Conversation

Cinder
@Triquetrea
I have lived with and befriended people from just about every layer of society, save for the ultra-rich. Thus, I come bearing words of peace: we're all bigoted assholes with scant understanding of those outside our bubble. There are no exceptions, at all, at a group level.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
Frequent claims that "X group is classist/racist/exceptionalist" (or whatever) is your group's habitual way of being just that. No, no exceptions for people explicitly rambling about ingroup/outgroup. It's human cognition all the way down. And this is who humans are.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
E.g. I sympathize politically with a lot of left-wing policies, but the way lefties talk about right-wingers is so often flatly delusional. It is just as bad if not worse in the other direction. Complete absence of reality-checking from anyone, anywhere, ever.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
If you travel frequently between layers and see what people spend their time on, where their priorities are, who they interact with... ... you see a little bit of cross-pollination, but a lot of closed loops with little outside interaction when it isn't baked into things.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
The extent to which people have opinions on <social group they barely ever see or interact with> is weird and sad. My accidentally rich, too-much-in-his-head friend lambasts "ordinary people" (who?). Service worker acquaintances call anyone making more than minimum wage 'rich'.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
Whatever semantics people bake into these names get inbred in their networks of associations, and people just do. not. know. shit. The sorts of things you hear about people you know personally, based on flimsily made, poorly-matched characterizations, are not even wrong.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
If your group isn't openly racist, it's totally-not-stereotypically convinced that some arbitrarily assigned, possibly fictive, other group is. You and your associates are politically adroit, but ALL of those other guys are deluded crazies. This is all totally normal bullshit.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
I have not encountered any groups that don't mostly operate on bizarre shared fictions of the outside world. Bridging gaps of shared semantics or acquiring outside knowledge is difficult and time-consuming. I'm constantly getting in trouble for forgetting or not knowing things.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
I mean, the absolute most basic shit is so frequently assumed and taken for granted that people get genuinely confused when asked questions. To say nothing of how angry they get when their extremely generous-to-themselves assumptions about Otherworld are questioned.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
Replying to
@Triquetrea
This is not meant as a nihilistic statement, though. Things, claims are obviously relatively true and false. It's just rare that you're going to learn much of anything from anyone, anywhere about those things they rarely touch.
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