The Long Nap: Difference between revisions

The Long Nap (edit)

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 ''The problem that this now leaves us with in the United States (and which I believe is echoed abroad) is that this class is all that is left of our national coherence, and they are continuing to hold on to power well past their retirement dates—because in a democracy, any shared group beliefs in nonsense, and particularly self-serving nonsense, will still beat an incoherent haystack of noise that nevertheless contains the missing needles of truth.''
-''And that's where I think we are. Our seniors believe in self-serving nonsense supported by legacy sense-making structures that have a measure of coherence is its major value. And this is weirdly a bipartisan coherence. President Trump, the CDC, the Surgeon General, the Speaker of the House, the Mayor of New York, the Washington Post, have all agreed to various obviously wrong statements about this virus, designed to shield our economy and our institutions from having to look at their abject failure to deal with the crisis in the face. The younger generations are habituated to the chaos of the internet, where the truth is regularly found sitting next to kitten memes shitposting and chaos.''
+''And that's where I think we are. Our seniors believe in self-serving nonsense supported by legacy sense-making structures that have a measure of coherence as its major value. And this is weirdly a bipartisan coherence. President Trump, the CDC, the Surgeon General, the Speaker of the House, the Mayor of New York, the Washington Post, have all agreed to various obviously wrong statements about this virus, designed to shield our economy and our institutions from having to look at their abject failure to deal with the crisis in the face. The younger generations are habituated to the chaos of the internet, where the truth is regularly found sitting next to kitten memes, shitposting, and chaos.''
 ''Yet it was from these dark alleys and corners that the consensus was first challenged. And our younger and more alienated adults are paying attention to the fact that the establishment center was obviously lying in matters of life and death about the efficacy of face masks, the meaning of small numbers of deaths in the face of the law of exponential growth, and the very real possibility that this worldwide pandemic originated in a high-security Chinese bio lab.''
-''Because the most aggressive such nonsense has become structural through what must be admitted to be an unexpectedly successful pattern of perseveration over more than four decades, our senior leadership class can be relied upon to engage in magical thinking on just about everything in the world of policy. They are not wrong in the same way that younger people on the internet are wrong—with a million different personal opinions which when aggregated seem to cancel each other out. Instead, this group is actually distinguished by their ability to close their eyes and march in a coherent and even bipartisan direction whenever the source of their growing wealth is actually a suitably and sufficiently disguised transfer from their own children, or a transfer of power to a foreign competitor.''
+''Because the most aggressive such nonsense has become structural through what must be admitted to be an unexpectedly successful pattern of preservation over more than four decades, our senior leadership class can be relied upon to engage in magical thinking on just about everything in the world of policy. They are not wrong in the same way that younger people on the internet are wrong—with a million different personal opinions which when aggregated seem to cancel each other out. Instead, this group is actually distinguished by their ability to close their eyes and march in a coherent and even bipartisan direction whenever the source of their growing wealth is actually a suitably and sufficiently disguised transfer from their own children, or a transfer of power to a foreign competitor.''
 ''Which brings us to the following generations and their Great Awakening from the Big Nap. At this point, it has become clear to the younger generations that an enormous number of young, alienated, deeply-indebted, and underemployed Millennials or Gen-Xers were able to see this coming for some time. The timestamps on official tweets and newspaper filings are a matter of public record, and there is little question that the wretched internet menagerie trounced the experts on a global matter of life and death. I cannot believe I'm saying this, but in many cases, the cesspool that is 4chan outcompeted the nation's top-ranking health officials and did so handily. When the dreaded internet—made up of supposedly untouchable trolls, gadflies, tech bros, xenophobes, grifters, edgelords, shitposters, racists, fascists… which is to say, the basket of deplorables beyond the control of the institutions that our betters warned us about—easily outcompeted the telegenic MDs, Ivy Leaguers, editorial boards, mayors, and even the executive branch, the jig was finally up: the need to stay within institutionally-acceptable parameters of discussion functioned as if it was an 80 point IQ handicap. The Overton Window had become a deathtrap of defenestration into the waiting jaws of COVID. Those whose primary concern was not public health, but instead respectability, protecting short term profits, or covering for our lack of preparedness, ended up giving deadly advice.''