• 0 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle







  • it seems a little wild to accuse the Christian Right of not supporting Jews (Israel).

    They “support” them in a way, but not out of any real egalitarian or humanitarian reason. For some, supporting Israel is the same as attacking Islam. For others, they support Israel because they think that will hasten Armageddon. It’s not because they really like Jewish people or Judaism, I suspect a number of the Christian Right really just like that Jewish people have a place away from them to call home.









  • I should refine what I said. I think they genuinely believe many of the things they espouse, but (1) they espouse many things they don’t believe in an effort to bring in outsiders with less harsh ideas before acclimating them to the intensity (“I’m as gay and liberal as they come, but even I can see how the trans movement has become largely exclusionary and radical”) and (2) this is more about what the purpose of the community is, rather than the individuals. The individuals that are trolls can just be blocked, even if it becomes tedious when they grab new accounts. The community itself has a purpose, however, and that purpose can be either focused “internally” (members are discussing things amongst themselves) or “externally” (members largely discuss how to affect other communities). I think worries about freedom of speech or the silencing of honestly held (and expressed) beliefs are largely worried about the former (which may be more earnest), but a lot of the toxic communities are the latter, where there is very little that is expressed in earnest on the platform, because earnest conversations aren’t the purpose of the community. They’re little more than staging grounds on a given platform to try and either recruit outsiders or annoy their political opponents. I think this last aspect is the worst part, since communities like the_donald only really shared a communal love of annoying ‘the libs’ or left wing ideas in general, and the only purpose of the community was to be shitty.


  • A lot of free speech arguments falter in situations like these, imo, since they are predicated on the speech involved being genuine feelings/ideas/emotions. Troll groups like explodingheads and /r/the_donald are/were less about exchanging ideas and more about inflicting ideas on others. When the_donald was isolated, their community essentially started to die because there wasn’t much genuine interest in discussing politics - their only interest was in ‘redpilling normies’.