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For generations, kids couldn’t wait until they reached adulthood so they could smoke, drink, eat four-course meals, make money, drive cars, have sex, and, if they were the type to join the military, legally kill other human beings. Now we would rather log on and tune out, preferably in the womb-like comfort of a Snuggie, which is the perfect thing to wear as we gaze at photos of kittens while gnawing on delicious cupcakes.

Nom-nom-nom.

There is probably no such thing as an uncomplicated cute image. As the essayist Daniel Harris argued persuasively in his 2000 book, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic, our enjoyment of adorable stuff has a hidden dark side.

“The process of conveying cuteness to the viewer disempowers its objects, forcing them into ridiculous situations and making them appear more ignorant and vulnerable than they really are,” Harris writes. “Adorable things are often most adorable in the middle of a pratfall or a blunder.” He mentions Winnie-the-Pooh’s getting his head stuck in a beehive as an example and goes on to argue that children themselves are not really so cute; cuteness, instead, is something we do to them. (Think of the Zach Galifianakis character in The Hangover outfitting the little baby with sunglasses.) L

ike everybody else, Harris has a family member who sends him cute images via e-mail. “My sister sends me things that are practically sadistic,” he says. “What was the thing she sent me? Accidents of cats! Jumping through things and not quite making it. It was very much in keeping with my point about the sadism of cuteness.” In his view, the Internet has not changed what we find cute. “But there is a change in the availability of these images,” he says. “The medium has made us hungrier for this stuff.”

Harris’s linking of cuteness and sadism applies to the famous “Hahaha” video: the baby may be cute on his own, but the clip heightens his vulnerability by presenting him more or less trapped in a high chair and reduced to a hysterical powerlessness by his father’s sly utterances of “Bing” and “Dong.” “There is something dark about using children for the pleasure of our maternal needs,” Harris says. “We enjoy being caretakers so much that we will create situations in which they need our care.”

Dans une tribune du Figaro publiée le 5 novembre 2009, Luc Ferry montre que l’idéal républicain français est pétri de christianisme : alors que la France est universellement reconnue pour avoir apporté au monde une nouvelle conception de l’universalité des droits, gravée dans la déclaration de 1789, Luc Ferry rappelle que cette conviction “que l’être humain mérite d’être respecté indépendamment de toutes ses appartenances” est née de l’union singulière des valeurs républicaines avec l’héritage judéo-chrétien. Et de rappeler : “N’en déplaise aux laïcards, notre identité doit au moins autant à la religion qu’à la laïcité.”

Concrètement, le principe fondamental selon lequel “je mérite d’être protégé en tant qu’être humain ’nu’” nous vient d’un développement de la Parabole des talents. Dans un monde aristocratique où la valeur de l’homme vient de son extraction sociale, la Parabole des talents impose “l’idée que ce qui compte, par-delà les inégalités naturelles que nul ne songe à nier, ce n’est pas l’héritage, mais ce que vous allez en faire, pas la nature, mais l’histoire et la liberté”.

Luc Ferry conclut donc : “D’un point de vue républicain, comme d’un point de vue chrétien, le petit “trisomique” possède désormais la même dignité morale qu’un Newton. La preuve ? Quels qu’ils soient, les dons - intelligence, beauté, force…- peuvent être mis tout autant au service du mal que du bien”.

The historical experience with agriculture is, in fact, an excellent illustration of the so-called “Luddite fallacy.” This is the idea—and I think it is generally accepted by economists—that technological progress will never lead to massive, long-term unemployment.

The reasoning behind the Luddite fallacy goes roughly like this: As labor-saving technologies improve, some workers lose their jobs in the short run, but production also becomes more efficient. That leads to lower prices for the goods and services produced, and that, in turn, leaves consumers with more money to spend on other things. When they do so, demand increases across nearly all industries—and that means more jobs. That seems to be exactly what happened with agriculture: food prices fell as efficiency increased, and then consumers went out and spent their extra money elsewhere, driving increased employment in the manufacturing and service sectors.

Companies with shareholders may very well be incapable of tolerating the openness and transparency so many social media folks clamor for. When every corporate decision you make influences the bottom line, in real time no less, you seek and destroy bad PR wherever it is found. They’re not clueless, they’re heartless—they exist to make as much money for their shareholders as possible. This isn’t horrifying; this is every day in most of corporate America.

So where does that leave us? A 21-year-old wrote a blog post. A guy broke the corporate rules and got fired. The internet (and the blogger!) is outraged. The name-calling continues, as everyone blames the big, bad, clueless, hopeless company. Mr. X will likely land somewhere less corporate, where speaking his mind is welcomed and his designs will see the light of internet day.

But the web will still be full of arrogant, uninformed, polarizing, self-promoting, controversy-creating content that has ramifications no one wants to own up to. And consequently, the web will still be lacking in common courtesy, humility, and the admittance that most of us don’t know best. Which is sad, mostly because it’s true.

The belief that sexual deviants by the tens of thousands are prowling the Internet in search of children to entice and corrupt, and that their ranks are increasing rapidly, has won broad popular acceptance. The most widely cited statistic is “one in five,” as in the number of children who have supposedly been approached by a sexual predator on the Internet. The origin of this figure is the Department of Justice’s National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which first reported it in 2001. Five years later the center amended the result to one in seven, but by either measure the figure suggests nothing less than an epidemic.

Until you look closer. The actual question posed in the department’s “Youth Internet Safety” survey asked teenagers under 17 if they had received an “unwanted sexual solicitation,” which was defined as follows: “a request to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that was unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult.” Since “adult” in this case was defined as anyone 17 or older, the definition included many would-be high-school Romeos, predators of a highly conventional and not particularly dangerous sort, and also took in a strain of intimate gossip familiar to all teenage girls. As the study’s authors themselves noted, half the solicitations came from other teenagers. Not a single solicitation led to actual sexual contact.