What's happened in the US over the last many decades is that these really important identities like racial and religious identities have become associated in our minds with our party identity. So when we go vote in an election, we're not just feeling like our party wins or loses, we're feeling like our party and our racial group and our religious group and all these big parts of what makes us who we are, all of those things get wrapped up in the outcome of the election also.
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But at the end of the day, it's consumption, not production, that defines you as an individual. That might sound like an odd thing to say, especially if you've grown up believing — as my liberal parents taught me — that advertising is a form of mind control that greedy corporations use to force you to consume things you don't really need.
Noah Smith
Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so. It is an easy task, because people who are intellectually lazy are convinced that this miserable terror is "the truth", that this terror is knowledge of the "extra-mental" world. This is an easy way out, resulting in a banal explanation of the world as terrifying.
René Magritte
There's a sense that if it's not hard, it's not real—and I think that's a much more sinister force in society than a move towards optimization.
Noah Brier