Quote:
Social Justice Warriors often say "[that fact] is problematic", or "[that fact] is part of rape culture", "[that fact] supports white nationalism". What do they mean? They mean [that fact] makes people think thoughts, and leftists can predict what those thoughts will be.
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But real people in real life tend to be complicated, so it's more like, [that fact] makes people think thoughts, which leads to other thoughts, which leads to counter-thoughts, which leads to counter-counter-thoughts, and then compromise thoughts, and then somebody actually does something, but they're clumsy, their instincts take over, they get caught up in the moment and what they were thinking the whole time has no connection to what they actually do.
(Deep Breath).
You don't know what it's like to be old, but I know what it's like to be young. When you're young almost everything you know has been taught to you. In order to teach it to you, we had to simplify things, in order to give you a clear picture we used brighter colors than the real thing. The cluttered background was removed, the distracting sharp edges were filed down, the confusing details were blurred out. Your view of the world is like a child's toy:
Of course when I put it this way, it sounds absurd. OF COURSE you know that trains are more complicated than that. But do you know HOW much more complicated it is?
Here's the Tokyo subway system:
And that's STILL a toy, with the bright colors, the lines straightened, and everything labeled, and all the clutter deleted. Let's zoom in a bit:
Still simplified. Everything is bright enough to see, with clean, clear lines. It doesn't tell you that part 81 is worn down. Part 57 has a hairline fracture. Part 22 is actually cheap Chinese knock-off, it will rust soon. Part 86 is actually a part 85 but it seems to work for now so nobody noticed.
That's just the transmission, just one piece of just one vehicle.
And that's just physical engineering, where you are dealing with stable, steady, well-understood forces like gravity, friction, inertia, whatever.
To translate this to social engineering, imagine if parts 36 and 64 are willing to sabotage the whole thing because when you asked them to do their job you didn't ask politely enough. Imagine if part 84 refused to screw in because it has an ancestral grudge against part 70. Image parts 61 through 65 mutinying because someone heard a rumor that the gears are greased with pig fat, or beef fat. And every caboose wants to be on the front of the train, and the tracks don't want to stay straight because they want to show off what individuals they are, and the wheels decide not to turn because turning is out of fashion now, and it turns out parts 34 through 46 don't even exist, there were added to the diagram so part 19 could sell the extra lubricant on the black market...
It's almost a miracle that anything works at all. And you think that a replacement you dreamed up in your dormroom is really going to do the same job, only better?
Are you certain that you're ready for this?
Consider that one of the defining songs of your generation is someone complaining that
teenage boys are too complicated:
I have been a teenage boy. I know how simple I was.
So, my dear SJW friends, the next time "
So what you're saying is..." wants to escape your lips, consider that while I'm willing to swap out part 132 for a replacement 132B, and the oil dripping from part 103 is worthy of further investigation, I'm still not with your plan to bulldoze all of Tokyo in order to replace the subways with unicycle-carriages pulled by free-range organic camels.
Even if it looks really cool.