My new exercise as I doomscroll Twitter in my official job of Very Online Person is identifying the underlying issue--the abstract class, to use a programming analogy-- that people are *really* angry about.
To quote Willa Cather: "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."
If you peer hard enough at all the sundry issues of the day, you'll note there are really only a few foundational ones....
Corporations are the last functional organizations that most Americans experience. To them has the government forfeited responsibility for many of the functions—some involving our most deeply-held values—that typically would have been legitimized by democratic governance.
Good-faith citizens following the consensus narrative over the past two years could be forgiven for thinking that it’s all a grand lie and that they stand alone against malignant forces of murky origin and purpose.
Result?
public abstract class LossOfFaithInInstitutions{}
public abstract class RewindTime{}
Your political loyalties are now defined, not by some timeworn axis like left versus right, but to which year you think society should be somehow magically returned.
The reason why the Left loses its mind on the topic of genetics is twofold:
1. It undercuts blank-slatism, which presupposes humans are infinitely malleable (to not say perfectable) by society. This is one of the core beliefs of contemporary liberalism.
2. Among the horrifying implications of abandoning blank-slatism is that in our technological society which prizes mental agility beyond all other virtues, it may be the case that some, when measured against this very one-dimensional metric, may do less well than others...
...and since this liberal society (for all its appearances of cuddly progressivism) accepts status and power as the only sources of moral dignity (and rejects other virtues such as kindness, loyalty, humility, steadfastness, etc.), to even go here is unthinkable.
Like a good PMC worker bee, I bought a Tesla 3 for my (brief) Apple job, and it ended up changing everything about my life. Now I can't imagine living without it. Neither will you, after you've tried it. The world won't be the same after wide adoption.
Driving goes from a miserable task where your entire attention is squandered on a menial task, to a question of what to do sitting in a leather chair in an internet-connected lounge. It’s more like taking a business-class flight than anything else.
You tell yourself that when you hit 'fuck you' money you're going to really put yourself out there and tweet what you think. Then you have conversations with people well beyond that level, and they're generally much bigger wusses than you.
Capitalism, how does it work?
If pressed, they'll say that now they bear an *even greater* responsibility to entities like portfolio companies or investment partners, meaning they must be even more cautious of what they say.
Another reality is probably the 'coercion of the brunch invite', and being part of a certain social cohort whose membership isn't based only on wealth.
But that implies bestowing that circle with a blinding, preponderant importance. That circle must seem the navel of the world.
The second, in this initial review of the content policing scheme, is that the core weakness lies in the 'perceptual hashing' used to discern fuzzy image equality. That's very false-alarm prone, and potentially easily hackable.
Elites of a crumbling empire entranced by a cult fixated on a criminal brutalized to death, preaching a gospel obsessed with the salvation of the oppressed, whose fervent adepts desecrate the symbols of civic authority.
The Christian message is and was an absolute revolution in world affairs. It is utterly bizarre and unlike anything that came before, or that exists now outside the West.
Because we've lived inside it for 2,000 years, and the West is currently preponderant, we take it as given.
What's striking is the horseshoe this creates between Christian conservatives and the secularized adepts of the same message.
For all their supposed differences, they both absolutely agree on the correct moral narrative for our times; they just disagree on the casting.
It's intriguing how the progressive left--Bernie, AOC, the 'squad', the whole crew that normally tweets 10 times per day and has opinions on everything--goes absolutely mute when confronted by some hard, inconvenient reality outside the US liberal bubble like Cuba or Afghanistan.
Biggest US military failure in our lifetimes, the final dishonorable chapter to the venture that started with the terrorist attack that redefined our age.