Anyone had bad experiences?
I joined the Mörk Borg Discord, unknowing of the fact it's infested with woke boys/girls/airplanes. I voice my opinion and get banned ... <snip>
Everywhere is like that now. It's exceptionally demotivating.
I took a break from the hobby for about a decade because RL. I come back and discover that the inmates are running the asylum.
If I didn't already have a million things requiring my attention, I'd start some kind of ttrpg podcast, just to try to push back with an alternate perspective.
Not long ago, I got banned from a discord for simply stating that I thought that maybe we ought to leave our RL politics at the door when we come to the table, and try to enjoy our imaginary fantasy worlds together as friends, without all the divisive crap. But I guess "silence is violence" or whatever-the-fk nowadays, and anyone who isn't a raving woke idiot is adjacent to Uncle Adolf. Kek.
Dragonsfoot and RPGpub seem to still be mostly ok. They're not explicitly UNwoke, but they're not infested with crazies either. This place is alright, but (no offense guys) I feel like the ratio of political talk to actual gaming talk skews too far into the political. I'm guilty of that too I am sure, but just saying.
That being said, I do think it is important to participate in places like Dragonsfoot and RPGpub, so as to gently push back against that kind of crap so that those places remain neutral and don't get taken over by wokists. Whether by design or circumstance, the wokist agenda with online communities appears to be to find neutral places, infiltrate their moderation team, and start purging people who are not woke. This must be prevented.
What's happening with this world? Why are these people so toxic and "violent"?
When my tinfoil hat is especially tight, I toy with the idea of it being part of a grand Maoist plan to destroy western culture. That may be a little extreme. It violates Occam's Razor, after all.
I think it's more likely that it's a self-promoting mass hysteria, much like the Satanic Panic of the 80s. It is most certainly taken advantage of by various political entities in the authoritarian left to further their own agenda, but I don't think it's a tool entirely invented and controlled by the authoritarian left.
I think that, like the Satanic Panic, it's a "fad of the idiocracy" (tell me again why we have a universal franchise?), and that it will eventually pass into history and we'll look back and laugh at it. Which isn't to say that we shouldn't fight it tooth and nail in the present, because it is a stupid, evil ideology that destroys everything that it infests. Just that we can most certainly defeat it if we push back instead of ignoring it in the interest of "tolerance". Perhaps it's an over-dramatic metaphor, but you ignore the wolves prowling the edge of your pastures at your own peril.