Nut picking

“I Love Lucy” wasn’t important content, but it was shared content. And it meant that tomorrow morning you had a whole bunch of topics you could go to with your neighbor or your co-worker that was just shared cultural data.

We don’t have any of that anymore. So, in a world where everybody is incentivized to go narrow but deep, there’s not a lot of need to call out B.S. and crazy on your own end of the continuum.

There’s a ton of incentive for both political addicts on the right to find some nut job on the left who did or said something crazy — “They’re all going to grab our guns” — or there’s some nut job on the left who says everybody on the right wants to do this horrible thing to you because they found some idiot on Twitter or on a podcast who said that thing.

The problem with that kind of nut picking is it doesn’t ever solve a problem.

I found Ben Sasse’s term a useful description of something I see constantly (especially on X).