The Anti-Anarchist Cookbook

Standing on your lawn waving around a gun sends a powerful message, all right. The message is “shoot me from behind cover and take my gun”. Open carry LOL

Such an excellent note, full of great metaphors. I think this is a perfect framing, and I hope it gets broad traction.

I’m generally police-suspicious, but I took a little bit of REDACTED training from some retired SWAT guys who predated the crime bill police culture. One of them remarked once that “the problem with these young cops is that they’re no good at customer service,” which really struck me as a clever way to look at it that I’d never considered. Hearing it put in that slightly different language made a huge difference.

I’m just approaching my 1-year anniversary of divorcing myself from the 24-hour outrage cycle and a brief retrospective is due. I initially deleted Facebook because I felt that, instead of helping maintain my relationships, it was actively harming them. I’ve never used Twitter (from outside it looks like all rage, all the time, mixed with an unhealthy dose of “Notice me Senpai”, and topped off with eternal permanence of anything one happens to drunkenly fingerblast at 4 am after a few too many Ambien. I’ve never been remotely tempted).

This was partly due to the fact that in an effort to speak Truth!, or build Awareness!, or whatever, I was putting up a bunch of (sometimes aggressively-) niche memes from my Grey Tribe echo chamber which were obviously irritating my family and friends when anyone engaged at all, and partly because I was getting reciprocally annoyed by the likes and shares from everyone else’s echo chambers. I was struck by a recent trip to visit extended family, most of whom I hadn’t seen in a decade or two, and how… unlike their posts they all were. Facebook was skewing my sense of how reasonable and decent they are, in a strongly negative way.

I took the plunge and deleted my account. I knew I had to replace the behavior with something and not just try to go cold turkey with anything as stimulative as Facebook, so I resolved to actually pick up my phone and call distant friends and chat with them whenever I felt the urge to go scroll through outrage porn.

The first thing that struck me a week or two after the deletion was how I didn’t miss Facebook in the slightest. I was expecting to struggle, to feel like I was missing something, to be tempted to rebuild my account… Nope. Not for a second.

To be fair, there were a couple valuable things Facebook gave me that I knew I had to find other sources for: groups and baby pictures. Groups were easily replaced by Reddit (for the public hobby ones, like woodworking or disc golf), or by email threads or Band for the private ones like D&D coordination. I’ve missed out on a lot of baby pictures, but my wife still makes sure I get to see the best ones, and I can email pictures I take directly to my grandma’s digital photo frame so she’s not missing out on her great grandkids. Problems solved.

I shook up my outrage exposure in other ways at the same time. I deleted most of my daily news sites, and the ones which I felt like I still needed to monitor for important news went into a folder marked “Sunday”, which I open once a week on (you guessed it) Sunday. The thing that surprised me most about this particular technique was the validation of some quote I can’t find the attribution on: “There’s no cure for reading the news like reading last week’s news”. Even just a few days’ distance reveals 99% of what you find on a daily news site to be woefully incomplete, uninformed, useless, inflammatory, and… pointlessly outrageous.

These days, most Sunday’s I don’t even bother opening the folder.

Instead, I’ve replaced my unhealthy outrage porn fixation with more long-form and constructive thought. I highly recommend SlateStarCodex (come back soon, Scott!), Open Source Defense, Handwaving Freakoutery, and, of course, Epsilon Theory.

For faster non-outrage dopamine rushes, I recommend non-Culture War threads on Reddit as well as Hacker News.

I think Rusty has similarly cut the cord from lots of social media and is similarly delighted with the results. I try, but Neb Tnuh the addict keeps dragging me back in …

If I was going to make a yard sign, it would say “I back the rule of law, it matters.” I figure it’s a concise and subtle way of co-opting the language of both extreme narratives to make an attempt at the Overton window. I don’t back the badge because we’re a nation of laws, not men. Additionally, who knew that “______ lives matter” is inflammatory and divisive with any word in it, including “all”. That one took me by surprise.

When things get weird you gotta go back to founding principles to find perspective. Nothing should be more universal and holy in this country as “the rule of law”, but who knows these days.

Hard same, TJ.