Life vs. Media, Continued

For Mother’s Day, I honored the mother of my child with the one thing that all women most desire. I refer, of course, to helmet nachos.

@yungfoodbeastHelmet ⛑ Nachos 💃 /w @_bookofelie at an @angels game 😭🤙🏽🤣🥰🤷‍♀️ #anaheim #foodbeast

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I’ve seen two major league baseball games in the last two weeks, in both the National League and the inferior league, in two different stadiums, and here’s an observation I just keep making: Everyone was friendly. Everyone was polite. Tons of “excuse me” in the stands, constant please and thank you. Happy stadium employees. Helpful people. In Los Angeles, I bought a single seat that turned out to more or less put me in the middle of a family. They adopted me. We high-fived a lot. In Anaheim this weekend, where it was 85 degrees and the baseball was just remarkably bad, the crowd was like a party with 30,000 of your closest friends. Weirdly, the people around us in the stands were mostly pretty noticeably fit. A healthy, happy, polite, well-adjusted, socially healthy public.

So.

Walter Kirn has been waving his arms in the air and shouting about the “totalitarian telethon of trash” that makes up legacy media and politics. In response, a professor in a small college town in Washington posts a sharp description of “The Immiserators,” the people (especially prevalent in academic and media settings) who work to inflict their Cluster B lives on everyone around them:

An Immiserator is any individual whose primary (or even secondary) function in life is to make other people miserable and deprive them of joy. There are lots of tools in the toolbox to do that, but the primary one is rules. Any time an exception happens, that can produce any kind of negative outcome, a rule must be propagated. (Big Hat Tip to Peter Turchin and his book, ‘End Times’ — credit where credit is due.)

…How do these Immiserators immiserate? They take the issue of the day, and scream. Over and over. Take the trans issue. You don’t want a 50 year old man, dressed up as a woman in your daughter’s locker room? You bigoted transphobe. Let’s talk about how you don’t know about “the science.” You don’t want to castrate a confused young child being bombarded by social media that the only way they’ll fit in is with body-altering hormones, and complete loss of sexual function, as well as an inability to easily urinate the rest of their lives? You’re promoting child suicide. You don’t want your daughter playing volleyball against boys wearing pony tails and claiming they’re girls? There is no one worse than you.

And they’ll let you know it. It’s the beauty of immiseration. In the parlance of this blog, I call this “emotional state matching.” They want you to be as miserable as they are. And they’re going to double down with some mix of social pressure, rules and generalized screaming until you do.

I disagree with this generally perceptive writer’s description of Trump, if you read the whole thing, but I don’t mind the difference in perception.

See also, and I feel this with every cell of my being:

I’ve said this before, but: My perception of the moment is that the vast and reasonably okay Normalsphere is just being battered, all day and every day, by Immiserator cheap shots, amygdala-punching calculated rage and fear messages that are designed by a mix of grifters and lunatics and grifter lunatics to produce “emotional state matching.” Crisis crisis crisis! We have a trade deal with China and an American-mediated ceasefire between India and Pakistan, which may or may not hold, so there’s evidence that the Trump administration is trying to produce some order in the world. But crisis crisis crisis!

I keep seeing health in people and sickness in institutions. We’ll see. But try to get outside and talk face-to-face to some humans if the media is driving you crazy. Baseball usually works. Helmet nachos require more napkins than you probably anticipate.