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Notes -
Zunger said it better, and like six years ago. Policy starvation's a bitch, ain't it?
What's policy starvation?
One of the observable mechanisms of social decay.
Long ago, I promised to write an effort post about this, but then I kinda lost the ability to write effort-posts. Here's the short version:
People want a thing. People clamor for the thing they want. Lots of different would-be leaders step forward offering to help organize the getting of the thing. These would-be leaders each have a different plan for how they'll get the thing. The plans tend to differ a lot their projections of how much effort and extremity will be required to get the thing.
As a rule, people don't want effort or extremity, so they tend to go with the plans that promise the easiest solutions first. When those don't work, they grudgingly accept the plans involving a little more pain and effort, and so on. Ideally, they reach a plan that gets them at least an approximation of what they want without too much pain and hardship. The people get what they want, the successful leaders are lauded for their excellent work, and everyone goes home happy.
But suppose people decide they want something that can't actually be gotten? The process above is carried out, starting with the easy plans, then the moderate plans, then the serious, hard-nosed plans. One by one, these plans are attempted, fail, and are discarded, but the people are still unsatisfied. Failed plans might be tweaked, but after a number of attempts grow discredited, and people stop backing them. If the thing people want isn't achievable by the means available, and people won't stop wanting it, you get policy starvation: people gravitate to to solutions and the leaders proposing them that under better circumstances would never be given the time of day, but now amass credibility as the only people offering solutions that haven't already obviously failed, if only because they haven't been tried yet. In the same way that physical starvation drives people to the extremity of eating spoiled food, and ultimately grass, shoe-leather or human flesh in an attempt to satiate their physical need for sustenance, starvation of policy drives people to extreme political acts: insurrection, revolution, civil war, democide.
Look around you, and you'll see it everywhere, on both sides. In this case, troll or no, Liberalism's promise was that once we adopted its norms, everyone would just sorta chill out, everything would work out, reason would carry the day, mumble mumble you get the Federation from Star Trek. It hasn't worked out like that. His generation did not, in fact, get it right, and they were, in fact, making promises, promises they were powerless to fulfill. And so they gifted us a world where people have lost confidence in the moderate Skokie solutions, and turn to Zunger's extremist zealotry instead.
Thanks for the explanation!
What does "Skokie" mean, though?
This incident, one of the iconic incidents on which 90s liberalism was founded. Shorthand for the dominant social consensus in favor of expansive freedom of expression, which used the case as a common-knowledge touchstone.
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