by ennui2 » Sun 04 Sep 2016, 20:16:36
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')how much more cordial and civil would we be when looking at each other instead of behind the wall of a digital screen?
Not very. The fact is that we all come from different places and there are prejudices because of it. That comes raging out in a string of comma-delimited labels. Yuppie, suburbanite, blue-state, New Englander, spoiled, white brat, nerd on one hand and right-wing, redneck, bigot, ignoramous on the other.
How that expresses itself in the debates is that a person's position is invalidated if they don't come from the same exact background you do. But the issues here are broad. Someone from a rural background who may have a super luddite anti-tech bias is simply not as equipped to judge what's going on with EVs as a techno-nerd. And yet everyone thinks of themselves as having an infallible grasp of all facets of doom.
There's this identity-politics resistance to listen to people from different backgrounds and this reflects sort of the lifeboat ethics thing well in advance. Someone who has already chosen to bugout into the woods and wait for the end of industrial civilization is going to bristle at the idea that they might need to keep twiddling their thumbs while suburbia plows on with EVs and self-driving cars and solar-panels. They've made a very strong INVESTMENT in going down a pathway and they need to defend their investment. If it feels as if maybe they miscalculated and they're somehow missing out, well, it's a threat to self-esteem.
I think this is a very strong undercurrent in all of the hostility these days. 10 years ago everyone seemed to be more on the same page as far as waiting for the other shoe to drop. It was a unifying force. But the center seeming to hold has caused people to be really touchy and sensitive about their life-choices.
And it goes both ways. There's the
"Oh, 'mos', look at you. You wimped out on the doomstead. But when doom comes, I'll be eating hot buttered popcorn and you'll be burning the furniture. If you didn't prepare, then doom...on...YOU! Doom...on...YOU!"You see what I mean? The issues get lost and it devolves into monkeys beating their chest to try to prove that their lifestyle choice was the right call and everyone else is blindly walking over a cliff.
And I think this sort of ego-baiting, this jockying for social status is a real macho bullshit thing, which is one of my pet peeves.
So I'm not really sure sometimes whether people are here to really get a better objective look on things or they are just trying to continually validate their lifestyle choices through bullying others--where the more extreme those choices might be perceived, the more sensitive they feel about it and the more they need to denigrate others who haven't followed suit to make them feel better.
There's simply no way to read people's postings day in and day out without piecing together this sort of subtext. It is not imaginary and it's not paranoia. It's all there in how rude and callous people are here.
"If the oil price crosses above the Etp maximum oil price curve within the next month, I will leave the forum." --SumYunGai (9/21/2016)