I felt the need to share something personal about myself to one of the most welcoming, great communities I've ever had the honor to call myself a part of. You can make posts lamenting my radicalisation all you want, but seriously that shit is none of your business and the fact that you decided to deride me for being "tricked" or something makes me really mad. Do you think some internet strangers can automatically re-write 10 years of the US school system's imprint on my brain? The people on hexbear were everything the people on your instance claimed to be and more, these "genocidal tankies" showed patience, compassion, and empathy to me, and you think you can just condesendingly harp on about how i've been brainwashed? seeing hexbear made me decide to take a second look at my worldview, and really research who i was, what i believed, and what i stood for. If you think you can reduce that to me being brainwashed, you can go to hell.
fuck you and never post about me again.
(what community do i post this to? cth should be fine right? just delete it and dm me if i have to move it :P )
Seeing the way libs blame "tankies"/Russians/insert-enemy-here for radicalizing people reminds me a lot of how abusive parents react to being cut out of their child's life. They'll blame one of the child's friends, or their new significant other, or their therapist, saying the person in question "poisoned their child's mind," but the one person they will never, ever blame is themselves. The entitlement, the infantilization, the complete blindness to their own wrongdoing, it's all eerily similar.
Besides the fact that your analysis is spot on, it's especially tasty since the post OP is calling out was framing Hexbear as abusive.
this is a really great way to put it. thank you
That is a scarily accurate analogy. The worrying thing then is I also have never witnessed an abusive parent be convinced out of their ways, I wonder what the best approach is there.
Introspection (the lack of which is usually the source of chronically abusive behaviour) is a skill that takes a lot of time to cultivate. You cannot convince a person to become introspective anymore than you can convince a person to start speaking French. It is also necessary for the right social environment to be present for introspection.
Or their university. Seen that one blamed a couple times.
It also reminds me of Satanic Panic shit