Most people believe in guilt by association, and can’t logically separate out opinions from facts or the message from the medium. I’m not sure where I went wrong, but I was taught that stuff in high school, and then further in college… esp in like debate club, or history projects, where you had to learn about the other side’s POV and all that… seems like nobody is learning that ‘skill’ anymore as it’s ‘irrelevant’ for people today.

The idea of things being separable, is not really in vogue as it was 20-40 years ago. The internet has allowed the organization of mass moron-ization. More and more both internet content and my real lif einteractions w/ people… remind me of my dad who was your classic very angry moron. He flew into a rage anytime he saw or heard anything that didn’t align with his pre-existing views and absolutely refused ever to learn anything new or entertain the possibility maybe he was wrong.

If Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal today, he’d be condemned for being an anti-Irish baby hating bigot any so would his publisher or anyone who read the book. You’d also have a movement clamoring to ‘cancel’ him and people on lemmy would be calling him Nazi and a fascist and citing the paradox of tolerance as to why he must be stopped.

Anyway, the problem is that most people operate at a raw emotional level. They do not think, they react. And this reaction-economy is what drives the internet, people are addicted to the shit that pisses them off, that makes them feel superior, and etc. It’s a neurological drug.

Thinking about things… destroys that addictive drug loop of raw emotion. and of the moral high of being a ‘good guy’ fighting the ‘evil bad people’. The moral ambiguity of reality makes people very uncomfortable.