braces for down votes and possible ban

Generally true, yes. In most cases, the leftists using that sort of terminology are tankies, meaning they are explicitly pro-authoritarian. They just want the dictators to be communists (or claimed communists) rather than capitalists (despite said dictatorial communism usually being about seizing all the money for themselves anyways and often results in full on capitalism regardless, China is a great example).

So you don't even need the word replacement thought experiment. Tankies are openly authoritarian.

I have a friend who has come to reflect this exact behavior to an extraordinary degree of accuracy.

It's interesting because the near puritanical nature of their responses to nearly anything has become more extreme than even the most devoutly religions individuals. Obviously the focus of their evangelizing is very different, but it has become difficult to even have a conversation.

I'll give you an example: I saw a new game called Pal World, which looked absurd, mentioned and was instantly met with the fact that the game was unacceptable because it supports forced labor.

Additionally, there seems to be an immense amount of hypocrisy in regards to what is good and what is bad, largely driven by what best I can refer to as their "leftist Zeitgeist." As bad as I can tell now, according to them, I am a liberal, and apparently liberals are bad, and the only true salvation is being a leftist?

Of course, I have a much more varied and complex set of moral and political values that likely don't fall under a singular label... But what do I know about anything.

I met him 95% of the way... and failed.

That's because the people you're picking fights with only care about being right. It's why the American government undergoes a political ratchet toward the right: the people pushing for radical change at all costs and the people seeking compromise are not evenly distributed.

There's this half baked idea that keeps bouncing around in my mind, let's give it a engagement friendly name: Scam Theory.

Scam Theory, stated simply, is the idea that most of society is composed of scams. Scams, in this case, are any relationship where a large group of people come to believe lies that harm them and others, told by a small group of people who peddle those lies because they benefit from that harm.

It's like Category Theory, where you start to see the commonality across many disparate domains of math; except in this case it's commonality across many different social groups, and the commonality is the cycle of abuse.

Under Scam Theory, there are only minor implementation details that differentiate political zealots and religious zealots. Given some time, I could probably think of dozen more commonalities between leftist revolutionaries and christian doomsdayers. Or any other religion's extremists for that matter. Or people that buy into get rich quick schemes. Or capitalism. Or any other type of scam.

One of the main aspects of commonality amongst all scams is that there are the in-group, who participate and get to go to heaven/live in utopia/become fabulously wealthy/find happiness/stay young forever/etc, and the out-group, who didn't participate get to burn in hell/get walled for being counterrevolutionary/stay poor/be miserable/grow old and die alone/etc.

All you have to do to support Scam Theory is be vigilant of scams, spread this info, and don't be like one of the easy targets who will suffer (scams) for not buying into Scam Theory

Marxism and Christianity only share the fact that they contain frameworks for analyzing material reality(Marxism through Materialism and Christianity through representing reality as though it is divine, and thus explainable via the divine), and this post seems to not be willing to honestly engage with Marxism as a concept.

1. Marxists do not oppose incremental change. Marxists believe that minor concessions under Capitalism are insufficient to actually fix the underlying problems, and this point of view is built on a thorough understanding of the Marxist critique of Capitalism.

2. Marxists do not oppose reform, they just believe it is impossible to do successfully without sliding backward, because the state is built in a manner that supports Capitalism and resists change.

3. Marxism is an economic critique of Capitalism, a philosophical framework, and a call to action. It is a complete set of tools to look at the world, analyze it, and how to fix it. In this manner, it can be superficially compared to Christianity, but only on the surface.

That's really it.

Outside of the word "capitalist," literally nothing presented in the top half of the image is even political, let alone authoritarian 🙄 it kinda seems like you're just using popular negative words against things you dislike.

Don't worry about getting banned. You didn't post on the .ml instances after all! ;)

Seriously though, you're not crazy. My advice is to not get emotionally invested in any of those types of interactions. If they're being too stupid for you, just block them. You're mental wellbeing will thank you for it.

The difference is that revolutions HAVE happened throughout history, and have been successful.

Comparing a political act that has historical precedent to a bible story with no basis in fact is probably the most flaccid “both sides” centrist argument I’ve ever heard.

Wild to me that people actually think liberal democracy isn't authoritarian, it is literally the dictatorship of the bourgiosie

Look. A lot of people are sick of what looks an awful lot like bullshit. We've seen what liberal politics gets us. We see that the victories of the past were won in spite of liberal moderates, rather than with their cooperation. If you find more people taking hard line stances, maybe it is self defense against being dragged into mealy mouthed excuses about why we have to vote for leaders who support genocides.

Stop trying to divide the working class against itself.

We are all working class.

• “voting for Biden is tantamount to fascism”

I've been hearing substantial amounts of "If you're not voting for Biden then you're implicitly endorsing Fascism". Perhaps this is just reflexive push-back?

• “the concept of an assigned gender, or even an assigned name, at birth is transphobic”

If you've ever actually dealt with babies before - with one particular anatomical difference that makes changing a diaper more exciting - there's not much about them that screams "gender" until parents make a big show of color-coding. And there's definitely a lot of goofy phrenology-tier bullshit that goes into "Blue is For Boys and Pink is for Girls".

There's definitely a degree of transphobia that goes into people who are insecure about their boy baby wearing girl colors. And I've seen quite a few dime-story psychiatrists insist that infants can be "turned" gay based on insufficiently gendered living spaces or treatments. The most consistently crazy claim I've seen is that when male babies are breast fed for too long, they become "sissified", which can range from becoming cis-homo to trans-hetero depending on who you ask.

It occurred to me just now that these interactions reminded me of nothing so much as an evangelical Christian

Well, let's maybe take a step back and first ask which one of these people are endorsing the bombing of an abortion clinic.

It's of course possible to just be opposed to the meat grinder that is modern society without requiring me to be some kind of revolutionary?

And I would raise the argument that the vast majority of "leftists" are like that and are not actually revolutionary because most people can't be bothered to be revolutionary. It's hard work and even if you succeed, then you have to do more work.

I'm quite happy for a government to exist, I just want it to be a good one. I'm not even asking for a Star Trek utopia, just not actively evil. That'll do for now.

way to present a big strawman, but what can we expect from liberals still clinging to american exceptionalism.