This video is nominally about Doug Ford. But he goes into federal vs provincial vs municipal spending/taxes, how different cities within a province can be working against each other, etc.
Tl;Dr IRL, you see the face behind a premature opinion - you know when someone's just young, instead of an idiot, and you account for that. Online, everyone is pretending to be grown, and you only see the likes - and instead of knowing to guide someone who's obviously a little naive, you question your own convictions based on the popularity of some kid's. And then bam, you've got a reality TV star as president, and Congress is a tiktok challenge.
If you're over 30, you likely have noticed certain patterns as people grow up. Kids hit puberty, get introduced to a bunch of new ideas, and think the older generations know nothing about them. Youth are deeply insecure about their identity, but also incredibly certain of their convictions - wavering as they are. Mostly because those convictions are social tools to them. You can show a young man a "cool" character in a movie, with a really terrible outlook on life, and they WILL embrace that outlook. Young women love that Marilyn Monroe quote - "if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best" and despite this clearly being a really selfish take, will just embrace that philosophy. Because celebrity. Every single trend is the future - because they don't yet have the disappointing experiences to temper their belief. Their ethical convictions are more or less taboos - to them, racism is "don't talk about race or language or culture", transphobia is "don't question ANYTHING", and religious extremism is defended because religious tolerance. "Weaponized tolerance", and all that - their convictions are mostly the stuff they're brought into, because it's all (mostly) they have to form their convictions around - that's why young men are targeted for radicalization by extremist organizations. What experiences they DO have are often limited to things like bullying, abusive parents, and isolation - and they can speak well on these and have well informed ideas. But those experiences can also taint their overall judgment - applying in places they shouldn't - leading to general anti-authority and anti-cooperative outlooks. The brand of counter-culture that labels itself anarchist, but doesn't have an answer for feudalism - because it's not a rational idea, it's an emotional one. Because they're impressionable, and the ethical/moral convictions they feel SO strongly about, aren't grounded in theory, experience and error correction - it's just feeling, and a search for identity.
For most of human history, this was balanced by being able to see who's talking. You could physically see that the person you're talking to is just a teenager. Or has just become a man. So you knew the context of their opinion. I imagine this is where the younger-but-still-old "respect your elders" norm, where youths were dissuaded from speaking their opinions came from. And I'm pretty sure this was a bad thing, and terrible for them. At the same time, the internet has made it both harder to recognize someone's age AND harder for a youth to NOT take a side. They're socially punished for not knowing the current taboo - often by peers of theirs: little snots who ALSO don't understand the convictions they're purity checking, but are eager for social clout. The little shits.
The result is social media being absolutely inundated by highly impressed opinions. Opinions that previously, adults would have had the context of - and could have guided on, but now, are being reinforced by droves of similarly impressionable youths. Any guidance that is offered, is attacked by those same people, looking for the social advantage of calling out someone's taboo - high school behaviour, masquerading as grown up dialogue
It brings high school dynamics into the public discourse. And it's obviously affecting us - I'm sure you've heard people call the current US admin the tiktok administration. A bunch of influencers. Those types THRIVE with a young, impressionable base - and we've sorta normalized it. We've normalized the behaviour and interactions and emotion-led-decisions of youth, to the point that half of America voted based on it.
The concept of "critical thinking" is 100% something every youth has learned is good. But critical thinking requires error-correction of your convictions - and that's something you don't learn until you're older. Until youve been embarassed by arrogance enough to temper it. They don't know what critical thinking (or racism, or bigotry) is, but they're online talking about it - heavily influencing public perception. So now, "critical thinking" is really just "what is the wittiest and shortest argument I can find against this". It's just "how many opposing sound bites can I find about that issue", and instead of doing the work to assess each one - independent of wit - just deciding "yeah there's no answer."
Adults are getting dumber because we can't recognize when the person arguing with us is fkn 15 - because we are social beings, and the comment with 10000 hearts appeals to us - even if it is the most predictably shallow youth-take there is. Youth are getting dumber, stressed and checking out, because they're not allowed to just "I don't know" the hundreds of opinions they're forced to have. I mean ask a teacher - it's bad. And not in a "kids don't learn cursive / the name of all 12 apostles / the sharp sting of a ruler on their knuckles anymore!" way, but in a "this story doesn't have themes. . . I dont practice literary analysis, I'm Catholic" way. That's an actual comment I received from a 17 year old a few months back. I don't even know what Catholicism has to do with it.
My go to example of this is Internet privacy, because it WAS my cause as a young man. I advocated the hell out of that. While Facebook was selling my finger print, and Amazon was outing me to advertisers, I was talking about my right to say edgy shit anonymously on 4chan. Porn shame was part of it too. Now I'm grown, and seeing all the cancerous shit the internet enables. I work in an industry fighting cyber wars against hostile nation states - wars on OUR tech, which THEY are winning, because they had the balls to legislate the warzone. I complain about ads a lot, because they aren't relevant to me - because I made them that way, for privacy. The people - the orgs - who pushed me to privacy advocacy, I learned were simultaneously trafficking in my info under another name. Orgs who's interest wasn't in privacy, but in preventing legislation - because profits. That's ANOTHER controversial opinion really, but its still a big ass thing these days. VPN companies push VPN "privacy" to consumers, saying it protects you from getting hacked - omitting that public VPNs prevent adoption of more secure methodologies like conditional access. Things actual security firms recommend - VPN orgs interfere with, and sell to you as "privacy and safety".
I'm 30ish and the last few games I've bought, I really didn't get in to. So I'm really reluctant to get something new. But I find Avowed's magic system looks really interesting and deep - and this is appealing to me.
Reviews seem pretty mixed tho. Is it worth it, to play around with a cool magic system?