In light of the thread yesterday about the futility of news consumption, I feel compelled to say that this feels like the typical fare of finger pointing to mak

In light of the thread yesterday about the futility of news consumption, I feel compelled to say that this feels like the typical fare of finger pointing to make us feel "concerned" (but not actually engaged in any pragmatically meaningful way). Perhaps I'm just naturally cynical but the realization that leaders of the west are just as likely to engage in decisions of questionable ethics doesn't seem like something that should come as a surprise. "Of course they engage in hypocrisy and ignore due diligence when it suits them" is my default reaction. But IMHO, this narrative tapers off right before the most critical aspect: by framing it as something about the Canadian government invocation of the Emergencies Act or AWS "censoring" Parler, or "neoliberals" (or whatever that is supposed to mean) this makes the narrative sound like that this war on dissent is only carried out by the power that be. But I've noticed that the mentality of boycotting and wishing for things to burn based on ideological disagreement is very much alive and kicking among anyone within an earshot of an news outlet. It's there when people here express opinions about what should happen to Facebook, or PIP-abusing Amazon engineering managers, or whatever is the hated group du jour. It has become mainstream to express disapproval in terms of destruction porn: "X people should be fired", "Y people should go rot in jail", "Z people should be banned". But this is exactly the problem with being manipulated into feeling "concerned". Wishing things away as a hot take doesn't actually help or even inform potential attempts at solutions, it just fuels an echo chamber of fantasies of increasingly intense punishment metering. A question that raised in my mind about the recent Ottawa event was whether politicians are acting in alignment with the will of the people. What's more troubling IMHO isn't the idea of a tyranny that oppresses people, but rather the idea that overreaching government action actually represents the will of the people; that is, that people want to see the destruction of the things they don't like.