He's gone off the deep end. I've seen the same happen with some friends and wrote about it, it's a sad thing when formerly intelligent human beings start losing it and fail to recover only to sink further and further into their own version of reality.
Funny how you criticize someone who pokes fun of people who fall into their own version of reality (and a giant corporate structure who encourages everyone to fall in line) as the one who is sinking into his own version of reality.
It feels like that started happening around 2014-2015. I genuinely wonder if he is afflicted with some mental issue. I stopped following him and the comics when he started blogging about how great trump was.
We have a pretty weird political case here in NL around a guy called Thierry Baudet who is clearly unhinged but still gets voted into parliament. Apparently there is a segment of the population that responds sympathetically to things that make no sense at all. They're not even trying to make sense or connect to reality, they just keep repeating all kinds of nonsense and whatever results in a response gets promoted further. COVID, Immigration, 5G, The Russian war on Ukraine, Abortion, Transgenders, Nitrogen in farming etc. Absolutely nothing is sacred, the common thread seems to be that if there are two sides to some subject they will sympathize with the 'losing' side and garner a loyal following. Misery really does love company.
> They're not even trying to make sense or connect to reality, they just keep repeating all kinds of nonsense and whatever results in a response gets promoted further.
You just described Trump's campaign strategy to a T.
No, it was earlier. I was subscribed to this Dogbert newsletter and it was increasingly obvious that he was not as logical as he thought he was. Like really believing in positive affirmations because he did a good exam after doing them.
He didn't start blogging about how great Trump was, he blogged that Trump had a high chance of winning the election and explained why. Can't you make the difference between explaining a phenomena and encouraging it?
There are realities and realities. A (by now former?) good friend of mine phoned me in the spring of last year, very worried that I had gone into the deep end (those were not his exact words, but that was the feeling). My "mistake" had been in approving and liking on social media messages and public figures who were against the announced vaccine mandate. I was finding that mandate dictatorial, still do. I was also already vaccinated by that date, waiting for my second shot (also got the booster later in the year, as soon as I became eligible for it).
Meanwhile this friend of mine (whom I still care about a lot, even though our lives have taken different routes) also told me that he'd be gone for Afghanistan for a month or so, his company (the biggest European defence group) was closing up shop there and stuff needed to be taken care of. So, I was receiving "you're in the wrong reality" complaints about my view on vaccine-related stuff from a person whose company is in the business of killing people (because that's the business defence companies are in).
I'm pretty much of the same position: I would vaccinate (and did) because I think that it is the right thing to do (unfortunately I caught a pretty bad case of the virus well before vaccines were available, so by the time I got the vaccine it was more for mobility reasons than because I expected a major boost against the virus from it) and at the same time oppose a vaccine mandate, it just doesn't seem right to me, people should have the right to choose such things even though the net result for society is negative and if they catch if for them personally it is even more negative or even fatal.
As for Afghanistan: that's a mess that has such a complicated history (going back 100+ years if you really dig into it) that someone who is mostly following orders by whoever is in command of that particular group is likely not going to bother reading up on to make up their mind on which side of that particular line they want to stand. Otherwise they wouldn't be in that line of business to begin with.
No. Look, you can go around and try to persuade people that you are very clever but all you are doing is making yourself look silly. Maybe give it a rest?
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for or against. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
