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I find it important to sometimes take time away from all heavy controversial stuff, whether personal or political, and just do innocent stuff that I enjoy, whether that's watching videos of puppies, or reading about sports (which is often controversial but rarely heavy), or watching adventure videos on YouTube, or going outside, etc.
When I am in politics mode, I find myself bouncing back and forth.
First I go read some stuff in mainstream media or Reddit and get angry at the leftoids (the left/right distinction is pretty meaningless but I use these terms as loose pointers). Stupid fucking imbeciles! Unselfaware hypocrites who hide their desire for power behind virtue signalling! Why can't they see what's so obvious to me? Useless swine!...
So then I go to TheMotte or 4chan to get some relief, but there I get angry at the righoids. Dumb, dull-witted morons! Cruel, cold sociopaths! Supercilious geeks with withered hearts covered by layers of defense mechanisms! Fuck all of them!...
So then I go back to mainstream media or Reddit and get angry at the leftoids again...
And then I go back to TheMotte or 4chan and get angry at the rightoids again...
I have a pretty dark sense of humor and can find a lot of twisted shit really funny, so a lot of the time I'm just reading political content and laughing my ass off. I like to go to rdrama sometimes, at least they make fun of both leftoids and rightoids and understand the virtue of brevity, but I usually get tired of rdrama after a while too, there are only so many layers of irony, smugness, and compassionlessness one can endure before one wants to go look at some flowers or just go to the bar and talk to actual people in the flesh.
When my humor runs out and I start to find all the politics actually heavy instead of fun, I know I gotta take a break. Step away, go enjoy sensory experience and be around people, maybe go out and try to get laid... And when I get out and about I am usually reminded that offline, most people actually don't seem to care much about politics, and the ones that do are usually not raging leftoids or rightoids. Well, or they're hiding it, but I think for the most part that's not the case, most people just genuinely are not very gung-ho about politics.
Many have said it before and I will say it again. The Internet really overrepresents the kind of people who care enough about politics to spend all day posting about it. One person who is obsessed with politics will tend to generate 100 times more online political content than the average person. As a result, when you are reading about politics on the Internet, you are not reading a fair sample of the overall population's political thoughts. You are reading, largely, the thoughts of the kind of people who, for whatever reasons, spend a lot of time writing about politics on the Internet.
TheMotte is far from perfect and I can criticize it all day long, whether for the transparent and weak attempts to get around the rules that many posters consciously or unconsciously engage in when they feel like posting a bit of emotional venting disguised as logic and rationality, or for the lack of simple human compassion that I detect from some. But at least here I usually do not immediately get called either a communist cuck or a racist fascist when I disagree with people, so there's that. I think that relatively speaking, and I mean very relatively speaking, this place is still an island of sanity, at least if you compare it to other places where people are willing to openly discuss extremely controversial political topics.
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