These people are a huge part of my reason for hating social media. Like man, why would I follow art accounts for politics? And why would you follow a fanartist expecting them to post about the current hottest issue and even get mad when they don't? "Being able to not care shows how privileged you are" ma'am, this is an anime fanpage on Instagram.com.

Depending how much you've poked around my commentary, you may be aware I cut ties with the Imperium Offtopicum group because of political partisanism. The chat community was always left-leaning, but once Trump entered office the culture steadily grew more militant. Part of it was out of legitimate grievance—a remarkably high proportion of regulars was LGBT, especially transgender, and government policies were a direct threat to their lives. But that anger metastasized as ideological dogmatism skewing toward "tankie" politics, tacitly endorsed by the chat leadership. This drove out both the moderates and anarchists over the late 2010s, and in 2021 the community virtually collapsed when the refugees from IOT's sister community Never-Ending Stories stopped running the actual games.

It was tragic to watch people I'd once respected, and even considered friends, devolve into parodies of themselves that treated any deviation from the party line as marking oneself out as a "class enemy"—my departure was prompted by accusations of transphobia that arose from a mishandling of unsigned edits to the community wiki amid a vandalism spree, that chat logs suggest was leveraged for a smear campaign by people I'd fallen out with. The fiasco left me in a state of paranoia for about two weeks; to date, only one person has apologized, and my apology to the aggrieved user remains unacknowledged.

Had chat culture not devolved into the vicious tribalism that it did, I expect the incident would have been resolved amicably, rather than leaping directly to fire-and-forget denouncements. Now, I'm strong in my convictions, and can draw the line between individual people and what they purport to represent; a colleague of mine is not so nuanced, and has seized on incidents like mine to reinforce a victim complex that was already steering him into Alt-Lite sympathies. When I see these people on CFC at large, going off on tangents about Leninist praxis like a chatbot prompt, or taking the worst possible interpretation of an argument in some weird impulse to gatekeep LGBT+ discussions, I can't help thinking they're breeding the very monsters they're so insistent we need to slay.

Aaahwooyii.

That's why I hang around in them Wild West Cowboy Saloons and go booooli! When me smokes them cigars and drinks me sarsaparilla and play that cooked wild west piano.