Since this is a sermon/rant, I am going to relax some of my rules of engagement and make some assertions that I think are reasonably supportable – but I may not bother supporting them. We can discuss them in comments if you want to challenge them. Otherwise it’s difficult to write without producing a great big bodge of anti-{skeptical trope} defences to head off pyrhhonian challenges.
One of the essential tools of political philosophy, I believe, is the technique of modeling how someone else would react if you traded positions with them. I.e.: imagine you do to me what I was about to do to you.
Let me encourage you to do something odd.
It’s not a toy, it’s an instrument of mass death.
If your opponent goes low, you should either respond in kind, or stake out a position from which you arguably look superior. Let’s get a case study from Joe Biden on how to do that wrong.
You can’t own all the problems; sometimes the best you can do is give a small nudge and let nature take its course.
Sometimes, history coalesces down to a vector – a sort of spontaneous push where a bunch of things all come together and civilization seems to be going in the same direction. That’s mostly an effect of my imagination, I fear, because when we look closer at what’s going on (or what has happened in the recent past) it decompiles into a swirl of messy social pushes in all kinds of directions that make no sense at all.
Here’s a candidate rule: any time you see an organization trying to enforce its own system of justice and discipline it is because:
One of the nasty side-effects of a market “maturing” is that the large companies that shape the market will use their installed base as leverage to try to split the market so that they can dominate the split part more thoroughly. It’s a gamble: they hope they can pull customers from the other “side” and lock them in. I’m sure that capitalists have some explanation how this makes a market more efficient, but I suspect they’re talking about making the market more efficient for the vendors, and not better for the customers.
Imagine that you go to play roulette in a casino, and the house wins unusually frequently. For example, every time. So you go the the caisse and say, “have you noticed that…?”