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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • The Dems had a weak message and they struggled to deliver it where it mattered.

    They raised a record amount of money, and spent it on door-knocking and cable ads talking about a rebounding economy, the middle class, and diversity.

    The voters who decided the election live in apartments and listen to podcasts, and see an economy in the shitter, and see themselves as working class (not middle) and just an average schmuck.

    Total disconnect.

    They didn’t even need to move to the right to reach these voters, and they alienated a bunch of the left by trying.








  • I think the two most salient points here are:

    1. Podcasts

    TV and radio are dead, social media is a wasteland. Podcasts are reaching young folks, especially men.

    Which brings me to…

    1. Young men are in freefall

    They’re doing worse than previous generations did at their age, across every metric you can imagine, and they’re also doing worse than young women.

    That’s not to say we should stifle women’s success!

    But if all you have to offer young men is a lecture on their unearned privilege, I think it’s not surprising that they take their business elsewhere.

    Importantly: This doesn’t make them right.

    But if we don’t figure this out, we’re fucked. We have to have a positive message for men who are struggling and desperate. If we don’t offer a plan, guess who will?








  • Humanity is so fickle, it’s impossible to tell.

    In the US, we went from overwhelming opposition to gay marriage to overwhelming support in less than a decade.

    On the other hand, we went from aggressively eradicating CFCs and fixing the ozone hole to dragging our feet on renewable energy for several decades.

    Even further back, we went from back-to-back world wars and economic collapse to a tentative global peace and prosperity.

    Monarchy seemed inevitable for ages, and then multiple democratic revolutions all sprang up in quick succession.

    Equality was fundamental to the Constitution, but we still haven’t healed the wounds of slavery.

    There seems to be no telling. Some problems languish for a long time, but then see massive improvements in the blink of an eye. Some obvious fixes lay dormant for an offensively long time.

    When I think about this stuff, I get a weird mix of hope and despair and guilt and frustration and impatience.

    It seems unfair that we got stuck with these particular crises, with no guarantee that we’re actually prepared to handle them. (Maybe that’s the entire story of humanity.)

    And then I remember what Tolkien had to say about such things: