2022 Politics: Pestilence and Turmoil.

[scottydog]

Congress passes election reform designed to ward off another Jan. 6

Good to see common sense prevail occasionally!

[Lupine]

^It was the least they could do.

[RJDiogenes]

The very least. Basically, all this law says is, "Yes, that other law says what it says."

[Lupine]

A (mostly) sensible commentary on Salon about the "Woke Wars".

My favorite quote being

Alas, there's a lot of pressure to choose sides. In our social media-dominated age, nuance is not allowed, and certainly not when it comes to the woke wars. Either you deny there are bullies who use social justice as a fig leaf, or you agree that everyone is in imminent danger of social ruin for forgetting to indicate their pronouns. There's no room for the boring truth, which is that both sides sometimes have a point and also that both sides are guilty of wild exaggeration. 

.
By only criticism is the obligatory moaning about "modern Capitalism" being at the heart of the problems.

[RJDiogenes]

Yeah, she definitely favors the Left and goes a lot easier on them, but she's got the right idea-- especially the insight that it's just religion. "Virtue signalling" is just that same old desperate need to be "holier than thou," and there's nothing new about preachers profiting from that. But any baby steps are good. I have been kind of getting the feeling lately that normal people have really reached the saturation point with this stuff, so it's good to see it brought up anywhere.

Personally, I think there's only one solution to the problem of being stuck between two extremist ideologies:

[scottydog]

I agree that much of the problem stems from people spending way too much time online, which only brings out the worst in them.

[Lupine]

^I'm not sure if it's due to people spending too much time online or that everyone is on a hair-trigger and overreact to everything.

[RJDiogenes]

Like anything else, the current situation can be traced back to various points in history-- Malcolm X even saw it coming in the 60s. But for me, I noticed everything was really going off the rails in 1993, because that was the year that I went to work for BMC, and also the year that I noticed it being addressed in venues like Doonesbury. But that's also about the time that social media, of a sort, began to blossom and people were able to let out their inner assholes while hiding behind aliases, so there was no danger of a broken nose. So I don't think it's necessarily the time spent online so much as the lack of accountability online.

[scottydog]

Good points. So then the question is, how do we fix the situation?

[Lupine]

And apparently Britain has the same problem.

[RJDiogenes]

"Who do they think they are? Religion?" Yes!

That is pretty much on the nose, although I would say that the media is also a tool of the Culture Warriors, even though they encourage it. The real source of all these idiotic memes are people who get paid by ad clicks, page views, monetized blogs and YouTube channels, books, Patreon, seminars, speaking engagements, and merch-- basically, the same preachers who the media hires as expert witnesses to give them another source of income. And the suckers are the same low self esteem suckers who are always suckered by cults, because they need somebody to be holier than.

[RJDiogenes]

So much for my prediction that Putin wouldn't last out the year.

Curse you, Vladimir!

That does it. I'm closing this thread.