Stop here

Posted Oct 2, 2025 9:49 UTC (Thu) by rbranco (subscriber, #129813)
In reply to: Stop here by prokoudine
Parent article: NixOS moderation team resigns

It's a pity we missed the chance for people to get educated on the Paradox of Tolerance beyond their wikipedic knowledge. We got a meta-discussion instead justifying the use of the term "bigot" to make sure we stick to the Us vs Them dialectic that only benefits those in power and where we all lose.

Stop here

Posted Oct 2, 2025 10:36 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

> Us vs Them dialectic that only benefits those in power and where we all lose.

This is the essence of it. The elites - at whatever level of combination of conscious planning and emergent behaviour arising out of the class incentives - use all kinds of delineated rhetoric to divide and conquer the masses, on lines of ethnicity, religion, culture. But never, never along the lines of class.

And we lap it up. And on occasion, when the curtain briefly splits for a second, and we see how the elites supposedly representing different factions - "Dem" and "Republican", "Labour" and "Tory", "Fianna Fail" and "Fianna Gael", "Al Qaeda" and "CIA" - hobnob together, laughing and slapping each other's backs, few seem to see it.

Too distracted by fighting other little people about whatever little line, whatever flag, they've been cultivated to obsess over, to notice.