Comment by scarecrowbob
3 days ago
You might consider (though perhaps not agree) that no where in my post did I insinuate that "flagging" was the same as taking a position on the subject:
my statement was about why I do, indeed, find utility these conversations you don't find useful.
That a) says nothing about my take on your understanding/ position on the issues around protest or politics and b) is a request to understand my position and not, like, a statement about the morality of your position.
And further, to me "being okay with the summary execution of people for protesting" seems like a pretty specific sentiment, and one which I have heard echoed here quite a bit. I find it super useful to see demonstrated so frequently that a person with excellent technical chops in a domain may often have massive deficiencies in their reasoning, if for no other reason that it helps me understand the weakness of my own cognition.
So, perhaps consider that it's you, in projecting a statement I didn't make in a very short and fairly clear post who is "giving a perfect example" of the level of nuance-free assumptions that do (as you correctly point out) often run rampant- and not just on this site, but in discourse in general.
To push my point a bit further, I am not here to make moral judgements or change peoples' mind on these political topics; rather, over the decade during which I've been interacting on this site, it has= has been super informative to trace the nascent fascism that breed in many of the confluences of technology and capitalism.
That may, to you, sound like hyperbolic rhetoric that is dismissive of other folks' opinions; from my position you're not understanding that this examination of (what is to me) highly disagreeable and almost sociopathic political discourse -is- the process of finding nuanced and useful understandings of our political situation.
The whole thread here started with “why do we continue to ignore this”, to which I replied “who’s ignoring this”, and the answer is “anyone who’s flagging this post.”
The conversation in this particular thread has gone off the rails, in large part because I am very angry about what’s happening, and I tend to get heated in replies. So I apologize for letting my anger get the best of me in this particular instance.
My only point was to say “I flagged this, but not because I’m ignoring it.”
I flagged it because I truly believe to my core that anonymous online discussion about emotional political topics is causing this country’s descent into fascism. Whipping people into a frenzy against one another, causes hatred to amplify past where it would be if it were just about the story itself. The discussions are where people go to out-signal each other, even if nobody’s there to argue the other point. Then if someone does end up saying something like “hmm, looks like the protester was actually carrying a gun” (or something equally not-wrong but clearly not the expected expression of ICE-hatred we all expect), they’re now the target of everyone’s anger. All that brewing hatred is now pointed at that one person, because they’re the closest thing on the site to someone who is actually pro-ICE. Then we have people like you casually saying things about this site being full of tech bros who are just fine with executions… I just feel like we need to tone everything way down. We need to be calm, to be honest. I know it’s hard. I don’t really know what else to say… it’s hard to formulate thoughts clearly in times like these.