This is what happens when discourse becomes detached from evidence, deliberation, and accountability. Instead of engaging with real issues, politicians compete in a theatre of outrage.
The student isn’t a person here, they’re a prop in a narrative war.
The student isn’t a person here, they’re a prop in a narrative war.
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Try talking to them before you decide what their motives are for presenting themselves as they do.
Engagement > accuracy
Performance > governance
Emotion > evidence
Identity = target
The logic of the algorithm now structures political speech. It rewards those who dramatise difference and punish deviation from the tribe.
In the old times an example of this democratic identify framework was the scouts.
Should a democratic society provide a Default Mode Network identity framework in its modeling.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/29/pelosi-condemned-pro-palestinian-russia-ties
Inna Vernikov is a trumpist former D on NY city council
performative targeting of identity isn't an absolute monopoly of trumpist Rs, but it is a specialty
and maybe it's epistemic decay, I'd say it's depraved indifference to our freedoms + safety
Epistemic decay perfectly describes what's happening in the USA.
This garbage only comes from one side of the political spectrum.
This ostentative display of rebellion, or whatever this is, will *always* be offensive to more conservative people (it's probably what they're looking for anyway)
It’s to define who belongs in the public. This student is being told, implicitly and explicitly, you don’t. That’s what makes this moment chilling. That’s why it matters.
Or: real democracy.
The student graduated the top of their class and did nothing to this f****** council person but exist
If someone is pro-weaponizing speech, then you have the force via votes / public support to propagate it or you don’t.
(Alas, for too many people these days right and left, politics IS culture. It's what they have instead of art or religion, which is a hell of a thing to do to politics.)
You want sweeping change, but don't want people to care about creating that change? You don't want people to to feel the anger about current systemic harms that might motivate that change?
I am outraged by adults ritually humiliating children, so I'm the prob?
I don't really know how to do that without outrage.