/townhall/ - Townhall

>>15231
>>15233
You're lying. This isn't a problem with "people". This is a specific issue with certain individuals of a particular movement.

This isn't a widespread thing. There's one social, political, and religious side in the marketplace of ideas that's wallowing in insanity. The other sides aren't.

Moderates don't want the President of the United States to literally build a gigantic fucking statue of himself in gold. The left doesn't want this. Apolitical people don't want this. Almost everybody doesn't want this.

It's the conseratives, the Republicans, the Trumpists, the MAGAs, or whatever you want to call them. They've gone completely batshit fucking insane. Everybody else is nowhere near their level.

The more I hear the lie that this is a general problem with "people" in general or "society" in general, the more I feel a lot of despair. Call a spade a spade. Name the problem accurately.

Most people like the truth. Most people support the truth. Most people enjoy the truth. Most people aren't MAGAs.

>>15234

To be fair, darkmatter2525 is atheist. According to a 2023 poll on religion, only 4% of Americans identified as atheist. 5% said they were agnostic.

If 91% are then unsure or follow some kind of religion, then from the atheist perspective, delusion would be a matter of degree. Atheists would be completely free of religious delusion, with agnostics likely coming in second, and going from there....

Of course, there are many different kinds of delusions - not just religious or political.

I think that technology, however, enables the creation, spread, and perpetuation of delusion (due to social media addiction and people taking the internet seriously) (as opposed to the mere sharing of data) that would have otherwise never made it into offline reality.

In your example, it would appear that Trump supporters used AI to make a picture of a golden statue of him either because they thought it was cute and/or in order to trigger opposition. Yet, anyone familiar with AI would know that this is just an AI-generated image and anyone can use AI to create a picture of anything that they may want.

For example, someone could make a golden pony that looks just as realistic. Or, they could make a video sharing their vision of Equestria in [insert_place_here] - it is just a new form of media.

At any rate, I suppose the silver lining of the MAGA movement would be the libertarian faction within the movement, which would encourage state governments to take on more of the roles and responsibilities of the federal government.

>>15235
You're committing this fallacy:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GreyAndGrayInsanity

To bring up religion is a great way to highlight the issue.

There are fundamental differences in Europe between something like Christianity as a whole and something like occultist neo-Nazi neo-paganism as a whole. They may both be "religions" in the dictionary definition of the term, but the actual specifics of what both faith traditions have said and done, especially when it comes to mass movement leaders, contrasts drastically. European Christians have included a number of those in spiritual authortiy including many different racial backgrounds. The neo-Nazis, on the other hand, preach exclusivity and racist hatred to the point of violence.

And within Christianity, meaningful differences still exist. Peace churches are known for their embrace of total pacifism. Socialist activists have often used Christian language. There also exist a great many apolitical moderates of a sincere Christian faith.

Were I to be an atheist, for the sake of argument, I'd have to be quite the blinded fanatic without an understanding of detailed probabilities and other facts about life if I claim "everybody of every religious tradition is equally a violent fool". A monk in France who feeds wayward birds is far, far less to enact evil than a skinhead with WWII tattoos living in Germany.

This lesson also applies to politics. And the arts. And any other emotional topic with a lot of arguing. Life exists in a spectrum such that being somewhat wrong is different than being completely wrong and both are still different than believing that truth as an inherent concept doesn't exist.

Believing that AI artwork is real isn't the same thing as believing it's a fantasy. Neither is the same as enacting what happens in the artwork into life through your own choices. And so on.

The MAGA movement, which opposes truth itself as a concept, is uniquely negative in a way that sets it apart from the regular marketplace of ideas. The same way that you would be inherently separate from me if you believed that your AI generated pony must exist in reality such that you would enact violence against me and others to make her thus real.

>>15236

>You're committing this fallacy

Eh, not so sure about that. I think that if one were to view what happens on the internet, their smartphone, and on social media to be indistinguishable from offline reality, then maybe -- or, perhaps if I were Gen Z and the line was more blurred. But being Gen Y and having virtually no real-life experience with anything I see in the news, on social media, etc., then I would tend to disagree. I don't think most MAGA people, or most people of any movement are as extreme as the media likes to portray. Usually, the extremists of any group will get all of the media attention, and this will be generalized to everyone in the group. Once generalized, people in power can then marginalize groups based off of people's wrong perceptions about them.

I would agree that some religions appear more helpful than others and that tradition and precedence must be taken into consideration. I believe even Richard Dawkins said he would prefer to be Christian as opposed to Muslim, if he had to be religious. Some cultures are preferable to others.

>The MAGA movement, which opposes truth itself as a concept

Interesting idea, and I think it probably goes back to fundamentalist Christianity when it first emerged in the early 1900s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fundamentals). As new discoveries and evidence appeared which called into question the truth of scripture, a large group of Christians rallied together, rejecting anything but a literal interpretation of the Bible. I suppose the MAGA movement in general could be seen as the modern incarnation and extension of that.

>>15236
>The MAGA movement, which opposes truth itself as a concept, is uniquely negative in a way that sets it apart from the regular marketplace of ideas. The same way that you would be inherently separate from me if you believed that your AI generated pony must exist in reality such that you would enact violence against me and others to make her thus real.

And here I thought the individuals who believe they were born in the wrong body and who enact violence upon those who refuse to share in their insane delusion, were the ones who "oppose truth itself as a concept."  Thankfully the MAGA movement is stamping this lunacy out of government.  Welcome to the new Age of Reason.