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Notes -
A link to an article about kids toys somehow led me down a rabbit hole to this article
https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/why-i-was-part-of-the-neoreactionary
Which I am still processing right now so maybe it's too premature for me to be posting it for discussion.
In any case I haven't been around here for a while, and I guess I still owe you all thoughts from the war, but one thing I've been doing is dipping my toes into activism in the "reducing extreme polarization" sphere and this article was from a totally different country and politics from my own and yet way too terrifyingly similar. The feeling of people existing in two different realities and erasing any evidence that threatens their specific chosen reality and starting to feel like you're going a little insane from being able to sympathize with both sides instead of comfortably siloing yourself into one black and white self-righteous viewpoint.
(Sometimes I wonder if we all just know too much and read too much these days. In my moments of debating whether I even should be doing activism trying to set up coexistence circles and hikes I wonder if everyone needs to just never read the news ever again and only talk to people they know personally face to face. I don't know, surely I'm not the only one here wondering how many truly obnoxious unbearable people I meet online are secretly bots created solely to make me and the rest of the planet miserable...?)
Anyway I'm interested in the motte's thoughts and I guess I'm once again shamelessly using you as a sounding board while I try to figure out my own.
Edit: she quotes from another article but the link is a dead link, it's fortunately available on webarchive, so if someone wants to read that one as well, it's here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250904220910/https://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2007/02/liberating_iraq.html
I think this all the time. 'News' is a mind-virus worthy of a bare few minutes a day--max. Yet it's addictive, somehow.
this is a long article, might take me some time to get through it, but one thing I notice straight off is the implicit assumption that all young people seem to share that "everything is political." It's just seeded into every aspect of everything everyone younger than 50 seems to want to talk about. It's not even questioned, it just is. I think this is a big part of the underlying problem because everyone is just desperate to be a Good Person (tm) and every life choice revolved around this basic motivation (even the people who overtly reject this have the same basic presumptions).
I really wish there were more "go fuck yourself" punks in the world. I feel like we need this energy to counteract the "I'm paddling my feet as fast as possible to be a Good Person (tm). I'm sick of Nice People (tm) and Good People (tm). It's not your job to save the world and trying to know every last detail about every possible threat to humanity just drives everyone insane.
I'll keep reading, it's not uninteresting just long. If something else catches my attention I'll reply again.
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