Unpopular Opinion
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This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
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Adam Curtis in the docu Hypernormalization makes an interesting point about the moralization of politics, how since 9/11 politicians have increasingly used "deceptive myths of good vs evil". And I think that has become a large part of online discourse.
Polarization is profitable because it drives engagement. You have one meme mocking the position of the other side and the other side has a counter meme, and together they boost each other, slowly mutate into more extreme forms. So people increasingly see each other as extreme versions. But it also makes your own side more extreme and unyielding.
And the rise of trolls with climate denial and ending in Trump being cheered for his psychological terror campaign shows where we are today. I suspect it evolved naturally as a response to the unrelenting stupidity by the fascist MAGA trolls. But it's not just maga that is fine denying reality, denying logical arguments and resorts to demonizing the ideological enemy. It is good vs evil all the way down now.
Meanwhile the true evil, the class warfare of the plutocrats against us, is largely ignored. Instead "tankies" and the more extremist communist who actually offer an alternative ideology that could provide a different perspective and a way out of our current situation have been defederated and banned from the largest group of lemmy instances. And that was only possible through this extremification of the ideological opponent as evil.
The same absolutely applies to fuckai. You still get comments that LLMs only copy and randomly rearrange text in their database and cannot reason at all. Which is objectively false. And you get the avalanche of hate.
Same with pointing out that the absolute evidence the CIA funded and trained the organizer of the maidan protests in the Ukraine and the evidence of the massacre being a false flag by far right nazi sympathizers, therefor rendering the question of fault and diplomatic solutions more nuanced than what is allowed in public discourse.
Meanwhile on topics like banning hate speech, where there shouldn't be any tolerance, there is.
So I do think you're mostly right, but it's not so much done out of cruelty, but because we've all been trained like dogs by social media to behave like this and enjoy the bliss of group approval. Kinda like The Orville episode about the base democratic society they encounter. Reality and truth is what the majority decides it is.
From where I stand it seems that dehumanization is the tool used there and nowadays people are increasingly quick to dismiss the entire person based on a single bit of information about them (which often isn't even true). And now that they're not even considered a human anymore anything goes. That's how you get otherwise normal people acting in horrific ways and history is filled with examples of that.
there is not definition of hate speech that everyone can agee on, this is part of why hate speech is protected by the first amendment in the US.
Paradox of tolerance
yes, and the first ammendment to the US constitution solves it by not giving a shit about what individuals do.
Only if you consider sticking its head in the sand to be solving the issue.
You made some good points. This comment would have been a lot more palatable if you didn't then proceed to bring .ml propaganda into it.
That was the point since I'm interested in the social and psychological phenomenon. There is evidence to prove what I said in western newspapers and Ukrainian academic sources, although it's not easy to find.
But my point is that as soon as something contradicts on someone's worldview these days, people loose their reason and hurl accusations. The possibility of being wrong is just immediately rejected. The enemy must be lying and evil or deluded and inferior.
That is why I brought that point into it, to show this is not limited to AI. There are also topics like "are pitbulls a more dangerous breed?" that was trending yesterday, with subreddits dedicated to hating Pitbulls, while studies and statistics say they are are not.