3 ms·

>That said, I think this grace should be given to the lunatic fringe: they instinctually feel something’s “not right” and the rest is all rationalization and th

>That said, I think this grace should be given to the lunatic fringe: they instinctually feel something’s “not right” and the rest is all rationalization and theorycrafting divorced from reality. Speaking as a formerly-"Moral-Majority-esque" Christian, who still lives in the deep red of the Bible belt, I assure you that this sense that "something is wrong" is _not_ a credit, depending on what the "something" is. In the county where I lived as a child, the KKK ran the county seat as a "sundown town" as late as the 80s, and only when an Oprah special on the area drew public attention and scrutiny did the KKK lose (official) power. It remains a starkly-white county just outside one of America's blackest cities, and its overwhelming majority is in fervent support of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who calls that area her home. To that crowd, yes, something is wrong: namely, the whites-only "order" they once enforced is now denied them by the force of both law and social pressure. And so, they lean _hard_ into white supremacy and "great replacement" conspiracy theories, in pursuit of their racially-homogeneous comfort zone of dominance. The feeling that something's "not right" is not a credit on its own; that depends greatly on what the "something" is identified to be, and what "right" means to that person.

K0balt 3y ago
That’s a good point, insofar as we should not give people a pass just because they have a sense of unease. But I think the parent comment still stands in that these reactions can be canaries or indications of an unwell society. In your example, of course, this unwellness itself directly manifests as source of the unease. But follow that pathology one step deeper and perhaps there is insight to be gained? What I am sure of is that we have left our sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems to their own devices without carefully examining their impacts for a long time now. This has left them rife with technical debt and exploitable bugs that some parasitic elements of society are using automation to aggressively exploit. I’m not saying that engineering them will have a better outcome, but perhaps if we study them with real rigour it is possible that one day it might. We would do well to remember that these constructs exist to serve humanity, and not the other way around.

K0balt 3y ago

That’s a good point, insofar as we should not give people a pass just because they have a sense of unease. But I think the parent comment still stands in that these reactions can be canaries or indications of an unwell society. In your example, of course, this unwellness itself directly manifests as source of the unease. But follow that pathology one step deeper and perhaps there is insight to be gained? What I am sure of is that we have left our sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems to their own devices without carefully examining their impacts for a long time now. This has left them rife with technical debt and exploitable bugs that some parasitic elements of society are using automation to aggressively exploit. I’m not saying that engineering them will have a better outcome, but perhaps if we study them with real rigour it is possible that one day it might. We would do well to remember that these constructs exist to serve humanity, and not the other way around.