- Joined
- Oct 19, 2024
Being generally on the Left, myself, I think that the lack of humor also reflects a much deeper, more serious problem.
Telling members of an online community that they can't talk shit because it could potentially offend a (usually purely hypothetical) third party sounds like a minor, kind of funny thing if you either oppose what that community believes, or if you just don't give a shit about any of it. Same for setting up weird purity tests, where doing a shared project with someone who has a few relatively minor differences with in-group orthodoxy can get you labeled as a rapist who believes that Hitler's biggest failure was not being able to finish the Holocaust or fully implement Generalplan Ost. The problem, if you support any meaningful number of the group's beliefs, is that being able to do that and get the majority of people in your community to follow along (sometimes when they personally believe that it's either too trivial for such a stern reaction or just outright stupid) is a pretty reliable indicator that your group's becoming insular and focused on internal politics.
That's always a problem, because insular groups are necessarily inwardly focused, and are so divorced from the rest of society that their members often have no fucking clue how crazy an average person thinks they are. It's particularly severe for the Left, though, because human beings are inherently conservative. From a young age, when we're still totally dependent on our caregivers and have evolved to trust them absolutely in order to survive, we're taught the worldview of our families and communities. That shapes how we interpret basically everything, usually until the day we die. Leftists tend to be better educated not because they're big brain smart bois or even necessarily because their views have more, higher-quality evidence, but because it takes years to learn the context needed to realize on your own that your society's beliefs are historically and socially contingent ideas, and that can be questioned. Usually, that also has to be an unintentional process of stringing together seemingly unrelated information until you see the world differently, because people are naturally resistent to deliberate attempts to get them to switch their views on what's right vs. what's wrong. I mean, they should be. That's serious shit, not something to take lightly.
Imagine if someone came up to you and said this:
That is what you have to figure out how to do, in a way that won't (at best) be ignored, if you're on the Left. Kind of a hard weight to pull, right? Now imagine if the person doing that is also a condescending asshat who thinks that everyone secretly understands that they're right (including about other topics that most outsiders can see are detached from reality) just because everyone who they talk to regularly believes the same things that they do. Also, that their ideological opponents are all borderline retarded bigots who hiss and spit at the site of any book longer than 150 pages that isn't the Bible. It's actually more reasonable to ignore that than it is to listen because, 9 times out of 10, someone doing that is in a cult and wants to teach you how to get the alien ghosts out of your rectum by screaming at ashtrays and dying from neglect in a shitty Florida hotel room after you have a psychotic break due to their abuse.
I used to post occasionally in some online Leftist forums, but only when I had what I believed to be useful or interesting information, because the rules on most boards had gotten too strict for members to actually have enjoyable conversations. Then half of them got taken over by Red Army LARPers who autobanned me for posting in a drama subreddit that had hosted a thread where people mocked the mods of /r/socialism for calling a female webcomic artist a misogynist because she enjoyed drawing catgirls. Not, like, sexualized catgirls, or loli catgirls, or catgirls owned as pets. Literally just otherwise normal adult women in a popular anime artstyle where they had cat ears, because she though it was cute. I dropped out of that community altogether a few years later, after getting into what seemed to me like a pretty civil disagreement with a Foucault-obsessed AnComm who linked a random blogger's article on how a severe mental illness that I actually suffer from was just a label used to control women in the Lumpenproletariat, and catching an unexplained five-day ban. It was when I asked why and got a message containing just a copy-paste of the board rule banning misogyny, and a screenshot of a comment where I had politely pointed out (with a link to a peer-reviewed research paper) that the psychiatric community's consensus had shifted away from the idea that the condition was actually more common in women, that I decided to take my permaban like a man and reply with a music video where Eminem politely asks for the real Slim Shady to stand and receive an ovation. Terroristic threats, obviously.
The real misogyny was the critique of structural misogyny we made along the way, apparently? I don't know. I know that wasn't the first genuinely bizarre strike I'd gotten across several different websites, though. Others highlights included using the most heinous slur since the development of written language by calling National Bolshevism "some st*pid shit", and mansplaining that the molecular diagram for an obscure chemical in the carbonium ion family wasn't actually a misprint of methane to a user whose gender I didn't actually know, and who may have been displaying false, socially conditioned deference by thanking me and asking if I had any links where she could learn more about superacids. Overall, it just creates a bizarre, tense atmosphere that I don't really want to participate in. I don't honestly what the tone on SA is like, and I can't imagine ever getting bored or lonely enough to find out by paying to use a forum that peaked 15 years ago and needs to be put in a museum of historically significant website fossils, but it's so widespread now that it would be a rare bird if not. I'm not trying to pet a black swan, regardless. White or black, all swans are proof that some birds have never forgotten their shared heritage. I think I'll let Chris Pratt keep the angry dinosaurs to himself.
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