@EdCates @johnzajac This is honestly one of my (least) favourite things about "liberal society". You can say to a friend "fuckin' gorgeous night we're having here, innit?" in earshot of a cop in a bad mood, and find yourself with a breach-of-the-peace fine. Or you can shit out one of the most hateful sentences ever uttered, but do it with the tone of civility, and you'll get published on the BBC News as a "respected author".

"Civility" is just shorthand for "a mechanism, defined in the moment, the absence of which becomes the excuse to silence those who have been traumatised by the systems which make rich people rich, less they say or do something inconvenient to those systems".

@johnzajac Oh, wow, there's still time to shape how lead is going to be introduced to our drinking water? Cool, cool. Can we choose "pipes", or is that too derivative?

"Don't be so ridiculous; that's an emotive fallacy and you know it. Lead-poisoning literally kills people, this just makes coding easier. You're sticking your head in the sand about its benefits."

Lead pipes "just made plumbing easier" for centuries too. Actually, we knew about the harms of lead long before we did anything about it. Leaded petrol was introduced after other forms of environmental lead were outlawed. Because, y'know, people stuck their head in the sand about the harms.

...

One of the "adult in the room" things that liberals seem to frequently latch onto, is overriding or "sacrificing" their instincts and intuitions. Unfortunately, this usually seems to include their conscience (among other more basic things, the selection of which seems mostly coloured by unchecked survivorship-bias). Replaced instead with a somewhat low-resolution facsimile of normality, completely disconnected from its place in history. Which, given how easy it is for the normality of the moment to be manipulated by people with several trillion dollars at their disposal, can be somewhat problematic.