Well, thanks for being open. I feel we still didn’t really address my concern, but that’s alright. I see OP’s post as a legit reaction to the emotions I got from there, even if they are clearly bad faith posting here.

Hey, maybe I’m just butthurt you didn’t spoon feed me where I’m wrong, so no love lost.

I did get kinder responses, that is true. Though my main take-away wasn’t a ‘wow, these guys are awesome, I wanna read everything’, more like a ‘I’ll only comment on anything political when and if I get past the literature they recommended’.

It is alright, I am sure the revolution will do just fine without my organizational skills. I am just arguing that OP is right to troll in this instance.

Again I want to emphasize, that I am really digging this convo, but I guess I have very little to lose as well. It feels like we are communicating, but I don’t think I need to ‘be the bigger man’ by understanding the other side (these are my neuroses, no shade towards you, just where I’m coming from).

I feel you do understand me, yet don’t really concede any points or validate them.

Goodness, does it ever.

But my problem was that the group put me in a box. Nobody wanted to know my level of education, just if I read this or that book on communism.

It is a totally fair reason not to engage in argument. It’s just… How can I put it…? Just because I didn’t read a book, I can’t be knowledgable on a subject?

My guesses are that your community is so exposed to bad faith arguments, so you cannot give everyone the time of day. I haven’t gone back to reread the thread, but you can probably see how I was basically backing into a corner through the whole thread.

The intensity of the argument isn’t the problem, the illegitimacy of the argument is.

Yeah, I know OP is trolling. I see it is causing calls to not pull apart. Sure, maybe not every thread goes for the jugular on the hex server, but it fept by going against the grain I was a pariah immediately.

I mean at the end of the day it is petty squabbles on the internet, I just feel that we’re missing out if we don’t make a connection. Like, you seem smart, well read, and have a pretty novel world view that would interest me. I grew up in the context that communism is not of the devil, so it was terribbly disjarring that I finally saw a safe space to talk about the fallies of communism with hobby scientists on the matter.

I dunno, maybe I was devil’s advocating and triggered a healthy response. It still feels off that I felt shut up there and now I see members of that community pleading for more open communication here.

Yup, that was me. Sorry for mixing you up. I guess you spoke to me like a human there first, that’s why your name stuck.

I feel it still doesn’t take away too much from my argument. While OP’s post is outright malicious and is meant to start a fight, I wasn’t doing that on what I thought was a proper place for discussion.

Again, I don’t want to jump to conclusions, and I did make a mistake, but don’t you see what I’m trying to get at?

It feels a bit disingenuous to hear the following:

to engage in productive conversation with Marxists.

I mean I got your point the other day, that I shouldn’t necessarrily argue about Communistic dogma without reading all the literature, but I had to fight tooth and nail to get to that point and not just be waved away as a bad faith actor. So I was already working hard just to be told to go and read up.

OP is using the same intensity hammer you guys got going on over there. Is it fair?