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Since becoming politically active, my recurring facepalm is discovering that a whole lot of people don't see the world as I do. I just finished If We Burn by V

Since becoming politically active, my recurring facepalm is discovering that a whole lot of people don't see the world as I do. I just finished If We Burn by Vincent Bevins and When the Clock Broke by John Ganz One point (of many) repeatedly hammered home, with IRL examples, is that a whole lot of people demand Order, even at the expensive of Justice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Burn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Burn https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195790601-when-the-clock-broke https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195790601-when-the-clock... A very successful evergreen (authoritarian) playbook is to keep people anxious, so that they'll accede -- nay demand -- to ever more draconian, reactionary policies. Something we're experiencing firsthand right now in the USA.

potato3732842 1y ago
My gripe is even more meta than that. It's an unwillingness to mentally grapple with what they're advocating for and if they do understand it then Like if we want to run society with summary execution for petty thieves or inequality under the law or whatever then fine, but have the balls to say that, because without an understanding of the goals and acceptable tradeoffs we can't effectively pursue the goals without hitting unacceptable tradeoffs. But people don't come out and say these things because if you reason about the implications it's pretty clear they're shit ideas so what people do instead is lie and misdirect and whatnot in order to advocate for "bad in principal, arguably positive in result" things on their pet issue. But when you multiply by everyone's pet issues we get the current garbage and current trajectory. I think part of the problem is that as material plenty increases the number of people partaking in discourse because they have existential problems that need solving goes down so discourse is increasingly dominated by "fake problems". This is also why you're seeing a pendulum shift away from "feel good" policies toward more "tough decision" policies as it gets harder for people in the lower majority of society (70%, 80%, idk) to make ends meet. So basically I'm hopeful that things get more honest and more sane as we get poorer, which sucks, I guess, but hey, silver linings.

potato3732842 1y ago

My gripe is even more meta than that. It's an unwillingness to mentally grapple with what they're advocating for and if they do understand it then Like if we want to run society with summary execution for petty thieves or inequality under the law or whatever then fine, but have the balls to say that, because without an understanding of the goals and acceptable tradeoffs we can't effectively pursue the goals without hitting unacceptable tradeoffs. But people don't come out and say these things because if you reason about the implications it's pretty clear they're shit ideas so what people do instead is lie and misdirect and whatnot in order to advocate for "bad in principal, arguably positive in result" things on their pet issue. But when you multiply by everyone's pet issues we get the current garbage and current trajectory. I think part of the problem is that as material plenty increases the number of people partaking in discourse because they have existential problems that need solving goes down so discourse is increasingly dominated by "fake problems". This is also why you're seeing a pendulum shift away from "feel good" policies toward more "tough decision" policies as it gets harder for people in the lower majority of society (70%, 80%, idk) to make ends meet. So basically I'm hopeful that things get more honest and more sane as we get poorer, which sucks, I guess, but hey, silver linings.