Iluta Abolina’s Reviews > Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation > Status Update

"You can’t eradicate crime by sending people to jail. You can’t fix the opiate crisis by bombing poppy fields. It’s tempting, but far too facile .. That may, in some cases, be clarifying; it may produce a temporary victory, or a moment of catharsis; but it doesn’t address the roots of the affliction. What we need, and urgently, is a new moral vocabulary.

"the content—it was often fairly polished, even cerebral[:] ..hour-long lectures about politics and race and opera and Romantic poetry. ..At first she found them shocking; then engrossing; eventually, the dialogue started to merge with her internal monologue, until she could hardly tell the difference between what they said and what she thought. Becoming a member ..was a gradual shift in your mental vocabulary.

"To be a truly original thinker, .. one had to be comfortable plumbing the outer bounds of one’s knowledge, even pondering the unknowable. But Big Swinging Brains were often loath to admit that their knowledge had limits [and].. tended to be hostile to ideas that challenged them. Ideas that were fundamentally incompatible with their life choices..they considered laughable, unthinkable, far outside the Overton window.