Millennials & Zoomers, especially the urban ones, are another species entirely and are for all intents and purposes about as mindwormed as kids in the West, especially after this year in the screen bunker. It's not surprising. They're just as attached to the global dopamine mainline streaming out of the US as everyone else. Even the kids who, for some incomprehensible reason don't speak English, get the same slop one trough down the waterfall in all the Romanian copycat Youtube & TV shows and dimestore influencers.The interview with Anna Khachiyan is also good:
What weโre really talking about here is a shift in governance styles: from the โprohibitiveโ paternal superego which sets the parameters in advance and punishes you in kind if you defy or violate them, to the outwardly โpermissiveโ but latently punitive maternal superego, which enforces no terms or boundaries ahead of time but retaliates arbitrarily and disproportionately after the fact โ in part because it doesnโt know what it wants until all is said and done. Roughly speaking, this describes any number of events that can be filed under the #MeToo movement and/or โcancel culture.
Iโd respect it more if it were consciously cynical. The fact that these imbecilic media cretins and career State Department and CIA functionaries actually believe themselves when they say that theyโre deeply offended by the repression of Putin or the CCP or Iranian mullahs or Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro โ right after they get off a call about the latest U.S. arms shipments to the Saudi monarchs or cash transfers to Egyptian despots or support for a coup against the democratically elected government in Bolivia โ is frightening. How could anyone believe that the U.S. actually opposes domestic repression? That kind of self-delusion means humans can get themselves to believe literally anything. Thatโs more frightening to me than if they were knowingly lying for power.In which Greenwald shows he really gets it. Bravo.
Or perhaps this new taste for censorship is an indication of Democratic healthiness. This is a party that has courted professional-managerial elites for decades, and now they have succeeded in winning them over, along with most of the wealthy areas where such people live. Liberals scold and supervise like an offended ruling class because to a certain extent thatโs who they are. More and more, they represent the well-credentialed people who monitor us in the workplace, and more and more do they act like it.Excellent work. As such, it has the BlueAnon kooks in full 360 head spinning mode.
Extreme authoritarianism works, because viruses arenโt magic. Extreme libertarianism works, because a naked, completely unleashed market can adapt as fast as any virus. We have inductive evidence for authoritarianism. We have to deduce libertarianism. We can still argue about the moderate window between themโbut we know it sucks.Maybe, just maybe the deaths are good, and you shouldn't try to stop it? Maybe evolutionary pressure is the answer to retroviral phenomena? Nobody wants to hear this take, it's too real.
Moreover, what if even these concepts of libertarianism and authoritarianism trap us within a simplistic frame? They seem to be oppositesโbut they both work. Suppose we could construct some kind of five-dimensional political geometry under which they were actually one thing? Libertarian authoritarianism might work even betterโฆ