An old high school friend decided to start a boxcar/judenstar discussion about freedoms and fee fees. The archetypal MAGAhats were all "yeah! You go gurl! rabble rabble" while a few of her braver friends vomited facts at her. She was deeply offended. She wrote another post about how she was offended. Deeply. What is the world coming to. The archetypal MAGAhats were all "Yeah! You go gurl! rabble rabble." It has to be terrifying. There's a large swath of society that no longer parses the content of debate. They put it on a scale and count the exclamation points. They have created a fact-free zone where the subject at hand no longer matters, what's important is the opinions that agree with yours and how deeply you all hold them. You reach a point where you... have to go around them. You can't help. You can't hold. All you can do is not get any on you when they explode. You can be ready to pick up the pieces and you can do your level best to contain the outcome but you have to acknowledge that they want your involvement less than anything else in the entire world and that all your efforts to improve the situation are strengthening their resolve. It is weakening the country but it is strengthening community ties. I don't know what the future looks like but I know it will be different. And frankly, demonstrating to the world that total surveillance and total privacy aren't mutually exclusive is likely to open some uncomfortable lines of questioning for our tech industry and our government, assuming we still have either.
For some of these followers, bringing facts into their political street fight is downright offensive. Like it could not possibly be a more odious or corrupt thing to do.There's a large swath of society that no longer parses the content of debate. They put it on a scale and count the exclamation points. They have created a fact-free zone where the subject at hand no longer matters, what's important is the opinions that agree with yours and how deeply you all hold them.
I've come to the conclusion that the unstated, unrealized, unexamined thought process is - this is our signalling - this is our language - disputing our signalling or language indicates your otherness - down with otherness ...and since "this is our signaling" and "this is our language" are unassailable identities, you find yourself... well, the phrase I waded in with wasI have long since learned that a person's rhetorical velocity from zero to Hitler is an excellent proxy for their resistance to logic so I will say only this:
I buy it. It's all so innocent when the signaling is like Trekkies or coin collectors going about their business in a way you or I can't and won't understand (sure, I have no idea if you're a coin collector... Just making a point). But when the in group/out group phenomenon becomes a political philosophy, the responsibility rests on the in group to consider reality in their thinking. The exclusion of facts in a political philosophy is pretty much exactly the basis of Stalinism. There's a reason it was only high power party members who were subjected to the show trials. It was about making sure everyone knew that reality was whatever the Party decided it was on that particular day, irrespective of what it was the previous day. We're literally in e situation now where people can trot out Nazi slogans and then get pissy when someone calls them a Nazi. And it's not harmless. People are suffering because of it.