The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Watching the anger boil off of this place. Is it an evaporative cooling trap? Weird sexual and violent video games have provided the same outlet for a neutered Japan. Is this happening here? Is this a trap?
I don't sense much anger tbh. I might see a post get downvoted because it's too left-wing or something, but all the responses are still usually polite even when they disagree. Even when someone's accusing the outgroup of destroying civilization it's done in a very literary way over multiple paragraphs, as opposed to what you see on twitter
I suppose it was mostly a reaction to kulak's posting of that Indian hate video. It has a lot of upvotes for a front page post.
All I saw of it was Self Made Human casting shade on Pakistan, the title didn't make it very appealing to actually click through.
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Oh lol, I didn't even click it
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Upvotes don't necessarily mean "Agree with everything stated in the post", especially, possibly, with posts by Kulak, who can be relied upon to post passionately held, longform, brave, and often objectionable posts on a periodic basis. I could be wrong and there are several people who buy into the Indian hate, but that's not my experience here.
Edit: People are free to hate whoever the hell they want. Not trying to suggest there's a Motte consensus.
What people do you hate?
There's only two things I can't stand in the world.
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The French. Actually I don't hate any group, but there are one or two individuals out there that I have no use for. (I'm sure there would be more but something something Dunbar number.)
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I'm not sure that I've noticed more anger than in other internet discussion spaces. There's more anger on my local Nextdoor about the proper prosocial speed to go in relation to the speed limit than most Motte threads.
Are you thinking of anything in particular?
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I'd like to provide a response, but I legitimately don't know what you're talking about.
I watched that crazy racist indian video, it has a lot of upvotes here. It also has a gross thumbnail that I had to use my ad blocker to eventually remove. I guess I was just reflecting on that, and some of the more interesting posts I've come across here. There is some deep seeded anger at the world in many of them, including some kind of death drive judging by how many sort of hope some kind of disaster occurs to shake things up and make life interesting.
There were a lot of emotions involved there, but I don't think "anger" was a prominent one. Contempt and disgust, maybe, but those are distinct from anger.
Are you sure you're not just thinking of that one Kulak post about decentralization? I don't think that's a particularly common sentiment here.
I mean, I do know the phenomenon you're talking about. 4chan was filled with that kind of posting in the early days of Covid. There are people here who are waiting for the robot god to rapture them up into post-singularity digital immortality, but that's fundamentally a constructive view of the future (bizarre as it may seem) rather than a destructive one.
At any rate I don't think it's as bizarre a fantasy as you make it out to be, particularly because people are able to compartmentalize and only imagine the cool and adventurous aspects of living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape rather than the mundane and dangerous ones.
Whomever made that video had a lot of anger. That is the only way they would spend weeks putting it together. People here upvoted his analysis of it, as well as the video, both of which do not contain a charitable view of the world.
I've been around the block. People are mostly good, if you meet them where they are; many are limited. The only true bad apples are the people that read "will to power" and "635 keys to manipulate all around you" strivers. Sometimes kind of interesting at first, but they suck, and I cut them out like a rotten piece of fruit. I'm always saddened when I watch them work on fresh prey.
This is not my experience, or my read of the 4chan video.
The 4chan video is sophisticated race-baiting and trolling of a sort I expect from the chans. It is specifically designed to incite anger, disgust and revulsion, an inflammatory piece of content in search of an audience. This is incredibly consistent with the standard 4chan MO, which largely boils down to trying to get a reaction. As this behavior is now widespread across the entire internet and it becomes harder and harder to shock people, they have to try harder to get a reaction.
To put it shortly: Gawker and their ilk turned trolling into a clickbait business. And then clickbait proved to be not really all that profitable, in the end. What are outrage merchants to do except escalate?
I don't think people are mostly good. I also think power law is universal and those who don't strive lose to those who do. People who don't think this is true have not lost hard enough yet, or are sufficiently isolated from the consequences of their losing that they don't notice those who are losing. I think the latter is one of the great tragedies of human civilization, and the more divorced from reality the elite or ruling caste get, the closer disaster gets (c.f. Marie Antoinette).
Why would anyone spend weeks or months cobbling this thing together for a reason other than hate and sadness? It contributes only negativity and disgust and crude evil to the world. There is no money in it like for Gawker etc...
What does losing even mean in today's world? As you say, "natural selection" has been well done away with for a long time, and good riddance, or odds are neither one of us would be here today having this conversation based on historical child mortality rates. Is there really something wrong with insulating humanity from the sheer brutality of gross nature? We should strive for that in all things, with overcoming death itself as our crowning achievement.
Side note; very few "popular" uprisings al-la the French Revolution are what you think they are, it is almost always elites and the sub-elites trading places. Here is a great podcast on revolutions the world over. https://open.spotify.com/show/05lvdf9T77KE6y4gyMGEsD
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The Nietzsche book? I highly recommend his work if you haven’t read it.
Anyway if you think this place is a uniquely wretched hive of moral degeneracy, why are you still posting here?
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I do think that there are perhaps missing outlets for anger in our society. But I don't really know.
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I think all text posting tends towards hysteria because exaggeration is one of the ways to get your point across without being able to moderate tone, volume, body language etc.
Most people here are essentially smart, relatively normal people who lead mostly good lives but have minor to substantial issues with how their societies are run. But I wouldn’t say it’s one of the angrier places on the internet, the board probably tends too old for that anyway.
Unfortunately exaggeration is a very efficient way to burn through the charity of people who disagree with you :/
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