freddiedeboer.substack.com
MelodicBerries virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
(freddiedeboer.substack.com)
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It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive
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Notes -
I love Freddie, in the same way that I love my more mindkilled friends. He's clearly a sweet, genuine dude with a desire to improve both himself and what he feels is his community. Like those who I know personally that have loyally turned themselves in as tinder for the Culture War, his grip has slipped on timing, scale and scope. The internet or technological advancement didn't (and can't) change things in this manner, these things at their most fundamental are force multipliers. This was a purely social shift.
The timing is off too, which begs the question: is there a more appropriate explanation for the change in values and cultural temperature in America, around the turn of the century? We were coming off the post-Cold War cultural windfall, rejoicing in our new lease on life. No more forever wars in places we'd never heard of, no more paranoia towards our actors and neighbors, no more looming threat of nuclear Armageddon. What was this significant event, that pushed us one direction over the others? Some readers may have already clocked what I'm talking about. 9/11 broke the collective mind of America.
We were like a smug toddler yanking the cat's tail, utterly convinced of our moral superiority and basic goodness. We're the city on the hill! Don't you understand we're the most tolerant? Human rights and freedom are our guiding principles! That's why we've been attacked! Are you suggesting something? (I am ignoring the obvious lies that were peddled around the events leading up to and during the hijacking, I don't believe any particular conspiracy is more likely than the official narrative but I don't think they're any more likely to be false, and have the benefit of being formed in the absence of the truth meaning at least it isn't dissembling)
What started as the unremarked-upon regime feng shui in the Middle East began to be taken personally by the unwashed goat herders, and sure enough they organized the bloodiest attack on American soil in living memory (all of this being enabled by actors and assets that we had armed, trained and put into place a few years earlier). We were scratched, like the people whose job it is to anticipate these things could've (read: good chance they had, in this particular case) predicted. No need to check we had our story straight, as a people America threw a fit (not to say that the slaughter of innocents regardless of allegiance should be given a placid response) and the hysteria never relented. We just got used to it.
This, along with the panoply of other factors that weigh in on large-scale features like culture, has unmoored the preeminent world power from reailty. Now we act confused as NGOs, LLCs, nonprofits, legal structures and the more numinous elements of sociological terraforming begin crossing finish lines with speed, rather than finesse.
In my opinion.
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