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I've been feeling like I've been living in a different reality for almost a decade at this point. The world just doesn't make fucking sense at all.
I think it's pretty unreal that everything that has happened in the wake of the 2020 election and January 6th and Roe and so much more has apparently only cemented people in their partisanship. Absolutely wild.
My theory is that many westerners in our current era have effectively replaced traditional religion with shallow political ideology.
So instead of going to church so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics, they go online so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics.
Seriously.
My theory is that many westerners in our current era have effectively replaced traditional religion with shallow political ideology.
I don't really think traditional religion has been replaced by political ideology per se. But I do think religion in the US has formed a symbiotic relationship with politics.
If you go to an evangelical church service in many areas, it is pretty much nothing but a Republican political meeting. In some churches, you're not even welcome if you're a Democrat.
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The two things aren't mutually exclusive.
Yes - some number of people have melded religion and politics. There's nothing new in that.
But I'm talking about a different dynamic.
Religion is only in part, and arguably not even primarily,about deities and creation myths and such. To some significant degree, and arguably primarily, it's about establishing and maintaining a sense of identity and community, and providing self-affirmation. People adopt and practice religion in large part so that they can self-apply a label that represents a particular set of values and virtues that they wish to project, and so that they can surround themselves with, and gain positive feedback from, like-minded fellow believers.
To that end, each religion has a set of values and virtues that are presumed to be possessed by whoever wears their label, a designated community of believers, a set of beliefs to reassure the believers that theirs is the one true faith, and a designated set of enemies upon whom to blame all wrong and toward whom to direct their hatred, reinforcing both their sense of virtue and their sense of community.
And those things are the things for which a growing number of people in the west are turning to politicsl ideology. They've just filled all the gaps that would otherwise have been filled by traditional religion with secular counterparts. They still have a faith which they share with fellow believers, they still have a label they can wear to designate their faith, they still have tracts and preachers and their sermons, which are still alternately about the inherent correctness of their own faith and the evil of the heretics and unbelievers, they still have a set of morals by which they can maybe attempt to live their own lives, but much more importantly, against which they can judge others, and so on.
It's really all of the same sorts of things serving the same purposes - it's just different insofar as it's centered on politics instead of religion.
I don't think it's even particularly notable except insofar as so many seem to be completely unaware of it. In fact, I would say that that broad dynamic of seeking identity and community and self-affirmation by investing oneself in some specific belief system and joining with others who share those beliefs and thus that identity is one of the most common and basic human traits. For some reason, it's come to be associated (and often disparagingly) with traditional religion, but people actually do the same thing with any number of different ideas or credos.
And currently, and particularly in the west and particularly online, a significant number of people do it with politics.
I believe this too and I don't even think it's controversial, I think it's fairly mainstream tbh.
Look at that stupid conservative congresswoman who got up in front of a bunch of conservatives at a "prayer breakfast" and said, totally casually, she only made it on time because she turned her boyfriend's request for a quickie down.
These people aren't religious, they don't even know what it means to be religious.
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Seems like past a certain point people will just keep doubling down because turning back would be admitting that you've been a fool.
What is crazy about American politics is that "one side" is not just wrong or misguided, but very wrong, demonstrably so. So very wrong that it is insane from an outsider pespective to try to imagine by what wild loops of logic you could end up so very wrong considering that we're all supposed to be watching the same movie. You can point at basically anything, on any issue at random, and try to reverse engineer the Republican stance on an issue, and you will face absolutely paper thin, weak arguments, weak premises, unverifiable claims every time, about everything, and in a very unmistakable way that the line of reasoning is, again, not just a bit wrong, but very wrong.
I knew a lot of people weren't very good at that abstract thinking stuff, making deliberate assumptions and at identifying signal from noise, but frankly, I did not expect almost half of the human race to be absolute morons when it comes to critical thinking. Good luck everyone.
Yup. Before the Trump cult, I never truly understood how Hitler could have come to power. Now I totally get it.
Trump's followers have stayed loyal to him through every deplorable moment: the pussy grabbing, mocking the disabled, the Muslim ban, kidnapping children at the border, collusion with Russia, extorting Ukraine, hush money to a porn star, stealing from charity, lying about an election, staging an insurrection, stealing classified documents, civil liability for rape ... Not to mention lying about covid, and botching the covid response and killing hundreds of thousands who could have lived, all while utterly destroying the economy.
The internet and access to information immediately has really been a wild ride.
In the beginning it was amazing though…lol
Seems like the Information Age is Fermi’s Great Filter. Goodbye cruel world.
What a crazy irony. Here we were thinking we had to survive the nuclear age and get to the point where we were all connected and well-informed. But it turns out the nukes led to an unprecedented period of peace and global information access and communication may destroy us all.
Make that the disinformation age.
that seems rather unlikely, even if it should prove something humans are fatally unsuited to (which Im not really convinced of yet, because a lot of the problems of the information age are not really new, there is plenty of precedent for leaders that make foolish decisions to nevertheless inspire large followings and use that to break political norms in the system they exist in for example, or for harmful rumors and movements to spread false medical advice or hate towards particular groups of people, before the information age). In order for something to be the great filter, it implies that that thing has to be the death of (or at least permanently halt the advancement of) close to every species that reaches it. In other words, it isnt enough for humans to struggle with it, it has to be something for which a species evolving that can survive it is essentially inconceivable. Given how different the psychology among even different animals on earth can appear to be, and that the problems caused by the information age will be greatly impacted by the psychological quirks of the civilization experiencing it, that strikes me as unlikely. It also has to actually drive the species that reaches it to extinction, or at least completely stop their advancement. Given that new technology continues to be developed, some of it surprisingly quickly and a lot of it helped by the fruits of the information age, the latter seems unlikely, so for it to be the great filter, it would need to actually cause extinction basically 100% of the time, and even for humans, Im not sure how it would do that (while enabling things like climate change denial and anti-vaccine movements to spread causes us problems, that probably isnt enough per se, even a disaster that made three quarters of the planet literally deadly to exist in and a plague that wiped out half the population would be insufficient to make something a great filter, for example, if that species survives in what marginally livable area remains to rebuild their numbers and continue to advance their civilization. It has to kill everyone with no chance for any group to find any means to survive it)
That was a large parenthesis, I do think you are right though.
Yeah, sorry, I tend to have a habit of putting lots of text behind parenthesis, and using run on sentences. I'm not terribly great at writing and when I try to condense things down I always feel like the results make less sense to me or are missing small bits of what I meant to say.
Hey no problemo !
Same, the world just seems to be getting more "confusing" and "hectic", not sure if it's just that as we get older and more "aware" we start to notice the things that don't seem to make sense around us.
I try to think each generation before me had the same feeling, like the world is getting smaller and faster. And everyone is just trying to get by without regard for the people around them or future generations.
I feel the same way, for what it's worth.
Never should have opened that black sarcophagus.
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What’s sad about this is that both of them are even candidates to begin with. America has become a huge joke, and I doubt I’ll ever be able to see it differently.
This country fuckin sucks
“In the half century of modern presidential primaries, no candidate who led his or her nearest rival by at least 20 points at this stage has ever lost a party nomination,” NYT’s Nate Cohn writes.
That makes sense, it would probably be part of the reason why DeSantis's former backers are dropping off. He severely overestimated how much the average Conservative cares about "wokeness," and it bit him in the ass.
Yeah it works on his base but when you enter the larger voting population, you need to bring more than a culture war.
Although, I say that and how Trump is there bewilders me. I don't know how anybody is a republican, actually.
The hope is that Trump vs. DeSantis is a battle to death. Or Trump wins over DeSantis, and ends up behind bars where he belongs.
IIts like watching an alcoholic drink themselves to seath
While screaming and beating their family.
I've never seen a "Biden 2024 make conservatives cry again" bumper sticker, but that kind of toxicity is commonplace in the republican party
It's all about winning.
It's about the illusion of winning. The average Republican voter votes against their best interests but does so to stick it to the left.
The USA votes it’s president in with the Electoral College. Every poll talking about “voters … tie … blah …blah …blah” doesn’t mean shit, cause the voters don’t get to pick the president. Their representatives do. And guess what, their representatives don’t have to represent them. They can vote however they want. They can even get elected and then switch parties to the bad guys team. Also, fuck the GOP.
This poll is crap
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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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