GAME CENTRIST

This is going to be a big, rambling, dump of none-too-clear feelings, but it feels like I've reached a tipping point of despair over the past week. 

The Trump/Putin summit started the slide - particularly the feeling that Trump is going to get away with his behaviour once again, and seemingly there's no stopping him however bad it gets. You don't need me to recap his lies, his corruption, and all the rest of it. 

And then on Friday, there was that whole situation with Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn.

In case you're unaware of it, here's a quick summary; Gunn has been very vocal Twitter critic of Trump and the alt.right. Consequently, this has made him a target, and consequently... at the end of last week, creepy alt.right figurehead Mike Cernovich dug up a bunch of tweets from Gunn from years back, in which he made jokes about rape, AIDS and paedophilia. 

That's the short version of it. There is, as with all these things, a lot of complicated nuance, but the fallout - despite this being a calculated attempt to ruin Gunn's career and life in a bid to silence him, or get revenge, or whatever - Disney fired him from Guardians 3, and Gunn cancelled a planned San Diego Comic-Con appearance. 

It has left me feeling really miserable. I mean, Gunn's tweets were disgusting and weird, and Disney had no real choice but to let him go. Yeah, most of the comments were from 10 years ago or so - I know first-hand how much a person can change over the course of a decade - but still... 

At the same time, the guy who unearthed Gunn's comments is disgusting and weird himself, and has his own history of making unpleasant comments about rape. 

Broadly speaking, while you can kick around the details... nobody is in the right here. It's just all really sad and depressing. Manufactured outrage or not, what choice did Disney - Disney! - have, especially having fired alt.right conspiracy theorist Roseanne Barr over an alleged racist tweet? 

And then you can throw Brexit into that as well; this feeling that there's no plan, no backing down, no common effort to unite... just a horrible inevitability that all it's serving to do is make things worse, and just lead to entrenchment of opinions and division. I've never felt our world feel so fractured, the future so utterly, unknowably, bleak.

It all leads it something I feel so often these days; a pervasive sense of, I suppose, frustration and despair - it honestly sometimes feels like the world has broken, and that it's sliding faster and faster out of control. It feels like we've been abandoned by empathy and intelligence, by common interest, and shared values. 

I dunno if this is a consequence of the Internet and social media uniting those of a similar mindset, fuelling tribalism and extremism, pushing fear and lies directly into everyone's psyche, or whether this is simply who we are underneath; animals who are tribal by nature, and to Hell with everyone beyond the gates of our village. 

Worst of all, I feel powerless and isolated. Nobody listens to anybody else, nobody sees anybody else; just their agendas. The world has become distorted through everyone's personal bias, and that's being exploited by people in powerful positions. 

Because so many of us are blinded by rage and prejudice - towards strangers, but mostly towards "The Other Side" (whichever side that may be) -  the Bannons, Trumps and Farages are able to turn that to their personal advantage, and weaponise it.

I mean, I Tweeted out a photo last weekend - which has since gone a bit viral - of an old Star Trek ep, which I suggested was set on a planet that worshipped Donald Trump. No real political content; I was merely drawing parallels between the look of the alien natives (orange-y skin, big yellow bouffant hair, and white rings around their eyes), and Trump's personal style.

Of course I got some guy engaging with me that I could only take the piss out of his appearance because I wasn't able to criticise his policies.

I took the same respond-with-nonsense approach to someone else over the last few days, who took issue with me asking people to retweet Digi posts and possibly support this Patreon - suggesting that the site would be doing better if I had "Less overt patronising leftist content...".

Rather than be bothered to engage with it, I just replied with various nonsensical gifs, which he responded to by calling me immature (duh), then suggested I was "butthurt" (uh?) before translating my original tweet as asking for money. Which, mate, is literally what it was doing...

It didn't bother me. I enjoyed trolling them with gifs, because I know not to take it personally, and I thought at least they might find it funny, and that arguing the toss would've made no difference. They weren't seeing me. They were projecting onto me their own bias and prejudice, which is what everyone seems to be doing to everyone else. With hindsight, maybe I should've talked to them. I dunno.

As you'll know, I got some grief for being a "centrist" some months back (a label that was applied to by some far-lefty type, who added that he "hates" me). I don't see myself as that. I see myself as more lefty than anything, but not so lefty that I'm going to automatically hate everyone who disagrees with me. 

Doing so is the reason we've ended up where we've ended up. Of course, the second you voice that you're isolated, you alienate both sides... who think they're right, and aren't prepared to interrogate that belief. They just stay locked in their battle of attrition, caught in an unwinnable war - as it currently stands.

I don't want the Nazis to win. I don't want the alt-right to win. I want them to be obliterated, and of course there's no moral equivalence to racism, misogyny and facism. But equally, the alt.left often do the right's job for them - often behaving just as despicably, fighting fire with fire, and just making more fire. 

And that's at the heart of what I'm feeling. In the current climate, it's an unpopular belief to have, that kindness and love can save the world. For me, it doesn't even come from a place of naivety, but personal experience. I spent two-and-a-bit years training to be a psychotherapist, and I learned - and saw - that if you give out love, you get love back. 

I only try to offer this appeal to those on the left (theoretically, "my" side - not that I ever, once, have thought of it in those terms) more, because - traditionally - left-wing politics have been about the greater good. There should, in theory, be less of a leap for them to make. 

Love, empathy, kindness, generosity, selflessness... it heals. Hate does the opposite. I don't believe this out of some hippy-drippy ideal, but - to a certain extent - out of sheer self-preservation. Showing one another kindness and love is the only thing that's going to save us. 

But right now, after the past week, I don't even know where to start. 

Paul