Glory and Glamor

"A millennial who tried van life says it's just 'glorified homelessness'." Put another way, a millennial who attempted to follow in the footsteps of "influencers" learned that part of the work of being an influencer is hiding all of the effort that goes into maintaining their perfect Internet lifestyles. One of the headings in the Fortune article is "Lifestyle content isn’t everything it seems to be when you’re actually living it," something that I, for my part, took for granted. Mainly because I'd always figured it was a given that the messy part of life was rarely shown, because pretty much no-one aspires to it. And aspiration, and supposed shortcuts to achieving it, is the entire point of Internet lifestyle content.

But I suppose that's easy for me to say. After all, I'm 20 years older than the woman in the article. I've had significantly more time to develop media literacy and, having watched how social media came onto the scene, a skepticism that it was any more genuine than television (reality or not) had been.

Lifestyle content, and its predecessors in the media landscape, has always sought to tap into the audience's feelings that they could be living a better life than the one they currently are. And it's an understandable feeling. While I find the constant descriptors of everyday life as a "dystopian hellscape" tiresome and self-important (not to mention clichéd), I completely understand the generalized feeling that things should be better that underlies it. And so when people appear to offer straightforward ways of attaining a better life, it's perfectly reasonable that certain members of the audience would jump at the chance. It's no different than any other form of advertising; offering solutions to problems that require little more than a reasonable monthly payment.

There was a part of me, when I was younger, that believed, because I wanted to believe, that there were people who had found a way to make it without playing the game by the rules that had been set out for everyone to play by. I suspect that if there had been influencer culture when I was in my 20s, that I would have latched on to them as people living the dream, and sought to follow in their footsteps. Now, I know better... or am at least more suspicious of the sorts of quick fixes that the lifestyles of the glamorous seem to offer. (After all, I'm well aware that "glamor" originally meant "a magical spell or illusion.") But that also makes me cynical, and while I've come to enjoy that aspect of my personality, I understand that it isn't for everyone. Some people want to believe that the people they see on Instagram or TikTok are genuinely letting them in on ways to escape parts of their lives that don't work for them. And it's something of a shame that they come to feel that they've been on the wrong end of deliberate deceit. But I suppose that advertising has that effect on a lot of people, eventually.

In Triplicate

Yesterday morning, I went out for breakfast. While I was waiting for the food to be brought to the table I checked the Google app on my phone, to see what the latest news was. In the local news section, there were 15 articles in the carousel. Three of them were devoted to covering the same sexual assault story from the next county over.

And people wonder why the public's perception of crime doesn't match the reality.

There is nothing wrong with crime stories. They're news, just like anything else. And media outlets have settled on "if it bleeds, it leads" for a reason. But it is possible to over-cover a story. In the Google instance, that came in the form of presenting three stories from different media organizations about the same event. The inventive to present stories that will draw people in, so that they'll see whatever advertising messages are placed alongside the story, leads to a shift in the proportion of coverage. And those sorts of shifts shape perceptions, because most people don't have much firsthand knowledge of enough of the world around them to have an independent sense of what's happening in the broader world around them. In other words, even if one understands that the headlines may not paint an accurate picture of the real world, it takes a pretty expansive view things beyond the headlines to understand the ways in which the picture is inaccurate.

Didn't Do It

The news of the day is that Paul Pelosi, husband to Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in their home in California by a conspiracy theorist. The political class was quick to offer verbal condemnations of the battery.

GOP Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., reacted to the attack, writing he is "disgusted to hear about the horrific assault on Speaker Pelosi's husband Paul," adding: "Let's be clear: violence has no place in this country."
Home intruder yelled 'Where's Nancy?' before attacking Pelosi's husband, source says

Unfortunately, this view is not as widely held as one might like it to be.

A majority (56 percent) of Republicans support the use of force as a way to arrest the decline of the traditional American way of life. Forty-three percent of Republicans express opposition to this idea. Significantly fewer independents (35 percent) and Democrats (22 percent) say the use of force is necessary to stop the disappearance of traditional American values and way of life.
After the Ballots are Counted: Conspiracies, Political Violence, and American Exceptionalism

And this is, in part, because people for whom violence is the answer when it comes to preserving "traditional American values and way of life" are often (potential) voters, too. Unless, that is, they're currently incarcerated for some impromptu preservation work, or ex-convicts in several states. And while some of the people who support use of force against those they see as enemies of the version of the United States they understand themselves to be entitled to would walk away from that position if the politicians they preferred came out strongly against it, many of them would simply look for new politicians to prefer.

It's that threat of lost votes, and lost offices, that mean that while people like Representative Scalise can be quick to stand up and speak out against violence directed at fellow House members, for a lot of Republicans (and likely some Democrats, too) tend to avoid talking about it unless there's been an incident that they feel the need to distance themselves from. (Like this one.)

But once one moves away from the political side of things, it's a different story. I know someone who a fairly devout follower of Donald Trump's brand of Republican party, and I mentioned to him that this was something of a bad thing for the Republican brand. Because even though people like this tend to be a bit too mentally ill to really described as partisan, the overly political nature of the attack would reflect badly on the party as a whole. He was having none of it, insisting that David DePape, rather than being someone who had gone off the rails, was actually a Liberal operative, who attacked Mr. Pelosi as a "false flag" operation to make Republicans look bad.

It's this sense, of being a member of a group that is on the correct side, and therefore incapable of any sort of wrongdoing, that grinds the conversation about political violence to a halt. Rolling Stone reported that Fox News sought to blame the attack on the Biden Administration and Speaker Pelosi herself, pointing to Democratic divisiveness and being "soft on crime." While seemingly absurd, it's a rational strategy for a media outlet that's built its brand on a certain level of partisan loyalty, and is expected to display that loyalty regularly.

It remains to be seen if this something that weighs down the low-propensity voters that Republicans are going to need, especially if they plan to retake the White House. But it offers and interesting view into the workings of the American political ecosystem nevertheless.

No, Not Like That

Rather than give up on the couple unit in favour of nothing at all, we should have been finding new units - units of friends and siblings and wasters who couldn't get a mortgage on their own. We should have used the opportunities presented by the breakdown of the traditional couple to create new and ever larger households, not smaller ones.

And we've still got time to buck the trend, but only once we stop being so sensitive to one another - only once we stop feeling sorry for singles, and start berating and hassling them.

Singletons are selfish

Because there's no better way to get someone to do what you think is best for them than by berating and hassling them. As someone who lives alone, I do so because I have the resources to do so. And I do, on occasion, meet people who give me a hard time about that, although, now that I am well past any reasonable age for first marriage, not as many as I used to.

And I would ask Zoe Williams (presuming that, after all this time, she still holds to her opinion) the same thing I've asked some more recent critics: "What's in it for me?" I understand that many can live more cheaply than one, given that I understand basic math, so clearly the financial savings are not a motivator. Getting people to form large households as some people seem to want, is a matter of no longer feeling sorry for single people. But it does require some sensitivity; after all, if you can't be bothered to get to know someone well enough to understand what they value, how do you give them a rational reason to go along with your desires for them?

While this example is both old and trivial, I think that it illustrates something that American (and apparently British) society could use some work on; understanding that when people don't need what one wants to sell them, just beating them about the head and shoulders is a poor substitute for a good sales pitch.

Wishful

The short-lived tenure of Liz Truss as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has drawn comparisons with the United States. Namely how quickly the Conservative Party in the UK decided that Ms. Truss was a disaster and had to go, versus the Republican Party's unwillingness to consign former President Donald Trump to the political wilderness.

The comparison is perhaps understandable, but it still inapt. Mainly due to one major difference. Britain's Conservative Party basically came to the conclusion that their interests were not served by Ms. Truss remaining Prime Minister. The Republican Party here in the United States, however, still believes that Donald Trump has their interests at heart, and will pursue them if he's returned to the White House. Note that in neither case did I say anything about the interests of the nation at large.

And that's because people don't generally see their interests as separate from, let alone at cross purposes to, those of their nation. And while a lot of left-leaning media types may see Donald Trump's policy desires as being just as bad for the United States as Liz Truss' were for the United Kingdom, Republicans don't agree with that assessment. And, as near as I can tell, there's no real reason for them to agree with that assessment. They're getting what they want, and they understand that what they want is what is in the best interests of the nation as a whole. The people who are hurt by it, or otherwise have problems with it, want, at least in the minds of many Republicans, something other than what's best for the United States. (Remember, the two parties tend to see the other as more extreme than is the reality of the situation.)

Democracy does not mean that people are gifted with an arbitrary level of enlightenment. It simply means that the franchise is broadly available. The ousting of Liz Truss is not a victory for British democracy; likewise, the continued popularity of Donald Trump in Republican circles is not a failure for American democracy. Both outcomes are merely a manifestation of how people see their own interests in the world.