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My God, you're right. Look at these comments. What the fuck? We've really been living in a country like this for this long? There's nothing that can't be sanewashed, can't be whatabout'd? There is no evil so bad that you can't blame it on Trump? I just can't believe what I'm seeing this year. I swear, the culture war is gonna go hot in a way we have never seen before.
I skimmed this and it's really boring. Literally the lamest thread on /pol/ is 300x as unhinged and you're not freaking out about that.
Even the whole thing is such a meltdown over a guy saying
Which is inappropriate as a public figure, but an incredibly common joke.
/pol/ is not a representative sample, they are exiled and are as marginalized as can be. I am honestly tired of the attitude that internet posters are not real people. This stuff being normal to them is not meaningless. Tyler Robinson was a product of reddit mind rot after all
The internet comments you see are also not a representative sample.
Anyone who comments on the internet at all is by definition an outlier, as the vast majority of people are lurkers.
Much of what you see on Twitter is algorithmically selected to cause you to engage more, and unfortunately shit you hate and makes you upset makes you engage, so that is what you'll see.
Redditors are.... Redditors. Every single geographic (city, country, whatever) subreddit is a wildly mis-representative sample of the people in whatever geography it is nominally about.
You know very well that reddit is not some vacuum where the opinions are totally meaningless. It's within the top 10 visited sites in the world. The lurkers upvote things. The lurkers don't care enough to comment, but they silently agree or disagree with things. If they really disagreed, they might post a comment themselves, like what I'm doing right now.
Are politicians representative samples? Very few people run for office, so they're outliers, right? Surely that means they don't represent anyone's real attitudes?
I'm not saying it's meaningless, I am just saying that internet commentators are not a representative sample.
In my experience as a Canadian living in Toronto, the Toronto/Ontario/Canada subreddits are all wildly out of touch with the median citizen who lives in any of those three areas. This is most evident in the sentiment towards elected officials versus their electoral results.
By some quick math I did a few years ago, /r/Toronto actually has one of the highest "# of subreddit subscribers"/"city population" ratios in the Western world, and yet literally any comment section in /r/Toronto is laughably out of touch with the views held by the median human who lives in Toronto.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I have a friend that complains that /r/AirForce is incredibly unrepresentative of the Air Force as a whole, and yet, everyone looking at reddit sees it and thinks that's what the Air Force is like. But those people coalesce from somewhere. The progressives have a pretty astounding stranglehold on the culture in a lot of places, and it's pretty scary if the sites where they're dominant start to turn violent.
I hate it, that's why I am here!
I am worried about this, just not "they're going to start rounding up red-tribers any day now" worried.
This, too, seems like it's a misunderstanding of @WhiningCoil's point. Did you read his original post about pogroms? It's not about rounding people up and executing them, it's about making it clear you hate a class of people, through rhetoric and through occasional targeted violence. Please tell me you've read his post fully before you downplay the fear of a pogrom again. His logic makes sense to me, and it's pretty topical, given current events.
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