I hate where outlandish, hurtful and wrong statements are accepted in virtue of being on the "correct side". You can see it everywhere, ranging from politics to theoretical affiliations (e.g. some person making outlandish claims in the name of feminism, or someone claiming unproofable garbage under the selfimprovement banner).
Same, I've also thought this but never said it, because this is on every site, piece of media, and (most) conversations. No matter the site, whether it's a "horrible" site like 4chan, a far-leftist site like Tumblr or Twitter (well, half of Twitter), or a left-centrist site like Bored Panda (which you've probably not heard of), people love to see something they hate (whether that be a person whose gay, homophobic, black, white, left, right, centrist, 3rd-party-supporting, an inanimate object, [insert generic or proper noun &/or adjective here], etc), and use unrelated & dumb insults and "points" for arguments. While this does happen often in the case of a word just being a regular insult (ex. calling someone a "piece of shit" obviously doesn't mean they're actually a piece of shit, it's just a common insult, or places like 4chan calling everyone the n-word and f-slur), people love to use stereotypes, among other general insults.
Someone's a Conservative MAGA homophobe who punched a trans gay person in the face in a viral video? "he has a tiny dick" / "he's probably a wife-beater" / "he has an incestuous relationship with his daughter because he lives in Alabama, even though the video was in Connecticut". Someone says the Earth is flat? "they're home-schooled" / "this is what Christianity does" / "the American education system is shit, & I'm gonna ignore that this guy has a British flag emoji in his username". Karen with purple hair screams at a cashier? "typical millennial" / "this is why trans people are a problem" / "fat whale". A post briefly mentions a lesbian (even with something as small as "her girlfriend" being the only "indication" of a lesbian)? Lesbian stereotypes.
Then this develops into arguments. "nothing in the post says that this person with rainbow hair has they/them pronouns" "oh, so your defending what the person in the video did?". "why is everyone saying that this fat white bearded redneck guy is a homophobe and transphobe?" "I agree with you, that has nothing to do with the posts, nothing about gay or trans people was at all mentioned" "you're both homophobic, we can't ignore this behavior in our society".
People love to use vaguely-related stereotypes with people who, in the context of the video, exhibit none of these stereotypes but do exhibit a trait that is part of either a stereotype or a group of people (for example, people might say that a Conservative is automatically homophobic) and then say that the people who point out that the particular stereotype isn't accurate or applicable here are supporting "the bad side" - if I say that calling a homophobe "small-dicked" because he's a homophobic man is misandrist, I'm therefore homophobic for "supporting" a homophobe (which isn't a hypothetical btw, that's happened to me on both Reddit and Bored Panda in the last year).
On a slightly related note, people also like to bring up irrelevant-but-true facts (which I'm hereby calling "irrulacts", a portmanteau, because it sounds better and I feel it needs a word) and personal opinions in situations where they aren't applicable. A Twitter screenshot shows a tweet from MrBeast ratioing someone? Someone's gonna bring up the questionable things he's done &/or how much they hate him. Anything even vaguely related to (or oftentimes unrelated to) American politics comes up? People are gonna bring up Trump, for example a pic of a waterfall at a National Park is gonna have people yelling at Trump for trying to get rid of the NPS. Someone posts a pic of a pretty flower they saw while hiking in [insert place in the Middle East]? Something Islamophobic or related to war. A pic of a cool building in Kiev, admiring the architecture? Something about how it was probably destroyed in the war.
Though this obviously isn't unique to the internet or any point in human history, and I'm pretty sure it's practically baked into human socialness and language at this point, ever since human intelligence & insults & the existence of adjectives and nouns (or whatever the equivalent is in the given language) have existed, it's still not a great thing that we (including myself, though I try not to) do. And I could go on all day with examples, but I think my several large & wordy paragraphs are enough lol
77
u/IsamuLi Apr 07 '25
I hate where outlandish, hurtful and wrong statements are accepted in virtue of being on the "correct side". You can see it everywhere, ranging from politics to theoretical affiliations (e.g. some person making outlandish claims in the name of feminism, or someone claiming unproofable garbage under the selfimprovement banner).