So seems I lost a friend over his new acquired communist/left/sjw/lgbtqwerty/fem thinking, he had almost stopped talking to me, should I?
The fuck is this thread. I'm way less worth than most people here.
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Regarding the lost friend, then it depends on why you went your seperate ways.
If a person becomes entirely consumed by an idealogue, then it can be nearly impossible to have any meaningful or rational dialogue. If they feel strongly about an issue and you either disagreed or didn't take their opinions seriously, then that's more of a natural seperation that you might be able to get around, but it will take time and an adjustment of attitude on one or both of your parts.
Some people become so embroiled in subjects that it becomes hard for them to take a step back and take certain interactions with their whole context, sometimes they fully acknowledge the context but believe that even small gestures are part of a bigger problem. Whether right or wrong, the importance is how you riff together, and the degree of hostility / sincerity between you. It's frustrating to deal with a person who acts like they have a crank in the side of their skull, and talking to them is like winding the crank and having the sheet-music of someone else's idealogical talking points spill out as an endless sidestepping routine. The flip side to this is that it's frustrating to feel something is really important, but have a friend wave it off or scoff as if its inconsequential. Where there isn't healthy dialogue, and where you can't find a survivable middleground of "we disagree majorly, lets call this subject taboo between us both", then things can dissolve quickly.
Referring to it as "communist / left / sjw / lgbtqwerty / fem" makes it seem to me (as an outsider) that you're blowing off something they're passionate about, and they may have gotten pissed at an ongoing equivalent of a softer spoken "who the fuck cares" :P Hard to tell where the humour ends and where the actual opinions start, on the internet. And when it comes to the 'issues', certain people tend to have little interest in humanitarian things unless it effects them directly. Some peoples political stances do not age gracefully, and yeah, even progressive-minded people can easily become set in their ways and became a new form of prejudice as they shift in age towards 'the previous generations'.
If someone is absolutely bullheaded and obnoxious, there is nothing you can do. Though it's quite easy for a flippant attitude to mistake "unrepentant strong stance on an issue" with "crazy stereotypical [group] lunatic".
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It also doesn't help with the popularity of short-form social media where it only takes a single click to signal boost an article or opinion, which often trims off context and subtler cues, like the degree to which you agree with various aspects. With how algorithms and content propagation works, even an open individual can accidentally find themselves sucked into an echo chamber just through exposure to the preferred content of friends and family, both in things that are supported, and the things they are concerned or angry about.
The end effect is that infuriating examples of counter-opinion are signal boosted en masse to the point that you can be conditioned into seeing strong disagreement as always coming from the mouth of a charicature-level bad faith speakers. It takes a lot of mindfulness not to get suckered into it, and even then nobody is immune to the wonky math of digital info exposure. Social memes are invisible and act very much like traditional disease infection, with all kinds of similar factors mimicing resistance, immunity, susceptibility and mutation (on the individual and herd levels). Even where an individual may be 'immune' they can still become an accidental vector.
Even an otherwise reasonable individual can be effected by how much exposure to charged social media they get. The saturation effect can really do a number on your perception. Even if only effected in the really short term, such as a handful of articles pissing you off and leaving you in a sour mood for a few hours, that in turn can change into a passing hostile exchange that informs someone else's bias along the tribal lines, or worse, said temporary sour mood may result in a snapshot event that another tribe uses to build a new 'totem of the enemy' to worship as an immortal scapegoat of why they should never listen or reason.
I always liked this video for its summary look at memetics, and while it does come across as initially patronising you should be able to quickly relate to the obvious patterns. It's about 8 minutes so most people will hard pass, but there's an important visual representation towards the end of how tribes become insulated from 'actual' exposure to opposing ideas, and instead gather around a nucleus of sorts, an exaggerated totem of their enemy, with each said tribe rarely interacting on an actual genuine level, and instead just trading token meme-bullets across the trenches in the shape of bitter mockery. The sad end-effect is that once people have gone this route, they place far more importance on their sense of justified anger at an enemy, sometimes even at the expense of harming actual efforts towards their own supposed ideals. Upon learning to enjoy hatred towards the 'enemy soldiers', people begin to validate taking shots at enemy civilians (ideals) just to make their soldiers hurt, with little regard to who that actually hurts.
Across the weird SJW vs anti-SJW divide for instance, people get so caught up in their poisonous bile that they happily propagate and enable judgementalism towards an entire sex, often masking it as 'just a joke dont take it seriously', but utterly ignoring it when those jokes become so commonplace that even their own community takes them seriously at the fringe. While the shit-eating war is taking place, these very same people are often glazing over glaringly important things like "Oh, shit, I actually have a son/daughter, and this shit I'm signal boosting may have a lasting effect that my children may end up having to soak in". Of all the 'women cry rape for attention' people, many will go on to have daughters. Of all the 'men are naturally predators' mentality, many will go on to have sons. If their children in later life became targets of some kind, they would be furious and lament their ordeals.
People just... really need to sober up. Catharsis may be a soft drug, but with enough saturation, can still form a brain-corroding addiction, and social media and all of its accidental connections is like an endless series of self-assembling drug-den. All of which tend to begin without any intention of overt hostility or desire to be so hateful, but without strict self-moderation and endless scrutiny to the bias of our speakers and news outlets, turn into the worst possible versions of themselves.
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...shit.
...huge posts.
My bad. I feel strongly about stuff too, but nothing more strongly than watching good people accidentally slide off down slippery slopes that bring out the worst in all directions. Whenever I see flippant remarks that seem to follow the usual scoffing along political divides ("My friend turned into a crazy feminist that believes in 58 genders lmao" / "My friend turned out to be a paedophilic MRA GG supporter") I always have this little inner defense mechanism that throws out a "press X to doubt".
I've trusted a lot of peoples judgements before, but on any emotional subject, it's very hard not to be an unreliable narrator to some degree. How'd that old adage go? The road to hell is paved with good intentions? I hope I'm using that right :P
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I'm not angry u r angry!
I'll need read this all slowly to process
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Its cool, when I go off on this subject I tend to go full ham. xP
The link I dropped in there does a far better and quicker job of summarising how the tribal stuff happens. My text is just padding grumbles.
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But some are more equal than others
Sad times.
Also I'm
richbroke $$ (again) so that's why prizes are so greatComment has been collapsed.