I see precisely what you see. Well said.

Communication on the internet is a huge part of the problem. Human communication is a very poorly understood phenomenon, but I theorize that humans evolved to communicate face to face. We need the body language and auditory voice cues that real-life conversation provides to gain context. This business of "communicating" via keyboard (as I am doing right now in response to you doing the same) has eliminated a lot of the context we need to understand each other fully. This allows for de-humanization en masse.

Having said that, ours is certainly not the first generation to face a moral panic. I am quite sure the people in the witch era in the 1600s felt an equal terror as an equal wave of irrationality and hatred washed over the "out" group of the time. So maybe the internet is just the current expression of the same age-old insanity we have been subject to since the beginning of humanity.

But I have noticed that people I talk to IRL (which I do as much as I can, even with random passers-by) are not nearly as insane as what we are seeing on all these "boards". People express stupidity in these "keyboard exchanges" that they simply don't say face-to-face. The effect of insulation from the social pushback is real. I am also quite confident that people are confusing what we hear through media (of all kinds, social and traditional) with reality in a way that is flat-out wrong.

We talk about this so much on this site. Having these sociopaths sitting in the middle, able to "adjust" the stories we are trying to send one another across "their" media, is a terrible model.

As much as possible, get off these screens and talk to people. Maintain our calm, but don't stop talking. Even when it's uncomfortable, keep talking. I saw a piece by a guy recently who was unexpectedly optimistic, saying that he thinks we're coming out of the darkness with this insanity rather than entering it. If he's right, I would expect people to realize over the next several years that all this time we are spending on these keyboards - here I am as I write this - is a dead end. We have gone into a blind alley, and it's time for us to put these machines down and get back to a direct experience of the world around us rather than a mediated one.

The times in this moment are very dark, without a doubt. In dark times or light, however, the best any of us can do is to model the light. Your posts do that. I deeply appreciate your perspective and the forum you have maintained here (even with all the flaws any such forum will have) for discussions such as this.

Onward.