[newprint]

I live in the US and I have a lot of active duty & ex military members in my close circle of friends. One of the consistent trends I have noticed is the significant uptick in the number of LARPing/cosplaying military videos on Youtube, i.e. tackticool dudes. I was looking the other day at buying the sport shotgun for shooting clay, went out and did some search on youtube to find out more about the rifle.... the search result brought out pages of (unrelated videos, that youtube thinks you might be interested) videos of dudes in full combat uniforms(+ med kits) shooting weapons at ranges. Why they wearing all this gear ? My friends who spent years in active war zones wear jeans and T-shirts to the shooting ranges.

To me, those Youtube videos are symptoms that some weird shit brewing in our society and this news is just flares of this symptom.

[ryandrake]

The Gun Fetish subculture in the US have been weirdos for a very long time. I bought a gun decades ago to do some pistol shooting at the range, and doing online research was just as silly/surreal back then. Pages upon pages of jacked up dudes in Oakleys advertising all sorts of security and survivalist gear. Bald eagles and American flags everywhere. People wearing belt-fed ammo and kevlar vests. It's all marketing. You've got to sell the idea that there's danger everywhere, and your small town home is under imminent threat of invasion by some enemy.

Problem now is the algorithms. You go search for reviews for a 22 caliber pistol, and after a few searches, your various feeds are filled with militias, doomsday preppers, and all the usual right-wing tomfoolery.

[soderfoo]

What I find most interesting about modern society is that every subculture has these hardcore adherents.

It's so predictable now. I was at a friend's house a month or so back. He was showing off his fancy outdoor pizza oven, in which he would be making pizza in that evening.

First thing I asked him is, "How deep in to this are you?" I immediately knew there had to be pizza oven nerds online arguing over which pizza spatula (called a peel I learned) is best, and the ongoing battle between wood purists vs metal fanatics.

He was wondering how I knew so much. If you look in to any interest or hobby, the rabbit hole is deep, and the politics and patterns are typically the same. So I'm not surprised it applies to firearms as well.

[InsideOutSanta]

"To me, those Youtube videos are symptoms that some weird shit brewing in our society and this news is just flares of this symptom."

Yeah. This has been brewing for a long time, going at least as far back as Reagan's "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." But it has become way worse in recent years, with Trump using extreme fearmongering as a political tactic, Covid radicalizing people further, and social networks creating echo chambers that drive their users literally insane.

People have been talking about FEMA death camps and similar stuff for so long that there are now people who genuinely think the government is using natural disasters as an excuse to somehow attack them (or that they create these natural disasters in the first place). Some of the people who think this are actually part of the government!

It is not surprising that there are physical threats to people who are out there trying to help.

This is absolutely bonkers. We can't continue like this as a society. Algorithm-driven social networks have made free speech an attack vector against free democracies, and if we don't figure out how to recover from this, we're screwed. But I have no idea how to even begin to fix this.

Maybe if bots continue turning social networks into dead wastelands, people will leave them and go touch grass instead of sharing crazy conspiracy theories and shrimp Jesuses on Facebook. One can hope.