Venkatesh Rao

Some dressed it up further with being on autism spectrum becoming an aspirational contrarian-genius claim. Basic logical error. Many geniuses being on the spectrum does not mean all on the spectrum are geniuses. Sadly, most just have compromised judgment with no upside.

Anyhow, back to shame, insincerity, and hypocrisy becoming part of the OS again, and shamelessness, scene-making and cheater-detection going back to being occasionally useful and tolerable tactics, rather than treated as a lofty contrarian-genius-asshole philosophy of governance.

In case you’re wondering why I’m focusing on cheater-detection as a pathology...https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1343975213424250881 …

Forgot perhaps the biggest piece of the shame/regret/forgiveness layer of the OS, which Biden is reinstalling: a proper place in public life for death and mourning, which occasion perhaps the most sincere displays of shame/regret/guilt/etc. Biden’s brought that back in a big way.

Some people suspected the constant presence of the late Beau Biden in the narrative was more than a little staged. But there has been a core of sincere emotion there. The sense of this inauguration also being the first public mourning for 400k dead from Covid also feels real.

Stuff like this Arlington ceremony... they just didn’t seem meaningful when Trump did them. He seemed puzzled like a blind person at a silent movie. At some level he didn’t seem to get why people were doing somber ceremonies. I suspect he thought funerals are just extreme PC.

There’s a sense of narrative claustrophobia being lifted. There’s a lot more room in the grand narrative for a spectrum of narratives that don’t need to all cohere. This pluralism is ironically what the trumpist narrative monoculture demonized as a monolith. Pure projection.