The internet is a strange thing and despite this forum having a lot of good aspects, in another way it’s a microcosm of some of the worst of it. I think a lot of people when they start posting here adopt a sort of persona which they may not really believe at the start, but as they keep posting here they begin to take their personas far more seriously than they actually should and end up choosing to believe things they otherwise wouldn’t if they didn’t post here. “Winning” an argument becomes far more important to them than what’s really going on their e-ego takes over.
labane is a classic example of that. To be honest, I don’t really he think he’s a massive Trump head in real life or anything and he’s clearly reasonably knowledgable on a lot of things but he does have some sort of serious underlying conservative anger complex which has been progressively exposed, or should I say suddenly exposed itself (here anyway) at a certain point around the time of the Paris massacre in 2015 and has never gone away. Somehow he has turned himself into the ultimate Captain America because he couldn’t accept some basic truths about Trump years ago and dug in from there. He couldn’t accept the basic truth that vilifying the entirety of a religion, as he did with Muslims, is a recipe for disaster - and especially when somebody in a position of power does it.
I think what we have here is a combination of him taking his own e-persona too seriously and being subconsciously brainwashed on a lot of things by right-wing media. He probably doesn’t even realise how he has changed since his very reasonable posts on An Fear Rua in 2012 which called out the Republican party’s endemic racism. Now he preaches the exact opposite.
I’d bet anything that in real life he has been completely suckered by the “anti-PC” narrative. So called “political correctness” is basically about respecting minorities or disadvantaged, it doesn’t take the rights of others away. What it has exposed is the deep psychological need of a lot of white men to feel superior to women and ethnic or sexual minorities etc., that their rights should be superior to those of women and minorities - ie. a deep psychological weakness. He seems pretty sensible on something like abortion but if look back over his posts over the years there’s a lot of Graham Linehan-esque stuff about trans people and of course the litany of vile, generalised anti-Muslim rhetoric.
What he also definitely believes in is this weird stuff you get in America about “American exceptionalism”, that Americans are uniquely virtuous, that “shining city on a hill” bullshit, the “American dream” bullshit, the exact sort of mass self deception that so called “great countries” like to fool themselves with about their history and their present - Britain and Russia are hopelessly obsessed with these delusional notions too.
I think too though he has a sort of split personality and a lot of cognitive dissonance and confusion going on because whatever his protestations, he does post on Boards.ie too (DreamsBurnDown) and tries to come across as more moderate but the old anger is never far the surface, and all the same talking bizarre points are there. He doesn’t flourish at all as a poster there though because if you abuse people you get banned, and his whole schtick here is to try and bully people, and once he’s stripped of that he’s powerless.
For the record I sincerely believe all my political opinions in real life.
