The Ticking Rage Bomb - Persuasion - 0 views
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The revolt has many faces but one sentiment: a desire to upend power structures deemed irrelevant, corrupt or unrepresentative.
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Our political systems don’t have the tools to grapple with the existential threat of climate change, or to control international mega-corporations, or to cope with capital flight in search of lower taxes and labor costs. Social-media giants have become political forces, competing with the weakening liberal order. Facebook’s policy regarding posts on Covid-19 vaccines is much more important to the success or failure of mass inoculation than any government campaign.
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Amplified by online lies, discontent with the liberal order is mutating into an assault on rational discourse itself. With Covid, it means anti-vaxxers and denialists fighting against science. But it’s much wider than that. The energy of the revolt is harnessed by both old and new opponents of enlightenment values. It’s an uneasy coalition of politicians, charlatans, anarchists, fundamentalists, online communities, totalitarian ideologues, neo-Luddites and conspiracy theorists.
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