Like, the sidewalk is a public forum. If you want to tell Trump to go to hell on the sidewalk, he can’t stop you from doing that specifically for the purpose of using government to chill a viewpoint. Somehow that got transmuted to “private individuals can’t block me when I’m being an ass.”

It’s unfortunate because there were some good-faith legal arguments in recent First Amendment jurisprudence that Twitter was a “public forum” (a legal term of art). A lot of the nuances got lost in this discourse, lotta bad takes, and then we got some bad rulings. Really a worst of both worlds vibe.

Besides the endemic fraud and money laundering, I think the most offensive part of that community for me is that pervasive, awful “code is law” thought-terminator. It’s so small-minded. The parrots who repeat it remind me uncannily of Patrick Bateman.

The crypto bros aren’t a “critical” industry. They’re not fixing any of the problems leading up to 2008. Rather, they are just recreating the same system with themselves as the boot. We should not be subsidizing with tax $ a machine that exists basically to solve sudoku puzzles and cook the planet.

I will also never convince many people that the Earth is not flat. That doesn’t make it subjective. One opinion is justified by evidence. Your “abortion is murder” hypo is excellent. Given conflicting evidence, which way does the overwhelming weight of the evidence point?

Whether abortion is murder isn’t a question of opinion. Believing really hard that a thimble-ful of cells is a person has no bearing on that non-sentient non-being’s non-agency. This hypothetical guy just made a fuckup in moral reasoning. And there’s a technical name for that: doing evil.

Our culture puts a lot of emphasis on “innocence” (as if “I believed what I was doing was good wholeheartedly” was the sine qua non of goodness) in a way which implies that moral facts don’t exist. Sometimes we fail to be our best selves because we chose not to look or our reasoning was faulty.