the bastards' last stand

Sometimes there are virtual interactions that are jarring in ways only the too online would recognize. Social media has become the cultural lab for discourse. It's the place where new themes and memes are cultured before being released into the wild to go mainstream. I remember laughing out loud after being called nazbol and strasserite for criticizing the George Floyd riots of 2020. It felt like an archaic insult from someone transported through time from 2017. (In the real world that would be equivalent to being called a jive turkey by someone who had just arrived from 1975.) Nazbol and strasserite were the way self professed online socialists accused others of being neo-nazi collaborators. That was before it became normative to directly frame supporters for one party in our political binary directly as nazis, skipping all euphemism. Reading nazbol in 2020 is a lot like being called anti-vaxxer now or seeing the mRNA inoculations framed as safe and effective. It is a reflection o

There are numerous parables written centuries ago which have withstood the test of time. We continue to share these parables with our children because they convey complex truths in simple and direct ways. Newer creative works continue to borrow from these tales because the moral lessons are timeless and universal. Although our societies have evolved to be much more layered and complex, humans, essentially, have not. We are not that different from the days of the Panchatantra stories of India or Aesop in ancient Greece. The complexity of our societies allows us to fool ourselves into believing that we have evolved with a similar level of complexity because of our intellectual and technological advancements. As adults, we tend to approach the moral lessons of our parables as quaint notions rather than universal truths. We forget that five people touching different aspects of the same thing might have five different perspectives like the 5 blind men with the elephant. Instead of balancing