Guilty as charged! Turning 30 soon, just shed the last remnants of my prior organically grown social circle, having judged so many people for their emotional callousness, sloppy thinking, and lazy ethics. Most of these days I don't even have anyone to talk to, which is why I've taken once again to that most inadvisable endeavour of writing my thoughts on the Internet!
I literally know one or two people who treat others with essential kindness and strive to make their lives meaningful. I wish I had more ways of giving back, because if it wasn't for being able to talk with them once in a while, I'd seriously be doubting my sanity right now. At the same time, it's just not right to lean too much on them - there's only so much anyone can do for your existential problems. So once in a while we share a moment of "yeah bro, I see it too, things are going downhill in a profound and horrifying way, but it's OK, we know we won't let it get to us and we'll figure it out eventually". And that's about as much relating to people that I do these days.
Could I choose to "unjudge" the people who I've held to what apparently these days is an unrealistically high standard? Easy, I've had many opportunities to try it! People can be quite forgiving of past misunderstandings, the problem is that they don't seem to learn from their mistakes a whole lot. I'm like, "okay, this person might not really be so great, but they're not a horrible person either, so let's give myself a chance to share some sort of meaningful experience with them!". It goes alright for a while, then I end up having to unilaterally struggle to maintain a basic mutual comfort zone while trying to dissuade poor attempts at gaslighting. (Apparently, it's considered "toxic" to tell others when their behavior is causing harm or distress?)
Somehow it's becoming very difficult these days to be a decent person - as defined by the bare minimum of not engaging in violence or manipulative behavior because you treat others like human beings - and be social at the same time. I remember when the Internet used to provide opportunities for just that. Right now it's doing the opposite; who would've thought that a marriage of mass media and the Cold War military-industrial complex would naturally act to set people apart. People are bombarded with so much emotionally charged but otherwise completely nonsensical information which has nothing to do with real life, that if you somehow fall through the cracks of that whole shared hallucination, you're effectively a pariah.
You make valid points - but I don't think the author of the post that I was replying to would be able to appreciate the nuance.
By bringing up the Karen White example, aren't you basically saying it would somehow be less appaling if it wasn't a trans person perpetrating the assault? Because I thought this sort of thing was abhorrent regardless of the salient details of a particular case?
Social media only makes it easier to focus on "which cage should we use for transgender people", and so much harder to ask ourselves "why are we putting people in cages". Or, as per the other example, "did Hunter Biden really lose his incriminating laptop?" vs "why are we letting ourselves be governed by people with familial ties to criminals?"
Social media and the polarizing meaningless debates that it enables serve the purpose of precluding people from focusing on the latter kind of question. (Which is already hard enough as it is, because it involves actual thinking.) If the public conversation is retreading ground that was already covered in the 1970s like you say, doesn't that mean that our society is regressing? Shouldn't be worrying first and foremost about that, since that's where we'd find the root cause of all the more specific issues?
How many people feel good for having the correct in-group opinions, while their contribution to e.g. the trans rights debate only goes as far as canceling JK Rowling, or, conversely, going to a Jordan Peterson talk? How many people have even heard of the actual examples you mention, as compared to the number of people who only know "uhh, so there's a debate on the Internet about some abstract hot button issue, and I'm required to pick a side in order to participate in society"?
A couple years from now the topics may be completely different, they'll just find another scapegoat or another thorny bioethical edge case, but the medium of debate will still be largely the same ol' Internet, and the AIs will only have become more effective at sowing discord.
Each piece of content's full semantic structure (think https://xkcd.com/657/ but 10x-1000x more elaborate) should be published in a machine-readable format; then in your personal content blocker you can define as elaborate a filter as needed.
What stake do you have in either of the debates that you're referencing? When was the last time a politician's family member or a trans person did anything good or bad for you, personally?
If you didn't allow social media to get you invested in these manufactured pseudo-political pseudo-events, you'd be free to realize that Trump and Biden are both obvious idiots and crooks; that people's gender identities, biochemical makeup, and surgical history are obviously completely irrelevant to complete strangers; and that many other things that you waste your time constructing your tribal identity around are obviously complete bullshit that someone artificially planted into the discourse for their own benefit. That someone couldn't care less about your best interests as a person, anon291.
The problem isn't that Twitter and Facebook censor one side of those debates and promote the other. The problem is that people are using them in the first place! That way, social media is the thing that forces those debates to exist in the first place - by making you feel like you have a stake in events that are completely remote from your life. Whose agenda is being promoted is tangential to the fact that these unelected, unaccountable corporate bodies have entrenched themselves in a position where they can basically replace our individual world-models with this sort of outrageous nonsense. That's what's fucking democracy up, and in the most elegant way, too: your right to make free choices between alternatives is preserved, but only inconsequential choices are ever presented.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog; on corporate social media, nobody cares that you aren't a dog.
I've noticed that the same kind of person to make the "would choose to be alive argument" would also make the "but you can't choose your parents" argument. It's completely insane.
I once saw a Facebook group with the cutesy name "life is a stockholm syndrome and I want my money back". That's spot on.
Happiness is preferable to suffering.
Suffering is a natural part of life. So is happiness.
Suffering is inevitable. Happiness is not.
For some people the happiness outweights the suffering.
It's not a given and you can't really know in advance, but I'm pretty damn sure that having a narcissistic psychopath for a mother tips the scale towards suffering.
Sometimes the happiness outweighs the suffering by such a large margin that you can't even imagine that for others it's the other way around. Maybe you become one of those people who put other people in literal cages "for their own good" - you can get involuntarily hospitalized for expressing doubts in the value of your own life, you know. Even if you're right. Especially if you can prove it.
So that biases the answer you'll get, on top of the natural bias towards self-preservation and reproduction. It still doesn't make it anywhere near truthful.
Ever look up the origins of the word "proletariat"? It literally means "breeders". It's the people who own nothing but their own lives, have no capital other than their time and body. We're selling our lives to the highest bidder out here, man. We're cattle.
Would you teach your kid to be aware of that predicament? No, you would teach them to avoid the subject entirely. For their own good, you see.
Many people are forced to be alive, and just rationalize around that to make the process of staying alive comparatively easier. You can probably imagine what reasoning around such traumatic cognitive dissonance for the sake of sheer self-preservation does to your overall cognitive abilities, and by extension to your ability to make the world a better place so people honestly want to stay in it.
That it's common does not make it right. We just hit the 8 billion mark, and unimaginable numbers of people across all social strata really don't do anything much but make each other miserable. Do they have the right to live and hope for happines? Definitely. Would it have been better if their parents had used that little miracle called "consciousness" to prevent their children's misery? Also yes.
Maybe you've never experienced what it's like to wish to have never been born, but having fucked up parents makes it very likely for a person to end in a situation where they feel like that about their lives. I think that if your child feels like that even once, you've been wrong to be a parent. (I realize that's a pretty high bar and it's unreasonable to expect the majority people to live up to it. But that goes for any moral standard.)
Of course anyone who is born chooses to stay alive, that's hard-wired into our biology, but that's exactly the reason you have no right to make this argument. Of course every human being has the right to parenthood, but this does not automatically make it right from the perspective of the child. I wish more people understood that and did not see their children as property.
Since we obviously can't ask our children whether they want to be born, it's our responsibility to make that decision for them. Primary caretakers determine the initial psychological makeup of a person, and the sad truth is that a lot of people from all walks of life have children because of irresponsibility, desperation, or plain egotistical reasons. This is cruel and abusive.
Best of wishes to the kid. I hope it grows up to be a happy person. Since it'll grow up in an affluent environment removed from the hardships that most of the world faces every day, there's a chance that happens. But evil people having kids is just cruel to the kids. I'd wager that once she's out of the slammer she'll endeavour to either raise it to be a psychopath, or make its life hell until she's eroded its grip on reality.
I hope in the future people get a better grip on the ethics of creating a new human being, and what you just said is understood for the fallacious reasoning that it is.
Unless you go full self-hosted, your website is also under the control of your hosting provider and DNS registry. You implicitly trust those, until you don't. (See the Linode/Itch.io gaffe from the other day.)
And what if your use case requires you to prove to others that you (or your publisher) can't surreptitiously and arbitrarily alter the information you published?
By anyone who uses them as the loaded terms that they are.
Oh, how I would hope that "positivity" and "negativity" would be understood as relating to position and negation, like in your example! But in practical usage (as in "stay positive" or "we don't want that kind of negativity around here") they're semantic stopsigns for silencing voices that express unhappiness.
I think the term for a culture of only accepting expressions of happiness as valid, with the goal of suppressing constructive disagreement, is "toxic positivity".