Like I don't really use any other social media, but sometimes (like this past week) I venture outside of my hexbear bubble and I browse twitter, or reddit, or instagram, or tiktok, and holy shit I just browse those websites for a minute or two and feel worse about myself, worse about the world, it honestly seems like everyone on those sites is completely insufferable and every post is designed in some CIA laboratory to make me irrationally angry. Like look, sometimes we can all get annoyed at each other here, and I am no exception to that, and nowhere is perfect, but wow this place is 1000% better than like the majority of the internet, I honestly don't know how people go through life at this point browsing the regular internet.
When you're immersed in that sort of background radiation of liberalism and chuddery you develop a resistance to it, or even the ability to tune it out. So when you go on Hexbear for a long while and your resistances to that sort of thing drop, if you try and go back on Reddit or Twitter or whatever, the little dogwhistles everywhere very quickly get to you and drive you up the wall. To the people on those sites it looks like you're totally overreacting to certain sentences or phrases or words, but you're now educated enough about these sorts of quirks that they instantly raise your blood pressure. I genuinely, physically roll my eyes whenever I see a word like "authoritarian" or "totalitarian" or "regime" now because, thanks to e.g. the Masses, Elites, and Rebels essay, I know what these libs are doing, whereas before, I could just tune it out and keep going. I know that these people are smug nationalist Americans who denounce any attempt to break free from US hegemony, rather than merely a dude harmlessly expressing their opinion on the internet.