I’m learning that trying to turn a bully into a friend is such grade school shit. It arrests your development, and I want to know about the ways it does. I’m embarrassed I wasted my time thinking of how to talk to liberals who seem set on being right wingers.
I realize that not only should I drop all intentional right wingers out of my social life, I have to in order to develop as a person.
Someone told me that communist reducation camps could reform Nazis, but it took controlling every aspect of their lives and everyone they spoke to in order to reform them. That it cannot happen one-on-one on an interpersonal level.
I do not have the tools to reprogram dedicated right wingers. Even with people who are trying to be leftists, I need them to already be surrounded by other leftists so that I only have to fill one tiny gap at a time in their preexisting knowledge.
The more I learn the more I feel like a new person to politics. I don’t think I’ll ever have to choose right wingers as potential social circle members ever again. Right now I don’t have to drink poisoned water anymore.
There are so many good at-home alone entertainment options now (this website counts as one) that the scarce couple hours per week you can tear someone away from them to hang out with you is less consequential to their political development than whatever feed they spend 20 hours per week scrolling. That was the unfortunate conclusion I arrived at after spending many frustrating hours talking to a longtime friend about trans issues and then they just kept sliding further down the right wing rabbit hole. I’m guilty of the same probably, from the perspective of some liberals I know. I do not value their political opinions as much as ones I read online here and elsewhere. One person stopped talking to me, not immediately after but probably ultimately caused by a discussion we had on Ukraine where I said they should make territorial concessions for peace because the war is nightmarishly awful and needs to end. In retrospect it was stupid to engage in that discussion and I valued their human company more than hashing out opinions on a war neither of us had any say about. But so it goes.
By the way the flip side of this is that a lot of people who share your political views are annoying as fuck or have various other traits that make them not good friends. I would not go so far as to say shared political beliefs are orthogonal to being a good friend but there are so, so many things that go into the cocktail of making someone pleasant to be around that I do often wonder whether I drastically overrate the importance of politics in friendships.
I would not go so far as to say shared political beliefs are orthogonal to being a good friend but there are so, so many things that go into the cocktail of making someone pleasant to be around that I do often wonder whether I drastically overrate the importance of politics in friendships.
It’s different when it’s your own etnicity being projected on, and you’te seen as a “neutral/good one” or “a dangerous/evil one” based on if you’re racist towards your own race along with them or not.
I knew a person who seemed okay with the topic of socialism, then they spoke negatively about my people’s country. Later they hurt me in a way I won’t mention.
So I drew a boundary. My people have some socialism in their history, so of course we are demonized. I can’t afford to be close friends with people who demonize the country of my people because that’s evidence they may see me as the “good insert my ethnicity.” Especially because I don’t want to be at a higher level of risk of being around people who are sexually attracted to me simply because they fetishize my people because they, as evidence, don’t fully respect me as a insert my ethnicity person. As someone said about being racistly removed from an event’s cast, they “stripped me of my humanity and agency, reducing me to an object onto which others can project their racist fears and smears.” I cannot sit there forever waiting to be approved by people close to me. They have racist bully shit to say about my people’s country without it being a genuinely open question, I don’t want to be super close to them. Although I will always run into and befriend some people who may be racist to me, it is a still a way I don’t want to try to turn bullies into close friends.
I’m so sick and tired of tiptoeing around the topic of my people. I’m not totally sure what other boundaries I need to set. I worry openly saying positive, nonracist things about my people will get me attacked verbally, emotionally, mentally, amd maybe and in other ways.
Yeah I think if someone is being racist but doing the “but you’re one of the good ones” shit (even using cloaked language) that is a very valid reason to not be their friend
