You can really see this with Matt recently. 15 minutes of musing on the vlogs becomes a snide "fuck those people" on twitter the next day. The only theory I really have is that design wise a lot of twitter is just normie 4chan. Both sites are pretty miserable when you think about it being thousands of people scrolling through mountains of uninteresting garbage, finding one funny thing every few hundred post, smirking and then starting over.
I think a lot of the anger there is just the online equivalent of someone kicking one of those carnival machines for not spitting out a prize after the 8th attempt. Nobody is really trying to talk to each other, they just want the mass to do something interesting again so they kick it.
To be fair it's not just legacy media. Even (smart) Youtubers avoid political stuff as much as possible. It doesn't take a genius to know you gain nothing personally by taking a stand but stand to lose a lot.
Fuck I know someone who went to the same school as me and is now at Princeton and he is just a gigantic moron, and I feel ashamed that people over there probably think his views about our country are legit and take them at face value. I have lots of stuff to say about his views lol
Note: If you're in the UK or especially the US, and you see a Greek student there (or a student from any country that is relatively poor compared to the US or the UK) they're at LEAST comfortable middle class, and their views aren't representative. Plus if they are just comfortable middle class and not actually rich, their expenses will be close to null, you won't see them throwing money around for no reason. Unis here are free and living expenses are nothing compared to, say, the UK so a decent wage here is nothing if you live in London. There is no way just any working class family could afford the costs of their kids studying abroad and even if they could only barely manage it, chances are they wouldn't elect to do that since uni here is free. Unless the kids had some kind of sick scholarship. There are some exceptions but they are rare.
I can not stretch enough how prohibitively expensive studying abroad is for most people here, ESPECIALLY in the US. If both parents work (not to be taken for granted in a country with a ridiculously high unemployment rate) then a family makes on average like 2-3k per month, and that's considered the positive scenario. According to Google, the average disposable household income is about 17k per year. Do the math of said family sending their children abroad to study at an expensive university plus the high living costs and the airplane tickets every year. So pls don't take the views of these morons for granted.
reduced to grunting, rutting fuckwit by that awful site
tearing off the mask of humanism :sicko-yes:
Idk but i think its the emphasis on engagement (positive or negative) and the brevity of messaging. like a lot of social media, the more a post is interacted with, the more the platform promotes that post, encouraging people to make purposefully controversial statements, because its almost guaranteed to get attention.
then, you can only write 260 characters on a tweet, which means that you have very limited space to succinctly convey possibly complicated ideas. (But on the other hand, you can write a long thread and have it get a lot of impressions if its on trend for the day.)
The thread format is fucking garbage for some thing.
The whole thing about the rest of the site is that it's set up to reward "dunks" above all else, so you have a dipshit OP with a snarky reply below it that means nothing unless you're already in the replier's circle. We could sit here and opine about a platform that encourage "substantial conversation", but if people wanted that they'd be on Reddit (which has its own set of issues lol).
very true. like, tumblr is designed to encourage long form posting, but it was hell in its heyday because dunking on someone almost always works if youre funny enough or your opinion is popular, or you have a large audience.
Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Isn't that too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as everyone knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to speak? Quite a few comrades always keep their eyes shut and talk nonsense, and for a Communist that is disgraceful. How can a Communist keep his eyes shut and talk nonsense?
It won' t do!
It won't do!
You must investigate!
You must not talk nonsense!
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_11.htm
How can a Communist keep his eyes shut and talk nonsense?
Very easily, apparently.
To be honest I think it's just exposure to a larger sample size of the population. Reddit, here, and most other social media outlets (barring Facebook, but FB is a weird case) become pretty echo chambery.
Something that I have noticed is that people who stick to Chapo.Chat and Reddit tend to only be exposed to the stuff that gets posted to make fun of liberals, and not the every day liberal take (also conservative) that is still very stupid.
I think it also tends to make us forget that liberals outnumber us by a lot. There are far more people in the US who support the Status Quo than those who want to overthrow it.
