this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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Risa
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Star Trek memes and shitposts
Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
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It's definitely true that some people with legitimate criticisms get misread, but I think it's inaccurate to say that it's "a lot more common" to see legitimate criticism construed as bigotry than actual bigotry.
Just look at this thread, there are a bunch of people whining about queer characters being forced in your face just for being a part of the show. The bigoted fans come out in force with talk of "STD" (ugh) all the time, which is what created that expectation in the first place.
I feel like dismissing all the bigotry out there (including in this very thread) as "it's just the internet" while dwelling on a few dumb comments you read in the past (probably on the Internet?) is disingenuous.
Ffs. Let's look at this thread.
The top comments are by far just assholes. They dismiss and demean people like high school bullies. They are overly cruel, and blatantly attempt to justify that behavior like pretending their targets are just deplorable who deserve to be treated like this.
I find it disingenuous that you focus on the comments downvoted to hell and completely handwave away this obviously shitty behavior.
My instance has downvotes disabled, so if those comments are downvoted to hell I wouldn't know. As a result they show as reasonably highly upvoted on my end. Even if those opinions are controversial, the number of upvotes they get (plus the fact that there's several such comments, even here) show that there's lots of people who share the opinion. We just happen to be in a community that tends to be biased towards Discovery, so those opinions are in a minority here. Go to other communities, and suddenly people will be complaining about "woke Trek" left and right and getting majority support.
People came at you because you responded to a meme about bigots complaining about wokeness, which even you seem to concede exist, to make a complaint about how legitimate criticism gets construed as bigotry—which the meme in the post is not an example of. It comes across a little like a self report. It's like if you make a post saying "Nazism is bad" and some conservative randomly responds "this is hate speech against conservatives". You were talking about Nazis, not conservatives, but their response comes across as them admitting they're a Nazi.
That said, people came at you really aggro. It's easy to get caught up in labeling people as bigots and then get carried away in the dunking. I don't want to handwave away that fact.
Thanks for that last part.
The reason I immediately jumped to the bullying is because I feel like I've seen this story a million times. Someone loudly proclaims some extremely popular moral opinions. In the process, they then proceeded to insult whatever morally defunct out group.
At first it seems great. After all, bigots/Nazis are horrible people that need to be put in their place.
However, over time, the definition of bigot/Nazi widens to the point where it essentially becomes meaningless, while the vitriol towards whatever group becomes more and more unhinged.
I remember on reddit there was a sub called justneckbeard things. It started by roasting toxic neck beards. However by the end they'd just be posting pictures of obese nerds, making wild and completely unfounded moral assumptions, and then using those assumptions as a justification to bully people.
I honestly don't think most of the people complaining about bigots are here to protect tolerance. I think they're just toxic people who enjoy being cruel.