Alas, I have depicted you posting "Young Sheldon? Inconceivable! ;-)" as Louis Malle from My Dinner with Andre and my own slight revulsion as Wallace Shawn from My Dinner With Andre

(And pointing out that "Vanya on 42nd Street" is a modern but powerful rendition of Chekhov that showcases his range or pointing to that play he wrote about drones or his essay about socialism just feels like I'm playing into the same reductive framework of cultural telephone)

(like, it's not even that they know Shawn as the guy from that movie they fondly remember. But it feels weird that whenever he comes up in any context, people are like "Don't forget that this guy played Vizzini in Princess Bride." Pulling out Grand Nagus just feels like an equally reductive counter)

(It's hard to get into this without fatally dissecting the joke logic, but this has always been a pet peeve of mine and it's funny to me that there's a meme that perfectly describes the situation, but about the same guy in a different role)

yeah i totally get what you're saying. i'm more peeved at a) those on the left dismissing it as "censorious hall-monitor liberalism" and b) the guy himself for apparently not doing due diligence and leaving himself an opening to avoid damage. that's a pretty low bar if you're running for office!

the simple answer to all of this bullshit is that we're not a monarchy and we don't and shouldn't base our values or our assessments based on whose genes are being carried. as humans we're all goddamn cousins, and we are all cousins to every other lifeform on this planet

like at a certain point of pedantry, are we going with "that's not your uncle, that's your aunt's husband"? or "that's not your aunt, that is your father's adopted sister"? what the fuck are we doing here

See i told you it would be a hot take

But I'm trying to get at why this place doesn't yet feel like a true substitute for what the other site used to be. It feels like it's in the grip of maladaptive psychological and ideological strategies that were once necessary and are now seemingly just habitual.

(Whereas on the other site fascists doxx and threaten you and the Department of State openly posts wrongthink as the sole reason for revoking someone's visa. It's orders of magnitude worse, don't get this twisted as some kind of apologia)

Part of it is just a sense that when the discourse is venting and overwhelmed, it sort of flattens everything into a useless and affectless space where everything and nothing lands but it's all important and urgent. I'm starting to recognize this as just an unproductive and unhealthy state of mind

Being on this site for any length of time feels like the quickest and surest way to diagnose problems with my politics and psychological baggage that I bring to the table. I feel an unusual aversion to posting substantive stuff here. It feels creatively stifling. And I don't totally understand why.

Like we haven't figured out how to draw the line between good faith and bad faith disagreements and so we just default to treating disagreements as being in bad faith or (more perniciously) good faith but revealing unaddressed character flaws

The real problems with this site have nothing to do with excluding bad actors and everything to do with the upstream habit of scrupulously identifying bad thoughts as a substitute for politics.