Comments by "Peter deWolf" (@StoneShards) on "Ashe Schow of the Daily Wire's Excellent Moral Panic Article" video.
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"Moral panic" does more to obscure the clear view of the current situation than it does to elucidate it. It's a dismissive phrase, not useful, except to historically pigeon-hole events. To me, all these "moral panics" are actually the responses from those in society less able to accommodate sudden realizations of the nature of their reality, brought to the fore by a suggestive confluence of events. "Panic" is the point of it: a lot of people take the blue pill, fearful of the change that new knowledge commands. Ignorance simplifies choice-making; difficulty looks more painful than promising.
It's not helpful, beyond a point, to identify "moral panic" dismissively. It's the usual tendency: identify conceptually, create label, apply label liberally, then forget the conceptual identification. Panic seems to me more a heightened state of indecision than of fear/anxiety. It's time to drill down past the umbrella terms (i.e. "fear", "love"...non-utilitarian terminology better saved for poetry) in order to get a sturdy handle on meaning. Real meaning gets lost in the cracks between such large/vague terms as "fear" and "love" and, especially these days, "hate". You can use such bloated terminology to communicate sufficiently (usually) in the case of basic directive interactions (i.e. "Go there", "Do that", etc.), but it is utterly useless in penetrating the nuances of meaning that confuse more contemplative/involved interactive investigative discussions. So, this means, if you don't know/use any other words for "hate" (besides "hate"), you won't be able to talk about it very well. And if you can't talk about it, you can't understand it well enough to handle it effectively. You wanna know how to stop hating? Learn and use more/other/different words for your "hate", until your (subconscious) word choices begin to reveal to you the true nature of your "hate"! When that happens, the lack of understanding that underlies the "hate" is transformed to a sufficiency of understanding, in the face of which the "hate" simply cannot exist.
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