Online or offline. News keeps reporting about loneliness and disconnection, but in my experience it’s just that it’s harder to interact with people in a civil way because they are so hostile, angry, and arrogantly convinced their viewpoints and experiences are the only legitimate ones.
Not to mention the lack of civility towards servers and other service workers. I can’t recall if I was just indifferent 10 years ago, but on a almost daily basis it blows my mind how openly rude many people are to servers and such, which seemed like a much more rare thing when I was younger.
There have always been bad people, but I think that, so to speak, they periodically gain a lot of influence.
The current situation seems to me to stem from the success of the Tea Party movement in the U.S., which also appears to have thrown things off balance internationally. They’ve established a new kind of anti-politics and, unfortunately, have been quite successful with it—relying on crude rabble-rousing, hatred, and a complete lack of willingness to engage in any constructive cooperation. That was a key precursor to today’s uncivilized MAGA style, which just about every far-right party in virtually every country now espouses.
Where I’m from—Germany—it’s the AfD that spreads racist nonsense and hatred. They’re neoliberal through and through, but they use their nationalist bullshit to blind their dim-witted followers to this fact. They’re exactly like MAGA: uncivilized and primitive and corrupt.
I think the success of this wretched political style, or rather it’s revival, has poisoned social coexistence worldwide, especially since it’s, of course, relentlessly promoted by the billionaires who profit from it and spread this poison through their enormous media power.
You kind of get the impression that the resurgence of fascism—with its super-rich supporters—is spoiling the mood for decent people worldwide with its dystopian crap, its wars against humanity, and its idiotic megalomania.
In so many words I agree. I find socialization to be difficult when you try to make an offhand comment about, generally, ‘the bad stuff going on’ and there’s a 30% chance the person you’re talking to will suddenly and very loudly start agreeing with and cheering on the ‘bad stuff’.
And then if it’s not that then you have a 30 percent chance that they will shut down and say ‘I don’t have enough information about the blatantly bad and terrible things to have an opinion or want to talk about it’, and then you’re left wondering what kind of conversation you could have with a person like that.
And I fucking hate Magic the Gathering so that’s right out. Admittedly it’s all on me, I get way too table flippy about TCG’s.