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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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Its not worth thinking about any of this at the object level. The things you are interacting with on social media are not human beings, they are AIs programmed to hurt you with weaponised language. By engaging with them you're allowing them to set the terms and tempo of the debate, and their only goal is to prevent real debate from happening because it's their best strategic option right now. The words are a cloud of ink. There is no "real" message it's possible to engage with, and the people responsible just need to be repressed and incapacitated .

The traditional word is "demons."

But yes, many people are just completely possessed by ideology. Not worth engaging with.

I don't even mean on an individual level, despite agreeing about possession. It's that there are entire narratives on the Internet that are manufactured from the ground up to be weapons. A literal evil think-tank sat around brainstorming ways to disrupt organic conversations with propaganda, and then deployed that propaganda through controlled media, paid influencers, bot networks, reddit powermods, etc.

When you run into something like the "haha Vance fucked a couch Republicans are weird" thing, you are being attacked by a literal virus designed to hurt your ability to think. Look how much time and mental energy people wasted arguing about it here, remember how gleeful the attackers were that it was working to demoralize you.

You need to sanitize those attacks with a flamethrower if you're going to have any kind of real community discussion in this propaganda warfare environment