Quoting from IronEdithKidd quoting some other comment 'cause I dig the ™.
I’ve seen this meme pop up a couple of times now, seemingly always from people who appear to be contributing in bad-faith, although arguing they are not. So I looked up the google.
Whereas the bible treats this phenomenon in a partisan fashion, the proliferation of the meme seems to have been quickly appropriated for use to characterise a capitulation to (what I had traditionally thought of as) the herd.
In this case I guess the closest thing to a liberal herd are the meta-individual societies of the bees. Quite the insult.
As I believe that thorough research clouds the minds intuitive eye, I’ve only skimmed the first couple of pages of search results but the soupçon of synthetic sincerity is sumptious enough to skim only briefly.
Let’s start with a call to reason. And reasonable assumptions by reasonable, thinking people doing thinking stuff!
I’ll make this easy: authoritarians do a lot of projecting. Also, the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Here’s a question. I grew up somewhere that’s considered “liberal” by US standards, then I went to university. Is that why the same subset of people who attempt to use the term Hive MindTM* without irony would likely label me a dirty fucking communist in today’s parlance?
I don’t think there is so much a Hive Mind™ as a demand for actual evidence of some kind to back up your opinion.
But as you can see in the many, many, many climate change discussions we’ve had here on BBS, that can also devolve into endless repetition of “my data can beat up your data”, so it’s not a perfect solution either.
It’s still better than unsubstantiated opinions or “because I said so”, though.
Well, specifically, this is a carry-over from misinformation over the ACA. The only form of data required is the ACA itself, and the individual who initially used the Hive Mind term had unsubstantiated fears, corporate-sponsored talking points and bogus chain emails to offer rather than any evidence from the legislation in question. I felt tossing the term back into his/her face was appropriate for the circumstance.
As for scientific debate, yeah, there sure are some topics that can easily devolve into contradicting data wars.
I agree with the “throwing it back at 'em” tactic for sure but when I went looking for examples, even I was unsettled by passive-fascistic reading of psychological motivations projected by the psychopaths in the first article link.
Specifically the video on that page emanates… bad vibes maaann.
Now that I think about it, it is perhaps a genius defence mechanism.
If you truly should know your enemy if you wish to beat them, making the experience of knowing so unpleasant as to be impossible does afford a kind of lunatic inscrutability.
