so here’s how the human centipede of twitter discourse works:

someone makes a tweet either about politics or with political implications. it blows up.

popular liberal/lefty account quotes it and leaves a snarky remark trying to out-woke the op

and then we’re forced to hear dozens of bad takes for the next week defending or attacking various peoples involved. nothing is in good faith, no progress is made, and everyone’s experience is made worse.

everyone on twitter spends all day trying to one-up someone else for social capital. I’m doing it right now. and it’s terrible for discourse of all varieties, but especially leftist discourse.

the original tweet was someone making fun of a racist for being poor. making fun of people for being poor as someone who claims to be progressive or left is not a good look. and what’s more important than that is that it reinforces capitalist ideals in people’s minds.

not to mention, it’s wrong. it’s fundamentally built on the liberal notion that racism is a function of ignorance and that only poor whites living in rural mississippi can be racist, not at all like my loving and inclusive liberal enclave. it was a trash tweet.

but someone didn’t come along and say “it’s ok to make fun of racists, but you shouldn’t make fun of someone specifically for being poor”. instead they made a vague and snarky comment to one-up them, a comment that can and has been used to defend racists. and someone else takes it as a defense of racists BECAUSE they are poor, and not a defense of poor people.

and now everyone has taken a side, everyone is mad, everyone is hyper-polarized, because hyper-polarization is encouraged and rewarded by market ideology, and market ideology is the thing social media is based on. the marketplace of ideas exists, and it’s bullshit, but most people have not been properly equipped to critique it. leftists included.

the reason why people get heavily invested in what some random on the internet believes is because of this belief in the marketplace of ideas. it literally doesn’t matter. if someone is diametrically opposed to you just say fuck off and move on. use the internet as a tool to educate, maaaybe choose a select few arguments to get in, and find ways to accomplish your goals materially instead of rhetorically. stop relying on capitalist ideology to achieve socialism.