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Mike Brock
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Unfashionable.

Yet, through organized society, we have tamed some of its worst elements.

I don't think that's the only difference. I think you should look into the research on symbology and it's relationship to propaganda, demagoguery and in-group behaviors.

What freedom am I advocating be abridged here, exactly?

These platforms are going to make the privacy issues related to advertising and tracking cookies seem like a pedestrian concern in comparison.

I'm not debating they are powerful. I think my original point implicitly concedes that. I'm arguing they lower information content in the discourse, tend towards framing things in black and white, in-group and out-group.

So is a lot of pernicious propaganda. Not sure why this is a salient point. It's not like I'm arguing they should be outlawed or something.

He’s very smart. I have incredibly frustrated disagreements with him (metaphorically that is, as I’ve never met him). He also has significant blind spots.

But I actually think he has valid insights into human nature. Even if I don’t take the same lessons from those insights into the political sphere as he does.

It can be. I think Marxist realism was a force for bad. It really does depend on what the normative goals behind the expression are.

Not it’s not *always* bad. It’s a well-known, evolutionarily selective survival trait. And pretty good one when you consider the landscape of human experiences 20,000+ years ago. I think in the context of a technologically advanced, organized society, it starts to have destabilizing effects that when coupled with our capacity for self-destruction, is a deeply concerning thing.