I’ve come to two realizations recently:
One
The sudden tankie willingness to believe that Trump cares about a cease-fire in Gaza, and got tough with the Israelis and then they capitulated which Biden could have done at any time, sheds some interesting light on how the tankies think. They accuse anyone who disagrees with them of shifting their realities around, such that anything Biden does is good, anything the State Department says is always true, even if it contradicts itself or basic common sense or reality. I always thought that this was just a lazy reality-free arguing tactic, but in retrospect, I should have realized that it’s a tell about their own thought process. Just like it’s a warning sign if someone constantly suspects their partner of cheating, or is constantly on an absurdly hypervigilant lookout for scams and people trying to cheat them out of money, this is a key revelation about the way Hexbear itself looks at reality.
Trump is a capable diplomat, if believing that lets them trash Biden. Trump cares about Palestinians, if believing that lets them trash Biden. The cart is firmly in its place in front, and everything else including the horse can follow along depending on what the cart dictates.
Two
Hexbear’s censorship, and wild hostility to anyone who comes to “their” place and tries not to toe the party line, really does do a pretty effective job of distorting the view of reality and consensus that their users are able to experience.
Take a look at these and compare:
What you’re noticing I think is actually a pandemic in modern society. People cannot fathom nuance. I dunno if social media put the final nail in the coffin of a long-festering problem, or if social media and the ensuing collapse in discourse birthed the problem alone.
Politics have become a team sport. All discourse has become a team sport. It’s binary. “You’re with me or you’re against me.” Or “information supports me or it’s rigged.” Extending that: “you’re my ideological enemy and whatever you think I think the opposite.” It doesn’t matter if it’s logical or it’s entirely contradictory. All that matters is getting to say “NO! You’re wrong and I’m right! You’re a [liberal, conservative, fascist, etc.]” Whatever serves their argument.
The complete inability to have logical discourse where the basis is reality, is itself responsible for the larger systemic problems. When there’s no common ground because the ground is either “yours or mine,” and when it changes in every discussion, there’s just no hope to ever do anything about problems. And the problems are mounting. And the ownership class is capitalizing on this constant culture war bullshit—and I mean “culture war” in the sense of each “ideology” having its in group and everyone else belonging to the out group—to run wild on what’s left of this current paradigm.
It’s hard not to feel doom when realizing this foundational problem. It undercuts any kind of underclass solidarity, so the class war is really just an ever-worsening class slaughter.
I’ve started to notice that this particular brain rot is becoming more and more common among Democrats as well. To a distressing number of people I’ve encountered on the Internet, be it here, Reddit, or elsewhere, Democrats ran a perfect political campaign and their candidates and policy were flawless and above question, so it’s entirely the fault of the voters that we got Trump again. Never mind that Democrats actively facilitated a genocide and largely ignored their base in favor of appealing to moderate Republicans who were never going to vote for them anyway.
The number of people in this country who are just incapable of seeing (much less understanding) any kind of nuance is dropping rapidly, even among demographics who should be aware of this trend.
Oh, absolutely. It’s a boundless problem. It happens with left wingers as well. It’s a disease in the way people think and engage with the world around them. Ideologies are badges now. They’re uniforms people wear. Similar to mental disorders on TikTok, Instagram, or, previously, on tumblr. That’s why I think the common link is social media. I know tribalism isnt a new phenomenon whatsoever, but widespread, more foundational tribalism on every single topic, kind of is.
People are arguing about reality. As soon as the right drifted away into fantasy politics, the bottom dropped out on discourse altogether. When about half the people are just straight up questioning long-known facts, the reality we all shared and could agree on suddenly became much more shaky and full of holes. Not that reality has changed, obviously, but when the discourse surrounding what we consider facts is questioned on this kind of scale, arguing that facts do, actually, exist just opens a sinkhole. And it’s not getting smaller. Because what are facts to everyday people if not something that we discuss and generally agree upon?
And the fact that this kind of magical thinking is spreading is more than troubling. It’s straight up doomsday shit.
So in a world where all of this is true and people invent an entirely new version of themselves to put online (and then lie to themselves that it’s actually them), pinning the “I’M A PROUD [democrat, Republican, communist, etc.]” to their chest is step one before they actually learn shit. They pick an identity and then look at every issue through that lens. Because they’ve found people online that belong to it and they choose that identity. Instead of learning and then realizing their ideology, they choose a team and then learn usually as little as possible to appear as if they belong. And get defensive and argue online with the “other” side, with wholly incomplete and usually inaccurate information that they looked up specifically to belong to an ideological group.
Fuckin crazy. You see problems like this, look at the state of discourse and really wonder…is there any coming back from this? How do we even start? Well, education. Obviously. But we all know that’s not gonna happen. We’re moving in the opposite direction as fast as we possibly can. (Because that serves the ownership class).