Facebook is other people
kevinmunger.substack.com
kevinmunger.substack.com
> We all hate Facebook, and Facebook (the corporation) is, admittedly, terrible. But to a large extent, we hate Facebook because Facebook is other people.
That said, I think there is something to this, and some parts of this article put some ideas into words that I think I'd previously subconsciously noticed, but had never quite fully grasped and crystallised into concrete thoughts.
The description of his older relative who is just starting to get online was particularly poignant. It's easy to forget how hard this must be for so many people who didn't have the luxury of growing up with this technology like I and many others here did.
This bit particularly hit home:
> If he gets online, he is at serious financial risk; never very financially savvy, he will be defenseless against the legions of outright scammers, identity thieves and ransomware extortionists.
And this rings true too:
> And his presence as a consumer of online news will have negative consequences, both for himself and for the wider information environment. He is an embittered, lonely man, the perfect target for information fraudsters who will claim to explain that the source of his pain is some despised group (immigrants, the deep state).
A lot of food for thought.
Those who are in power know they can use the disenfranchised as their whip.
The article correctly identifies imo that it’s paramount we need to start thinking inclusive when it comes to setting up society.
Or like that quote, a society is measured how they treat their poorest.
Pretending to act on someone's behalf while belittling them (a recent case being changing Lantio/Latina to latinX because virtue signalling), all the lies everywhere (look at this perfect sponsored life I live).
My city now sports nothing but black flags and stickers, or thin blue line flags. BLM were bullied from showing support publicly.
People would rather complain than help the homeless.
Home owners will screw over the rest of society to protect their 'investment'.
Businesses treat their employees worse than ever while paying them the lowest ever.
The rich oay nothing in taxes.
The list goes on and on.
The Internet isn't making people crazy.
People have been fucking crazy this just lets them have the aforementioned megaphone.
The solution at this point is starting over.
If you don't like what the mirror shows you, breaking the mirror or replacing it won't solve the problem.
Truly, I'm down to get together with some people, buy an island, and start from scratch.
Putting bandaids on squirting arteries does nothing.
More people have access to transformative resources than has ever been the case.
All the ills around you were even worse in the past and its only the incremental efforts of the decent that have gotten us to these heights.
We haven't fallen from grace - we're rising out of the muck.
We kill/harm each other at record rates.
We are sinking into the muck, using wet naps to clean our eyes to pretend we are making things better.
So please elucidate where you think we are killing eachother at record rates, because I don’t think that is the case.
Need I go on? I'd ask instead what good do you think we humans are doing, and further if you believe it outweighs the bad?
A friend of mine started small with a organisation and now helps tens of people a year with domestic issues. All people who might have been worse off, and perhaps start doing bad things.
1) Access to education 2) Labor norms 3) Lifespan and infant mortality 4) Social justice 5) Depth and breadth of our understanding of subjects from physics to mathematics to philosophy to justice (setting aside that there's also plenty of navel gazing in these efforts)
These have made a dent, and there's plenty more to do.
One thing I take issue with:
> This electoral democracy still excludes the poorest and least capable in our society, who cannot keep up to date with politics and make it to the polling station to actually cast a ballot.
We have to stop doing this. If we want to create some kind of common set of values that binds us together regardless of class, wealth, etc we also need to accept some things that we can collectively agree as positive or negative traits or values.
Too often, middle class people infantilise the working class, refuse to accept that they have agency, and ascribe their lives and behaviour to externalities and societal injustice. This doesn't help anyone, it just reinforces the division of society and stops us seeing our neighbour (regardless of class, wealth, etc) as essentially the same as us.
The poorest in our society can keep up-to-date with politics, and a lot of them do. All they need is a TV or radio, and the poorest in western society can get hold of one of these. If they don't, that's fine, I don't accept there's a moral imperative to do so if it's not your bag, but let's stop with this nonsense. Just go to hustings or the local meet of any political party and you'll meet people from all wealth brackets. Probably more of them poor than wealthy. So where does this idea that poor people can't keep up-to-date with politics come from? Any that want to can, and most do.
Similar sentiments like: poor people can't be expected to read books, or eat vegetables, or go for walks, or tell their kids to do their homework, or help their kids to read, etc, etc. None of these things require money. Oh, but what about the institutional injustices, and the ways in which our society is configured such that poor people do not benefit from having those values instilled? And the fact that money stresses preclude other less critical concerns finding a time or place? Sorry, that's middle-class well-meaning crap, and it's helping to destroy any kind of cohesive set of shared values we once had.
I disagree, at least to some degree.
My counterpoint is to merely point to the “fundamental attribution bias” as being the usual direction of human cognitive biases.
The general idea is to “enable” people to have more agency and to give them the tools and support they need to make informed, self-interested decisions. The idea is not to blame externalities directly.
Those things still require free time. Having these as values and being able to regularly practice them are two different things. I don't see how that fact is "well meaning crap".
1. they often have multiple jobs since many jobs on the lower end don't pay a living wage.
2. they have longer commutes so they live in less expensive communities where their wages can go further. But those communities tend to have less available jobs overall.
https://www.statista.com/chart/15224/daily-tv-consumption-by...
The decrease in television watching is actually among the more technically literate, not illiterate; according to Nielsen, younger people are watching streaming services instead of television.
Trying to teach your kids how to read or reading them a story cannot happen when much of the tv is consumed.
Parents using TV as a crutch to entertain kids is really common, and I'm eternally grateful I grew up in a home without TV. However, that was pre-modern streaming, ipads for kids, etc.
This is a really condescending take, and I don’t think that unhappiness and mental illness magically avoid knowledge workers - perhaps even the opposite. I do think that earning a software engineer’s salary makes you view the world in a different way than most people, and it’s true that I don’t see too many software engineers (angry or otherwise) on Facebook, but perhaps that’s because we’re all hiding here. :-)
This knee-jerk moralizing is a huge part of why “Internet is bad”.
We weren’t like this 10 years ago. The Great Awokening has made everyone more judgemental.
The argument made in the article is that bitter, ostracised people who want to lash out have existed forever. The biggest change in the last 10 years is that the internet has become more accessible to this group and allowed their voice to be heard.
Not saying the author is right, but it's an interesting perspective and definitely worth considering.
I find this somewhat disquieting. I certainly thought it was somewhat true up to the early 1990s.
The implication is that it was always known that people are easily manipulated. They needed protecting from themselves and the manipulators need to come from a certain class.
I object to that notion, but I am appalled at the base insanity that Facebook creates so I find myself conceding the point.
It appears to me that we haven't really switched the model, but looking at the analysis of the tiny number of influencers it takes to generate 90% of anti vax or whatever propaganda on facebook it seems clear this isn't democratization.
We have simply been handed a different set of carefully curated sources of information.
Von Braun said "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?".
Facebook says "As long as people keep reading the content, who cares what the content is?".
[1] https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/06/01/...
[2] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=119247...
Yet all of his examples are of conservatives, even though liberals do the same (often worse). The whole article itself was a very politely written “lashing out” at people who vote differently than he does.
It seems to me that the knee-jerk opposition to "wokeness" always comes from people who would rather sweep problems that don't affect them under the rug than acknowledge that they need to be fixed. They are the aloof, socially normative people in this article, utterly confused by and thus dismissive of the struggles of those outside of society's standard ingroup.
"We weren't like this 10 years ago" because, as the article describes, those concerns were previously ignored by the mainstream because they didn't fit the experiences or interests of those who had influence over the mainstream. Now that those institutions have lost that filtering power, we're hearing from more real people with more real problems. Healthcare access, structural racism, mental health resources, poverty, etc. They are taking their little hammers to our Twitter feeds. The solution isn't to shame and ignore the people complaining about them - it is to fix those societal issues that cause the pain to begin with.
There is a massive hodgepodge of ethnic communities in the U.S., of all possible colors, and their societal and economic outcomes do not conform or correlate to the idea that people of darker skin are more oppressed by the society and are worse off.
10 years isn't that long ago. All those sites were around then, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News...
Even the topics changed only a little bit. GamerGate was 7 years ago. 4chan and 8chan were reviled before that. The major political debates are as old as time. The division between American and European morality is about as old as those world-views.
The callous indifference to society at large is kind of sickening in about half of these comments here. We do absolutely need to address the problems in society, and it takes very little effort to observe it outside of an ivory tower. There are those who are working to change it, and they are being attacked from all sides by nonsense and government sabotage (I'm not talking about protestors, I'm talking about actual social workers and the like being sabotaged by elected officials for decades).
Just go outside of your comfort zone in society once in awhile. It's extremely observable. I figured most IT workers would at least have minimal exposure to this, but maybe many of those here didn't start in tech support.
Your faith that your poor old relative can come to no good end if he's allowed access to public forums is not an argument I can respect. You could be wrong, and where's your right to keep him from going to hell in his own way? Find him better forums that can help, if you so fear the people he may meet.
"On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" is still one of the greatest reasons to have an Internet. People with differences can more easily ignore those and collaborate ont heir shared interests, and thats a good thing. Whether we approve of those interests or not is a separate issue.
How do you identify this class of people who aren't fit to be heard? Who gets to decide?
There are side effects of the way that we conduct society today that can become huge problems when mixed with social media.
Solutions span the range from "prevent the mixing", "adjust society's side effects", to "eliminate social media" (with a reasonable or pragmatic option likely somewhere in-between).
However, I think gatekeeping is overly maligned right now. A fully open community is exceedingly unlikely survive going viral. Influx of new users at that scale is likely to outnumber existing users at a much larger scale, resulting in replacement, or at least dilution of the source community.
Misery might have a nicer veneer when it's not floating in poverty, but to believe that blessedly “successful” knowledge workers only encounter miserable Americans on social media is a stretch.
I think the author overestimates just how good his class has it. Behind closed doors, places like Silicon Valley are just as unhappy if not more unhappy than many other places where people are less educated and less financially secure. Drug and alcohol abuse are common. Many marriages are unhealthy and unhappy. Lots of people are concerned about money even though they have more of it than most people would accumulate in lifetimes. People struggle with their interpersonal relationships and many are lonely.
In reality, the suburbs, college towns and gentrified urban neighborhoods can be very unpleasant places. As an example, about a month before I left Silicon Valley, I had a terrible encounter in an upscale coffee shop. A man physically threatened me after he literally stole my table (where my food and belongings were) while I was using the restroom. This was not a mentally ill homeless person as one might guess, but rather a well-dressed young man who might very well have worked at one of the big tech companies surrounding the coffee shop.
Instead of author's "other people" approach, I'm going with "misery loves company". Facebook isn't other people. It's you.
I like to use a phrase that sums up alot of this: social media has given the village idiot a megaphone.
As the author points out, we can no longer ignore this idiot.
The village is full of "idiots", but they're people who suffered serious head injuries, people who have been mercilessly exploited from birth, people who have trauma and no possible outlet other than the internet.
And a lot of the rest of the village is full of people who are "alright Jack", people who think the "idiots" deserve their fate, people who need someone with a hammer to remind them of empathy. Wink.
Firstly, in terms of social media I doubt that misery would ever stop commanding people's attention. I've heard that in psychology studies people tend to latch more readily onto negative ideas than positive ones in a group setting. For what it's worth, my anecdotal experiences have cohered with this too.
Secondly, I think the politics of pushing equity over mere equality of opportunity is more complicated than proponents would suggest. Humans have an instinctive normative sense of fairness that would need to be subsumed somehow by a more intellectual altruism. I doubt it would be an easy sell to suggest sharing the fruits of everyone's labour regardless of the amount of work each person has put into producing those fruits.
Surely it would not solve every source of human misery, but I don't see how it wouldn't be a substantial improvement.
> I doubt it would be an easy sell to suggest sharing the fruits of everyone's labour regardless of the amount of work each person has put into producing those fruits.
There is a whole branch of political philosophy dedicated to exactly that, which capitalists around the world (valuing utmost the ability to accrue and hoarde capital) have spent over a century turning into a dirty word.
Nowadays in the US, even the suggestion of public healthcare is an untouchable evil, because helping your fellow man is seen as being taken advantage of, and the idea that someone might get something for free is abhorrent. This, despite that fact that public healthcare is normal, successful, and more efficient in almost all other western democracies (because the cost of services isn't padded by executive bonuses and investor returns)
Besides, if you have insurance, you already believe in that general concept. It is a pooling of resources with the knowledge that some may give and take in unequal measures, but that on average less people will need to take than will give, and that you have a safety net in the case of an extreme unlucky event. Same idea, just applied on a societal scale.
Capitalists have successfully ejected murderous regimes from their timeline, by saying that capitalism isn’t really real unless it’s got a free democracy associated with it. Thus imperial Japan, Belgium’s atrocious behaviour in the Congo, the behaviour of the British Empire is completely left out of “capitalist history”.
If you did the same trick for socialism you could just count Denmark, Sweden and other successful mixed-but-really-socialist democracies and you could say that socialist guided economies are actually fantastic. Ie if I define socialism as only real socialism when there is a free market democracy but large well funded social programs that keep the society from excessive inequality, I suddenly have the recipe for some of the happiest countries on earth.
And some people, you know reasonable people who actually understand Marx’s critique of capitalism - not as a recipe but as a pretty accurate descriptor of the end result of the natural forces of capitalism - they might say that Denmark style socialism is actually what they would like.
But of course Denmark = Soviet Union in some peoples mind so that’s impossible.
Let’s forget of course that past Stalin’s death, the USSR’s criminal activity was relatively limited. They didn’t invade a country until Afghanistan and that was still without imperialist purpose - they just believed Afghanistan to be in their sphere of influence. In comparison with American military, the Soviet military essentially was used to put down revolts in part so the world the USSR believed has been left to their influence after Yalta. When Portugal was turning red in 1974, the Soviets refused to have anything to do with it.
Vis à vis the crimes of the Soviet Union or Red China past their murderous genocidal creators - Mao and Stalin - were relatively limited. In the same vein you could argue that the US was also founded on genocide, just of Native Americans.
"To implement the Nordic model, you have to have a society which is a high trust society, i.e. the government is trustworthy and not corrupt, you identify to your state and not to your tribe, you can trust your fellow nationals, and you can also trust to outsiders. This all stems from Lutheranism.
Calvinist societies are highly individualist and they distrust any central government, and they also tend to distrust outsiders. This is why US, Switzerland and the Netherlands have not adopted the Scandinavian model, while Germany has. Likewise, Catholic countries tend to be more corrupt than Protestant, and Orthodox countries even more corrupt than Catholic. This is why the Nordic model won’t succeed in those countries."
Im not sure I agree with you. Yes Germany isn’t Denmark, the distance from US —- German government policy is vast. Even the difference between UK and Germany is vast. What do we call that difference ? Some people might call it socialism, others just more govt intervention. Still the societal dynamics are so different yet “capitalists” and free market folk want to take it all under their wing, while ascribing only genocidal dictatorships to socialist policy.
Private healthcare is also a restricted public (or "group") healthcare. You pay your premium along with the rest of your group (the section of the market that can afford and wants the same provider); the fund's management organise the healthcare and any parallel investment. The "socialist" view is that everyone within the political boundary (state/country/etc) pays into one pot, nominally run by elected officials. The "private" version is that subsets of the political boundary each have their own and the market decides the sets. The _healthcare_ part is the same (quality differentiators aside).
Anyone complaining that social healthcare is wrong/immoral/offensive is lying to themselves.
We have and that's why I never have grasped the fairness of "equal opportunity" while at the same time being allowed to inherit your parent's success (or failures). :thinking face:
I feel like that’s pretty deeply ingrained in the idea of fairness.
One (of the many) problems with that approach is that it takes away a meaningful incentive for an individual to sacrifice their time and energy. Without that there is only your own individual life to enjoy.
As well as “work for my children” and “work for myself”, there is a secret third option: “work for the good of my community / society / humanity as a whole”
You may find joy and fulfillment in pursuing the proxies such as love or even truth, but you're fooling yourself if you think it's not because you are at the core biological.
We forego bowing to genetics and tradition at our peril. How would we convince a sentient super AI to "not be evil" or even describe to it what that means?
I agree our slow-to-respond genetically encoded behavior/values might not be fully optimal for survival in the modern world. And that there are now threats ("evils" maybe) that our emotions fail to correctly respond to.
(Also there are lots of preconditions, aka reasons, for human and other life on earth...)
Under the selfish gene hypothesis, genes seek to increase their own reproductive success, and it’s not a rule that this is aligned with an organism or species fitness. (Of course, genes don’t actually “seek” anything in the personified sense)
I agree, but I expect that's due to scarcity (which forces zero-sum thinking) and we're eventually going to get to Buckminster Fuller's idea of a "post-scarcity economy" where the automation generates enough for everyone.
I think the author's broader point is well-taken, though:
The way we operate as a society today may be generating a bunch of pollution (environmental, psychological, existential, etc...) and we may realize we're going to have to do something to reform that when the negative consequences emerge.
The example in the article is poignant, but part of a broad class.
FB groups is relied on by rescue groups routinely with huge altruistic benefits. An example I personally know: animal shelter workers routinely find homes for abandoned animals, rather than euthanasia...at least in the United States.
The app/product is terrible but this is one of the places where thats not the case
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/18/facebo...
There's an awesome idea for a sci-fi/cyberpunk/horror story in here somewhere.
Reminds me of Serial Experiments Lain.
> There's an awesome idea for
Absolutely gross.
It's not their role to be safe spaces.
However, the impulse to create art that aims to better inform the populace of various sufferings is age-old. Victor Hugo wasn't Valjean, but Valjean was based on an incident he witnessed, and Les Misérables was born from that, to use one example.
Particularly ironic quote in an article that implies that the real source of his pain is privileged “successful” knowledge workers.
And someone no less than Craig Good of PIXAR corrected me at that time, to scold me in public. "Just because you got here first, doesn't make you better than them. You had newbie questions once, too."
=== ==== ==== =======
Chekhov's LITTLE HAMMER is everywhere.
Another point for China style thought police? Reminds me of the chat bots trained on the Chinese vs. U.S. internet.
> So while Tay, after only one day online, became a Nazi sympathizer, Xiaolce offers free therapy to Chinese users.
https://www.inverse.com/article/13387-microsoft-chinese-chat...
I remember when this kind of stuff used to make me feel better because I felt like it "wasn't just me". Now it makes me feel worse, because I realize that no-one will "come and save us".
Also, who are the people running the economy? I think it’s an emergent phenomenon of humans natural behavior, amplified by our current scale and low friction interconnectedness.
I don’t know. I assume there has to be at least some intended direction for them to be able to write comics about it, but I am just a peon in this system :)
Many of those rules are defined by a small group of people (laws), and a very important external factor (money) is directly influenced by central banks. These people decide pretty directly how much and into what types of investments money should go.
And that was about the definition of an isolated incident, or the exception that proves the rule.
So, I'm left wondering what your point is? You think utopia isn't something to strive for? We must accept our fate because of an isolated incident in a country that while much much better at taking care of its people than America is still far from actually a utopia?
Is that really helpful to the discussion ?
Life was really bad for me about 13 years ago, and that means it's easier to relate to other peoples' suffering now. People have practical needs - food, shelter, a little money - but need community even more.
Thanks to ambivalents pointing it out, I read the article, including Chekov's story of the little hammer. I also remembered UncleBob talking about code: "clean as you go" [1]. We can make the world a better place, but the solution isn't to pay someone else to do it professionally - we have to all take responsibility and fix our little parts of the world as we go along. We can also make it better by not only filing bug reports, but suggesting what to do instead. Then we'll all be saying "thank you" all the time!
Treating others in the way that we want to be treated (not how they treat us), dying to ourselves, and giving thanks - that's a message from someone who did "come and save us", our Savior. I'm not very good at following his instructions though >_<
I have a fairly long list of bug reports regarding reality, including suggestions of how things could be improved. Is there somewhere that I can file these such that they might get addressed, or at least considered?
When it's totally outside our control, we can always let the great Debugger know how things are going, and if there's a problem, ask to stop time and hack some solution in. We have to live with the consequences of that being answered though, so be careful what you pray for!
There is a neat end-of-file marker that works in most human languages though: "Amen."
When the Debugger stepped into human life, now that was something special, Immanuel. His name seems like the most logical name to talk to, because we can know Him personally.
I'm curious: why do you believe this? Of course it's not a particularly uncommon belief, but I am interested in where it comes from.
Or, if it was intended more of a casual comment than an accurate prediction of the future, then I will simply ask for that: do you believe it is most likely that ~"no one will come and save us", and if so is a component of that belief based on a belief that ~it is not possible to save us?
That story relates it better than I can: https://www.rei.com/blog/climb/fun-scale
> the final thousand feet was horrifying—steep sugar snow that collapsed beneath our feet as we battled upward, unable to down-climb, and unable to find protection or anchors. On the summit, with the immaculate expanse of the range unfolding in every direction, Scott turned to me and said, in complete seriousness, “I want my mom so bad right now.”
I have this very same feeling now and then. I wonder if you and I are the only ones. Or, is this particular way (how we are feeling it) the only manner in which this......whatever it is manifests in reality? Or might this be some component, one among perhaps thousands of others (or even more, or maybe much less) that keeps humanity at this local maxima trajectory that seems (so they say) headed for some sort of major calamity, on more than one front.
That need is where the moralizing comes from. As the piece describes, there are swaths of people who are left behind by difficult gaps our societal culture - but there are also people who are either ignored or explicitly oppressed by our political system too.
The "evil" in the oppression part is easier to explain (though more divisive) - in modern US politics, Republicans are almost universally hostile towards and opposed to expansions of rights for marginalized groups. LGBT+ rights are an obvious example, which they have almost universally opposed. Yes, Democrats have also opposed things at times and acted slowly, but over time the party has changed to accept them, and Republicans have not. Whenever positive change is made, it is almost universally by Democrats against Republican opposition.
The ignorance part is trickier. As a conservative party, the core Republican demographic has always been the idealized social norm. Almost by definition, maintaining existing social norms is what a conservative party does. In pre-modern US politics (say, pre-1970s), that would be the middle class, straight, white, Christian, male. Because that is the base, that is the group whose interests the party serves. Thus, a blind spot is formed that excludes everyone else in society who does not fit that mold. Generally speaking, their needs are ignored - even fought against, if it would cause disruption to the social norms their base represents and values.
Ignorance itself is not evil. But sweeping known problems under the rug is. Over the last few decades especially, we have learned a lot about the problems of our fellow Americans that have been ignored by society. Minority discrimination, marginalization, extreme wealth inequality, lack of healthcare access, mental health problems, etc... And again, Republicans are almost universally against any change that would alleviate that suffering, usually with the excuse that they are too expensive (e.g. healthcare) or are not real problems (e.g. BLM). The real reason, though, is that any such change might cause discomfort to their base - rich white people who don't want to pay taxes (and the people like the kid in the novel who are manipulated by them).
As society learns more about the people who it has left behind - exactly as this article details - it becomes a moral imperative to fix those problems. Republicans have been purposefully obstructing progress for decades - Gingrich and McConnell have literally bragged about it.
As social media connects us more, the stories of the oppressed and marginalized become louder and more apparent. As this realization becomes more clear (as some would say, "becoming woke"), the urge to fix it becomes greater. At this point, there is no longer a reasonable justification for inaction. Combined with the growing influence of the racist alt-right and clear escalation of anti-democratic practices, it is difficult to characterize them as anything other than "evil", particularly if you are (or are allied to) any of the groups that they harass or dismiss.
However, I believe that it describes a relative conceptualization of the world (Group <X> "is" <Y> relative to Group <Z>).
Hopefully the idea that I am trying to communicate lands as intended within your mind. Assuming it did to a sufficient degree: if you were to rerun this same evaluation process from an absolute perspective, do you think it would come out to at least some significantly different conclusions, paint a different picture, etc?
"I don't want to be political." <posts pro-gun, pro-police, pro-military stuff> "Why do you keep making things political?" <posts editorial about Afghanistan> "Stop bringing politics into everything!" <posts meme making fun of masks>
I think some of these people sincerely don't recognize how political their own views are. They think they're just being patriotic, as though definitions of patriotism aren't political. They think they're just expressing religious beliefs, as though their own religion hasn't had an intensely political role since the day it was founded. To them, "politics" is only about deviating from what they know is Right And True. As long as you agree with them on every political topic, they don't think of it as politics.
The greater issue we are facing is people unable to cope with "dissenting" (read: different) opinions because for whatever reason they think it's a personal affront on their identity for someone to disagree with something they've said online, under an anonymous (not for long!) moniker.
Facebook Isn't Other People. There is no 'democratization'. These platforms did not create anything. Facebook, Twitter, Gab, Parler, Win, Reddit, HN, Wikifarms, are fairly holistic in their representation of what people are actually like from the very beginning. You just don't want to admit you're as much of an asshole as the next poster, if you could get away with it.
Because most people seem to believe in a single objective Reality™. It leads people to not just disagree, but to consider “the other” as having a totally broken thought process. Makes it a lot easier for people to dehumanize the other :/
A response of "Actually, it is the first day fall" I can understand, but how does observing that a given day is the first day of winter, to stick with the above, equate to having some kind of emotional bond with winter? I have never been able figure out the logical leap made. The only conclusion I have been able to come to is that the mere existence of certain keywords is enough to challenge their reality, and making it about the person helps them cope. But perhaps that is just me projecting the idea of a broken thought process on them.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming every account on the Internet is an actual human. I obviously have no way to prove such a thing, but it would be strange if there weren’t a massive amount of bots-posing-as-human online trying to influence opinions and behavior.
But nope it's from June. :/
nope, pretty much the same as June.
"The line “Hell is other people” in French reads “L'enfer, c'est les autres” or “Hell is [the] others.”
(The best known English translation of the play, by Paul Bowles, actually renders the line “Hell is just – other people.”)
We get a little more of the flavor of the line in English if we read it as “Hell is the Other"
https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/07/most-famous-thing....
In English, we are okay with "the young" and "the old" but shy away from doing the same with other terms, especially in the plural. "The poors," "the gays," "the olds" are all considered derogatory trolling.
Not so in French. The best translation of "les autres" really is "other people."
Another example of this is the film ‘Au revoir les enfants’ which a literal translation would render as ‘Goodbye the children’ but is really just ‘Goodbye children’.