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[–]bopomofodojo 25 insightful - 1 fun25 insightful - 0 fun26 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

These people really are cultists. I hate to do a "both sides" (as a committed Marxist and Materialist, I'm not a centrist lol), but fucking hell the hard-right is a cult, and the woke "left' is a cult.

She decided she could no longer be my friend and "she didn't know how to talk to me anymore".

Straight out of cult doctrine.

I can only hope the tide starts to sway, but given how batshit insane everyone on "both sides" seems to be, I'm quickly losing any hope.

I wish you all the best though, may you find better friends.

[–]marmorsymphata 23 insightful - 1 fun23 insightful - 0 fun24 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

I've spent the past 4 years watching my father shed all his principals and turn into a selectively brainless Trump psychophant and it's been so creepy to watch. I'm only just realizing that the left is doing the exact same thing, just with the trans cult. I can't figure out where it comes from. How and why did everyone collectively lose their minds and cluster up the moment Obama's term ended?

[–]bopomofodojo 36 insightful - 1 fun36 insightful - 0 fun37 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

It's a hot take, but: Social Media.

The algorithms are beyond destructive, they're actively malicious. You are fed a constant diet of affirming (in a general, not TRA, sense) content, things that agree with your worldview, posts, and are tailored to your very specific (and even personal) demographic. Slowly, fringe views no longer seem fringe because you see them all the time, and newer and newer fringe views seep in, and the cycle repeats.

I've seen numerous people on both left and right succumb to this and this is the unifying thing. They are terminally online, they get all their information from Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/YouTube, they're always sharing memes (feeding the algorithm), and once it's taken hold it just builds on itself. It doesn't matter what the content is: Qanon MAGA shit, trans shit, or hell even gardening shit. It happens the same way regardless.

Couple this with the fact that huge swaths of my (millenial) and younger generations have built basically their entire social lives online. For the zoomers, in a lot of cases it literally is their only social live, even among their IRL peers. This is also why cancel culture is so effective; the idea of having your whole social life destroyed for making one false move makes everyone anxious and hyper-reflexive in their affirmations of loyalty to the cult ("TWAW", "the election was rigged", etc.).

I don't know if there's even a way to fix this, short of massive deprogramming on a societal level. But since this serves the ruling class, and the majority have seemingly succumb to it, I don't know how to even begin fighting back, at least not in their realm. Only IRL can help.

Finally I think the timing with the end of the (second) Obama term was mostly coincidental. This really started very early in the 2010's with the rise of the algorithms on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, which was then adopted by other social media sites/apps. It really started to show itself in 2016 after a gradual initial climb, and has now become almost all-encompassing.

[–]RedEyedWarriorGay | Male | 🇮🇪 Irish 🇮🇪 | Antineoliberal | Cocks are Compulsory 11 insightful - 2 fun11 insightful - 1 fun12 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Cancel social media.

[–]Athelhilda2 15 insightful - 2 fun15 insightful - 1 fun16 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Balkanization. This is what happens when you have too much diversity in a country and not enough in common to hold it all together. Tribalism takes over and people begin to separate like oil and water.

[–]RedEyedWarriorGay | Male | 🇮🇪 Irish 🇮🇪 | Antineoliberal | Cocks are Compulsory 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Bingo!

[–]SerpensInferna 15 insightful - 1 fun15 insightful - 0 fun16 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Thank you for your kind words. I'm kind of a social weirdo anyway and she was one of my two closest friends, the sting was deep. I'm not even sure how to make friends anymore. My interests are fairly esoteric and it seems like if people aren't woke nut jobs they're literally Nazis (and how I've come to hate how people throw that word these days so when I say literally I mean literally). I'm in existential despair where humanity goes from here.

[–]bopomofodojo 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I feel you there, the polarization is becoming increasingly dangerous. Not because ideologies clash; that's always been the case. But because of the sheer resistance to anyone actually questioning what they believe. Your friend's response is a classic example of that - rather than deal with what you're saying in a reasoned way, they completely shut down with the "I don't know how to talk to you (anymore)" bit, which is really just an excuse to end all interaction lest you inadvertently cause her any cognitive dissonance by questioning her views. It's a sad state of affairs when friends are torn apart, not even because of some deep-seated ideological difference, but because of questions about some pretty absurd aspects of a particular shared ideology. Then again, as a leftist, I know the depths of leftist infighting over trivial shit, so, I guess it's hard to be surprised, but still that shouldn't be ending close friendships.

[–]NonimeTired of Explaining Reality to Fuckwits (TERF) 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Unfortunately, it seems that social weirdos have problem finding non-woque social weirdos to hang out with. I don't know what it is about the community, maybe unchecked mental illness, but all of my "weirdo" associates have decided they are trans or are extreme-left TRAs years after I stopped speaking to them for other incompatibility reasons.