Thread by @xenocryptsite

There's this weird black-and-white discourse pairing on this site where on the one hand "the elite are always the real fascists" but on the other hand "people are radicalized by material suffering" and it kind of just goes around in circles because they're both too simple duh.

So like when that guy shot up Vegas, someone found IDK he'd lost money gambling, "aha here's the material suffering!". But he was also rich so "aha, it's the rich guys you have to watch out for!". And it's all just like, scoring points or something?

So then people end up arguing about the material circumstances of these people they've never met based on like, pictures of their stuff, in order to score points for one or the other side, which then implies ??? about anything useful.

It probably especially goes in circles because they're both left-coded opinions or even like, the-same-faction-of-left-coded.

And I'm just like...people are weird and hard to explain, especially individuals. Some of these people who stormed the Capitol, their best friends are probably confused as to why they did it. But I'm sure you can figure it out, with your phone.

You know, I mean yeah, in the aggregate, you can look at the history of such things. But any individual is going to join for their own reasons and then there's self-reinforcing group dynamics and...it's weird and complicated like anything else!