michael_nielsen

Examples include alpha (male), welfare, GMO, fundamentalist, hate speech, riot, SJW, quotas, etc.

If you stand slightly back from the Left/Right...it's like a ping pong match of simplistic semantic signaling. Then the auto-reactivity.

The job of writing and art is exactly to challenge this gullible complacency. To sharpen skepticism without increasing pessimism.

“A principal task of art is to strengthen the adversarial consciousness.” —Susan Sontag 

(Is it from her Paris Review interview, which is the piece on her I reread most often?)

I had to look it up, but yes! She's such a mentor to me. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1505/the-art-of-fiction-no-143-susan-sontag …

I actually asked because I specifically _didn't_ want to look it up. Every time I open that page I end up rereading the whole

What a gift they've made it free & open to the world.