I hardly ever get attacked online by people whose opinions I fundamentally oppose. They mostly just ignore me, even though I frequently attack them and their organisations in public. But every now and then I get these really vicious attacks from people who know that I basically share their opinions. Usually they get angry with me because I (seem to) question some in-tribe Leftie sacred truth.
One example was when I mused ”I wonder when the covid vaccine will become commercially available and what it will cost”. People went apeshit over this and called me a bad Social Democrat, apparently because somehow they interpreted the question to mean a declarative statement, ”I think rich people should be able to buy the vaccine ahead of everyone else”. Another was when I said that I think it’s great that modern medicine allows women to opt out of Down syndrome pregnancies. Again, some people apparently interpreted this quite differently, perhaps as ”Down syndrome people have no value and should all just be shot”. Or the time when I said that I didn’t see the practical value of organising a massive multi-thousand participant protest rally against a small local neo-Nazi club, when 90% of the parliamentary voters supported explicitly anti-Nazi parties. Or the time when I scoffed at the most recent ungainly euphemism for disability.
I’ve been trying to formulate my view of these attacks from the Left. There are some good English and Swedish words.
- Over-earnest
- Sanctimonious
- Self-righteous
- Prissy
- Humourless
- Condescending
- Förnumstig
- Distanslös
- Självgod
- Nedlåtande
Facebook calls your contacts ”friends”. That’s my yardstick there. If people are unfriendly on Facebook, for instance by not giving me the benefit of the doubt if they question something I seem to say, I usually block them right away. I’m not on the social media to debate hostile people. At the time of writing, I have 3267 Facebook friends and there are 44 names on my block list.
See also: Relatively Woke.