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And then @Amadan will wonder why someone might consider a good chunk of left wingers to be actually evil.
Oh, such a zinger. How many times have I talked about having to censor myself on social media? I have had similar experiences to those of @dr_analog. You know why I don't talk about my personal life here much? Because a good chunk of right-wingers are also crazy and evil, and I have received literal death threats. I don't feel particularly threatened by a few mentally ill cheeto-inhalers, but I am mindful that if the crazies are saying it directly, other people are thinking it, so I should not widen the attack surface. Sure, leftists who cancel family members for having the wrong opinions about trans people and BLM are "evil," I guess, but I would submit that so are the people who eagerly express what they want to do to their political enemies in the coming civil war they can't wait to break out.
I'm sorry to hear all that, but how does it have anything to do with the conversation? The argument comes from you expressing disbelief that WhiningCoil's in-laws could be evil. Your objection is carried nearly entirely on it being unlikely for someone to throw away a personal relationship in order to score a few political points (mostly in their own heads, rather than in any tangible way, by the way), I'm pointing out that the core assumption of your argument is false.
Bad comparison. The world is full of blowhards. It's one thing to fantasize about what you'd do during the glorious revolution, it's another to actually do it. Your death threats example is a more fair comparison, since these were actually sent to you, though the missing element there is them coming from a friend or family member. And even then I wouldn't gaslight you about the person sending them not being evil.
I'm sorry this is not evident to you. I'm resigned to the fact that we're mostly beyond the moral event horizon.
That's odd, I'm pretty sure I said what happened to you was evil too. I guess thinking that your argument was not relevant is past redemption.
Your inability to see relevance means we (or you, rather) have reached a stage at which I can only seek to not be accused of further "gaslighting" you.
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If it’s comforting, thé historical pattern in hegemony holding democracies is very clear- real or imagined security threats drive deviations from normal business, which drives polarization that turns inwards(we are here), butchers a good chunk of the political class on both sides, and results in a decidedly not democratic center right government that does a lot of corruption but doesn’t really hold grudges and keeps the economy going. In the long run, we’ll be OK.
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Echoing this, I recently posted a deadpan joke right before the election and it was signal boosted by a right-wing influencer, essentially calling me a vile democrat and many people took it seriouisly. People found my phone number and I started getting phone calls threatening me to delete the tweet if I know what's good for me (and I'm sure a bunch of people who share my name also started getting them, not knowing what the fuck was going on).
I was being followed around the internet for a bit. All of my content was starting to collect dozens of deranged, threatening comments.
I posted a pic of myself shooting an AR-15 and it seemed to chill out markedly and I was soon forgotten. But I was definitely looking outside of my front window every few minutes the first two days there.
So, I'm sorry to say, I agree with you that it's not only the left that's fond of this kind of cancel-violence.
That sucks and all, but we weren't talking about a mindless mob going after someone because of poor reading comprehension, we're talking about people who now someone personally staging an intervention with their wife, over a minor political disagreement. There's several things here that should have raised alarms and stopped them in their tracks, that aren't expected when it's just about mouthing someone off on Twitter.
What's the difference? The intervention with the wife is so much more personal and less ad hoc than randos (hypothetically) calling up my employer and trying to get me fired?
That this is not just random Twitter psychopaths but otherwise normal friends of my wife becoming inhabited by Agent Smiths?
My wife noticed that phenomenon in 2020.
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Depends on your definition of "evil". I generally require malice, and a malicious actor probably wouldn't try to confirm the situation with the wife before spreading rumours or making false reports to the police.
Not saying there aren't malicious people on that side of the aisle, of course - I'm not an imbecile - but this behaviour isn't something I'd take as evidence of it. With that said, severe delusion without malice clearly can suffice to produce major problems for others; the meme example is of course the Pyro.
That’s the malice.
There’s no confirmation - there’s a false question of safety.
I have limited experience with Machiavellian manipulation, but my understanding is that the normal pattern is for the cackling villain to tell everyone that X is abusing Y except Y. This is because Y is the one person who has the knowledge and the credibility to publically debunk the false accusation, and it's in the villain's interest for that to be delayed as long as possible.
I suppose it's entirely possible there was such a villain upstream of the people calling.
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These people are successfully suppressing right-wing discourse by harassing family members. Whether they literally have a tail and horns, that's evil.
I'm not disputing that this is a state of affairs that's a major problem in need of solution. The fact that the Pyro thinks he's helping does not remove people's right to avoid being incinerated - in that case, if perhaps not this one, lethal force in self-defence is perfectly acceptable.
But "know thine enemy" is a basic principle, and there's a difference between some loon who thinks you're an evil alien out to eat his brain and a Mary Ann Cotton.
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I don't. There aren't a lot of mustache-twirling villains in real life, and it doesn't take a lot of creativity to come up with a story where you're the good guy, actually.
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