We all know this at this point but the whole rightwing npc meme thing only took off because rightwing people recognized it as how they experienced the world and just assumed their political opponents did as well
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All my opponents just believe in “the current thing” while I have long known that Canada is controlled by Mexican drug gangs and we need to tank the entire North American economy to stop them
This and "TDS" are just pure projection on their part. They can't handle internally that they themselves have succumbed to cult/hive-mind thinking that they have to cast it on to their opponents in order to cope. Throw the allegations back at them and they completely shut down.
They have no theory of mind. They think everyone else has all the same thoughts and beliefs as they do, but that liberals are hiding their true beliefs to signal virtue, which they would only do for nefarious reasons
We’re all finding slightly different ways to say the awful truth. My phrasing is these people instinctively hate, and fear all human beings and cannot trust anyone. All they can do is either attack or run away or be subservient blindly without thinking to anyone that sounds as fearful as they are.
Even controlling for my own memory/selection bias, I have only ever been called an NPC by people who A) are regurgitating common talking points and 2) have shown other signs that they see anyone who disagrees with them as less than human.
The biggest difference in the left-right continuum is empathy. Understanding that every human has their own motivations and values. It's how some racists end up befriending or marrying a person outside their race because they're "one of the good ones." Empathy only extends to people the know.
It feeds into a lack of curiosity or creativity. It makes one callous and cruel and unable to build a community larger than a room. I honestly think the only way to combat may be free childcare with professionals trained to build social and emotional skills. Make better citizens.
you should cut them some slack. they're mentally incapable of acknowledging the interiority of other humans, fundamentally skeptical of the very notion, so of course every allegation about the minds of others will be a cruel reflection of their own. could be ableist.
My first encounter with his mindset was high school in 1979. I was playing Dungeons & Dragons and one of our circle of players ran a world where his goal was maximum dead characters. All of his NPC‘s were brutally efficient at killing us. So no one like to play in his world my friend had a world.
With amusing and clever and generous and NPCs and we loved playing in his world. The first player actually wrote a letter to our whole community disparaging his style of play as “Monty” (Monty hall the host of “let’s make a deal”), and called all of us toadies. We were playing a game we were kids.
We had given him a nickname: “ Social” . Because he was so antisocial. His name is Michael Vinson. I think he went into finance and I’m sure he’s part of the broligarchy now. His close friend woke up from that little cult and now writes fantasy novels. David frauenfelder. Nice guy
One of my friends NPC’s was a vampire balrog, so immune to religious and magical spells. He wrote around on a powerful magical lightning bolt which she had named Concorde. The BalRog’s name was Dennis Moore. He would come up to groups of players and make them even out their magic items.
If you had too many, he took some away gave them to others. If you didn’t have enough, he’d give you others or give some of his own to you but first he demanded you hand them all over to him. “In a bunch, in a bunch!” . This gameplay kept me sane in high school. I never knew how profound.
I once witnessed an online argument where an alt-righter was calling everyone else NPCs but after a certain point just started spamming the same copy/paste response to any followup responses, exactly like a character that reached the end of its dialogue tree
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*then says something very untrue that's believed by 50 million Americans*