An old high school friend decided to start a boxcar/judenstar discussion about freedoms and fee fees. The archetypal MAGAhats were all "yeah! You go gurl! rabble rabble" while a few of her braver friends vomited facts at her. She was deeply offended. She wrote another post about how she was offended. Deeply. What is the world coming to. The archetypal MAGAhats were all "Yeah! You go gurl! rabble rabble."

It has to be terrifying.

There's a large swath of society that no longer parses the content of debate. They put it on a scale and count the exclamation points. They have created a fact-free zone where the subject at hand no longer matters, what's important is the opinions that agree with yours and how deeply you all hold them.

You reach a point where you... have to go around them. You can't help. You can't hold. All you can do is not get any on you when they explode. You can be ready to pick up the pieces and you can do your level best to contain the outcome but you have to acknowledge that they want your involvement less than anything else in the entire world and that all your efforts to improve the situation are strengthening their resolve.

It is weakening the country but it is strengthening community ties. I don't know what the future looks like but I know it will be different.

And frankly, demonstrating to the world that total surveillance and total privacy aren't mutually exclusive is likely to open some uncomfortable lines of questioning for our tech industry and our government, assuming we still have either.