I’ve encountered the same rhetoric, tactics, and moral framing in offline activist spaces for years, long before Bluesky or current platform dynamics. Online platforms don’t invent this; they surface and concentrate it. The underlying attitudes -- maximalism, moral absolutism, tolerance for disruption, and readiness to analogize opponents to historical evil -- are not artifacts of bots or manipulation. They’re characteristic features of a political subculture.
If anything, the mistake is treating the "reasonable", aspirational version as more real than the people who consistently show up, organize, and speak — and then assuming the most visible expressions must be "controlled opposition."
> I’ve encountered the same rhetoric, tactics, and moral framing in offline activist spaces for years, long before Bluesky or current platform dynamics. Online platforms don’t invent this; they surface and concentrate it.
Once again, we seem to be in agreement on this.
> The underlying attitudes -- maximalism, moral absolutism, tolerance for disruption, and readiness to analogize opponents to historical evil -- are not artifacts of bots or manipulation. They’re characteristic features of a political subculture.
These things are not mutually exclusive. It's both, and people (and their bots) across the entire political spectrum are guilty of involvement.
If anything, the mistake is treating the "reasonable", aspirational version as more real than the people who consistently show up, organize, and speak — and then assuming the most visible expressions must be "controlled opposition."