Social media kills political understanding
Perhaps your only concern is, understandably, keeping him out of office. Fine. But to defeat something, you must understand it. And treating this quite plausible political threat as a kind of strange alien which does not so much befriend as contaminate our loved ones, and which can have no other explanation than as a manifestation of our most base intolerance and bigotry, probably isn’t quite “steel-manning” the opposition.
Why has such child’s play become so politically mainstream? The answer perhaps lies in the second reason: social media. Politicians are the nervous hostages of voters, who at present are the nervous hostages of malicious algorithms designed to cultivate self-assurance and righteousness with artistic precision.
You Call That Compassion?
The trouble, or so I’ve been told, is that like so many of the homeless she refuses help when offered, and both the policy and the culture of institutionalized do-gooding prevent the people who might save her life from doing anything about it. To force help on dying people must not be considered. And for the current generation of said do-gooders, that’s the end of the story. Nothing to be done. For reasons that I find impossible to understand, just utterly senseless, many progressives have decided that forcing help on the homeless and the sick is a worse outcome than simply letting them die. And letting them die is exactly what we’re doing.
At some point you have to admit that your preference for altruistic neglect is still just a preference for neglect.
My culture cannot handle nuance.
Several decades ago, about the time I was born, there was a push to empty and close “institutions,” known otherwise as “asylums.” Abuse, neglect, and a lack of accountability were rampant in these places, and shuttering them and changing our understanding and expectations of healthcare for the disabled or mentally unwell was an unequivocal good.
But what did we replace that system with?
For those with money and time, assisted living facilities or home care is an option. But what about everyone else?
With mental institutions banished to the dustbin of history, they were never replaced with a viable, more humane alternative.