this in his book, the old man from Jutland. How he worked on a farm in his 20s in the 40s, where all the animals were being treated really well. Too well. They didn’t get any discipline and that made them quick anger and violence when they didn’t get their way. One instance of some farm animals who thought he came to them with food and when he didn’t, they attacked him.
I feel like we are like those farm animals in a sense. We haven’t seen enough hardship so we make life hard for one another instead and think we are doing something important by screaming at one another on a stupid internet forum. I find it so embarrassingly tone deaf and out of touch when people tell me that any of what goes on, on Lemmy is important and productive political discussion. The same kinds of people who think that stabbing people’s car tires in the name of Just Stop Oil does a fucking thing to change the world. They don’t want to go the boring way, where you go talk to politicians, try to convince them with your words and with research and time spent on building a case for what you want to see changed. That is totally not the cool sexy way to do activism. No no. Let’s do vandalism and harass people and act like fools instead. That will make change. Let’s sit on our forums and call people fascist. That will make things better.
That is how I see things.
I don’t think we can just wipe that turd off onto people with disorders. Most people have it in them to act like animals if they get the right encouragement.
There is also a difference between observing real fascism and talking about that, and then calling everything you don’t like or want to silence, fascist. There’s a very big difference and people should be more careful with words like that and only use them when it is applicable and not use it as a catch all slur. Then it loses its meaning. People on Lemmy use fascism for everything they don’t like. The irony is that some of their own behaviors on this platform has some of the same characteristics as fascism does. Not a one to one, but there certainly isn’t much space for differing opinions and there seem to be a wish for a world where only one set of values is permitted and it should be implemented through violence. That is how a lot of people think on here and I find it amusing that they point the finger at everybody else and any attempt at nuance is met with accusations of fence-sitting. People are very very special on this platform, as they are on every other social media platform.
But let’s not blame people with disorders for a behavior that is a universal trait of human stupidity.