Not really. The only observation is: want for vindication (which sounds dramatic) is just want for affirmation (which is a word that invokes a different emotion in you.) It's a matter of degree. It goes all Valhalla only when you're starved of it.

You are like a hopeless sugar addict dieter that fantasizes about eating a wedding cake for months or years and when her (or his) pent up unexplainable metabolic rage reaches its breaking point, where she (or he) might have gone with a sensible small chicken salad and then some white knuckling, instead does something so shameful that it's done in the tub.

Yum!

So given enough time to age, "I would really like some kind of explanation" eventually becomes "I will reclaim my good name!"

Duels had that quality. A duel is when two gentlemen go out into the bush together and shot at each other. Usually with an audience but not always.

IN any case, that just so happened to also have its height right around Peak Snobbery vis-a-vis the English.

I'm just saying, the inability to talk about basic home economics might have caused some repression. Repression might have caused a lot of embarrassment that couldn't really be dealt with other than by "besmirching my plantation" or whatever. I wonder if the supposed backstories^* in the history books are just the salvos in a war that's really about something, um, rather personal.

Was every gun duel in history actually a mutual suicide of two lovers ahead of their time? I bet there's not none. "Then let us make a pact, my sweet love." ... "Tell me Arron. Tell me and I will follow you."

Fucking hilarious.

I defy you to find some example in history where there was repression about taboos in a big way and it was so deep you didn't even feel wet, and all that definitely measurably was a net-positive. "Aha! You're talking about butt stuff!" Maybe. But if we were in Papua New Guinea it would be all like "Oh, wives who refuse to eat their husbands brains. Well I'm not one of them!" What does a repressed Papua look like?

If you took a poll of Manhattaners asking "Do you think we should be more open as a society" you could easily confirm without prompting that the fist words of "explanation" will be about sex stuff. Or maybe the runner up. We all know what that is!

It's like there are "concerns" that the whole globe now has as one, in real time, a gigantic ouija board of doom.

It feels good to be audibly concerned when around other people. You learn that they are concerned and they learn that you are concerned. The net happiness goes up. That network extends about as far as how many porches away an average person can yell. "Yes! Glenda and I are also concerned."

But now, in a much cruder way you can sit on the front porch with people who ended up there via a self-whatever algorithm. Do you think they said "no" when the guy offered the idea of, "hey let's, like, let the algorithm optimize itself. You know, just put it in the pipeline."?

Or you might be sitting next to a robot or a neckbeard or a Cossack or an impossibly attractive young perky girl (avoid him most of all).

The new guy, you know, from Stanford, who has spent the last 25 years pounding adderall and reading AI research papers that only a few hundred people in the real world can really grok. He's all like, you gotta do this.

Anyway, it's important to have the right "concern" for the above reasons, so there's a kind of race to win friends by being at the head of the parade when your "concern" is declared the winner.

How do you become the winner? Well, when something bad happens that reaffirms one of your many opinions, you latch onto and amplify it. What is this going to do, you know, now? It seems like it would dampen bad stuff from happening: calling out a bad event (that you predicted) should give everyone pause just that much more. Bad is bad after all.

Given that all parties, so far, are human. You are going to encounter human stuff when for example you loudly point out. "Guy downtown was running naked covered in mustard and mortifying grannies today. Oh, and completely unrelated, cops found his Freemasons card in his wallet^*." If it were a real problem, like "factory explodes. hundreds dead.", and it often is, could picking a fight with e.g. the Freemason safety inspector detract from the actual problem.

What if every "big crisis" was infected with this same thing? Bad thing happens --> Facebook erupts in border skirmishes. The bad thing? It's still getting mentioned endlessly on Facebook. The person in charge of trying to find the cause of the bad thing and preventing its reoccurrence is too tired when he (or she) gets home to flip on the Facebook and "like" anything. Does he (or she) get comfort in the fact that Facebook and the hyperconnected world is just chattering away. Maybe how the boy down the well is doing, or something.

This impulse to be victorious at all costs even if it involves face paint is something worth keeping a spotlight on.