How do I be less offensive

Post the jokes

I don't have them anymore

I don't go on Facebook at all but I do hang around socialists IRL. I've said some things that could be a bit dicey but misunderstandings are not the end of the world.

Two bits of advice I heard that are good is (1) don't surround yourself with yourself. The second (2) I'm borrowing from something I heard about people with depression, which is that people with depression who take therapy will go through exercises where they deliberately make mistakes to show that the consequences are not really bad. I think it applies to saying dumb shit because there's a tendency to think getting a bad reaction after saying something inadvertently dumb is like the apocalypse, but it's not so. Anyways I'm kind of rambling but I think this frustration leads some men to go "okay fine fuck it; the ingrates!" and they go whole-hog towards the right.

I wasn't socialized on 4chan but I'm a white dude from Texas who grew up with a lot of bullshit spookery and ideology implanted in my brain, still have it buried in there, and I hang around a lot of Mexican socialists so, yeah, I've said some dumb shit. It takes effort for me to interact with people.

But ultimately, what it comes down to I think is that the left does look after its people even when we've got some warts. It sounds cheesy, but this whole thing is about direct solidarity with people under attack and restructuring the whole economy and society to serve human and social purposes, right? The right does not have that because it's a bunch of grifters and they mostly rant about what they hate. Naturally enough, they all hate and despise each other too and will throw each other under the bus whenever they run into trouble or when the opportunity presents itself. Like Zig Forums has been tearing its hair out over the guilty verdict for the guy who drove that car into those people in Charlottesville. Do you know how many alt-right dudes showed up at the trial to sit as witnesses? Zero. Well, one, briefly and then he left so he could write about it. But they make a big deal about how /theirguy/ got a raw deal but none of them actually give a shit about him as a human being.

Like, you can't fake solidarity. If we don't have that, then we're nothing. The word "intersectionality" gets a bad rap here, but the legit groups are intersectional and they are social communities with a social consciousness, I guess you could say. So that's how I would keep in mind when interacting with the left broadly speaking. I don't think it's even necessarily about having a "progressive" mindset or even liking other people that much, or being liked. More about standing alongside people in a struggle, I guess. Maybe this is dumb I dunno.

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I have also spent 10 years on 4chan and saying "nigger" in real life is not an unsurmontable compulsion. Sounds like you're just retarded.

if you want a relevant strategy for imageboard arguments: when you want to annoy people you disagree with don't try to be offensive. try to sound like you're from tumblr or such. intentionally think "what could i do here to look like an outsider?" and then do that.

you'll get thrice as many (you)s as you would for telling people to drink bleach and hours of entertainment as people who got here 2 years after you did type up walls of edgy text in the expectation it'll shock you back to tumblr or get their epic takedown screencapped for future use.

in all measurements - (you)s, ratio of text you type to text others type, preventing idiots from wasting your time by ensuring they disregard your material point in favour of focusing on proper form, "problematic" is infinitely more powerful than "faggot"

I get how you feel since I've been involved with some queer groups and I had to separate myself from 4chan programming. Developing empathy is a gradual process - try to read more on the issues that seem to provoke you, attempt to see things from the other person's social perspective, and remain civil. It won't happen overnight but you can definitely become a more tolerable person with somd practice.

Similar time period spent on 4channel, I just hide my powerlevel and never bring it up, almost creating other personas for Anonymous me and meatspace me.
Then again, I'm not really joining groups and such yet.

Can you give some examples? Does this usually happen in discussions about leftism/politics or just in casual chats?

Doesn't the left do this constantly, though? People were gloating over Mark Fisher's suicide.

I think there are real political differences, beyond just using "retard" or whatever (which, by , isn't exactly what's happening in every case, anyway). The rejection of people based on inappropriate language is linked to a certain political view of the world, and one that doesn't comport with most of us here. It's not as if most of us can't pretend to follow the same "woke" social rules as most left political groups and hide the differences with our silence, but everything about it feels fraudulent and disgusting, like having a friend who would reject us unless we lie to him constantly about fundamental issues.

I'll say, for my part, it took me a very long time to find any groups on the left that shared similarly critical views of identity. If you're just joining random groups, online or off, you won't find very many communities on the left where you share much fundamentally in common. That's sadly just where things stand in the Anglosphere and much of the European left at this historical juncture.

I also don't really think it's a question of empathy, although it may require learning a kind of language game called "Empathy." If you said that you were empathetic for, say, incels, most left groups you'd find lacking in the same. It's more about affirming having empathy for the correct targets of empathy, and affirming that one cannot understand that person's position truly in some fashion and demonstrating some sort of deference for the correct empathy targets.