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The fact that your entire tone shifted to one of aloof denial and 'masterful intentionality!' after this suggests that it actually hit you quite close to home. You clearly had been hedging around the issue, and people have been attempting to engage you in good faith instead of calling you out to your face. It's hard to deny the impression your comments give when you're getting ratio'd on lemmy though. That's... that's rough. Your initial point about mental health was founded from a perspective that we can all understand, but you didn't factor in what a huge effect material concerns have on a person's mental health. The two are very linked, and for any one of a thousand possible reasons, you just missed the mark.

And that's okay.

You're letting yourself be ruled by an unfounded anxiety about your own intellectual inferiority and you're sensitive to any flaws in your reasoning or arguments as a result - that's why you were trying so hard to use clarification to adjust the initial meaning of your statement. I wanna assure you that from even a brief read of your comment history nah, you're plenty intelligent. I doubt you have many concrete indications in your life to point to, which is okay those will come in time.

But you're going to be a happier person if you can learn to accept and admit that you were wrong. My kneejerk reaction to things like this is to do exactly the same thing you're doing, and I spent a good portion of my youth being the same kind of commenter-that-claims-they-were-a-troll-all-along as you are, and I was miserable. Letting you in on a secret here though: People estimate the intelligence of an individual who's admitted their fault to be much higher than someone that sticks to a clearly flawed argument and argues from the ego until the fire in their metaphorical cave has burned down to embers. It's a basic trick of actual social manipulation (instead of the bush league tricks image board trolls rely on), and it's never failed me. Maybe it'll work for you too.