See the problem with this though, is that if everything’s just pretend and made up, then I can’t get mad about Elon Musk’s “Nazi Salute”. And yet, there are abundant red flags showing a rise in fascism, that if ignored, may very well permanently alter the world order and our standard of living. In the past 48 hours there was a significant chance the supply of coffee that drives most of my economic output could be disrupted or tariffed.

And, that’s because a lot of this comes back to the connotation of the word, “pretend”. Replace it with the word, “Idea”, and you get sort of the same concept, but suddenly the non-existent thing sounds much more powerful.

Hit a military target. No one got super outraged when terrorists blew up the Cole. But when they took out 3k civilians on 9-11, or about 1.5k civilians on 10-7, they made a lot of normally anti-war people very angry and willing to look away while their military made horrible mass casualties as a response.

So, the problem is if you kill a few angry people, they all have at least 2 friends/family members, and therefore you create twice as many angry people as you destroy. The only way killing angry people actually reduces the number of angry people is in fact genocide. But if you’re willing to commit genocide, you have to stop and ask yourself if maybe, you’re the angry person.