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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'll start off with my condolences to anyone of any gender that had to listen to nRXs for this to happen at the end of it.
... I have a thought. That's not fair, I recognize... though I'd like some counterexample showing I'm just cherrypicking.
Talking about anything in a sensible way is not the point of the story; talking about why no one can group can talk about anything in a sensible way isn't part of the story. Laurenson isn't writing for Red Tribers, obviously, nor writing to Red Tribers, or even explaining Red Tribers to Blue Tribers. The point is to explain where Laurenson's coming from to Blue Tribers, and that's fine.
But from a Red Triber perspective -- and I fully recognize I'm far from hydroacetelene's level of 'real' Red Triber -- it's kinda the last part of this story where there's anything interesting. The Now What section is the biggest frustration, since it starts with 'here's the Blue Tribe principle insulting me and here's the Red Tribe random asshats insulting me, tots similar in scope and regularity' and then leads to a trio of revelations that practically come with the punchline 'do you think we don't know that?' But does anyone think there's a literate Red Triber on the planet, and I'm defining 'literate' here by Chicago definitions, that does not already know that a news media environment with any mix, no matter how lopsided, of Red and Blue Tribers devolves into squabbles?
I can make the argument that deradicalization matters, I can and regularly do make the argument that liberalism is dying at this rate, I can and have made the argument that it's really really dangerous. I'd like to solve that! I've been doing the (sometimes literal) Touch Grass thing, and some STEM-focused community outreach, and a half-dozen other programs trying to bring people together without bringing politics to the forefront.
Online, I'm overtly the bi furry gun owner for a reason, knowing how offputting the constant gay or gunnie references are to so many people: areas I'd like to go and philosophies I'd like to let live become 'target rich environments' if the only ones who wear it on their sleeves are the Everything Leftism Coneheads and straight-from-central-casting . I'd hope that there'd be some impact from showing people are people, and that Red and Blue can join together to achieve goals more important than wars of all-against-all over microns of worthless territory, and that at least some goals of those politics are more than hate or rage or malice.
... but I don't know if that will work, either, and ultimately, the Litany of Tarski wins. The STEM outreach program's had a small and subtle cold war over rainbow pins in the local community, the modded Minecraft server I helped with software problems had its owner proudly promote the time he beat the shit out of Brendan Eich, there's many Blue and Red tribe spheres I can't wear anything on my sleeve. Worse, so many high-profile people pretending to straddle political aisles are very clearly not that there's less than zero trust, here.
Everything else is a distraction. Yes, people are hallucinating their own consensus realities, but (as Laurenson points out!) it's not like the normies are doing any better. If we can't even talk about anything in a sensible way, if we can't talk about why we can't talk about anything in a sensible way, trying increasingly complicated and roundabout messaging won't solve it.
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