Jay Judkowitz

🧵 In Defence of Nuance Nothing on this list, race, religion, migration status, politicians, capitalism, socialism, AI, social media, free speech, regulation, is universally good or bad. Say that sentence out loud and it sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. Nobody in their right mind actually believes an entire race, religion, or migration status is a monolith of virtue or menace. Nobody seriously thinks every politician is corrupt or every politician is trustworthy, that markets are either the source of all prosperity or the root of all harm, that state provision is either the guarantor of fairness or the enemy of freedom. And yet look at how public argument is actually conducted, on @X, in tabloid front pages, in the mouths of politicians reading from a script written for maximum outrage, and you'd think the opposite was true: that every group, every ideology, every technology has a single moral valence, fixed and knowable, and that anyone who says "it depends" is dodging the question. This is the binary trap. It is not an accident of bad-faith actors alone, though plenty exploit it deliberately. It is a structural feature of how modern political communication rewards certainty over accuracy. A claim like "some asylum seekers commit crimes, most don't, and the ones who do aren't representative of the group" is true, boring, and unshareable. A claim like "asylum seekers are flooding Britain and something must be done" is false as a generalisation, thrilling, and extremely shareable. The incentive structure of social media doesn't reward the first kind of claim. It punishes it with silence while rewarding the second with engagement, and engagement is the only currency that matters to an algorithm. The same mechanism works in reverse for people who want to defend a group uncritically. "Immigration has net positive economic effects" is true as an aggregate statistical claim but gets deployed as though it forecloses any legitimate question about strain on local services, integration, or specific bad actors. Absolutism isn't a right-wing habit or a left-wing habit. It's a rhetorical shortcut anyone can reach for when nuance is inconvenient. The same flattening happens to the people who represent us. Every scandal gets generalised into "they're all the same," a line that lets the specific politician who did the specific corrupt thing off the hook by dissolving them into an undifferentiated class, while also letting the person saying it off the hook for doing the harder work of distinguishing who actually deserves scrutiny. The opposite absolutism shows up too: uncritical loyalty to a party or a leader that treats any criticism as betrayal. Both moves avoid the actual question, which should never be "are politicians good or bad" but "is this politician, on this issue, acting in good faith, and how would we know." Few pairs of words generate more binary noise than capitalism and socialism. In reality, every country on earth has some kind of 'mixed economy', which combines elements of free-market capitalism with government regulation and welfare provision, blending free-market and social-democratic elements. "Capitalism" gets used interchangeably to mean innovation, choice, and growth, or exploitation, inequality, and ecological ruin, depending entirely on who is talking, with the underlying reality, a set of institutions and rules that can be structured well or badly, disappearing under the label. "Socialism" gets the same treatment in reverse: shorthand for either solidarity and a functioning welfare state, or shorthand for authoritarianism and empty shelves, again depending on who's talking, with the actual policy content, how much is publicly provided, how it's funded, how it's governed, vanishing behind the word. Every reasonable well-functioning economy is a mix: markets doing some things well, public provision doing other things well, regulation correcting where either one fails on its own.