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feels a bit like how you treat a kid playing Pictionary.
A phenomenon that psychologists call “pluralistic ignorance” begins to set in: when no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes.
Overton window is a newish term—named after late political scientist Joseph Overton—but it’s a concept as old as democracy itself: that for any political issue at any given time, there’s a range of ideas the public will accept as politically reasonable. Positions outside of that range will be considered by most voters to be too radical or too backward to be held by a serious candidate.
No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people. ―William Howard Taft
honor culture has given way to its opposite: dignity culture.
A second form of victimhood—experience victimhood—is
People faking illness is so common that there’s a term for it: Munchausen syndrome.
Victimhood culture encourages people to define themselves by their suffering, their trauma, their vulnerability.
Tumblr, which is kind of like the blog version of Twitter, made being sad an essential part of what made you interesting, and so it led to romanticizing mental illness.
“people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it.” As a consequence, “social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.”
“We’re operating on like, five or ten different definitions of racism simultaneously at the moment as a society. And yet the word ‘racist’ carries a severe stigma. So the stigma is very precise, but the definition is very vague.”25
“To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
weren’t merely wrong, they were blasphemy.
difference between using and mentioning a word—what’s known as the “use-mention distinction.”
“Paradox of Tolerance” like this: If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
