The groomer thing can be dumb, but can also have some validity especially when schools formalize policies of keeping parents in the dark. "Don't tell your mommy and daddy about our little secret" should never be something adults are saying to children.
That, and some of what passes for "all ages" and/or "family friendly" drag entertainment is pretty raunchy, so if you combine exposing kids to highly sexualized content, and encouraging them to keep secrets from their parents, that adds up to "groomer" not being an entirely inappropriate description. Still gets thrown around too cavalierly, but it's not like it's a total nothingburger; there is some there there.
I think there’s another important angle to consider on why some - please note I said *some* - people go down the unhealthy heterodox rabbit hole: it’s a reaction to feeling betrayed by the people and ideas they invested in or maybe even made sacrifices for. For example, you have always been a very vocally liberal person, one who has donated time and money to Democrat causes, publicly urged and scolded people to “do the right thing,” argued with and even distanced from conservative friends and relatives, and fully supported every policy and talking point even when you had concerns or questions because you believed you were following the science, reading the legitimate news sources, and are on the team that cares about people who have been hurt or are struggling and need compassionate support. But then one day, you find out it’s your son with myocarditis and just talking about it gets you attacked as a dangerous anti-vaxxer, or your teen daughter suddenly the 3rd girl in her friend group demanding a binder and testosterone, the school has been lying to you, and you’re being told by everyone from your liberal friends to the president you fought to get elected that you are a bad mother who must want her child to die if you ask any questions (and a TERF who should be punched in the throat on top of it) or any other situation where real life crashes into ideology. Then you start researching things in legitimate places - like the original research papers - and find that legitimate scientists and journalists- even liberal ones! - have documented *exactly what you are experiencing* and it’s only the “bad, conservative” media outlets that have reported on it. It can feel like a deep betrayal, like your foundation for how you figure out what’s true vs not true has been shaken in a truly frightening way. And All of this is happening while you are in a place of personal/family crisis and your friends and your “people” are turning against you. It can really shake a person up. It’s the perfect set-up for landing in another extreme circle or falling down a rabbit hole.
I doubt online discourse will get any saner in 2023, but I appreciate you fighting the good fight anyway. It isn't just progressives either -- the same craziness goes on in other spaces as well, though with slightly different decorations. Everyone seems to have given up on actually accomplishing anything, or even believing in anything, and just want to fight about petty sub-issues for their own personal benefit.
I’ve appreciate you, Jesse because for too many people, heterodox means anti-democrats or just conservative rather than holding more independent views. I find myself so alienated from a lot of “heterodox” spaces because they all fall in line behind the same bullshit.
I think there's a risk in having an intense interest in something, be it wokeness, racism, Trump, Biden, etc., that really pisses you off. While I have serious concerns about certain censorious tendencies on the right and the left, I try to limit the amount of time I spend thinking about them because I don't think it's healthy to spend large amounts of time angry.
One of the things that's helped with my depression is to refocus my thoughts to something else when my thinking gets too negative. If I'm not careful, it can be easy to let a whole day of negative thinking bring me down. When I catch myself in a pattern of negativity, I mentally visualize a stop sign, think STOP, and try to refocus my thoughts on something else. This isn't some kind of slam-dunk solution to depression, but it has helped improve my functioning and mood. You don't need to, and probably shouldn't, try to banish all negative thoughts and should work to improve things you're unhappy about, but it's healthier to STOP and to go look up a recipe for saag paneer than to spend all day seething about the latest outrage.
There's a certain type of person who seems taken something they're very angry about from being one of many things thing they think about or do to making it one of the only things they think about or do. Given their lack of other interests, I'm not sure they'd actually be much happier if they got out of bed tomorrow and found out all the wokeness they were mad about was magically gone.
I thought it was really ironic that Eric Weinstein coined the phrase “audience capture” given that his brother Bret is a classic example of that, he started out opposing some pointless woke policy at a university, but now he defends wacko stuff like using ivermectin to treat Covid.
For me it also helps to remind myself, when an orthodox progressive has emitted a smelly little orthodoxy, of the totality of my own political outlook and the totality of theirs, and thus of how much there is that we agree on that is very important. For example, two of Australia's most ardent proponents of current Anglophone progressive orthodoxy on gender are a Senator who does excellent work on climate change and the environment, and an economist who does excellent work on labour issues, inequality, poverty, etc.
There is also the melancholy historical fact that no generation of the Left has proven to be immune to one or other irrational enthusiasm that was considered at the time to be a matter of the highest progressive principle, yet was subsequently recognised to be, at best, a well-meaning but foolish excess and, at worst, complicity in foul crimes. We need to become better at recognising such errors before we fall too far into them.
I like wood working/carpentry because I’m a pretty weird guy already (although I keep most of it to myself in real life) and it just gets me in touch with reality where I fuck something up and just have to sigh and rub my head and go back and fix it for longer than the prep time I avoided out of laziness that caused the error to start with. Just gives me a good chance to really productively hate on myself.
Very good advice. I hesitate to post this and risk getting tarred as one of the "deranged" who's waded too far into crazyland, but I do think a lot of legit questions about vaccine safety and efficacy (especially the new bivalent booster) have been swept under the rug. Check out UCSF epidemologist Vinay Prasad for a moderately skeptical/nuanced take and, for a more "extreme" but still based on medical studies POV, check this out: https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/philadelphia-2023?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web. Jesse, we really need skilled science reporters like you to wade into this stuff instead of presuming all questions to be rooted in insane conpiracism. Idk if somone like "Arkmedic" is reliable or not, but I do know you to be.
“a self-reinforcing feedback loop that involves telling one’s audience what they want to hear and getting rewarded for it.”
Is there a better description of mainstream news media? It's the de facto business model for both right-wing media (Fox) and the left (pretty much all the rest). "Give the customer what they want" is the mantra for successful businesses in a free-market economy. So it makes sense that would apply to independent media (Substack, podcasts) as well as the corporate variety.
One factor in Online Derangement Syndrome that you might note is the anarchy. There's no system, as there is in a healthy democratic society, for bringing decisions to a head. It's a cacophony of atomised voices, never a true collective. So another thing that can help is to join (and work to influence) a democratic political party. Put your issue in perspective, negotiate it with other people, expose yourself to challenge from people you respect and trust ... and just maybe, put your POV to the test at the ballot box.
There is another point to remember: there is no virtue in heterodoxy for its own sake.
If you find that a particular progressive orthodoxy that you support is not soundly based in evidence or logic, is morally problematic, leads to a bad place in your life or the lives of people you know, is one-sided on an issue that involves a conflict between right and right, etc, then of course you have a right and a duty to reconsider your position and formulate or adopt a better position. That better position will be heterodox - but it will be a better position because you have done the work of research, reflection, discussion, etc, to come up with a better position. It will not be a better position simply by virtue of being heterodox.
Thanks for this - especially the preference intensity tip. I'll weave that one into my own look forward to 2023.
Audience capture is a stone cold killer of useful commentators. I make it my business to offend all comers (not really). But when some anti-woke pieces did particularly well the temptation to do more was noticeable. I had nothing fresh to say, so it was easy not to succumb. I wish some other writers would take this view..
The groomer thing can be dumb, but can also have some validity especially when schools formalize policies of keeping parents in the dark. "Don't tell your mommy and daddy about our little secret" should never be something adults are saying to children.
That, and some of what passes for "all ages" and/or "family friendly" drag entertainment is pretty raunchy, so if you combine exposing kids to highly sexualized content, and encouraging them to keep secrets from their parents, that adds up to "groomer" not being an entirely inappropriate description. Still gets thrown around too cavalierly, but it's not like it's a total nothingburger; there is some there there.
I think there’s another important angle to consider on why some - please note I said *some* - people go down the unhealthy heterodox rabbit hole: it’s a reaction to feeling betrayed by the people and ideas they invested in or maybe even made sacrifices for. For example, you have always been a very vocally liberal person, one who has donated time and money to Democrat causes, publicly urged and scolded people to “do the right thing,” argued with and even distanced from conservative friends and relatives, and fully supported every policy and talking point even when you had concerns or questions because you believed you were following the science, reading the legitimate news sources, and are on the team that cares about people who have been hurt or are struggling and need compassionate support. But then one day, you find out it’s your son with myocarditis and just talking about it gets you attacked as a dangerous anti-vaxxer, or your teen daughter suddenly the 3rd girl in her friend group demanding a binder and testosterone, the school has been lying to you, and you’re being told by everyone from your liberal friends to the president you fought to get elected that you are a bad mother who must want her child to die if you ask any questions (and a TERF who should be punched in the throat on top of it) or any other situation where real life crashes into ideology. Then you start researching things in legitimate places - like the original research papers - and find that legitimate scientists and journalists- even liberal ones! - have documented *exactly what you are experiencing* and it’s only the “bad, conservative” media outlets that have reported on it. It can feel like a deep betrayal, like your foundation for how you figure out what’s true vs not true has been shaken in a truly frightening way. And All of this is happening while you are in a place of personal/family crisis and your friends and your “people” are turning against you. It can really shake a person up. It’s the perfect set-up for landing in another extreme circle or falling down a rabbit hole.
Having normal interests and friends is very important in order to keep you from falling down a rabbit hole.
Following sports is a big one for me. It's the easiest way to escape the online culture war.
I doubt online discourse will get any saner in 2023, but I appreciate you fighting the good fight anyway. It isn't just progressives either -- the same craziness goes on in other spaces as well, though with slightly different decorations. Everyone seems to have given up on actually accomplishing anything, or even believing in anything, and just want to fight about petty sub-issues for their own personal benefit.
I’ve appreciate you, Jesse because for too many people, heterodox means anti-democrats or just conservative rather than holding more independent views. I find myself so alienated from a lot of “heterodox” spaces because they all fall in line behind the same bullshit.
I think there's a risk in having an intense interest in something, be it wokeness, racism, Trump, Biden, etc., that really pisses you off. While I have serious concerns about certain censorious tendencies on the right and the left, I try to limit the amount of time I spend thinking about them because I don't think it's healthy to spend large amounts of time angry.
One of the things that's helped with my depression is to refocus my thoughts to something else when my thinking gets too negative. If I'm not careful, it can be easy to let a whole day of negative thinking bring me down. When I catch myself in a pattern of negativity, I mentally visualize a stop sign, think STOP, and try to refocus my thoughts on something else. This isn't some kind of slam-dunk solution to depression, but it has helped improve my functioning and mood. You don't need to, and probably shouldn't, try to banish all negative thoughts and should work to improve things you're unhappy about, but it's healthier to STOP and to go look up a recipe for saag paneer than to spend all day seething about the latest outrage.
There's a certain type of person who seems taken something they're very angry about from being one of many things thing they think about or do to making it one of the only things they think about or do. Given their lack of other interests, I'm not sure they'd actually be much happier if they got out of bed tomorrow and found out all the wokeness they were mad about was magically gone.
I thought it was really ironic that Eric Weinstein coined the phrase “audience capture” given that his brother Bret is a classic example of that, he started out opposing some pointless woke policy at a university, but now he defends wacko stuff like using ivermectin to treat Covid.
Good advice, thanks Jesse.
For me it also helps to remind myself, when an orthodox progressive has emitted a smelly little orthodoxy, of the totality of my own political outlook and the totality of theirs, and thus of how much there is that we agree on that is very important. For example, two of Australia's most ardent proponents of current Anglophone progressive orthodoxy on gender are a Senator who does excellent work on climate change and the environment, and an economist who does excellent work on labour issues, inequality, poverty, etc.
There is also the melancholy historical fact that no generation of the Left has proven to be immune to one or other irrational enthusiasm that was considered at the time to be a matter of the highest progressive principle, yet was subsequently recognised to be, at best, a well-meaning but foolish excess and, at worst, complicity in foul crimes. We need to become better at recognising such errors before we fall too far into them.
I like wood working/carpentry because I’m a pretty weird guy already (although I keep most of it to myself in real life) and it just gets me in touch with reality where I fuck something up and just have to sigh and rub my head and go back and fix it for longer than the prep time I avoided out of laziness that caused the error to start with. Just gives me a good chance to really productively hate on myself.
Very good advice. I hesitate to post this and risk getting tarred as one of the "deranged" who's waded too far into crazyland, but I do think a lot of legit questions about vaccine safety and efficacy (especially the new bivalent booster) have been swept under the rug. Check out UCSF epidemologist Vinay Prasad for a moderately skeptical/nuanced take and, for a more "extreme" but still based on medical studies POV, check this out: https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/philadelphia-2023?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web. Jesse, we really need skilled science reporters like you to wade into this stuff instead of presuming all questions to be rooted in insane conpiracism. Idk if somone like "Arkmedic" is reliable or not, but I do know you to be.
“a self-reinforcing feedback loop that involves telling one’s audience what they want to hear and getting rewarded for it.”
Is there a better description of mainstream news media? It's the de facto business model for both right-wing media (Fox) and the left (pretty much all the rest). "Give the customer what they want" is the mantra for successful businesses in a free-market economy. So it makes sense that would apply to independent media (Substack, podcasts) as well as the corporate variety.
One factor in Online Derangement Syndrome that you might note is the anarchy. There's no system, as there is in a healthy democratic society, for bringing decisions to a head. It's a cacophony of atomised voices, never a true collective. So another thing that can help is to join (and work to influence) a democratic political party. Put your issue in perspective, negotiate it with other people, expose yourself to challenge from people you respect and trust ... and just maybe, put your POV to the test at the ballot box.
I like your Substack. Happy new years
Great article, Jesse.
People are gonna come at you about the Sam Harris part of it, because they are dumb, but you are absolutely correct.
There is another point to remember: there is no virtue in heterodoxy for its own sake.
If you find that a particular progressive orthodoxy that you support is not soundly based in evidence or logic, is morally problematic, leads to a bad place in your life or the lives of people you know, is one-sided on an issue that involves a conflict between right and right, etc, then of course you have a right and a duty to reconsider your position and formulate or adopt a better position. That better position will be heterodox - but it will be a better position because you have done the work of research, reflection, discussion, etc, to come up with a better position. It will not be a better position simply by virtue of being heterodox.
Thanks for this - especially the preference intensity tip. I'll weave that one into my own look forward to 2023.
Audience capture is a stone cold killer of useful commentators. I make it my business to offend all comers (not really). But when some anti-woke pieces did particularly well the temptation to do more was noticeable. I had nothing fresh to say, so it was easy not to succumb. I wish some other writers would take this view..