Popehat: There’s a whole subnormal subculture of people on here who are obsessed with running people off the site. The vast majority of the time they fail (as, one senses, they do at nearly everything in their lives). But they’re very happy when they succeed. /1

There’s a whole subnormal subculture of people on here who are obsessed with running people off the site. The vast majority of the time they fail (as, one senses, they do at nearly everything in their lives). But they’re very happy when they succeed. /1

/2 You get the sense that these people have been bullied themselves. Normal people react to that by hating bullies and bullying. But some people have the sort of soul that says “I can’t wait to get on the other end of that.”

bsky.app/profile/ther...

A good chunk of the people pulling that edge-lord style bullshit would be full on fascist if the fascists would have 'em.

Yeah, it’s amazing how alike in personality and behavior the edgelords on the right and left are. It’s almost as if the ideology is not the point, being an asshole is the point.

Yeah, the reality of horseshoe theory isn't 'the far left and far right are basically the same', it's 'the extremes of any movement tend to attract the same kinds of shitty people'.

And enable similarly shitty adolescent behavior.

I think the ideology is "we are miserable assholes and we will behave like it"

Fringe leftists are like Libertarians. They simply cannot govern themselves. Libertarians will ultimately end up building actual compounds and shooting at each other. Leftists will continually subdivide until they are alone in their own smug superiority and can shame the others.

Life of Brian dot gif

Splitter!

It’s a lot easier, and provides a quicker dopamine hit, to tear shit down than to build something.

To quote Clive James “My own all-embracing political theory, for what it is worth, is that an inordinate proportion of the world’s misery is brought into being by all-embracing political theories.”

Whatever it is that causes people to get their jollies from purity spiraling, dogpiling, and tone-policing, I am so glad I don't appear to have it.

I used to think well at least the guys on the left sound marginally intelligent while the folks on the right sound like they barely finished grade school. Now the lefties just sound mad & the right wingers sounder smarter than b4 but also much more likely to hunt us down & k*ll us.

I wish there was a keyboard shortcut that would auto-reply “I bet you’re fun at parties” to the underwear gnome edgelord set.

Actually, many of the far left & far right work for the same funding source. Thats why your friendly neighborhood Intelligence folks call it the horseshoe.

They're so wrapped up in their own self-righteousness that they've lost all self-awareness

Hey! I’d think you especially would be sensitive to lumping in assholes with those boorish scolds!

I tried to say that before, but everyone somehow decided that we must blindly obey some ism instead of examine individual people in power. Actually believing or doing things is bad for them, only spouting buzzwords is acceptable it seems.

Remove *almost* and you’re there.

Also worth noting lots of people who are bullies claim they were bullied and then it turns out, no, they were bullies when they kids, too.

Sometimes they were bullied because they tried to bully others but failed.

I was bullied as a child and had an eye for others who were bullied - my memory is that there were: 1) People who were simply bullied (maybe fought the bullies back, but didn't bully people who didn't attack them), 2) Bullies (no one was bullying them, at school anyway, but they bullied people) ...

and 3) Bullied bullies - people who managed to wind up in both categories.

Now, that frustrates people

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is not democracy.” Abraham Lincoln (1858).

I've been seeing far too much casual trashing tonight, and when you push people on why they're going after someone it comes down to "vibes" - "I have a feeling," "I got annoyed": BURN THEM TO THE GROUND! Sick of it.

One interesting change is that the US Army's approach to training was an institutional example of "Why not abuse people? I was abused and I turned out okay" (Ron Howard voice: he most certainly fucking did not turn out okay) and in two decades went from "wall-to-wall counseling" to low-stress. 1/2

My instructors at Drill Sergeant School in 92 lamented the cultural change that removed their freedom to physically assault trainees without consequence, and by the time I left active duty, people were starting to wonder if you got better results treating people like people, and not animals. 2/2

When I did basic in 2001, physical assault wasn’t a thing, but other forms of arbitrary abuse remained common, e.g. giving soldiers an hour sleep time, then wake an hour “for cleaning” (repeat all night). We got the required min sleep time daily but were so sleep deprived we were hallucinating.

When I was in basic in 85 the drill sergeants weren’t allowed to hit us. (Except on the range, with live rounds, if a trainee did something remarkably stupid.) We sure did a lot of pushups though.

Full Metal Jacket wasn't until 87, but every DI has an awareness of the worst-case outcome of a trainee with live rounds. Also, if you didn't notice: when Joe gets to throw a live grenade, there is always someone in the pit with him that will break his arm off if he doesn't let go of it.

We had that, too.

One of the reasons why horseshoe theory seems probable is that this is a *very* common attitude on the far right, too.

I suspect that the dynamic you are talking about is the real ideology of both sets of people, and they have assumed the trappings of the ideology they ostensibly claim to hold because at the present moment in time it allows them to indulge.

(This is related to the "I used to be an X, now I am a Y" political Saul who now Pauls his or her way around but really they always were mostly a fanatic they just change horses)

Yup, there is a type of person who likes being a fanatic more than the thing they are fans of.

To that theory, I've always felt like converts are always the most fervent and intolerant believers in any ideology.

Half of the most hairbrained warriors for the Catholic church to embrace the absolute worst version of itself are adult converts.

I strive every day to not be this kind of person, as someone who was raised conservative evangelical. Black and white thinking works for exactly ONE thing, and that is the fact that Nazis are Bad. Everything else has shades of nuance, and people on all sides hate being reminded of that.

I've seen this in many online spaces over the years. I don't think it comes from a place of wanting to be the bully, but protecting the space they feel they've created for themselves. They just fail to realize how corrosive the behaviour is on that very community. It never ends well.

Seriously, I have vivid memories of people pulling this kind of horseshit on old PHP forums, not to mention shamefully participating in it myself on occasion. It's a seemingly intractable problem inherent to social media.

Online attacks existed on Compuserve and dial-up BBSs in the 1980s. I’m sure the other services had it also back then. And the flamewars on Usenet were legendary. Some people just want to attack others.

On Usenet an employee of company A threatened to have their lawyers contact my employer, company T, because I posted about a bug in their product. A bug they claimed didn’t exist. I heard through the grapevine that his legal dept told him they had real work to do.

I'm not old enough to have Usenet horror stories, but I am old enough to have inadvertently summoned Derek Smart by mentioning him in a forum post once. It wasn't even mean, but that didn't matter to him. Whole bunch of people out there who need to relax a bit, or at least log off a while

I remember buying my first modem in 1986. I thought I was going to have access to an exciting world of discourse on the BBS: intelligent discussions of programming, science, movies, and the burning issues of the day. I mostly found 12 year old boys (in affect if not chronology) slagging each other.

I helped run a BBS that was at a computer store in the 1980s. We tried to keep it focused on the computers and local meetings. Doing that for even a small BBS took a lot of time. I did use a few other BBSs back then. Some were very toxic. Some were ok.

You're right, and I don't even think it's always intentional. It seems almost like a reflexive lashing out coming from a place of pain. Which I empathize with, but being hurt isn't really an excuse to hurt.

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