I saw this some years ago…

Which is good, but I think we’re (the sane part of humanity anyway) beyond this point even. This came across my Facebook feed the other day…

A good many years ago, after I got my first Internet account and discovered USENET news groups, I got into it with homophobic bigots on one of the ‘alt’ groups created specifically so gays and lesbians and the ‘phobes could have at it with each other. What I quickly discovered was the arguments you got from them were empty of all reason, morality and logic. All they had was a bottomless hate (almost always not just toward us either) that would not suffer self examination and would not be moved. They’d dress it up in religion, thump their bibles, throw out the anti-gay junk science du jour, do it over and over again no matter how often it was debunked, and just not stop. But there was nothing behind any of it more then contempt, loathing, and hate.

I was asked often back then why I bothered arguing with them. But it was a different time and place. You knew there were other gay people watching these arguments and I was doing it for them. I knew I wasn’t going to change any hearts or minds among the ‘phobes. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, a bigot’s mind is like an eye; the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes. There was no changing their minds about us, ever. But I could show the lurkers that the ‘phobes weren’t anything to be afraid of, that they had nothing and especially did not ever have the moral high ground. 

That was the middle 1980s and 90s. It’s almost a different world now, at least for LGBT people. The ‘phobes of course, have never changed. And they elected Donald Trump to a second term as president.

With the help of a couple white racist South African billionaires and silicon valley tech bros who think they’re running the world now. 

So a bunch of people have ended up over at BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social) after Elon Musk turned Twitter into a fascist playpen and began babbling about mind viruses. And now that a significant percentage of Americans decided reelecting Trump was what they wanted we are done with arguing with all of them. I mean how do you discuss Anything really, with Anyone who thinks that man is presidential material, let alone anyone who thinks ‘free speech’ means you promote nazis and silence anyone who speaks out against them. And now were hearing complaints from the howling monkey tree that we’re building an echo chamber, which is really rich considering the right wing one they’ve been living in ever since Reagan and Fox News.

This is not about the “low engagement” voters, it’s about the ones that are completely engaged in the politics of it, just immersed in that Fox News cocoon because that’s where they want to live, and if they can’t make the rest of us live there too, they’ll insist that we have to play along. But no. A lot of people now are tired of them. I’m tired of them, and I did my time in USENET.

It’s different now. I don’t see any plus to getting into it with a Trump voter. I see them in the social media comments and I block them. Block block block blockety block. The notion that by blocking and not engaging with them we’re choosing to live in a cocoon is ridiculous on its face, considering all the hostility toward science and the humanities the rest of us have to listen to whenever they open their yaps. By cutting them out of our lives, online and off, we are choosing not to live in theirs.