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Notes -
Yeah, there's been a lot of small-scale stuff like this recently that's been very disheartening, across a variety of communities. I've pointed to the End Of Forge in the MineCraft community for a nonviolent version, but funhouse mirror insinuations and games of telephone have reached to broken communities or actual physical fights in more than a few cases.
On the flip side, it's not exactly new, so much as seeming to occur at smaller scales. I've worked at length with a MineCraft server operator who later pointed out how proud they were for punching Brendan Eich, from context probably somewhere in the 2007-2009 period. Dogpatch Press has been pretty hard on considering "fraudulent ideas" that need be ejected from the marketplace of ideas like... libertarianism -- and that 2018 tweet is not exactly some massive change in perspective. Part of the 2 the Gryphon cancellation (2017) involved a not-exactly-subtle campaign smearing him as a nazi, including r/drama-heads assisting it. There's been efforts to cancel a fur for a fetishized drawings of World War One German outfits that I've been aware of as early as 2014, and I'd be surprised if there weren't closed-door discussions far earlier.
Nor is it specific to Too Online communities like: I've had to handle a lot of drama from supposed adults over politics in STEM outreach work that near-instantly escalated to claimed fear to life. As much as RPGnet is a telling story on the political axis, as specifically for failures to keep 'fuck nazis' as a bound applied to actual nazis, a lot of the political mess over there post-Morke since has only be adjacent to politics. And while Trump was a convenient excuse for many, it really just was an excuse and not just one aimed one direction.
What's particularly frustrating is that this happens even when there is something there. That Skaard tweet from March 2022 you screencapped was in response to this dogpatch.press article, and it's an absolutely fascinating piece even and especially from an anti-fascist perspective. There's certainly actual smoke and probably fire for a few people, there... and it was so heavily mixed in with random things that weren't smoke that they eventually revised the article to at least remove bits where the sole evidence against someone was 'drew Italian Futurism' or 'drew pithy conservative comics' or whatever this is, and the revised version still has crap like 'hawaiian shirt' or 'NFTs' or 'Pine Tree Flag' as if they were anywhere comparable to 'glorified a real-world spree shooter' or 'thinks "miscegenation is worst thing you can do in the world"'.
Yes, to some extent even weak information should be evaluated, but there's a very fine line between trying to pick out from a weak signal and going full Pepe Silvia. And while it's more frustrating to see when it distracts from serious criticism of actual bad actors, it's more worrying when it's aimed as a seque at rando edgelords or actual innocents who get wedged between unrelated bad actors.
[caveat: my impression's that Skaard's still a bit of an edgelording twerp, though I've not interacted directly it probably impacts my interpretation. But it's also probably why the edgelording teen disclaimer doesn't impress a lot of others.]
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