one of the most bizarre impulses to me is the following:
A: Fascist Steve has small dick energy.
B: Hey, can we not say "small dick energy"?
A: Oh my god, now's not the time! We're dealing with Fascist Steve!
Like, of course, man. By my calculations, the fascism should have cooled down by the summer of 2027, and by then we can talk about the grievances you've deemed minor.
There is never going to be The Time. I'm unconvinced that it helps to believe in The Time, for the same reason the most awful strains of Christianity tend to believe in the rapture. For a while, I assumed that the Person A's of the world knew this, and did not care. After all, everyone's interacted with someone who got into the discourse game to dunk rather than to be correct, to talk about small dicks rather than big ideas.
But I've seen a couple instances of this where A goes out of their way to talk about how B is ultimately right about how it's actively bad to say Fascist Steve has a small dick. Unsurprisingly, this didn't make A's remarks less tedious. However, this did surprise me-- I assumed that anyone who believed B was right would see that "Now's not the time" is a pretty absurd thing to say.
So I'm worried that it's worse than the simple Dunk Impulse-- I think A believes their contributions to the discourse are important to the level that they have the responsibility focus and strategically allocate resources.
That's alien to me (even if I'm in a bad enough mental state to argue on the internet, it's about being right, not to play a form of chess where checkmate is "L + ratio + small pp") but it also seems like an caustic way to view and present yourself. Like, what does your worldview have to look like that you think the bottleneck to you affecting the world positively is not whether your beliefs are sound, but which of those sound beliefs you are steering the discourse toward discussing?
And sure, some of this is Twitter's fault. But the mindset of being a messianic super-poster who treats conversations as grand strategy game that they have to play to unlock "Is small dick energy bad to say?" in the discourse tech tree? More generally, the mindset of being so far above the average poster (or god forbid, so far above your wife or roommate) that you're concerned (rather than mad or some other emotion) that some of your friends aren't going to reach enlightenment before the rapture revolution? That's soul-corrupting, and it's not Twitter-specific at all. I've had to log off discord calls with some of the closest people in my life because they were talking to each other about other people like that. Not only is it not Twitter brainworms, it's normal in these parts.
More than anything, I'm confused and frustrated. Really. Without going into the details, earlier this week I overheard what was on reflection one of the most abusive tirades I've ever heard flung. I didn't do anything because my body involuntarily froze, wondering whether what I was hearing was actually that bad or whether I needed to adjust my priors. I've been living variations on that scene my whole life, basically, on and off the internet. I am still shaking and doubtful.
So to see people not only flaunt that they are not shaking and doubtful, but to use that gift in a petty way that only makes sense if they see themselves as The Messiah But For Communism-ObscureTheoristIsm... it's demoralizing.
