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So I've done my best recently to avoid being subjected to personalized social media feed. So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead. It turns out it is classical Culture War stuff. Bluesky is apparently imploding because of "Waffles".
So this is not a "boo outgroup" post, my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though. It is as uninteresting because of the monoculture for me as getting an actual account mastodon instance or truth.social and gab due to the ideological alignment of majority of their users.
It seems that it is hard to make large scale "microblogging" platform that caters to heterodox political culture and I'm a little curious if there is any insight for why it is hard to make one?
Every now and then I start to regain hope that the worst of my outgroup probably aren't as bad as all the memes imply, and then I read something like that article, and my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. "Fascism" was mentioned in every other sentence of the opening paragraphs in between denunciations of milquetoast liberals and other traitors to the progressive cause in the most extreme terms:
My eyes nearly rolled back into my skull at
Please tell me these are meant to be epic dunks and sick burns rather than earnest descriptions of ideological opponents. I knew that our common ground has been shrinking for some time, but if this is unironic we are, without exaggeration, inhabiting completely separate realities. Disagreeing about "terrorism/freedom fighter" at least implies some sort of common understanding of facts -- the subject under discussion is understood to be a violent activist, the difference in opinion is on whether that violence is justified, and that can be debated. But I don't even know how to begin talking to someone who earnestly believes Scott is a "noted race scientist."
I think you're mistaken on the process. The worst of the outgroup are never going to get any better -- in fact, if you're winning then they are likely getting worse by evaporative cooling.
We've had a decade straight of the absolute worst of the Blue Tribe not only being loud, but actually being in charge. We didn't win by evaporative cooling, the evaporative cooling started when we started winning.
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I think the one with Scott is referring to the fact that in some of his leaked private correspondence he once said "HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct". Her wording is stretched to the point of being false, though; "scientist" means "one who does science", not "one who believes science".
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