Running a deliberate eugenics program is unseemly in 2020, but it’s okay to look the other way and let a virus aimed in approximately the direction you want do the work. Running a deliberate institutional eugenics program (destroying ones you don’t like) is still ok though.
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For evil to prevail, all it takes is for one asshole to recognize a temporary moment of historic steering capacity and grab it to derail the good-by-a-slim-margin fragile, slow trend. Trump found not one but two such levers: irrational white sentiment against Obama, and a virus.
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Obama was no saint. He was par for course among presidents in office since globalization kicked in. But he happened to be black and that unleashed an acute fear available for the right opportunist. A few Obama voters and blacks voted Trump, but he mainly rode white fear to office
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In his fourth year, the virus has turned what was Trump’s uphill struggle to dismantle a Obama’s legacy into an easy downhill course. Software eating the world has proved a harder force for him to steer. But countries like China have done a great job with it.
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In case it isn’t obvious, my “eugenics by happy accident is ok” point in first tweet is sarcasm. If it needs to be said, it’s an awful thing to let happen, and not very different from running death camps yourself.
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This thread is unfortunately a rather awkward attempt to try and pick out a rather complex pattern of evil emerging out of an opportunistic manipulation of potentially good forces using transient leverage. It’s not a simple kind of evil that’s going on. This trips up moralists.
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Humanists want to keep it simple. Just “resist” what Trump is doing with sheer force of abstract moral clarity. Unfortunately it isn’t simple. He’s steering potentially good forces towards evil, and it is tempting to try and shut down good forces in the process of stopping him.
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Ie, it’s the easiest thing in the world to let anti-trumpism turn into leftist anti-globalism and anti-techism. Sadly this is what I think will happen.
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I don’t hold out much hope for both forces (globalization and software eating the world) being put back on their fragile net-good tracks. I suspect both will just be pointed in a new evil direction. Decades of turn-taking in distorting big forces towards mutually opposed evils.
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End of conversation
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