I've been on revleft.com and hung around far left online communities. I'm familiar with some of the far right ones as well, though I've never been a regular on them. So I have a fairly high tolerance for controversial subjects and i'm willing to debate almost anything in good faith. I'm generally better with one-on-one discussions because you get to know a person, their stories and experience that has brought them to that viewpoint. It tends to make it easier to communicate and bridge major ideological gulfs if you know where someone is coming from. You can usually find me sitting in my bedroom reading some Marxist tract or even a share of Nazi and Fascist literature. This year I glanced at some material on southern defences of slavery in the run up to the civil war, something I would never have touched a few years back.
Being on religious forums now, I'm just haunted by a feeling a creeping unease and alarm and the nagging sense that there really is no limit to what people will do or say. Given my background is some of the most politically extreme online communities there is, that has been ringing alarm bells on and off for a very long time. With coronavirus, now it's in over drive and won't shut up.
My conscience wants me to ring the alarm bells and warn people about what kind of stuff they are now regularly debating and getting involved with. But then only a handful of people would believe me or take me seriously. They don't have the same experiences or context to see how I might have developed that perspective. So I feel conflicted about caring for the community and wanting to defend myself from other people's behaviour. I think there are some major life lessons about dealing with toxic relationships buried in this somewhere, but ...*shrugs*... I don't know. It's a weird kind of emotional vulnerability mixed in there along with a hefty amount of maturity as well. I don't understand it very well.
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