Hahaha, you're probably right.

Super close! #14 is The Legend of Zelda, #20 is Venture Brothers, and #23 IS Jhonen Vasquez, but it's Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (not Zim).

But then, finally, we go were argument is abandoned entirely: dismissal, mockery, and petty gaslighting. The grease trap of discourse. The slippery dregs.

Only after those have been addressed can you wade into what's left: conjecture, suspicion, belief, or generic assertion. What remains in this space is so subjective that it's inarguable, and so this is the last bastion of a weak argument; it's the place rushed to when the outlook of success is poor.

We can't navigate the complication of it, so we perform in spite of it, until we [think we] believe our own performance.

We don't know the difference between what we've constructed and what lies beneath it. One is driven too often by a desperate, secular attempt to synthesize meaning from social validation, and the other is the indestructible unknown reality that terrifies us.

--is the inability to see the difference between impassioned efforts toward identifying the truth of a situation and the emotional satisfaction of acting in adherence to the tediously curated identity/persona we've build for ourselves.

They're burying themselves in each other, seemingly addicted to the reciprocated affirmation. Even Twitter didn't feel this pedantically adolescent and emotionally incompetent.

I'm not inclined to take Rolling Stone magazine as a particularly salient source of information on social morality.

An argument of convenience, not relevance. The parallel is that both are writings which communicate the views of an author. In the one case, generally a single author; in the other, many authors. A book is a collection of content created by a single..."pleb." Ironic name-calling, given its meaning.

Because whether I like something or not is no indication of its effect on the world, and I'd rather know its effect than be satisfied--or comfortable.

One of the defining prerogatives of an ideologue is to wave off any reasonable dissent as pedantry, so they don't feel an obligation to understand it before lazily criticizing it.

It isn't that it's senseless or misunderstood, it's that you don't care for the effort to acknowledge it.

"Any book worth banning is a book worth reading." - Isaac Asimov

This entire comment section is the fearful, simple-minded madness of crowds. An echo chamber and nothing more. A representative microcosm of BlueSky, as it happens.

Your mental model of the world is a blinding, frantic fiction.