I remember growing up on YouTube. Starting with the atheist-chrisitian debates that got engulfed into politics around 2016 and never went back. And doxxing someone or trying to get them fired for not agreeing with you was seen as the lowest of the low. On all sides.
Shame.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/tesla-dogequest-websit...
I'm not on much social media. But my general takeaway is...yes? The cultural Overton window on this seems to have shifted at...some point over the last few years. It doesn't really strike me as repulsive anymore, which is interesting in itself.
I do in theory. But my test is not would I do it (no), but would I reject out of hand the acquaintance of someone who had. And the answer, today, is no, whereas a few years ago I think it would have been yes.
And I hope you understand that there is an enormous difference in person A purchasing a popular car and person B publicly celebrating a gruesome murder.
And getting fired for expressing a 1A-protected opinion outside of work hours, and getting your car destroyed for purchasing a legal product are pretty comparable.
If you purchase a vehicle, it is not expected that the world should know. Purchasing a vehicle isn't public speech.
In none of the above cases should the person be physically mapped or stalked. Or be the victims of terrorist attacks.
It was about beliefs, that's why the right wing is winning, always, just from a game strategy viewpoint.
Trying to find a compromise is losing the game in the long term. That's why doxxing in public is so effective for the right wing, because it moves the needle of what is okay to say as a rhetoric, while lowering the chance of finding a compromise, too. The more hate it spreads, the better.
And the absolutists on the left side of the spectrum are just as radicalized by now as a copycat game strategy. The irony here is that if they would get voted into the Capitol, they would stalemate democracy just the same.
And that's the bug that Putin is exploiting with his propaganda machine, since 2011, the day he realized he must control the media when Gorbachev's daughter tried to start a coup and failed.
Also check out what happened to MTV in Russia, which had a comedy show about Putin. That's what's happening to Jimmy Kimmel right now (and probably John Oliver soon).
It wasn't always like this. But if you remove the classics and philosophy from high school, and then dilute the liberal arts in undergrad into gimme courses, you wind up with generations who can't think about values. And then you devolve into purely transactional politics.
Everything they did this year to the education system, cutting funding, force-aligning them with political views, eradicating Democratic government members... it all boils down to creating the education system that creates the next generation of MAGA followers that are easier to control and easier to rule.
Just the mandatory AI usage in the education sector combined with the "bug" in the library of congress' website that showed a different version of the constitution when you set the User Agent to an LLM one; which specifically removed all parts that had rights to call for militia by the House of Congress (which cannot be a "bug", let's be honest) ... is such a red flag for me.
I attended an American high school at the beginning of the 1970s. We may have read a few pages from Plato, but that was about it for anything like philosophy. My son went to a better school, and there read some of the Nicomachean Ethics, which is more than I got. But it is not extensive coverage.
As for the classics, it would depend on what you consider classics.
I would be interested to learn what high schools, outside a very narrow band of selective schools, used to teach the classics and philosophy.
There was leftist terrorism in the 70's (e.g., The Weather Underground), but nothing I'm aware of since.
They define Antifa as a terrorist group but it's just a collection of young men who want to get into brawls with extremists on the other side -- like some sort of Fight Club.
The President has declared his desire for his political opponents to be jailed -- and he's surrounded by enablers who are more than willing to do that. Worse yet, a significant chunk of the population is totally okay with that.
They never fail to mention "trans activism" or something similar when talking about the shooter. They concocted this whole elaborate conspiracy theory about "trans groomers" years ago, and I'm absolutely certain that a lot of the recent online safety legislation has the goal of surveilling the trans community.
Worst case scenario would be declaring being gay and transgender people mentally ill and indoctrinated into "radical left-wing ideology" and then force detransitions and conversion therapy, and shut down their communities, or best case scenario a couple more chuds are radicalized to mass murder. Although since spree killing minorities is common enough to be considered a pastime in the US, the latter was probably going to happen anyway.
That "our" president is actively demonizing everybody who is not a loyalist fills me with dread. Stochastic terrorism is a very real threat.
If we make it out of this dark period we're going to have some serious lessons to learn and to make sure they last across generations.
Writing this way implies that those two are equivalent or even comparable. This is truly evil.
You can criticize anyone. I’ll die defending your right to do so, even if you criticize me as I do it. But, if you ever celebrate a death, anyone’s death, I don’t want you as my doctor, my kid’s teacher, my lawyer, not even flipping my burger. How could I trust you with my life if you clearly do not value life? I want you ostracized from polite society, because you have lost what made you human.
Uh, I'll toast to Hitler's death. Bin Laden's, too. I think your criticism is narrower than just all death, or if it isn't, you have to concede your views are outside the mainstream.
Evil simply can't resist the temptation to devour itself.
djohnston•4mo ago