* How do you keep offering insights? You’ll feel tempted to get out of your lane and to leave the areas where you have genuine expertise. You’ll feel compelled to relay conspiracy theories. How else do you maintain your conviction that you are one of the rare people who truly sees reality?
I love the podcast Decoding the Gurus. I agree with their analysis of Scott Adams.
A few years ago, I said Scott Adams offers more unique insights per minute than anyone else I knew who broadcasts on Youtube every day (I don’t think I knew anyone at the time who was delivering social commentary on Youtube every day).
In retrospect, I think Scott had useful things to say in 2015 and 2016 about the rise of Donald Trump, but his show has gone downhill in the past two years.
Email: “I thank you for your videos that mention quality of life in Australia. I have immense trouble figuring out where I should live. I really do, it causes much pain and consternation. Your comments help. I wish I still had the innocence and openness you have in talking to strangers. I tend to be quite misanthropic, when I see these strangers it crosses my mind seventy percent of them are pro abortion or insert other negative thought here. I know that is not a good way to be I will probably be in Australia for rest of my life and your appreciation of things I ignore about it is helpful it is a salve to me.”
* Many people who buy into the great replacement, it becomes their magic key, and they interpret covid restrictions as though elites are trying to kill us. “They want us dead!” Much of the low-brow AR has become anti-vaxx.
* There’s no connection between how people sound and how they are. Some people sound depressed and lacking in confidence and yet they’ve built a great lives. Some people, like me, can sound like they know what they’re doing but not so much. I can make a great first impression, it’s just when people get to know me. I’ve rarely had friends less competent than me, nor GFs worse than me at reading social cues.
* What’s the underlying tension that drives your addictions? For me it is my frustration with how my life is turning out.. I have been behind in social skills from the time I started school in 2nd grade. I know some other kids who started school late experienced same thing.
* My first reflex when something doesn’t go my way is to throw out the f-bomb. Is this bad?
I’ve been walking about 20 kilometers a day since I arrived back January 6.
In his 2020 book “Politics Is for Power,” Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts, sketched a day in the life of many political obsessives in sharp, if cruel, terms.
I refresh my Twitter feed to keep up on the latest political crisis, then toggle over to Facebook to read clickbait news stories, then over to YouTube to see a montage of juicy clips from the latest congressional hearing. I then complain to my family about all the things I don’t like that I have seen.
To Hersh, that’s not politics. It’s what he calls “political hobbyism.” And it’s close to a national pastime. “A third of Americans say they spend two hours or more each day on politics,” he writes. “Of these people, four out of five say that not one minute of that time is spent on any kind of real political work. It’s all TV news and podcasts and radio shows and social media and cheering and booing and complaining to friends and family.”
Real political work, for Hersh, is the intentional, strategic accumulation of power in service of a defined end. It is action in service of change, not information in service of outrage…
But fury is useful only as fuel.
…Steve Bannon has made it his mission to recruit people who don’t believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers.
…I’ll say this for the right: They pay attention to where the power lies in the American system, in ways the left sometimes doesn’t. Bannon calls this “the precinct strategy,” and it’s working. “Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local G.O.P. headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers,” ProPublica reports. “They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.”
The difference between those organizing at the local level to shape democracy and those raging ineffectually about democratic backsliding — myself included — remind me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.
“We do not have one federal election,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. “We have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results. While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can’t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they’re spending, what technology they’re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.”
