TLP Weekend Edition (December 21-22, 2024)
What we're reading and checking out.
📊 “How Social Media Warps Your Reality,” by Jay Van Bavel. Do you often find your social media experience unpleasant? Do you feel like you constantly encounter outrageous material? In a new paper featured on their Substack, The Social Identity & Morality Lab, Van Bavel and his colleagues argue that “social media acts like a funhouse mirror, exaggerating and amplifying certain voices and behaviors while diminishing others. This warping of reality happens because social media platforms are dominated by a small, vocal minority of users who post extreme opinions or content. Algorithms further amplify these extremes, giving people the impression that such views and behaviors are the norm, even when they are not.” This serves as the latest reminder that social media does not reflect real life well at all, and users who notice themselves responding emotionally to something they see there would be wise respond with caution.
📖 “Progressives Against Abundance,” by Alex Trembath. Is progressivism, as advanced by its self-appointed spokespeople, consistent with the abundance movement? On the Breakthrough Institute’s Substack, Alex Trembath tackles this issue and, more in sorrow than in anger, says: maybe not.
Last month, the Roosevelt Institute’s Rhiana Gunn-Wright asked, rhetorically, “what base does the abundance movement represent?” Many of us within the movement responded, arguing that abundance represents, variously, scientists and engineers working to advance the scientific frontier, labor unions and construction workers who want to build infrastructure, ecomodernists bringing technology and growth to the fight for ecological sustainability, renters and homeowners concerned about the tightening supply of housing, civil servants constrained by the accretion of sclerotic regulatory procedure, and consumers everywhere affected by inflationary supply chain shortages and cost-of-living stresses.
After my own reply to this effect, Gunn-Wright blocked me.
Gary Winslett called this rhetorical incuriosity a “blind spot” for progressives. I would go further. By making this accusation and then ignoring the answers, Gunn-Wright and her abundance-skeptical compatriots are engaging in something more like projection than ignorance. Their ostensible critique is that abundance lacks a genuine constituency, providing window dressing for powerful vested interests. But that’s precisely the gist of an increasingly widespread critique of “The Groups,” the network of progressive advocacy outfits which are, arguably, laundering elite ideological projects through the rhetoric of social justice (or criminal justice, or climate justice, or whatever).
📰 “They entered treatment. Drugs, overdoses and deaths followed,” by Alissa Zhu, Jessica Gallagher, and Meredith Cohn. The Baltimore Banner and The New York Times teamed up on a sad and maddening new investigative piece on how PHA Healthcare runs government-funded flop houses in Baltimore billed as drug recovery efforts:
Amanda Vlakos had been living for years in rat-infested abandoned buildings in Baltimore, fighting an addiction to opioids, when she learned of a possible escape: a drug-treatment program that offered patients free housing.
Sober when they arrived, Vlakos and her boyfriend were placed in a barely furnished two-bedroom apartment with a succession of strangers who often used drugs. She relapsed after a month. Roommates kicked in doors, flooded the bathroom and sold drugs out of their unit. Even some of the house managers got high, residents said.
On Sept. 5, after nearly two years in the program and with nowhere else to go, she sent a desperate text message to a former counselor. “I feel so helpless and alone,” wrote Vlakos, 34. Two weeks later, she died of an overdose.
PHA Healthcare, the company whose program Vlakos entered, collects millions of dollars a year to treat hundreds of people struggling with addiction. But many of its patients have not gotten better. Instead, placed by the company in what are effectively government-funded drug houses, they have relapsed, fallen deeper into addiction and sometimes died, an investigation by The New York Times and The Baltimore Banner has found.
🐕 Paws of War. On a more positive note, Paws of War is a terrific charity organization with several missions including connecting veterans with dogs and cats they’ve rescued overseas, training dogs for first responders, providing mobile veterinary services, doing relief work, and more. TLP readers combined last year to give the organization a nice gift and if you’re looking for something to support this Christmas and holiday season, please consider Paws of War: “Helping both ends of the leash.”
🎶 Woodland, by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings. These two have been making meticulous and magical folk and country songs together for decades. Their latest album (named after their recording studio in Nashville almost lost to a tornado) includes 10 new gems adding some pedal steel, organ, and bass to their otherwise sparse acoustic arrangements. Welch and Rawlings put on an amazing live show and if you get a chance try to catch their tour next spring.
As to your second post about the anti-abundance forces. I am generally supportive of abundance but I am old enough to remember when people were talking about Affluenza. And this wasn't just confined to the Left either. I know a number of devout Christians that are disgusted with the commercial bacchanalia that Christmas has become.
I think where the Left went off the rails on this was when they started attacking basic stuff like food, energy, transportation, and housing instead of the stupid "stuff" that was the target during the Affluenza years. How much of this is the product of the funding and encouragement of the Groups by billionaires and politicians whose basic assumption is that they will be insulated from deprivation, I can't say.
Double post from your first link.
It is not just the algorithms. You get an awful lot of crazed action from the uncurated commenters too. I bailed from Facebook a decade ago and have never been in X or any of the video platforms like TikTok or Instagram so my perspective is from MSM and the print portions of the Internet. A lot of these platforms don't allow comments but when they do I often read them to try to take the pulse. Even when the owners are posting relatively civilized, if sometimes controversial pieces, the commenters are often just off the wall especially when it comes to basic norms. I have abandoned some of my regular read and comment platforms after watching people call each other morons or other things that would be considered fighting words if you did it in person. Lots of people advocating violence too. While some of this is undoubtedly trolls, I have been doing this for years and have a long memory about prior posts. It could be that they are consuming social media out of my line of sight and adopting attitudes from that but I find little evidence like links. What links that do exist are generally amusing or downstream links from MSM.