Many people who loudly pride themselves for tolerance, kindness, and openness toward difference drop those principles the moment someone expresses a preference or view they dislike. Disagreement itself is fine. What is not fine is the usual responses that follows: comments whose main purpose is to insult, shame, and make the other person feel small, delivered in front of an audience that can be counted on to approve.
It’s status performance. The goal is not to show why the opinion is wrong or change minds; it is to hurt the speaker and fish for applause. Feeling morally justified does not change the nature of the act; when the sole intention is to hurt they’re being evil and a bully.
The people who upvote or otherwise reward those insults are part of the same behavior. Standing by and cheering while someone is targeted is participation. It supplies the social payoff that makes the cruelty worthwhile.
This is one of the reasons large parts of the internet feel needlessly hostile. When perceived moral superiority is used as cover for meanness, and when an audience reliably encourages it, the result is environments where many people simply stop speaking. The claimed values of kindness and tolerance are revealed, in those moments, as conditional.
And no, this isn’t about being tolerant towards people with extreme views. The idea for this post was sparked by my previous post about AI music and the vicious personal attacks I received for admitting to enjoying some of it.
In another post here, you literally said:
“I have a very pragmatic view on music: all I care about is whether it sounds good or not. That’s it. That’s literally it. And from that standpoint the advent of AI music has been a major net positive for me. You can choose to ignore that and come tell me about the ethics of using AI or how you care about the story behind the song and so on and that’s all fine but just note that you’re no longer addressing what I’m actually saying here.”
A user responded saying this:
“Hey, I get it, you just have zero respect for the effort, creativity, imagination, or sacrifice that an artist has to put in to create a work thats any good. To you, art is merely a product. Who cares who made it, how it was made, or what it even means, or if there was any meaning at all. I totally understand. I went to the store yesterday and they had this hand crafted chair made of high quality wood for sale for like $300. Fuck that! I’ll just go buy a cheap plastic piece of garbage chair pumped out by the thousands in a Chinese factory. I mean it’s just a chair, right? It has one job, who cares what it’s made of. “Quality, Shmality!” I say. I just wish more people would understand this, like I entered this fighting game tournament last month. But I’m really ass at Street Fighter, so instead I wrote this bot that would play the game for me so I’d win with double perfect every time. Can you belive they kicked me out for cheating? CHEATING! What kind of shit is that? I just used a helpful tool to totally do all the work for me as my only contribution was giving broad parameters while the computer program makes literally every other decision. The audacity of these people! Don’t they understand this makes me a champion gamer?”
To that, you replied like you mostly do:
“That’s an interesting cartoon caricature you crafted there. I just don’t have any clue what it has to do with the topic at hand. Or is it “BOOO!” that you’re just trying to say here?”
Every time someone says something more logical, convincing, and fair, you attack them with that. You act like a victim and say they just made up a caricature of yourself and whatnot. You share so many patterns of speech and behavior with types of people that suck, like MAGA. Reactionary, too emotional, too irrational.
You are petty. That’s all there is to it. You are also morally inferior and abhorrent for supporting AI judging the state of the world. No matter what you reply with or say about it, it is indefensible. You are causing the deaths of so many artists who are committing suicide or giving up to a conformist boring mediocre life working for the Jeffrey Epstein Class because they cannot compete with a computer and a market filled with uneducated morons that prefer their plastic slop over organic real art. I already know your response to that is “that ain’t my fault. I am just a customer, consuming what I like, having fun! The customer is always right” but no, it goes beyond that. You genuinely have blood in your hands and it is so easy to convince people of that now.
Just as the Jeffrey Class intended: replace the poor with robots. You are helping them cull creative talent, because they hate artists, they hate how influential they are. They know AI will always follow a set of rules they themselves wrote, so. You are helping them, because you probably want them to continue abusing children, or what? Why do you support AI this much?
Did you even read the comment you’re using as an example? It’s pure smug sarcastic ridicule with no substance whatsoever. They started with bad faith strawmanning and personal insults since the very beginning. When called out on it they just doubled down. I’ve engaged everyone in good faith in that thread who did so towards me. Everyone else I’m calling out for indecency and this is one of those people.