Get Ready For President Tucker (5-3-23)

02:00 New Yorker Radio Hour: The Fall of Tucker Carlson, and the Making of Candace Owens, https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/episodes/fall-tucker-carlson-and-making-candace-owens
05:00 Megan Kelly: What New Leaked Tucker Videos Show
08:00 NYT: Carlson’s Text That Alarmed Fox Leaders: ‘It’s Not How White Men Fight, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/business/media/tucker-carlson-text-message-white-men.html
33:45 Tucker could be president
38:00 Left and Right have lessons to learn from Covid, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=147662
49:00 Vice’s downfall, https://unherd.com/2023/05/my-part-in-vices-downfall/
55:00 Not how white men fight? https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/its-not-how-white-men-fight
57:50 Hoover: Charles In Charge: God Save the King with Douglas Murray, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faZPQR2t5m8
59:00 How To Romanticize Your Life || Being the Main Character of Your Life, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdsE5vCTaWI
1:05:30 NYT: The Mundane Thrill of ‘Romanticizing Your Life’, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/well/mind/romanticize-your-life-tiktok.html
1:12:00 Elliott Blatt calls in to talk about Tucker Carlson

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Romanticize Your Life By Finding Your In-Group (5-3-23)

12:00 Surgeon General tackles loneliness, https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/02/health/murthy-loneliness-isolation/index.html
18:00 MSNBC: We need social connection for our survival: Surgeon General on risks of loneliness
25:00 The price of working from home
48:00 Julie Hartman goes down the rabbit hole with Dennis Prager, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58r1MbuH9oM
49:00 Decoding Dennis Prager the guru, https://www.lukeford.net/Dennis/indexp2a.html
1:12:00 Guardian: Chimp Empire review – this epic tale of betrayal is like Succession, but with apes, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/apr/19/chimp-empire-review-this-epic-tale-of-betrayal-is-like-succession-but-with-apes
1:22:00 When Vice was the future of news, https://unherd.com/2023/05/my-part-in-vices-downfall/
1:25:50 Chuck Johnson ahead of the curve on Vice, https://dailycaller.com/2013/07/03/vice-founder-famous-for-truth-telling-has-history-of-lies/
1:27:00 Roger Scruton on why intellectuals are on the left
1:31:00 NYT: Carlson’s Text That Alarmed Fox Leaders: ‘It’s Not How White Men Fight, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/business/media/tucker-carlson-text-message-white-men.html
1:35:00 Hollywood writers going on strike are forming powerful bonds with each other, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2023-05-03/writers-strike-boom-bust-golden-age-gold-rush-column

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The Waco Warning (5-2-23)

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When you feel ignored…

I hate feeling ignored. It hurts. But it rarely drives me crazy.

I interpret being ignored, usually, as a loud answer to the bid I was making for someone’s attention. I don’t tend to stew over it. Instead, I think about how often I ignore others, and how people ignoring me are likely acting in their best interest. Then I think about how I can realign myself with reality so I don’t stay in this pain.

I sometimes bid twice for someone’s attention, but if that doesn’t happen, I almost never bid a third time. I digest the important information conveyed by being ignored (usually I have over-estimated my importance to the other person), and then I move on. There are plenty of people who are happy to respond to me. So I take time to reconnect with myself, mourn if necessary, soothe myself, and when I am at peace, I move back into the world.

I don’t hold a grudge against those who ignore me, because I know how often I ignore others. When people who once ignored me get back in touch, I usually respond positively. Sometimes that has taken more than 15 years. At age 56, I don’t cling much.

One of the sickest feelings I’ve had is when I’ve butted into conversations where I’m not wanted. I don’t think that has happened to me often over the past five years, but on the rare occasions it has, it’s a reminder that I’ve lost touch with reality, usually with a delusional sense of my own importance.

The more isolated I get, the more delusional I get, while the more connected I get, the better I get.

When I feel bad, such as when I’m feeling ignored, I no longer try to distract myself from the bad feeling. It’s usually telling me I’ve suffered a loss. I no longer seek to drown my sadness by blissing out with grandiose fantasies. I try to understand what I’ve learned from the setback and I grieve. Within a few hours, or days, I’m back to enjoying life with the people who enjoy me.

Men’s Health says April 5, 2023:

If you communicate with people throughout the day—basically, if you’re human—then you, like me, sometimes find yourself “following up,” “circling back,” and generally coming to terms with being ignored, especially considering all the other instances in your life in which you might go unheard. (No response to a “let’s reconnect” DM to an old friend; crickets when you ask your landlord to renew your lease; no answer from the doctor’s office, even three days later; hello, barista?) At a certain point, feeling invisible can begin to take a toll on your mental health.

In fact, Kipling D. Williams, Ph.D., a professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University, found that being ignored literally hurts—it triggers the same part of the brain that registers physical pain. Technically, you’re experiencing ostracism. You may think of ostracism as the stuff of black sheep and outcasts, but it basically means you’re being excluded from group dynamics or otherwise feeling ignored. The person or people ignoring you might not even know they’re doing it. They may not have received your message, might have been on vacation, or just haven’t had time to respond. “It’s hard to know what they were thinking. But it doesn’t really matter. From your perspective, you are perceiving that you’re ignored and excluded, and it has its effects on you, whether or not it was intended to be that way,” Williams says. That sensation of being invisible feels so bad because it threatens some basic human psychological needs. And it works quickly. In experiments, Williams and his team watched what happened when some people were left out of a virtual ball-tossing game with strangers—about as low-stakes an ostracism scenario as you can imagine. They saw that those people being ignored reported elevated feelings of sadness and anger after just a few minutes.

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NYMAG: Where Is the Republican Soul-searching for Getting COVID Wrong? Fauci is at least answering some hard questions.

Jonathan Chait writes May 2, 2023:

Conservatives got COVID extremely wrong. Where is the accountability? Where is the course correction? The answer is that they don’t exist, because the conservative movement is incapable of engaging in them…

Donald Trump threatened to fire Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a top CDC official, for telling reporters in February 2020 that the virus would likely spread to the United States. Trump insisted that month that China was “getting it under control more and more, that the United States had just 15 people [with COVID], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” He repeated over and over: “Just stay calm. It will go away.” (March 10). “It’s going to go away, hopefully at the end of the month. And, if not, hopefully it will be soon after that.” (March 31). “It is going to go away. It is going away.” (April 3). “I always say, even without it [a vaccine], it goes away.” (June 16). And on and on…

But even highly respectable conservative intellectuals made utterly absurd claims about the pandemic’s likely death toll. Hoover Institute scholar Richard Epstein predicted COVID would kill just 500 Americans, before correcting a small computational error and revising the prediction to 5,000 (still a gross underestimate, as more than a million Americans have perished from COVID-19).

In March 2020, the Journal ran an op-ed arguing that the standard models of the projected COVID death toll were “too high by orders of magnitude,” proposing the actual death toll would be 20,000 or perhaps 40,000. The prominent voodoo economist Kevin Hassett created a model that persuaded White House staff that COVID deaths would drop to zero by mid-May 2020.

The wishful delusion that COVID posed barely any serious health risk produced other delusions. Hydroxychloroquine would cure it! The vaccines were unnecessary or even harmful! These errors were the product of ingrained mental pathologies on the right, which is why a figure like Hassett is now merrily assuring Republicans that defaulting on the national debt would be no big deal.

Far from examining the epistemic bubble that produced these bizarre beliefs, conservatives have coalesced around them. Trump is now running away from Operation Warp Speed, because it constitutes a political liability for him. Ron DeSantis, the Journal’s preferred candidate, has turned the anti-vaccine movement into a powerful wedge against Trump. DeSantis has appeared with and promoted anti-vaxxers and recruited an idiosyncratic vaccine skeptic, Joseph Ladapo, to run his state’s health department. Florida is “affirmatively against” providing the COVID-19 vaccine to children, making it the only state to adopt such a position. Ladapo recently altered a study to exaggerate the risks of the vaccine.

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