spent time with some normie friends td, topic turned to Floyd, BLM, policing, surveillance etc. me & another techie started talking about opsec & threat models but were quickly outnumbered with the usual anti-{police,state} rhetoric; remembered why I'm on here in the first place
wasn't really much I could do to respond to many of the things said without either lying or giving a very generic "I agree there are problems" and that's just boring af, not really what I want to do with friends
really can make one feel alienated from their social circles huh
you can tell who in the group isn't with it by watching who stays silent or only chimes in generically on these topics; this sort of camaraderie is inherently Straussian, relying on dogwhistles
which kind of sucks tbh; do I really gotta find new friends? or just wait it out?
but, is the latter strategy even possible? will there be any deescalation of rhetoric, or will this just keep getting worse forever?
the discourse can stay polarized longer than I can stay socially solvent
this feeling, in the beginning of the pandemic, is what drove me online initially, in search of voices sympathetic to the desire for measured discussion, without the inflammatory language currently in vogue
it seems it's going to keep me here for a bit longer
I don't really disagree w/ many of the lib object-level positions, but the way in which they're shared, with highly emotional language that moralizes disagreements, making it effectively impossible to discuss openly without making yourself seem like the asshole; I'm not about it