was I wrong?

These days, I try to keep away from politics and current events here on the blog, but that doesn't stop me from dropping comments over at Instapundit, especially in the daily "open threads." Someone had put up the following French-language tweet, which I thought made a great deal of sense, but which seemed to be missing some balance. So, because I'm often bizarrely inspired to write in French when I see French-language tweets, I wrote a French response (and without AI, thank you very much). 

Here's the tweet, then my response:

Je crois qu'on ne mesure pas ce qu'Elon Musk est en train de construire avec X.

Tous les médias de l'histoire ont été couplés à une culture, une langue, une bulle géographique. Le Monde parle aux Français. Le NYT parle aux Américains. NHK parle aux Japonais. Chaque média filtre…

— Brivael - FR (@BrivaelFr) April 5, 2026

I wrote:

Très bien exprimé, monsieur. Nous sommes en train de voir une supernova d'idées qui se globalisent instantanément—et les gouvernements et les médias ne peuvent rien contrôler. C'est le rêve de l'internet, enfin réalisé.

Mais en même temps, il faut considérer l'avertissement de Michael Crichton qui, dans son roman Le monde perdu (The Lost World), a déclaré que le pouvoir de survie reste dans les mains de la diversité—ces "bulles" isolées dont vous avez parlé. Quand l'information est simultanément répandu et disponible partout dans le monde, le monde risque de tendre vers la monoculture, et la monoculture est une force qui peut affaiblir la civilisation.

Donc il faut, à mon avis, essayer de maintenir un équilibre robuste entre l'unité et la diversité pour assurer la survie de la civilisation mondiale.

Translation (by something called "Deep L," and put up by a commenter):

Very well put, sir. We are witnessing a supernova of ideas spreading across the globe in an instant—and governments and the media can’t control any of it. It’s the dream of the internet, finally realized.

But at the same time, we must heed the warning of Michael Crichton, who, in his novel *The Lost World*, stated that the power of survival lies in diversity—those isolated “bubbles” you mentioned. When information is simultaneously disseminated and available everywhere in the world, the world risks drifting toward monoculture, and monoculture is a force that can weaken civilization.

So, in my opinion, we must strive to maintain a robust balance between unity and diversity to ensure the survival of global civilization.

For my efforts, I got this smartass comment in return:

Who invited these Macron plants?

—as well as three downvotes by the rightie thought police. Why? What did I say that was so unreasonable? Were the downvoting idiots so fixated on my use of the word diversity that they were immediately triggered? Oh, no! Liberal alert! Diversity in itself isn't good or bad; it just is. What determines the goodness or badness of diversity is the context. In the States (and in many European countries), racial diversity has been pushed to a ridiculous extreme while the left simultaneously demands absolute ideological conformity, even from the members in its own ranks. The American right has, lately, been pushing back against this ideological convergence in favor of ideological diversity of thought.

If anything, my post's warning about "drifting toward monoculture" (I would've translated that as "tending toward monoculture") should fit smoothly into the conservative brain since today's conservatives are so against globalization (practically a synonym for monoculture*). You'd also think that conservatives would want to preserve "local color" instead of watching everything meld into one bland, uninspiring shade of brown or beige or gray where everyone thinks and acts and learns and cooks and plays in exactly the same way—a world of robots.

Even the original French-language tweet got a dislike. Incredible, the idiocy of some people. And here's the thing: If someone were to disagree with me, surely that person would at least recognize that nothing I said in my response was intolerably radical.

"Macron plant." Jesus Christ. I'd rather be thought of as a Crichton dittohead.

__________

*AI, being programmed by leftists, is no help here. Google "globalization and monoculture," and the AI god will say that monoculture is a bad thing... but only because the overall "culture" is becoming more Western which, from my perch in Korea, strikes me as laughably untrue (Korean Wave and all that). Countries are all trying their best to "globalize" each other, and it's not obvious that the West is winning this contest.