Calm reflection is now guilty by association and the implications are not good

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

--Yeats

There was a time when calm reflection was a better sign of moral character than accusing, disgusted outbursts and cries of moral calamity.

But something has happened.

The ascendance of sociopathy in the US has revealed a ruling class of calm and cold-blooded killers leading a clan of angry, violent ignoramuses. Men like Ben Schapiro and Steven Miller and Mitch McConnell act without conscience but also without fever. (Lindsay Graham, Donald Trump, Jim Jordan and their ilk are sociopaths, but not fully socialized sociopaths, so their outbursts put them in a second tier.)

What this has meant, it appears to me, is that many on the left, especially many liberals who once valued independence of thought, honest reflection, and respectful discourse, have come to associate cold-bloodedness with evil, and this seems to have loosed the tide of frenzied blood-letting in leftwing discourse. That is, once the liberal class started to associate calm discussions of painful, social problems with reactionary rhetoric and immoral character, respectful interaction became guilty by association, and the feeding frenzy was fed steroids.

Social media is now a piranha tank. Piranhas don't kill each other, but when another fish tries to navigate through, it is bloodied in an instant.

Facebook has explicitly or inadvertently tried to incentivize balkanization. If someone who disagrees with you reports you -- I have been "canceled" by Fox Viewers three times (and yes I appreciate their hypocrisy)-- FB banishes you. It makes their business model work best if we all block anyone who disagrees with us, and swim in homogeneous pools of like-minded souls who confirm our biases and support our craziness.

As confirmation bias is one of the key flaws of an irrational mind, Americans have taken up a challenge, and social media has supported that effort, to become as ignorant and irrational in as short time frame as possible.

While most are reading with the idea of emotional tagging -- they're in a mad race to decide if the meme is something to applaud or attack -- the few who are left trying to figure out whether the idea is right, wrong, or in need of amendment are criticized for lacking revolutionary zeal of one sort or another. The Left is famous for its tests of loyalty -- and it is clear today that there is little room for respectful disagreement on the Left --- but the Alt Right has done great work becoming all clan and no mind, with proclamations of RINO and brutal attacks whenever a Republican wakes up with a conscience. With few exceptions, Republicans who spend 24 hours afraid of going straight to hell are so lambasted by the Alt Right ideologues that they rush back into their putrid dens as fast as Punxsutawney Phil after seeing his shadow.

Trump's defeat in 2020 means 10 million of us will not be dying of Covid-19 and sucked dry of any future by Plutocratic thieves, but even sans Trump we can't actually survive as stupid as we are. For example, the 1.9T relief package needs to be paid for eventually -- and if we don't return to pre-1987 tax rates we will have essentially crippled our children's future in this country. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The arguments on social media are, frankly, so poor that fewer than 1% of the time the proponent of an idea has actually organized his or her logic and evidence to make an honest claim. Critiques are about as well organized, so most disagreements degenerate into nonsense.

Further, everything is out of proportion. In New York State, for example, we have suffered a serious and tragic setback with covid-19: many deaths and economic devastation. I am skeptical that NYS can survive fiscally. Our governor is doing 2-3 crisis jobs, most above his head, frankly. He is clearly overwhelmed by the impossible budget crisis he must solve over the next month. It is discouraging that people who imagine themselves to be morally mature think that the lives lost and the damage done by distracting him in the midst of these crises are justified by their moral absolutism. He should be investigated, as most moral people will agree, but if Trump's prosecutions could wait years, Cuomo's can wait until we are out of the fire. Attacking Cuomo at this moment is akin to slapping the driver of the car because you learned that he was guilty of something upsetting and you cannot wait until the car arrives at its destination.

Until we learn to interact with those we disagree with and learn from one another much more effectively, we will not grow. Further, until we learn to cooperate with one another, we will not be ready to solve the existentially-threatening climate crisis which is about to reach a lost endgame from which there is no coming back.