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One of the biggest issues we seem to be facing socially right now is pessimistic victim complexes, especially among young people but it's popping up everywhere. The obsession with being the underdog narrative has grown to massive proportions, whether it be young people adopting oppression olympics identities or the insane comments I saw just a few day ago comparing being a modern man in Europe as tantamount to slavery. Everybody needs to be a victim now in at least some way.
I do think part of it is exposure to more information and negativity focused algorithms. It's hard to feel all the wins when everything in your feed is just people complaining about the compromises they've had to mistake. It's like what Scott Alexander had talked about before with showing the same film to Israel/Palestine supoorters and them both coming thinking it was biased against them. People see the stuff that agrees with them as the neutral baseline and the stuff they don't agree with as an anomaly so something that might be "70% agree, 30% disagree" gets treated as "70% normal and smart, 30% abnormal and dumb". So even just more fair information looks like biased against you information.
But it's not just algorithms and information, they would not work if people did not bite. It's because they want to be angry. Someone naive might think "good news, data centers don't use much water!" or "good news, vaccines don't cause autism and there isn't an autism epidemic, it's just diagnostic drift" or "good news, cops don't really kill that many minorities" or "good news, schools are not giving litter boxes and trans surgeries to cat identified kids" would be received with a smile, but instead it's pushed away with anger. Weirdly enough, "the world is better than you thought" is seen as a bad thing to learn! They want to be a victim of a bad society.
Bruh I had to quit Facebook over this. Not posting culture war content. No, the things that drove others most berserk was arguing things were, actually, good and getting better and not bad
Yeah media is definitely a big part of it, American media dominates the world. We're the fun little soap opera Housewives of the US for them to all laugh about. You can find maga hats and confederate flags and (BLM protests and whatever else all across the world. Not often but more than you'd think, and it's because our whole country is blasted on loudspeakers and things spread everywhere.
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Arguments are soldiers. More specifically, in this case, the mistake is assuming that, say, "datacenters use too much water/we should waste less water" is the reflection of a terminal value. "Datacenters bad" is much closer to terminal, whatever it is; the role of the water narrative is more akin to "finally I have found a good story to convince the sheeple to join the fight against datacenters".
If you take it away, this does not, in their eyes, make datacenters any better, but just makes it harder for them to get agreement and sympathy. So it is with everything else; telling any doomer that their legible indicators of doom are a lie is just telling them to shut up and endure their feeling that everything is rotten alone. (Crime statistics tend to do similar things for right-wingers.)
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Uh this just opens up a cascade of other issues. Like it's good that the 'classical autism' numbers are remaining consistent but significant diagnostic drift around mental illness is going to have other major issues especially in a robust welfare state.
That there is actual issues in the world to discuss doesn't make the main complaint people keep saying over and over again any less nonsense and anger motivated. Someone like RFK has all the resources he could possibly need to understand that the "autism epidemic" isn't actually meaningfully a thing, and yet instead of focusing his efforts on what you said, issues related to diagnostic drift, he wastes all the effort and energy instead. Because admitting that the autism epidemic isn't real topples the other parts of the jenga tower he's built his beliefs on (like if autism epidemic isn't real, then vaccines or preservatives or whatever else couldn't be causing it) so he has to clutch onto nonsense and waste time and money that could be actually doing something useful.
And even when things aren't directly connected, it's not like people go "X isn't true? That's good to hear, but I'm still worried about Y". Like if you think data centers are using too much water and too much electricity and are only good for slop then you can accept the good news on water but still be worried about the grid and slop content. Instead, most people just get pissed that you're pointing out X isn't true.
You're completely missing the point with this. Yes, autism as defined by the previous school of thought is maintaining relatively consistent numbers generationally. However, scope creep of the diagnosis combined with the weaponization of 'I have a disability give me free shit' from people tapped into the system inevitably gets downright rapacious when people who were considered able to have full healthy lives (albeit a bit weird) a generation ago now have a label which entitles them to access whatever societal privileges. I agree that the vaccination = autism correlation/argument is spurious and created by a series of underlying mostly-uncorrelated correlations. RFK's identifying something salient in that the modern system of privilege creates massive overdiagnosis of psychological conditions, even if he doesn't understand or wish to communicate that fact since he'd likely get sledgehammered from anothe direction.
The Data center point is a complete non-sequitur in this case and isn't really reasoned from any place other than 'I don't like data centers and I broadly like the environment, this is a good cudgel'. The same goes for discussing the Trans violence rate not being that high when you take out a vanishingly small chunk of sexworkers, yet yaddayadda Trans genocide.
No I understand the point, I disagree with you that it matters much. "Sure he's wrong but at least he's vaguely directionally correct in this particular interpretation" is just "he's wrong" to me. He's using all the government rhetoric and resources to target the wrong things when he has every opportunity and resource to have a better and more nuanced and more correct view.
He's actually worse than a similar person who believes the "autism epidemic" is real and doesn't use it to blame vaccines cause at least that similar person isn't going to be behind the deaths and sickness of tons of kids.
It's exactly the same. Something that people if they bothered at all could easily see the real facts (autism epidemic isn't real, data centers don't use much water, whatever) but not only refuse to update themselves on it and focus on actual issues, but get angry at the very idea of it.
The trans issue makes everyone insane and stupid. There is no trans genocide epidemic and there is no trans mass shooting epidemics, violence is incredibly rare in all directions from most groups in the modern world. The only things that really kill you when you're young is drug overdoses, car accidents and by your own hand. If you don't get into trouble like gangs or hanging around the very few kill streets you're exceedingly unlikely to be murdered no matter who or what you are. Humans have always been like this to some degree, but ever since telecommunications allowed stories to spread from far away we can get flooded with a deluge of horrific but very rare examples that makes violence and crime seem far more common than it actually is.
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I don't personally care that much about the victim complex per se. That's eternal. What I care about is real politics being done according to those grievances and the downstream societal damage. And that's hard to deny. Though that's kind of been the story of the entire 21st century so far I suppose.
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