Dont sweat it. Talk is cheap and internet talk is theee cheapest of all. I gare unn tee in the real world none of these silly "let the weak die" hypotheticals have ever passed his lips.
Dont forget, online, everybody is only a version of themselves they want the world to believe.
Oh I agree.
But online, I would say everybody is only the version of themselves that appears when they are alone. Sentiment matters. Thoughts in your head influence your decisions and the linkages aren't always straightforward. So I think some things are just worth calling out, even if just to get the thought out. It's just a bad sentiment. What is a community with no willingness for challenge? I tend to be live and let live, too. But I don't expect to go unchallenged on everything that I say within whole communities of people. I have my framework for reality, just like anyone else. It is a framework that acknowledges that there are many others only somewhat like it. Sometimes you bump into somebody that just has this weird framework and messing with it will mess with yours, and then you're living in noise, because you argue from different reference points - contradictions begin to form within your own words. Your thoughts are being hijacked by their thinking and it keeps either of you from adequately expressing yourselves - you're not truly talking about the same things, even when it seems like you might be. It's just the wrong kind of mixing of ideas, and the internet is prone to spawning it, though sometimes I think it's our own conception and usage that's the problem.
I'm still teaching myself to spot that and step away. It's tricky, because I also think that what you see is what you get and if you treat your interactions online as throwaways with no meaning, that is how they will appear to you. But even that is just your conception. It doesn't touch the actual effect these things might have on you. We tell ourselves all sorts of things about our interactions to get by, but it doesn't make them true. It doesn't define all that they are.
There are times when I don't mind that whirling a little, though. I kind of just think that if there are people out there who are comfortable saying these things, and the internet has room for THAT, there ought to be room for those comfortable to challenge those things. Maybe those checks need to exist so that we don't all lapse into frameworks of madness in our quasi-solitude. I think there is value in being critical. Every now and then I see someone else doing so and it changes my thinking. It doesn't take much energy either. But it's a matter of where you're at internally, what you can really handle emotionally. Don't worry! Me angry is a bitter jerk, truly. If I'm explaining things at all, I'm probably good with the conversation. That was me trying to respectful, honest. It's easy to make it an angry conversation, but then it really does sit on the lowest level of human interactions, like the arguments you see scrawled on the side of a bathroom stall. THAT is an interaction I will pretty much bow out of on a dime. It's never worth it. So long as people are actually talking and not simply indulging themselves, I don't have an issue with people simply expressing these views. That's the gist.
Another thing I like to remind myself, there is more than what you see in all of these interactions. You only see a reaction that has been chosen by the recipient, from behind barriers across distance. I think more stuff lands inside of people than any of us seem to want to so much as consider... the net impact of the things you say and do... the interactions that you have every day. How do they influence you, what places do you go to in your mind, and how do you find the land? Is this a place where humans can live? A space that you can inhabit and grow in? Are you happy there? Or is it more like a prison, so intricately constructed through series of experiences that it can no longer be found to have points of ingress... or escape?
That to me, is the great psychic danger of internet interactions. Of being influenced to construct a framework for reality that basically amounts to subjective entrapment. There are things that can happen online that can leave a person really stuck. I call it 'the noise'. Essentially, it is a watershed of reference points, a convolution of one's subjectivity, wholly undecipherable by the one experiencing it. You become lost in dissonant notions... all of this stuff whirling around you with no good way to navigate it except to cloister down to where there is almost nothing. Cruelly enough, it makes everything seem meaningless. You lose the nuance in the shifting artifacts of that noise you sense, as the reference points you've passively acquired via grazing the net betray you.
I do think that stuff matters. It's all about the little things when it comes to one's running frame of mind and reference points. And this stuff gets built up thought by thought, conversation by conversation. It's stuff that plays out within and beyond all of us, every single waking moment. We have to pay attention to the things said by ourselves and one another, and be able to approach them with sincerity. It's practically our most ancient, unspoken tradition. This didn't change just because we found another new style of interacting.
