Thank you, Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard, for peeling the onion, so to speak, WRT the history of equality, and the importance of reserving one’s right to privacy in respect of things like sexual orientation. The key point you made, about not surrendering that in service of “a cause”, and the damage done when one becomes a caricature in that context, was sound and well-presented.
Self-described progressives would do well to think hard on this point. The same is true of their opposite number on the right.
Why has contentment plummeted and isolation increased since 2015? Social media. It lands every hot-button issue in front of people like a confection, making it impossible to avoid consuming. And when people are faced with a highly charged emotional subject, they respond emotionally. Our limbic systems are designed to take every "crisis" at face value and respond accordingly. I honestly believe the only way up and out of this crater in our epistemological landscape is to turn away from social media.
Thank you, Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard, for peeling the onion, so to speak, WRT the history of equality, and the importance of reserving one’s right to privacy in respect of things like sexual orientation. The key point you made, about not surrendering that in service of “a cause”, and the damage done when one becomes a caricature in that context, was sound and well-presented.
Self-described progressives would do well to think hard on this point. The same is true of their opposite number on the right.
Progressivism seems to be a dead end, I think.
Public patience is wearing thin with extremist political operators of all stripes, I think.
The reactionaries on the right are at least as disturbing and, thanks to the shambles that Trump has wrought, more-and-more discredited.
Sure, except that no one was giving "reactionaries on the right" the time of day until progressives took everything too far.
Society functions as a pendulum that way.
No Obama, no Trump. No Biden, no re-Trump.
...etc.
@gs: Barack Obama was hardly an extremist of the left. And Joe Biden was even more centrist than Obama.
You could be right.
Yup
The left's separation and ranking was always a grotesque oversimplification, never helpful or additive, and ethically indefensible.
Very well-reasoned arguments in this excerpt.
Why has contentment plummeted and isolation increased since 2015? Social media. It lands every hot-button issue in front of people like a confection, making it impossible to avoid consuming. And when people are faced with a highly charged emotional subject, they respond emotionally. Our limbic systems are designed to take every "crisis" at face value and respond accordingly. I honestly believe the only way up and out of this crater in our epistemological landscape is to turn away from social media.
Thank you for putting this on my radar. The book should be considered for the subject of a university sociology course……I would definitely sign up.
We are so screwed.