Reminiscent of the Satanic Panic is right. I'm a little too young to have experienced the height of that panic, but some of it did carry on into the 90's and I remember getting comments from school mates who heard old, long standing rumors from its heyday about the fact that my friends and I liked to play D&D or Magic: The Gathering. Comments along the lines of how that stuff had hidden demon summoning in it, right? Those cards are secretly occult, right? Didn't some guy attack his friends from playing that game? All that sort of nonsense.
A lot of what's shown here is reflective of both the lesser experience I had and the myriad stories older gaming friends of mine shared. Accusations of racism and white supremacy today are the equivalent of being called a devil worshiper during the Satanic Panic. While such accusations are already seeing diminishing returns for how overused and blatantly nonsensical they've become, it doesn't make their use in this way any less pernicious.
As someone who went through it, I can say this and I probably should have added it. I did a lot of running as a kid.
The atrocities I listed, I got to experience most of them, save for the imprisonment, suicide, death, etc.
Get ready because this will not calm down easily. The unfortunate thing is that you can see how people react to clickbait these days and I'm loathe to be the one to announce, it works. The really unfortunate thing is that people take the clickbait, don't bother reading the rest and immediately put pagans in the crosshairs.
The solutions are always oversimplified "Well just don't wear X. Well just don't read X. Well just don't believe X." and that's the end goal. Shut It All Down over fear
It's an age old moralist tactic; pick whichever niche group you can, find the fringe within it, and play on public ignorance by painting the entire group as that fringe. The fact we live in a time where more and more of our daily lives are consumed by the need to work and balance our budgets, (often poorly) on top of how every facet of entertainment is being inundated with current day politicking to keep people wound tight and make them feel as if escaping all the nonsense is impossible, and it suddenly becomes very easy to see how and why that behavior of reading the title, the subtitle, and occasionally the first paragraph or two of an article became the norm.
That then lends itself to tactics of lying by omission or by structure, which is to say intentionally putting the spin you want the people to read in the section that you know the majority will stop at and leaving anything that counters it until the end.
The sad part about this is there's plenty of people out there who know they're being lied to in this way, but they still get sucked in all the same, like some variant of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
Interesting read. Thanks.
No problem. Gotta warn people of what's coming.
Reminiscent of the Satanic Panic is right. I'm a little too young to have experienced the height of that panic, but some of it did carry on into the 90's and I remember getting comments from school mates who heard old, long standing rumors from its heyday about the fact that my friends and I liked to play D&D or Magic: The Gathering. Comments along the lines of how that stuff had hidden demon summoning in it, right? Those cards are secretly occult, right? Didn't some guy attack his friends from playing that game? All that sort of nonsense.
A lot of what's shown here is reflective of both the lesser experience I had and the myriad stories older gaming friends of mine shared. Accusations of racism and white supremacy today are the equivalent of being called a devil worshiper during the Satanic Panic. While such accusations are already seeing diminishing returns for how overused and blatantly nonsensical they've become, it doesn't make their use in this way any less pernicious.
As someone who went through it, I can say this and I probably should have added it. I did a lot of running as a kid.
The atrocities I listed, I got to experience most of them, save for the imprisonment, suicide, death, etc.
Get ready because this will not calm down easily. The unfortunate thing is that you can see how people react to clickbait these days and I'm loathe to be the one to announce, it works. The really unfortunate thing is that people take the clickbait, don't bother reading the rest and immediately put pagans in the crosshairs.
The solutions are always oversimplified "Well just don't wear X. Well just don't read X. Well just don't believe X." and that's the end goal. Shut It All Down over fear
It's an age old moralist tactic; pick whichever niche group you can, find the fringe within it, and play on public ignorance by painting the entire group as that fringe. The fact we live in a time where more and more of our daily lives are consumed by the need to work and balance our budgets, (often poorly) on top of how every facet of entertainment is being inundated with current day politicking to keep people wound tight and make them feel as if escaping all the nonsense is impossible, and it suddenly becomes very easy to see how and why that behavior of reading the title, the subtitle, and occasionally the first paragraph or two of an article became the norm.
That then lends itself to tactics of lying by omission or by structure, which is to say intentionally putting the spin you want the people to read in the section that you know the majority will stop at and leaving anything that counters it until the end.
The sad part about this is there's plenty of people out there who know they're being lied to in this way, but they still get sucked in all the same, like some variant of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.