5 ms·

It's almost like the people behind these machinations don't care about sustainability and only about their immediate rewards.

• jacquesm 7y ago
  You can leave out the first three words of that sentence and it would be factually correct, more compact and less qualified. A win on all counts imo.
  • rabidrat 7y ago
    "It's almost like ___" is common internet vernacular for "I can't believe this isn't obvious to everyone, but apparently it's not, so here it is: __"
    • anigbrowl 7y ago
      Quite so, but (like Jacques, apparently) I've come to think that the posture of ironic disbelief expressed in that phrase is corrosive of public discourse. I suspect it's responsive to unfavorable external conditions, like the famous line from Casablanca where the police chief raiding Rick's cafe insincerely says 'I'm shocked - shocked - to find that gambling is going on here,' to offset his embarrassment at functioning as a tool of the Nazis' political strategy. Put another way, we pretend to give people we dislike the benefit of the doubt and they pretend to believe us, to avoid the unpleasant fact of an underlying social conflict.