It's genuinely a little disturbing how many Very Online Left People just end up taking a circuitous route to RETVRN

I genuinely think social media cooks brains in a way that makes them primed for regressive behavior. I think that it fosters an inability to critically think, maximizes jumping to conclusions, gamifies trolling and cheap dopamine hits, and generally erodes self-control with instant gratification.

Speaking of the online left, look how they're responding to Obama befriending Mamdani.

At this point I think it's probably on the same scale as booze for brain damage, and worse for addiction.

It’s getting very bad. And with Bluesky having No Algorithm the only logical conclusion it can reach is that the evil algorithm had little to nothing to do with it and People Are Just Like This

I think it's both, but yes, network effects and instant gratification are, IMO, the problem.

I think it has an algorithm, I clicked like on titties and it kept showing me titties

Jumping to immediate conclusions, posting about them in the moment, and then getting a dopamine rush from likes and follows from reactionaries who see what might have been your one-off episode as confirming their priors That is a *scourge* On Here

it's horrific!!!

It mostly registers to me as "these people's ideal life always seems to end up moving backwards to a time when Things Were Simpler."

Also I just gotta say we REALLY gotta get past the ethos of The Rich Remember

I'm starting to think this site is a massive net negative. Just making people crazier and crazier.

Things were not better in the past. Even Gen Z thinks previous generations had it better & we didn’t. Crime was much higher. I lived in LA during the Rodney King riots. The crack epidemic was destroying Black neighborhoods & families.

Black folks had to fight for the right to vote getting beaten & lynched, now kids say they have to be “inspired to vote.” JFK said “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

We had a candidate who’d already tried to stage a coup to stay in office after losing an election & was promising to be a dictator on Day 1 if elected again, but people still couldn’t get their lazy asses out to vote for the qualified Black lady.

all conservative ideology is ultimately revanchist; this is the fundamental braking force on my own small-c conservative tendencies

Yeah, I try to keep my tendencies at "conserving" stuff: Don't break things for no reason without trying to understand why they exist, but don't turn Chesterton's Fence into Frost's Fence (unthinking "good fences make good neighbors") or the freaking Berlin Wall.

The whole point of Chesterton's Fence is that it slows you down but it's *vincible*: You can figure out that it's no longer needed, maybe never was but people never questioned it, and it can be demolished after some consideration. It's a check on "move fast and break things" not all forward progress

Yeah, it makes more sense if your only throughline is "people own and make money on tech advancements"

The thing is, RETVRN feels reactionary-coded to me, and never felt right-coded, but the right keeps doing it. A communist doing it feels like the most natural thing in the world (no pun intended)

I am doubling down on my belief that some opinions shouldn't be had by anyone

I found the thread, and the comments are not making me hopeful for the future of the left...

Was that the deathstyle one or something else?

Different one. I just saw it. I do not know who this person is but it’s funny.