Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

These past few weeks has been hard on this world. Every time things happened, people on both far right (I will avoid the label 'Nazi' the left slapped on them except for the real neo-Nazi) and the far left trying to stir up people (who leans one side or another) into action and extremism like in the comment sections of this site on the events.

Of course, there are paid shills, ghost accounts on this site for the stupid purposes of shutting down opposition by downboats, rile people up, and the thing I will not tolerate. LIES.

It is very easy to make a demon on the internet these day. Get a picture of someone, caption it with something that the public think that it is quite plausible person "would" say and put it in the worst fashion possible, paste it on 9gag, reddit, or wherever and rakes in the "likes".

Both on internet and in real life. I try to stop things before it become a pissing match by trying to disprove those shoddy MSpaint shits and any 'memes' made up to slander one side or another. I ended up getting yelled at, threatened, labelled various things, because it is not thing people want to hear.

Inb4 someone dox me and ad hominem. Let me make my stance clear: 1) I am not in US 2) I am a staunch traditionalist 3) I have my grudge against communist ideal because my family once lost everything because of their ideal, look up Cultural Revolution, but if someone makes up a lie specifically just to slander them and if I caught it, I will expose it because as a traditionalist 4) I do not stand up for lies.

Inb4 why should I care about something so distant from myself. I wish I could ignore all this shit and be happy, but I do not like seeing lies and slander being spread left and right especially how easy it is these days for a person to label someone, and how despicable the labeller. Memetics is a real thing, and weaponised memes are what I do not wish it to came to pass though it maybe too late now.

I say it once and I will say it again. It is because we bloody stopped living in Truth, that is why the world right now is a Bedlam, a delirium of madmen. /rant

So, anyone doing the same, thoughts on my actions, downboating me and more insult, anything?

I understand exactly what you mean. It seems like whenever something happens, be it something mundane like the president getting an extra scoop of ice cream, to something very serious like a Neo-Nazi rally where a man plows a car through a crowd of protestors, people will get up in arms and literally come at each others throats over it.

I just wish we could go back to a time when people didn't get so angry at each other for different ideas. That people didn't slap a label on someone just because they expressed a belief a certain group shares.

It just seems nowadays the entire political climate has become stuck in this infinite cycle of feeding off each other. The left feeding off the racism and sexism that people on the right exhibit, and the right who feed off the racism and sexism people on the left exhibit. It's just now it's escalated to the point where people have started hurting and killing each other over it.

And just like you said, it seems like almost nothing is immune to this. It's even been happening on this very site, with people on both sides flooding image galleries with "memes" to help their political cause. Not that I'm against the idea of political memes in general. It's just the ones that are so blatantly obvious are there only to push someone's ideals. Some can possibly get away with this just on the fact of being funny, but most aren't even that, they're either offensive political cartoons or just annotated articles from some news site that's not even referenced.

I just don't want to watch this site become a political echochamber for one particular side (either like Tumblr for the left or r/The_Donald for the right). And I've seen people get in very heated arguments about this, even I myself doing this. I have tried my best to contain myself in this regard, specifically by restraining myself from just outright calling other people out on stuff I believe to be stupid, but in recent time I've even found that to be difficult.

I just wish we could somehow bring everything back to "normal," where instead of calling each other names for what we believed, we actually just talked about why we believe certain things instead of just outright demonizing the other side.

The way I look at it, most of the internet stuff is all show. It's easy to type out how shit you think conservatives or liberals are, it's a lot harder to say it to someone's face. I'm reminded of that classic /news/ comic, because it really does reflect how most people use the internet to converse and exaggerate.

When you need to really be getting depressed (and worried), is when it starts happening IRL, not just at protests or rallies, but in every day life. When you can't go to the store or school without seeing a political argument, when people start getting harassed at work because of who they voted for (we are seeing this pop up a little), etc.

Until that escalates, I like to think most people will act civil and polite IRL thanks to social and cultural obligations. Perhaps the fact that might be the only think stopping them from acting like assholes is cause for depression and frustration.

I think we'll be a lot better off if and when both "sides" lose their persecution complex.

Sadly this was all predicted a long, long time ago. TS Elliot and others at the turn of the last century looked at the crumpling of the Western Consensus and concluded that the value systems could not hold against the onslaught of philosophical change.

At the core of the problem was a shift in philosophy. Up until about 1900 in Europe and a bit later in the US, the focus of academic philosophy was on ontology -- determining what "reality" is. After hundreds of years of blah -- blah -- blah philosophers concluded that if you wanted to say what was -- what reality is -- you had to know it, but that you couldn't know it without anything like certainty. So the mantra became, "Nothing can be known for certain" which led to "nothing can be known" and "What I know I know for me, what you know, you know for you" and eventually, "what is true for you is true for you and what is true for me is true for me."…meaning there is no truth.

All of which is to say that since there is not truth there is nothing left but power. Since there is not truth there is not need to engage in rational persuasion. No need to consider anything but what encourages/empowers you, and no need to be honest or even civil. Whatever gives you more power is morally superior to any other system of morality.

So the sides coalesce around either ends of a spectrum (see my post on Left/Right) and rhetoric is the activity of getting your side all riled up so they take to the streets. It's all about rallying the troops and if you need to use a bit of chicanery to do it, well, so what? In such a state clever mantras are more powerful than solid arguments and can be more easily re-tweeted to boot.

If you attend any university or college these days you will find much about "narrative" or "story telling" with an emphasis on the idea that all truth is story telling and always has been. The best story tellers tell you a story that reinforces their power and/or denigrates any competing "narrative." Logic, reason, and evidence are just tools. Science is a source of statistics to support your side, any "discoveries" of science that don't support your side are just "propaganda."

So of course nobody is going to actually attempt to persuade anybody of anything else, because you only try to attempt to persuade somebody about the truth. If truth doesn't exist then persuasion is a waste of time. Rhetoric, in the classical sense, died years ago.

AJ