Comment by fasterik
10 hours ago
A lot of people still feel this way, possibly the majority. I think we're already starting to see a backlash against the cynical politics of the past decade and a renewed interest in shared values.
10 hours ago
A lot of people still feel this way, possibly the majority. I think we're already starting to see a backlash against the cynical politics of the past decade and a renewed interest in shared values.
I don’t really agree. Carl Sagan and other public intellectuals popularized these sorts of memes but no one really stepped in to replace them. The Ezra Kleins and Nate Silvers of the contemporary world are not in the same class. And the culture is so much more anti-intellectual than it was back then...
Nate Silver’s early 538 work absolutely was this. He was spitting out minitab output from the command line straight into articles to answer fun questions like, “Is Tom Brady the most efficient passer of all time?”. It’s a capital offense that the NYT scrubbed the web of everything from 538.
Grand thoughts always meet reality poorly. Does Spaceship Earth mean that you live in the forest to be surrounded by the greenery or live in a high-rise to preserve the greenery? Do you allow the other to exist to preserve Spaceship Earth? Environmental organizations in San Francisco treat this question like Shiri's Scissor. It is not so easy to coordinate people - disagreements on the specifics can easily fragment coalitions.
None of that makes you a “citizen of the world”.
That’s just a moniker wealthy elites who feel more connected to other wealthy elites in largely indistinguishable major metropolitan cities, than they do to people from any specific place or nation.
Maybe! I hope so!
But the more I hope, the more one single cynical sociopath seems to co-opt the entire commons for their own purposes. The leverage of sociopathy is incredible.
Sadly this individual has destroyed my aversion to political violence in both instrumental and moral terms.