4 ms·

I wish I could do this better. It still scares the heck out of me to say something that could be construed as even remotely redville when I’m in navy blueville.

• chmod600 6y ago
  I think almost everyone would feel the same way. I know I would. We should reflect on why we feel more like this than in 2010. Persoanlly, I think it has to do with the moral realm vs the practical realm. We think of morality as a good thing, but it is more about absolutes than goodness. As we bring more things into the moral realm -- who you vote for, for example -- it shuts down reason, discourse, nuance, and understanding. Traditionally, the moral realm is about what you do. There's not much value in society discussing murder and whether its a good thing to do or not; and there's a lot of potential harm. If murder becomes an issue of nuance, people can rationalize it too easily and you get chaos. Now, I feel like our thoughts are becoming part of the moral realm, and that's a bad thing. There's no chance to discuss and learn together if one person thinks that the other is evil. It also means that it's easy for an otherwise good person to do horrible things because they feel that they are attacking evil. I don't meam to say that moralization is new. It has certainly happened in the past, say with McCarthyism, or the Spanish Inquisition. But it does feel like the pendulum is swinging in the direction of everything-is-a-matter-of-good-and-evil. And frankly, it seems like most of this moralization of thought is coming from the left. There's still some socialism-is-evil sentiment on the right, but that was pretty minor this cycle compared with the Trump-is-evil sentiment.