The thesis / recommendation seems pretty clear to me from the opening paragraph—if you see a mind-killing political example, just calm down as a reader and refuse to be mind-killed.
IMO, that’s not helpful advice. It provides very few tools for diagnosing when you’re overreacting, and no techniques for actually implementing this refusal.
More importantly, it ignores the fact that you need mutual knowledge, not just calm, that you AND ALL READERS are interpreting this as only a value-free fact estimate, and not the overwhelmingly more common cluster of topics that includes how to act on it.
We can only go a step at a time. The other recent post about politics in Discussion was rife with obvious mind-kill. I’m seeing this thread filling up with it too. I’d advocate downvoting of obvious mind-kill, but it’s probably not very obvious at all and would just result in mind-killed people voting politically without giving the slightest measure of useful feedback. I’m really at a loss for how to get over the mind-kill of politics and the highly paired autocontrarian mind-kill of “politics is the mind-killer” other than just telling people to shut the fuck up, stop reading comments, stop voting, go lie down, and shut the fuck up.
The thesis / recommendation seems pretty clear to me from the opening paragraph—if you see a mind-killing political example, just calm down as a reader and refuse to be mind-killed.
IMO, that’s not helpful advice. It provides very few tools for diagnosing when you’re overreacting, and no techniques for actually implementing this refusal.
More importantly, it ignores the fact that you need mutual knowledge, not just calm, that you AND ALL READERS are interpreting this as only a value-free fact estimate, and not the overwhelmingly more common cluster of topics that includes how to act on it.
We can only go a step at a time. The other recent post about politics in Discussion was rife with obvious mind-kill. I’m seeing this thread filling up with it too. I’d advocate downvoting of obvious mind-kill, but it’s probably not very obvious at all and would just result in mind-killed people voting politically without giving the slightest measure of useful feedback. I’m really at a loss for how to get over the mind-kill of politics and the highly paired autocontrarian mind-kill of “politics is the mind-killer” other than just telling people to shut the fuck up, stop reading comments, stop voting, go lie down, and shut the fuck up.