I’m with you 1000%. And the unpopularity of the opinion is alarming. This is something I did sociological research on in college.

Be extremely wary of any ideology that frames someone else’s culture as morally inferior or disposable.

That’s 100% being exploited as an alt right pipeline. Not everyone in those spaces slides all the way right, obviously, but that is often the function: take legitimate left-leaning concerns, attach them to disgust and cultural contempt, and then redirect people toward reactionary politics.

That’s how you get granola moms drifting into anti-vax conspiracies. Same mechanism, different target.

Online vegan spaces, fuckcars spaces, anti-vax groups, homeschooling groups, some permaculture communities, the pattern is familiar. The underlying ideas can be completely valid: fewer cars, less meat, more sustainable living, skepticism of corporate power. But the communities can become pipelines when they stop critiquing systems and start talking like entire cultures or groups of people are the problem. And they all do.

And when people regularly talk about other cultures needing to disappear from the earth, we depart from “edgy activism” and move into clearly defined genocidal language.

The problem isn’t being anti-car or anti-meat. The problem is pretending dehumanization becomes righteous because it’s dressed up as progressive ideology.

tl;dr Anger is addictive, leads to dehumanization, and allows for genocidal politics.

I follow the community. I don’t hate cars. I do however hate their current role in society.

In rural areas cars are 100% a necessity. What are we gonna do? Introduce a vast network of busses absolutely everywhere that transport 1-2 people + busdriver at the time? EVs are probably mostly good enough for most cases in rural areas, but I won’t get into that. Point is, you need a car in rural areas.

In many cities cars have too big of a role, many places in cities should not allow car travel that is not necessary. Disabilities, packages, plumbers etc should ofc. be able to travel by car. All cars (incl. EVs) create pollution in the city where people live. They make lots of noise, and take lots of space. So they do not make a lot of sense from a city perspective.

Then we have the middleground, smaller cities, suburbs etc. is more up for discussion in my opinion. Mostly it depends, not either or. Depends on the area, the infrastructure, population etc.

I’d argue that any community that’s build around the mutual hatred of something is always going to be inherently toxic by its nature.

I dunno if I’d say worst, because it would require comparison to all the similar communities based on an ism to the degree of zealotry.

And that’s what it comes down to, what makes that specific community easy to point to as a bad example. Any time you get zealots all in one place, it turns shitty fast. That’s true regardless of what their article of faith is. All that matters is that they believe something and do so the the exclusion of any other factor.

Like, if you run across a group of scientists that believe so strongly in a given fact as a guiding principle, they can quickly turn into zealots even though that original fact is indisputable. It’s all about placing a belief over any other factor.

Fuck cars in particular hates cars, and the assholes among the community are zealots that simply do not give a fuck about any other factor. Doesn’t matter what use case there is, what hurdles are in the way, you’re an asshole because you didn’t immediately say “fuck cars, no matter what!” That’s a zealot. At that point, it isn’t about the subject matter, it’s about them wanting to feel superior, to feel “right”, and of equal importance to a zealot, that you’re wrong and lessser than them because you don’t see the “truth”.

Now, not every person there is an asshole or zealot. But the assholes and zealots of any group are the loudest and most obnoxious. So the community as a whole becomes very unwelcoming and insular.

Again, it isn’t about what a zealot believes. They may be 100% right objectively (though that’s rarely possible), it’s that a zealot isn’t there to actually work towards a goal or spread knowledge. They’re there to be smug and self superior. That is different from someone that holds a belief without being a zealot. You can usually tell the difference because the zealot will make all the noise while the other ones actually do something and don’t waste their time bitching at other people.

This is an unpopular opinion.

ill upvote. as someone said any community thats built around mutual hatred. whether nazis or facists or pollution or violence or whatever…

You already got voted down, so maybe you’re into an unpopular opinion.

I up voted because I’m not a fan. Not that the overall premise is wrong, it’s that I love driving.

Mostly because they’re isolated into a single comm. I’m more concerned about the crazy anti AI group taking it all the way to the extremes. Case in point, the comments in here being derailed.

I’m impressed that you drilled down through the pile of shitty communities to find the worst one. There’s too many for me to even start the task.

Congrats on a truly unpopular opinion.

I’d vote fediverse greentext communities personally. Reposting comment screenshots from 4chan on a predominantly progressive space is pretty fucking weird behaviour if you ask me, yet greentext one of the most popular types of community. Eh and really I’m sure a lot of it is 2nd hand reposts from reddit. As if that’s better.