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Cake day: August 10th, 2024

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  • I see it almost the opposite way. A lot of what you’re describing is exactly why I don’t put much value in dressing fancy or performing “respectability” for strangers.

    Wearing a nice suit to the lodge once a week doesn’t make someone a good person. Plenty of people can dress up, look impressive in public, shake hands, say the right things, and then go home and be cruel, abusive, miserable, or drunk. I saw enough of that growing up to lose any belief that polished appearances are proof of character.

    So when people stop treating suits, fancy clothes, and public image as moral signals, I don’t see that as societal decay. In some ways, I see it as growth. People are realizing that looking respectable and being respectable are not the same thing.

    If anything, when I see someone using appearance, tradition, or status as a mask for behavior I don’t respect, it makes me want to be the opposite of what they stand for.






  • This is a good example of one of the uglier incentives in political media.

    I’m not saying Stephen Miller is reasonable here, or that his politics deserve some soft-focus sympathetic framing. The quotes are plenty extreme on their own. But that’s kind of the point: if the facts are bad enough, just tell me the facts.

    Instead we get the usual headline-maximizing language: “meltdown,” “unhinged,” “bonkers,” etc. It’s written less like information and more like bait for people who already hate the guy to click, dunk, and share. That’s the same machinery that twists stories in every direction: find the most emotionally flammable wording, strip away nuance, and make the reader feel like something more dramatic happened than what the article actually shows.

    This is why people distrust media even when the underlying story is real. The reporting may be about an actual ugly rant, but the packaging trains everyone to react to the spin first and the facts second.

    “If it bleeds, it leads” has basically become “if it enrages, it engages.”