this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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Asklemmy
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I cringe so hard at the twitterist carebear-hugbox way of smugly claiming the intellectual high ground and shaming somebody:
"Be better." or "Do better."
The sentiment isn't terrible, but it's prevalent use is obviously just dripping with arrogance and thrown out in the most petty ways. Ugh!
They're the same types that appear in comment threads with contradictory arguments to literally fucking anything -
"We should save the whales"
"Yes but my cousin got splashed by a whale on a boat trip as a toddler and now has a terrible phobia that makes her wheeze whenever she sees one. Do you want that, is that what you want?"
"We should plan walkable cities"
"OH MY GOD SHES IN A WHEELCHAIR TOO DO YOU ONLY EVER THINK ABOUT YOURSELF YOU ABLEIST"
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My theory is that they're just unbelievably bo-o-o-o-oring, humourless people with nothing to add to a conversation but a desperate need for attention
The wheelchair one (whilst obvious hyperbole) is a great example of why this rhetoric isn't useful.
Often people who say we should plan walkable cities don't consider what that would mean for wheelchair users and other disabled people, because they don't have the lived experience to think along those lines. So it would actually be super useful if someone could say "okay, but what about wheelchair users?" in a constructive way, because there are additional considerations re: pedestrianisation and public transport. Disabled people are way too often treated like an inconvenience or obstacles to progress, and that's fucking exhausting, so it's useful to have allies who ask "hey, what about disabled people tho"
The people your comment is about don't do this. As you highlight, they make things about themselves, and if anything, this makes it harder to have productive conversations about what a 'walkable city' for everyone would look like. I suspect that for many of these people, it's based on a nugget of good intentions inside a blob of insecurity and dread at the state of the world; they feel like they're not doing enough so they resort to very loudly virtue signalling in the most bizarre ways.
See?
The "whilst obvious hyperbole" bit is the clue. The two situations/comments/opinions are just examples, never happened and never will
It wouldn't have mattered what examples I'd made up, someone like you would come along and go "wELL aKShULLy"
Fucksake!
My dude, I'm agreeing with you
Edit: effectively I was saying that I agree with you that there seems to be a particular kind of person who is overly contrarian, very loud and impossible to have productive discussions with.
I felt like the wheelchair example you picked was a great example of how this happens "in the wild". I wanted to build on your comment by using that example to elaborate on how these contrarian types cause harm, even if they might seem to be concerned and well-intentioned. I found the wheelchair example to be a good one because it is actually something that I've seen happen multiple times.
I feel that your reply is an unfair characterisation of my comment. Given how the internet's communication norms can prime us to read and respond to things in an overly adversarial manner (especially as it's clear from your original comment that you've got way too much experience with silly argumentative types, so I sympathise), I am hoping that your response was based on a misinterpretation of my comment and/or me being insufficiently clear in what I originally wrote (apologies if so).