[salawat]

Even the "wehraboo's" and "Confederate LARPers" aren't what they are on the surface. A sibling poster mentioned 2016'ish being some sort of seminal formation date for them; it isn't hard to realize that in the current day and Age, the net allows for the reach of those with sabotage or ideological undermining to be even wider than ever before.

Undercurrents existed at one point, yet the flames were fanned by the increasing utilization of online media to increase visibility. One will absolutely not stop that.

Furthermore, the phenomena of placing blame on others for current emotional states isn't necessarily that far off. Mental/memetic contagion is a well known phenomena; it seems to be fundamental to how information transfer works.

The issue regarding contagion though, is that there is a model which currently exists with regard to thought and behavior that largely downplays the pliability of individuals and vulnerability to external influences on their reasoning. We see this philosophy in our justice system espoused time after time. X is a bad apple. X can never change. X should be removed from society. Preaching of this model weakens our most vulnerable populations. They end up never developing any sort of memetic immune system, or framework to guard against entirely rhetorical or emotional form of attack or influence.

Of course, that all assumes that there was a solid foothold gained in the first place development wise.

[anigbrowl]

Astute. Although I spend a great deal of tiem railing against certain extremists the underlying problem is our poor understanding of the dynamics of social contagion even as it is being avidly weaponized. Cross platform transference is particularly understudied and hard to study due to the competitive nature of the industry and other factors. Feel free to drop me a line if you're interested in conversing further.