by iKarith » Monday June 20th, 2022 3:39pm
The thing about that … before everyone knew everything about everyone thanks to social media, we didn't. You got to know someone because they were involved with something you were and … they were people, normal people. If you found they believed things you didn't, you already had gotten to know them and so they weren't necessarily "evil" for thinking differently, just "wrong".
These days anyone who thinks different from you is not "wrong", but automatically "evil", "worse than {Hitler,Stalin}", etc. I'm pretty sure there's folks that are "left-wing" here, and I'd guess they're both fairly sure I'm in the other one. Because there's only allowed to be two? You'd think the Europeans at least would know better, but nah, not so much.
I do have some pretty strong opinions about a couple groups that actively made things worse/scary/violent a couple years ago now because I abhor that kind of thing on principle. And I've got a problem with people making accusations where literally X or not X are both "proof" of some grievous sin because apparently they read minds and know that either one is some kind of secret code for what you actually believe …
But even those are enough on social media to get you labeled, branded, and of course, othered. And there's folks who can, have, and do set out to utterly destroy your life over such sins in their own deluded minds. Gotta say I've experienced that coming from one direction than another … but where I live I'm exposed to one faction in far greater numbers than the other. I know they both do it, and I'm personally sick of it.
We can't avoid these things seeping in here now and then because we can't really shut out the world. We are just getting over the scary parts of a pandemic after all. And then now there's a madman who decided to make his best effort to start WWIII as soon as he thought he could get away with it. Even if you could expect people to leave the politics at the door (you can't completely), those are some pretty heavy world events. It's hard to turn them off, especially if you know people affected by the pandemic or either side of Russia's crimes.
In my own case, yes, yes, and yes, though I am pretty fortunate. I know people affected by covid, but anyone I'm close to has recovered pretty well, having avoided it until they were vaccinated against older, more deadly strains. And my Ukranian friends lost homes/neighborhoods, but they got out. My Russian friends are Internet users and never fell for the propaganda and lies. (I worry about one young Svetlana in Moscow who's likely to get herself arrested mocking Putin in big and showy ways in public—be careful and be safe Sveta—but otherwise I'm damned fortunate!) Still, we can't really expect people are gonna be able to turn that off.
But we can offer them a chance to step away from that for a few minutes and enjoy a good game battling monsters and digging for loot. And that's worth something.
<InSpectreRetro> All hail Zargon!!! Morcar only has 1BP.