Comparing Reddit to some 4chan offshoot is played out at this point. I am bothered that toxicity from the Left gets a nice mainstream pasture to jerk themselves off day and night with tacit mainstream approval while milquetoast Right wingers get left with condemned self-hosted shitholes or bust.
We've seen how the Left reacts to 'bad speak' where no slurs or threats are even deployed. And the entire neurotic hammer-dropping process has been completely absent here as it was with Kirk.
You want to compare this to a chan schizoid going off on gassing the Jews? Okay. I'll grant that an apples to apples comparison leaves the virulent antisemite looking worse. But this phenomenon where Reddit discourse gets pass after pass? Yeah, I think thats more concerning and even dangerous.
Is Reddit representative of the Left? Not entirely, but it represents a mindset that is quite alive and well over there. And its one I've detected enough IRL that I no longer consider this 'a random internet opinion'. Meanwhile, I know zero people that express chan bile unless they have the good sense to leave that on the net.
They have a good record of condemning violence in such a non-descript manner that leaves much ambiguity. Or the final note betrays their real concerns.
"I condemn ALL violence, and especially the Proud Boys and other groups emboldened by Trump's rhetoric" and/or "what is Antifa even?" has never cleared my threshold of acceptability.
That doesn’t speak to your main point of hypocrisy regarding Republicans, which I won't argue against. But this track record you gesture at is superficially thin.
I don't doubt your account of what you saw in terms of RW reactions, but I'm not sure youre modeling the general critique that I recall? To be clear, even I'M not conviced that what I saw wrt to Floyd and Chauvin was 'murder'. And that's the most high profile example of the issue you're alleging. Everything else from Mike Brown, to Jacob Blake, to Trayvon Martin - I am even less persuaded. In fact, seeing this narrative of police brutality extended even to Blake is what transitoned by skepticism to outright disbelief. Which isn’t to say it doesn't exist, but I'm not buying the package being sold.
The most clear-cut example of police brutality I witnessed was with Tyre Nichols. This came and went in the span of a week for reasons that are probably unsurprising to anybody here who looks into it or remembers the details. If we're trying to assess 'who is more caring/indifferent regarding police brutality', I will give everybody a fat Zero based on that. It seems we are only interested in this phenomenon as ammunition to hurt the other side.
I don't remember RWers condoning 'murder'. I remember them saying that many of those alleged victims led lives and expressed behavior that made their demises seem inevitable. Things like fighting the cops, not following commands, escalating hostilities, and generally living lives up to that point that reliably produce these outcomes.
You may still find that ugly, callous, or mistaken. Whatever it is, it's FAR away from dancing when a professional TALKER gets sniped in the throat.
Along with eveybody else from any political corner. And that is solely due the intervention of one eccentric manchild billionaire. I guess I'm fortunate that things progressed that way given the way the stars were aligning.
I don't really care if toxic sentiment is spilling out in some free-for-all arena - or at least don't care as much. I do care when spaces (often de facto Left-ruled) make a big song and dance about rules and decorum, deploy them maliciously against their opponents, and spare themselves. This is sanewashing what got many other subs monitored and eventually banned, and allows users to acclimate to a norm.
Find me the mainstream right-wing Reddit easily downloadable and accessible from the IOS store and I'll take these comparisons seriously.
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