If I were really fucking rich ($100 million +), I’d be buying up airplanes and cattle farms and all kinds of other shit to compensate for all the things the neo-puritans are gonna try to take away soon.

On a more serious note, sort of stealing an idea from Nils Gilman, I think the neo-puritans (who are mostly on the left) are going to join forces with a large part of the alt-right over time. In some ways this is already occurring with opposition to porn and sex, and from there it’ll transition into eco-fascism next. CRT as practiced outside academia is also basically acceptable left-friendly segregation and racism, so that will play into it somehow as well.

The next few decades are shaping up to be…interesting.

One of the primary skills of this era is being able to tell when experts are lying to you, or are just wrong, without tipping over into bizarre conspiracy thinking like “vaccines don’t work” or “Bill Gates is microchipping us all.”

This is really hard to do, of course, and it’s really a superpower when you can do this. Most people realize the available experts are inferior, but then they flop right on over into conspiracy thinking because they don’t have good enough minds to evaluate actual evidence and cannot understand complex systems.

I am very thankful that I have the skills necessary to dismiss experts as needed, evaluate evidence apart from their lies and obfuscations, and that I can comprehend complex systems pretty easily.

And this is why it is pure poison for web browsers to not display the actual and complete barenaked URL in the address bar. https://t.co/t4fVmhZ4mB

— Charlie BRAIN WORMS Stross (@cstross) October 14, 2021

The poison is intentional. The lie — as always — is that it was “for security” because those poor, poor rubes grammas didn’t know what all those funny words meant.

The reality is that the URL was deliberately obscured so that advertising and such could be more easily foisted on us and its source hidden, while search is emphasized. Why do people so easily buy the lie that it’s “security” and “for your own good?” Especially since that has never, ever been the case.

Huh, I think I might’ve figured out why there are so many social scientists and other screeching lately about, “There’s no such things as generational differences!!!!!!!”

Not sure how I missed this, but I got it now: it’s because if you can deny that there are generational differences, you can then obfuscate the fact that there have been enormous economic changes wrought by pretty malevolent forces arrayed against each successive generation. That is, Gen X is worse off than the Boomers, the Millennials are worse off than Gen X, and Gen Z has it even worse than all of those. Concealing that is vitally important to the neoliberal project — hence, all the Drum et al. articles about how the Millennials don’t have it bad at all, it’s all lies that they are struggling, the facts are fake, etc. It’s all of a piece and “there are no generations” is one of those fragments.

That took me an absurdly long amount of time to figure out. Maybe I’m losing my edge. But I got there.