There's a mode of argumentation on twitter that, while not unique to twitter, really makes it impossible for actual arguments to happen. It's the way addressing someone directly scans as aggressive, or even an invitation to abuse...

...while broadly attacking an over-broad and vague straw man ("you guys/the left/liberals/lotta people on here are saying") can only produce an argument that convinces no one, because no one identifies with the straw man being attacked.

A lot of it is bad faith, of course! But it's uniquely easy in this medium to ignore the substance of what the person you're beefing with actually said and even to wildly mischaracterize it, under the guise of not addressing them directly (because to do so would be aggro)

And then, of course, their response will make as little sense, because everyone's tilting with the very specifically pernicious windmill they've crafted into existence.

So much of it goes back to the way you *feel* like you have control over context--you think you're writing to one kind of imagined audience, that's seen what you've seen--but we're all occupying slightly different parallel universes, subtly different in a million respects

Good premise for a SF story: everyone occupies a slightly different parallel universe, but interacts with each other as if we all occupy the same reality (even though in mine the United States never invaded Iraq and in yours cold fusion was perfected in 2009, etc)

And we all agree to pretend we don't see the places where friction and dissonance occurs because it would be impolite

Anyway, people who disagree with you generally do so because of how their ideology makes sense of their material conditions; if you think a real person* disagrees with you bc they're stupid and malicious, you might be taking the easy way out and missing the real substance of it.

*people whose job is to manipulate you with discourse--media people, politicians, powerful people of so many stripes--are not real persons and a different set of considerations applies

I say this bc while Powerful Politicians are full of shit and shouldn't be trusted, many/most who vote for them--finding the ideology compelling--do so in good faith, with good intentions, bc the discourse plays on and reframes real material interests and fears. That's its job!

If you've been interpellated as a "taxpayer" or a "law-abiding citizen" you can suddenly, in good faith, inhabit a really reactionary frame of reference, politically, without having ever *decided* to. The frames are powerful bc they make it delightfully unnecessary to think.

But an argument between a taxpayer and a worker--or between a law-abiding citizen and an always already criminalized subject of the state--might as well take place in the sci-fi story I was describing. These are alternate universes.

And to bring it back to twitter--where nothing you tweet is even legible without deducing context into it--the assumptions and "objective facts" we're all presuming are the MOST submerged part of our discourse

In summation, twitter is cursed ground and this thread should have been the blogpost that I'm now too unmotivated to write it as because I already tweeted it