I wasn’t “targeted” as such but I want to issue a “thank you” and a statement of great respect for our brother @HMS_Irruncible.
I admit that SDMB is 100% of my “social media” consumption. So my contact with the rest of humanity is limited to IRL and a few e-friends from work, family, or ancient history.
Plus of course organized media, be they new- or old-style.
His(?) comments speak to somebody of decent morals paying serious attention. That’s huge in todays F-ed up world.
SNL 11 years ago.
Thank you for reassuring me of the wisdom in deciding to spend time here rather than those other places.
I would not really know as I don’t move in those circles, but from what I see online, the behavior I described is bursting out of the woodwork. I noticed it in 2016 and it seems to escalate with each presidential election cycle.
It could be bots or trolls, it could be algorithmic boosting, I couldn’t say. Perhaps more than anything the uptick in how social media encourages hot takes that are simplistic, outraged, and dramatic. But in my online experience, it definitely appears to be a new onslaught of liberal-hating from the left. I’m not seeking it out, it seems to be finding me. So if you consider yourself a leftist it might be worth checking in what’s happening on your online flanks, it might be shocking.
I wonder how much of it is actually coming from “the left”. There are certainly other people with an interest in setting us at each other’s throats.
(I’m sure some of it is coming from that particular sort of leftists. I knew a few of them in the 70’s, also. I expect they’ve been around even longer than that.)
I’m not going to go hang out on Xitter in order to make sure that there’s nonsensical crap on there. I’m sure that there is.
Have you tried the experiment that you asked us to try? In turn, I think you might be surprised by the results you get.
That is absolutely the truth.
If I approached your circle of people then I suspect that I’d be at least partially surprised. Both because it sounds like you run with a more mature and measured crowd, and people in real life tend to be more measured and restained.
But online in my social media feed? There’s no need for me to ask people what they’re already telling me freely and voluntarily on a regular basis.
No doubt that’s definitely true to some extent, but I don’t really see how we can know for certain.
One thing I do know, in social media where this kind of commentary is raging, I never see any pushback from other leftists regarding commentary that liberals are indistinct from fascists or Nazis. I do suspect that a lot of these interactions are fake, but the silence and absence of pushback is definitely real.
Without having an idea of where you are hearing this unopposed garbage we have no way to counteract what you claim is being said elsewhere, do we?
If you’re curious about dipping your toes in the water to see for yourself, you could do worse than look at post #95 where I described sites that I frequent.
If you want to haggle about whether I’m lying or suggest that I’m not seeing what I’m seeing or otherwise delusional, I could not possibly give less of a shit about pulling up an example for you to “counteract”, whatever the fuck that’s even supposed to mean.
I think it’s more an issue of you potentially exaggerating matters. Perhaps ignoring the pushback or just not seeing it, or seeing a few instances of people (maybe even trolls) and extrapolating that it represents genuine leftists in general.
No need to be delusional or a liar for any of that to be true.
Frankly, I don’t think raking you over the coals is warranted here, especially as you had the tact to mitigate your previous statement, and not deflecting, so I support your suggestion that people can just fuck off.
I believe that was as far as you got to support your contention that it is pretty much universal as to how people on the left feel that capitalism is worse than Nazism…all three of which can be fine-tuned to give you any opinion you already have. Once you select who you follow on these platforms it will give you exactly what you are looking for. I never called you a liar or delusional, but I am saying that with those three platforms it is mighty easy to create an echo chamber.
I suspect most of the sensible people aren’t in those discussions. I’m not hanging around in those or in the equivalent ones who can’t tell Harris from Stalin, either.
What makes you think we don’t hang out in other online fora? In fact, I spend a lot of time in dedicated Left online venues (mostly Discord groups). And I don’t see the leftists you mention there.
Yes, you’ll see them on X and TikTok - because that’s where the online trolls hang out.
I take the meaning here but I would direct you all to above comments where I was pre-emptively derided from an anticipated “No True Leftist” argument.
That’s partially my fault for making a rhetorical statement that sounded as if it was to be taken literally and scientifically, when everyone knows that even a group of self-identified lefists won’t agree on who’s a true leftist, and now we’ve moved to the phase where we’re reassuring ourselves that Those People are the echo chamber, not the representing the whole world. Not like the august SDMB faithfully speaks for the whole world.
You’re certainly free to write off Twitter as a trash-heap of psychos and fake news. Certainly it’s always been bad in that way, and it’s gotten worse since Musk took over. But these sites have the numbers to be considered the “public square” in ways this site never is. Especially TikTok having the hearts, minds, and eyeballs of young people.
You know what’s going to be “true leftism” in the next 10 years, as far as popular understanding goes? It’s whatever the youngest leftists are doing. They’re on TikTok cooking their brains in their own self-referential rhetoric. Almost certainly that’s being juiced by Chinese propaganda, but does the source of an belief make it any less of a belief? No, of course not.
Or maybe they’ll all turn into yuppies. It’s happened before.
Well, not all, but enough so that the hard core True Believer Radicals were left behind as quaint artifacts.
If we make it that far, I look forward to people attacking the Ocasio-Cortez presidential primary campaign as being too corporate-driven, while the Right will just go on claiming she’s some sort of commie freak. And if that is still so 10 years from now it will mean we have retained some semblance of normality.
We’re running into a difficulty here, but maybe not what you think. It’s more like this:
You: People online are making ridiculous hyperbolic statements, unsupported by evidence, like you wouldn’t believe!
Me: Can you give some evidence for this?
You: I have no interest in giving evidence for this!
As far as I can tell, there’s definitely an online rando making hyperbolic statements that are unsupported by evidence. But if you would provide evidence, it might be persuasive.
You say that you’re encountering this sort of claim regularly. Does that mean you encounter it multiple times weekly? If so, could you give us three examples from the past week of people you’ve already encountered, saying “that liberals are indistinct from fascists or Nazis”? If not, could explain what you mean by “this kind of commentary is raging”?
Because I think you’re misinterpreting those claims.
Look, I already conceded that was a loose rhetorical point, it’s unlikely that you’ll find that word-for-word text saying that the texbook definition of capitalism is indistinct from the textbook definition of Nazism, I think you know full well that’s too narrow to find a literal example. So if that’s the point you want to contest, then congratulations, I guess you won the internet, go in peace.
On the other hand if you want to take it in the intended rhetorical spirit, I went to BlueSky and searched up “liberals are Nazis”. You asked for 3, I grabbed 6. Here are some of the front-page results for that:
What I’m describing here is aggregate behavior. It wasn’t hard at all to find, it was on the top page of search results. if you want to quibble that this isn’t the literal text “liberals are indistinct from Nazis”, or that lots of people on social media are fake, or this is only 6 examples, I can’t stop you from missing the point, go ahead and win that argument.
I’m also not going to get into what is a “real leftist” either. I think people who are active in their community, are well-grounded in theory, and engage in a lot of real-life community actions are who I’d consider the authentic, ideal ones. These are people that I although I don’t always agree with them on every matter, I would feel badly about insulting them. And I do appreciate you all reminding me that you’re still alive and kicking out there. It’s possible my brain is also a little cooked from those adversarial interactions.
But if millions of screaming TikTok socialists are running away with your banner, maybe even without your knowledge, I’m not sure that authentic real-life virtue is really a counterbalance against that. Social media isn’t reality but it is real, it’s where people find, share, and amplify opinions that eventually manifest in real-life behaviors that spread to the offline world (if there’s really such a thing anymore). So i think it’s a mistake to dismiss this as irrelevant social-media hot air.
You sure did, didn’t you? Thus your claim moves from “this kind of commentary is raging” and that people are telling you this “freely and on a regular basis” to a claim that “on a site with 24 million users, there are at least six people saying dumb shit.”
I asked you for three examples that you’d already encountered this week. Unless you’re regularly searching for that phrase, your need to search for it to come up with examples seems pretty clear that you’re not encountering it “on a regular basis.”
That was a super-helpful post in clarifying what’s actually true. Your original claim is utter nonsense.
Millions, now? Okay, champ. Please keep lecturing us about leftists and their hyperbolic claims.