We Are Experiencing Definitional Collapse
freddiedeboer.substack.com
We Are Experiencing Definitional Collapse
1–10 of 48 posts
Re: We Are Experiencing Definitional Collapse
#2Hokey old values like "respect your neighbors, and their right to be wrong" will still work.
"Chaos is coming" hah! It's been here all along, you've just been lying to yourself about its distance from you.
Re: We Are Experiencing Definitional Collapse
#3> Our moment is one in which anything is possible because nothing means anything.
It would have been useful if the writer added more historical context to this. In 1946, for instance, Orwell raised some of these points in his essay, "Politics and the English Language" [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
Re: We Are Experiencing Definitional Collapse
#4Truth be told this has been happening for several decades now:
"The Age of iPod Politics" (2004)
http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,699790,00.h...
> The great American pacifier is our love of stuff and our ability to fashion our own insular worlds through our staggering selection of things to buy (even if we can't actually afford an SUV). But consumer America is different from political America. In consumer America, diversity of preference is not just tolerated. It is mandatory. [...] You make your choices, and I make mine. Yours, of course, are wrong. But what do I care?
> Patching together customized networks of pundits, political comics, online news feeds and talk shows, we can choose among universes in which the polls show a dead heat or a blowout, the National Guard memos are truthful or fraudulent, the economy is rebounding or relapsing. You can watch Fox News and see your surrogate reduce my surrogate to a sputtering fool. I can go to my favorite political sites and follow the blogrolls, link after link, discovering how vast is the universe of people who realize that I am entirely right about everything. This virtual self-gerrymandering promotes black-and-white thinking. [...] You know that my naive ideas will lead America to crumble like Rome, and I know that morons like you are going to get me killed by a dirty bomb, but we never need to actually say a cross word to each other. Or anything at all, for that matter.
It's hard to say when it all started, and you could probably say it's been going on in this country since the Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists (or the Tories vs. Patriots, even). But growing up extremely online during the War of Terror, none of this is different to me in kind, only quantity.
Re: We Are Experiencing Definitional Collapse
#5This article smells like cynicism pretending to be self-congratulating intelligence. Painting whole swathes of groups to be all the same ("Liberals cheer the FBI and CIA, call for limitless censorship, and insist on blind faith in tech giants and pharmaceutical companies. Conservatives have cast off Christianity, their north star, the orienting principle of all they believed, discarding it offhandedly like a gum wrapper.") and saying they should've been something else is... meh, stupidly reductionist.
Re: We Are Experiencing Definitional Collapse
#6[deleted]
Re: We Are Experiencing Definitional Collapse
#7Oh, I don't know. Whatever the faults of $CURRENT_YEAR, it still compares favorably to that time when we randomly invaded a country because a two-pizza team in the White House thought it'd be awesome.
And then we re-elected the guy who led the circus, because YEAH! WARTIME PRESIDENT! USA! USA! USA!
We've always been tyrannized by a majority of unprincipled, easily-duped, low-information voters. This is why democracy sucks and has to be checked by an anti-majoritarian constitution that enshrines basic liberal values.
It doesn't stop every horrible thing from happening, like the aforementioned stupid war, but it sure helps stop the worst stuff.
Re: We Are Experiencing Definitional Collapse
#8It's kind of a weird rant, but a real problem. The divisive effect has been to weaken the US as a world power.
Meanwhile, Russia's leadership apparently has just issued the orders to move on Ukraine.[1] Putin sees the US as weak and divided, and is taking the opportunity to restore the Russian Empire. (One step at a time. First South Osseta, then Crimea, then Donetsk. How big a bite this time?)
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/20/politics/us-intel/index.html
Re: We Are Experiencing Definitional Collapse
#9Hokey old values like "respect your neighbors, and their right to be wrong" will still work. "Chaos is coming" hah! It's been here all along, you've just been lying to yourself about its distance from you.
[deleted]
Re: We Are Experiencing Definitional Collapse
#10When people start claiming that we are experiencing 'a world gone mad' or 'group hysteria' or, as in this case, "Definitional Collapse", it makes me wonder if that person's context or worldview is one of those that is under pressure.
The world is, as it always has been, tribal. The pressure to ensure that the out-group stays out and the in-group is protected is stronger than ever in the face of ever-present screaming voices from the out-group intruding on our lives.
We hold to tribes first, not beliefs. And we feel pressured to protect even the most lunatic fringe of our own before we make common cause with the most sane voices 'on the other side'
Trying to view the world through the lens of nominal logic will only drive you made with the inconsistencies.