As an aside, the Menlo Park in California came before the Menlo Park in New Jersey. The latter is where a 29-year-old Thomas Edison set up his home and lab before moving up to West Orange
"The 2026 Sailer fund to investigate human-biodiversity among the Eskimo-Inuit of Alaska and the Yukon; with two-day side-stop lecture-tour at that one library in Anchorage."
In the 80s, I spent two days at its main base, Beale AFB north of Sacramento, in December, and the tule fog was so thick, I never saw a hangar, much less an aircraft or runway.
There's one at the California Science Center, next to the LA Memorial Coliseum across the street from USC. I've never seen it, but in San Diego's Balboa Park we have a doppelganger, the Lockheed A-12, on outdoor static display. You can touch it. It takes an expert to tell the difference between SR-71 and A-12. Both are titanium-skinned and totally cool - when not screaming through the stratosphere at Mach 3.
The problem is that the people who need to hear you won't open your ears. I recently visited a childhood friend in Indiana. We see each other every handful of years or so. Politics never came up over the years; I always considered her one of the most down to earth, reasonable, old school Democrats out there. I was floored when something came up in a recent conversation and she unexpectedly blew up with, "But January 6th!". I was stunned. I really think that if she is lost to any reason... all Democrats are. It rattled me and has left me feeling hopeless about things in general.
Basically all my family and friends older than myself are Democrats and always have been, and they would all consider themselves "reasonable, old school Democrats". Yet they all unblinkingly continued voting for the sexual mutilation of children, inundation from the third world, and war against Russia.
Why? I suspect it's mostly just habit. They always voted Democrat and they're too old to change now. The TV tells 'em to and so they do it. They've heard the leftwing narratives so many times they can recite it like catechism. Which I do ask them to recite, just to see how well the media control works. "Gender affirming health care" rather than monstrous abuse of children, "diversity is strength" rather than genocide, "freedom and democracy fighting tyranny and dictatorship" rather than pointless, dangerous, and expensive carnage. I have to hand it to the boomer-brain wranglers, they really know their business.
And yes, they are lost to reason on any subject where the brain wranglers have gotten there first. If you question the catechism, they respond not with reasoned debate but with furious rage, though they can still reason on other subjects. Programming is real.
"[With a few exceptions,] all my family and friends... consider themselves 'reasonable, old school Democrats'".
My experience, too.
One piece of the puzzle may be the (on average) higher Agreeableness of women. Those closest to me have absorbed the Respectable Consensus on the issues you mention, and go with the flow.
E.g. I shared the following tweet with pro-gay-rights Mrs. AMac78. "LGB Courage Coalition" makes a principled and sensible case for rejecting the ongoing Legacy/Social Media celebration of transitioning children, from (as you would guess) an LGB perspective.
Key paragraph: "As gays and lesbians, we see this as fundamentally an issue of justice—because gays and lesbians are being harmed. The rush to medicalize gender nonconforming youth disproportionately affects same-sex attracted young people, many of whom might otherwise grow into healthy, whole LGB adults. Instead, these youth are often told their feelings mean they were 'born in the wrong body,' and are steered toward irreversible medical pathways. Justice demands that these children be safeguarded from unnecessary, irreversible procedures—not funneled into them under the banner of 'affirmation'.”
I met up with my "reasonable" Democrat in 2019. Despite Trump in office... zero politics came up. And that was the time period nearly every Dem was losing their mind; my sister in law disinvited us from Thanksgiving dinner in 2016, even. Then saw my friend in 2021; nothing came up. Now saw her in 2025 and that is when she exploded. I am truly at a loss.
I think you hit the nail on the head with this. The fury of seeing more vote for him was probably more than they could ever reason with. Unfortunately, I think it is pointless to bother with them anymore. There will always be a resent from them.
The reason they respond with rage is that they have no reasoned basis for their pious beliefs, and since these beliefs constitute their sense of identity as a good person and member of what they imagine to be an enlightened consensus, drawing them into question is felt to be threatening. Better just to ask them questions gently. If they say "what about January 6," you might ask them how they characterize that event, and then ask whether they see anything that might draw that characterization into question, and so on in that vein. They are typically ignorant of the actual facts, and know only the media narrative. This procedure will not change their opinion, but will, if they don't insist on dropping the matter, instill the beginnings of doubt. If they insist on dropping the matter, it will have shut them up.
Two of my favorite comedians, Marc Maron and John Delany have done multiple routines on how bad it is that Trump is president...with zero policy examples. Maron just expressed his anxiety that he doesn't know what he's going to do (first term) and then said if it turns out not as bad, he'll admit it--but if it turns out much worse then republicans owe him an apology (clapter!). His joke example was something like waking up and learning it was now ok to hunt at zoos. I think Melany compared it to a horse loose in a hospital.
All of which is to say that the people who hate him most just hate him like you hate the devil. They just know that he is the source of all evil. Wait for some evil (OMG he's enforcing existing immigration laws!) and then freak out again.
I've also seen a small amount of making fun of him for being so stupid as to not know that economists and physicists have proven tariffs are bad.
But in summary, in contrast to how it was when I was a kid, political ID is almost policy dispute-free these days
They are very ignorant. They have no idea that videos exist of the Capitol police waving people in. Or that people standing outside on the grass were hunted down and charged with an offense months, even years later. No idea.
> They have no idea that videos exist of the Capitol police waving people in. Or that people standing outside on the grass were hunted down and charged with an offense months, even years later.
Floyd demonstrations: "Peaceful protesters should be respected and honored. If some protests were fiery and only mostly peaceful, well, in practical terms, there's not much any authorities could have or should have done about any hypothetical arsonists, rioters, looters, or CHAZ insurrectionists. It's only fair that sympathetic local governments compensated some of them."
January 6th: "Violent, armed, trespassing, and/or treasonous insurrectionists were correctly hunted down, charged, convicted, sentenced to long prison terms, and bankrupted. As criminals, violations of their civil rights didn't matter. If many peaceful protesters were waved in by the Capitol police or just stood outside on the grass, well, in practical terms, it served them right to be ensnared in the same dragnet and to suffer the same consequences."
"Reasonable" Democrats don't seem to think that a single policy could have been fair to Peaceful/Violent protesters of MAGA/BLM beliefs.
1) I'm in my fifties, so the older generation for me is mostly my parents' age: in their seventies or eighties. Most of the men have already died, so that age cohort skews female, and therefore has the female's feelings-over-logic approach and herd instinct.
2) In the same way that they don't really understand what they are voting for, they also don't usually hold anyone else's vote against them, because to them it doesn't really mean anything. To them, voting is an arbitrary characteristic, like hair color, or a fashion accessory, like a hat. They are not policies with real world consequences. It's just random stuff in the landscape, so unless they step on something sharp that penetrates their (mental) skin, they don't bother about it too much.
3) By contrast, starting with people younger than me (especially women), even just slightly younger, if they discover a nonconforming political opinion, they will not hesitate to take retributory social action: disinviting guests, cutting off friendships, throwing a fit in public. They seem to believe that they really have reasoned their way to political truth and therefore that dissent is not merely divergent but actually dangerous and offensive. This is despite the fact that their "political truth" consists in reciting exactly the same false and absurd catechisms as their more indifferent elders. Indeed, they often have accumulated an even larger mental cache of deceptive narratives, which they identify with and hold more sacred then do their elders.
You're seeing the feminization of culture at work, with wokeness particularly pronounced among females, but also seen to a degree in feminized males. However, younger Gen Z males, sick of the verbal abuse, are turning right.
It's not that they are lost to reason. It's just that humans as a species usually do not think outside the bubble and do not rock the boat. If the Overton window inside your bubble is like that, you just follow. There are people who don't, but these are usually schizoid. That's why Soviet Psychiatrists had an easy time institutionalizing a lot of dissidents in the 1960s-1970s.
Trump represents a paradigm shift from ideology to territory. He practices Machiavellian and Schmittian politics: you reward your friends and punish your enemies; if you want policy you have to get power. Democracy is nothing less than counting up the rifles and agreeing to go home before the shooting starts.
Such stark realities are deeply upsetting to people who believe the glue holding it all together is the Holy 14th Amendment to the Konstatooshun of the United States of Amerikwa.
The Left of course has always known its about people and power. They fire everybody who doesn't toe the party line, protest in the streets, and manufacture votes with mail-in ballots, dead or incapacitated voters, and ballot harvesting. (That's why Democrats do nothing about armies of homeless camping in their districts.) They are already practicing political violence with widespread rioting and two assassination attempts on Trump and one on Josh Shapiro. This party is just getting started and January 6 was a walking tour.
Trump spotted the electoral $100 bill on the floor and picked it up. He knows the power is in tribal energy, not George Will-intellectual energy. The Alt-Right is right and David Brooks is and remains wrong. (He described himself as a "John McCain Republican" in an interview with Tyler Cowen a week ago, the absolute buffoon.)
The American Right's awakening to the realities of democratic politics is causing lots of heads to explode. The liberal (classical and otherwise) worldview was that humanity would advance endlessly along Obama's Moral Pant-Crease of the Universe while the Right politely cleared its throat. Now that the Right is signaling it's prepared to wield power and violence, people are shocked and frightened and lashing out.
I'd add that politics are a lot more umbilical than intellectual and there's probably a large hereditary component. Your liberal friends and relatives really REALLY do not want to talk to you. The New Right movement has split numerous families including my own.
Yes. The left can't stand that the right has stopped being nice and is playing the same ballgame now.
We were disinvited from my sister in law's Thanksgiving dinner in 2016 after Trump's election. The weird thing about it was that we never discussed politics any time before. The thing is... I never felt like they particularly liked us anyway. There is/was something about Trump that unleashed something in people to finally reveal if someone didn't like you. Why him, though? There were other polarizing political figures over the years... but the left just finally lost it. I truly don't get what made Trump the proverbial straw. I've never seen a reasonable explanation.
Not sure why Trump is some sort of tipping point either. Weirdly the angriest people i've seen have been the david french and george will types. I was at a neighborhood event talking politics with some other dads and mentioned I hadnt voted since 1996 but registered in 2015 to vote for Trump. One GW Bush-type was so angry he was shaking.
Things have gotten very real now that it's clear that white people are to be made a minority in their own homelands. It really is all about blood and soil. This is admittedly frightening and people get upset and lash out at the prospect that their skin is going to be their uniform. Lee Kuan Yew knew what was at stake in a city-state like Singapore. The stakes are way higher in a supersized country like the US.
I suspect that for the bien pensant left the success of President Trump may have particularly unhinged them because it showed that what they had been told were and accepted as de rigueur opinions of those in the enlightened consensus were in fact not only rejected but their adherents were openly or discreetly disdained and even held in contempt by many or even most of their fellow citizens - too many and including many obviously decent and intelligent people to dismiss as a negligible fringe. Because most "liberals" have no more basis for their conventional left opinions and attitudes than what they believe to be socially acceptable, and their sense of identity is so weakly founded on this, they are herd animals for whom electoral repudiation came as a bewildering shock that understandably provoked rage.
The closest figure comparable to Trump to drive the Democrats crazy that I can think of is Nixon. He seems to have been a center-left president who gave us OSHA and the EPA and extracted American troops from Viet Nam, and was extremely popular with voters, but Dems just _hated_ him and managed to force him from office despite his overwhelming victory in the 1972 election.
Old lefty boomers almost have a stroke raging against him as if it were still 1970.
I think today's left thought they could "Nixon" Trump and their failure to do so is at the heart of their derangement.
Correct me if I'm wrong... but wasn't Nixon doing well in the polls? In other words, why do the Watergate shenanigans? With all the government corruption that has been unearthed, I wouldn't put it past our intelligence community to have been behind the "break in".
Nixon had misplaced loyalties. His subordinates did the Watergate stuff, and Nixon didn’t know about it. But when he found out, he should have cut them loose. A rare political misjudgment.
You know what they say. The wheels of noticing grind slowly. Or that the lies are already on the other side of the world before the noticing has a chance to get out of bed and put its boots on.
I’ll donate one to the Missoula, Mt library & you can do a talk at Shakespeare’s Book store. I just attended one with Walter Kirn in his tour & it was standing room only. CJ Hopkins (currently living in Berlin) passes through next month on a tour. Maybe next summer if you plan ahead :)
The choice of "Noticing," as the one-word main-title for the Sailer anthology, may not have satisfied one important factor in book-titles today: Uniqueness with an eye to very-easy findability.
A search of WorldCat for "Noticing" gives many results (many about math teachers, for some reason). It gets around to the Sailer book only by No.15. (See list further down in this comment.)
Many of the other "Noticing"-titled books high on the list post-date the first-run of the Sailer book. Several seem suspiciously similar to the Sailer anthology. Look at No.3, by Cass Sunstein. (The Sunstein book's audio-book, No.11, version also beats up the Sailer Noticing book.)
("Cass Sunstein is a constitutional scholar with the soul of a secret policeman," once wrote longtime Sailer-blog commenter Mr. Anon. Here is Steve himself, summarizing Cass Sunstein's work, in 2017: "There’s no need for free speech. Just ask Cass Sunstein, he’ll inform you what is an ugly view and what is a beautiful one. For example, beautiful views include Cass’s idea that the government should hire agents provocateur to 'cognitively infiltrate' online conspiracy theorist forums...")
________
Here are No.1 to No.15 results of a WorldCat search for "Noticing":
(1.) NOTICING (2023). By Kobi Yamada, illustrated by Elise Hurst. Publisher: Compendium Inc. (Everett, Washington). "This is a story about noticing the little things, the grand big things, the imaginary, and sometimes, hidden things. It is about embracing what's possible. And that the incredible is everywhere, and in everything--waiting to be known, discovered, recognized." (P
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(2.) LANGUAGE TEACHER NOTICING IN TASKS (2021). By Daniel O. Jackson. Publisher: Channel Views Publications. "This book provides an accessible account of teacher noticing, the process of attending to, interpreting and acting on events which occur during engagement with learners, in contexts of language teacher education. It presents an innovative study of task-based interaction and emphasizes the role of reflective practice in professional development."
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(3.) LOOK AGAIN: THE POWER OF NOTICING WHAT WAS ALWAYS THERE (2024). By Cass Sunstein & Tali Sharot. Publisher: Atria Books (Simon & Schuster), New York. "A neuroscience professor and a Harvard law professor team up in this groundbreaking work, based on decades of research in the psychological and biological sciences, that shows how disrupting our routines can lead to seeing, feeling and noticing again--and embracing much-needed change to live happier, more fulfilling lives."
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(4.) DOING PROCESS RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONS: NOTICING DIFFERENTLY (2022). Barbara Simpson & Line Revsbaek, eds. Publisher: Oxford University Press. "This edited book takes up the challenge that process philosophy and process ontology pose to conventional, entity-based empirical research, even daring to question the relevance of 'methodology' in contemporary process organization studies...."
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(5.) DEVELOPING HABITS OF NOTICING IN LITERARY AND LANGUAGE CLASSROOMS: RESEARCH AND PRACTICE ACROSS PROFESSIONAL CULTURES (2020). Alyson Simpson, Francesca Pomerantz, Douglas Kaufman, & Sue Ellis, eds. Publisher: Routledge. "This is a book for education professionals who want to build the capacity of teachers and school leaders in meaningful ways. It draws together research and practice around professional learning that makes a difference and questions existing definitions of 'professional development'..."
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(6.) NOTICING (2019). By Ashleigh Wink. Published from an MFA thesis, Maryland Institute College of Art. "My current body of work is a direct response to being present - an exercise in noticing and notating existential occurrences that reveal the temporality and impermanence inherent in our existence. These existential occurrences present themselves in the form of light and its movement across a surface - ever changing in color, in intensity, in perception. How do I perceive the changes of the light which, much like the changes of life, may be subtle and slow, or obvious and quick?"
.
(7.) THE ART OF NOTICING DEEPLY: COMMENTARIES ON TEACHING, LEARNING, AND MINDFULNESS (2016). Jan Buley, David Buley , & Rupert Clive Collister, eds. Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, England. "The theme of deeply noticing the world of teaching and learning around us unifies the collected commentaries celebrated in this book. The contributing storytellers, teachers, researchers, poets, photographers, writers, mentors, and guides are integral to sustaining 'the art of noticing deeply' to foster wide-awakeness (as Maxine Greene termed it years ago), and engagement in teaching and learning settings and beyond..."
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(8.) THE ART OF NOTICING: 131 WAYS TO SPARK CREATIVITY, FIND INSPIRATION, AND DISCOVER JOY IN THE EVERYDAY (2019). By Rob Walker. Alfred A. Knopf. "A handsome, beautifully produced compilation of meditations and exercises to inspire us to find joy and expand the ways we engage with the people and places, the objects and tasks we encounter in our everyday lives. Long-time workplace advice columnist for The New York Times, Rob Walker, draws from his annual School for Visual Arts course and from interviews he conducted with men and women from a wide range of disciplines..."
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(9.) THE POWER OF NOTICING: WHAT THE BEST LEADERS SEE (2014). By Max H. Bazerman. Publisher: Simon & Schuster. "Imagine your advantage in negotiations, decision-making, and leadership if you could teach yourself to see, and evaluate, information that others overlook. The Power of Noticing provides the blueprint for accomplishing precisely that..."
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(10.) MATHEMATICS TEACHER NOTICING: SEEING THROUGH TEACHERS' EYES (2011). Miriam Gamoran Sherin, Victoria R. Jacobs, Randolph A. Philipp, eds. Publisher: Routledge. "Mathematics Teacher Noticing is the first book to examine research on the particular type of noticing done by teachers---how teachers pay attention to and make sense of what happens in the complexity of instructional situations...."
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(11.) Audio-book of the Cass Sunstein "Noticing" book (see No.3).
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(12.) TEACHER NOTICING OF PRE-SERVICE AND IN-SERVICE SECONDARY MATHEMATICS TEACHERS: INFLUENCES OF TEACHING EXPERIENCE, COGNITIVE DEMANDS, AND TEACHING INTERNSHIPS ON PERCEPTION, INTERPRETATION, AND DECISION-MAKING (2024). By Anton Bastian. Publisher: Springer Spektrum, Wiesbaden, Germany. "In light of increasing demands on teachers and the need to develop teaching-related competences, this book examines the situation-specific skill of teacher noticing in pre-service and in-service secondary mathematics teachers. A video-based test instrument is used to measure teachers' noticing skills..."
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(13.) SERIOUS NOTICING: SELECTED ESSAYS, 1997-2019 (2020). By James Wood. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. "In Serious Noticing, Wood collects his best essays from the first three decades of his career, supplementing earlier work with autobiographical reflections from his book The Nearest Thing to Life and recent essays from The New Yorker on rising writers of extraordinary promise. The result is an essential guide to literature in the new millennium."
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(14.) TEACHER NOTICING: BRIDGING AND BROADENING PERSPECTIVES, CONTEXTS, AND FRAMEWORKS (2017). Edna O. Schack, Molly H. Fisher, & Jennifer Wilhelm, eds. Publisher: Springer. "This book reflects on the continuing development of teacher noticing through an exploration of the latest research."
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(15.) NOTICING: AN ESSENTIAL READER, 1973-2023 (2024). By Steve Sailer. Publisher: "Passage Publishing, [Los Angeles?]" (question-mark is in the WorldCat listing). "Noticing: An Essential Reader is the definitive collection of Steve Sailer's most incisive observations on culture, immigration, class, politics, and human biodiversity. Sailer's unique approach to the most controversial topics of our time, combining good old-fashioned common sense with a researcher's eye for data, has allowed him critical insights into American life that few others see and virtually no one else dares speak out loud."
Steve's Banned Book Road Trip!
What do the yellow circles represent?
As an aside, the Menlo Park in California came before the Menlo Park in New Jersey. The latter is where a 29-year-old Thomas Edison set up his home and lab before moving up to West Orange
It's 7,600 miles, the majority of that from Hillsdale College in Michigan to Kenai Peninsula College.
Note: I'm not actually planning to drive to Alaska to visit my library books.
"The 2026 Sailer fund to investigate human-biodiversity among the Eskimo-Inuit of Alaska and the Yukon; with two-day side-stop lecture-tour at that one library in Anchorage."
Prairie Dunes is in Hutchinson Kansas. It is world class and not to be missed.
I knew that I'd heard of Hutchinson, Kansas.
Hutchinson's Cosmosphere is fantastic. They have the Apollo 13 command module, an SR-71, and various other impressive air and space things.
Sounds cool.
I'm trying to remember if I've ever seen an SR-71 ...
In the 80s, I spent two days at its main base, Beale AFB north of Sacramento, in December, and the tule fog was so thick, I never saw a hangar, much less an aircraft or runway.
There's one at the California Science Center, next to the LA Memorial Coliseum across the street from USC. I've never seen it, but in San Diego's Balboa Park we have a doppelganger, the Lockheed A-12, on outdoor static display. You can touch it. It takes an expert to tell the difference between SR-71 and A-12. Both are titanium-skinned and totally cool - when not screaming through the stratosphere at Mach 3.
Ken
The thing about the SR-71 is that you may not have seen it, but it's sure seen you.
Congrats Steve!
That's Hillsdale College library now carries the book is nice. Congratulations!
Do it!
The problem is that the people who need to hear you won't open your ears. I recently visited a childhood friend in Indiana. We see each other every handful of years or so. Politics never came up over the years; I always considered her one of the most down to earth, reasonable, old school Democrats out there. I was floored when something came up in a recent conversation and she unexpectedly blew up with, "But January 6th!". I was stunned. I really think that if she is lost to any reason... all Democrats are. It rattled me and has left me feeling hopeless about things in general.
Basically all my family and friends older than myself are Democrats and always have been, and they would all consider themselves "reasonable, old school Democrats". Yet they all unblinkingly continued voting for the sexual mutilation of children, inundation from the third world, and war against Russia.
Why? I suspect it's mostly just habit. They always voted Democrat and they're too old to change now. The TV tells 'em to and so they do it. They've heard the leftwing narratives so many times they can recite it like catechism. Which I do ask them to recite, just to see how well the media control works. "Gender affirming health care" rather than monstrous abuse of children, "diversity is strength" rather than genocide, "freedom and democracy fighting tyranny and dictatorship" rather than pointless, dangerous, and expensive carnage. I have to hand it to the boomer-brain wranglers, they really know their business.
And yes, they are lost to reason on any subject where the brain wranglers have gotten there first. If you question the catechism, they respond not with reasoned debate but with furious rage, though they can still reason on other subjects. Programming is real.
"[With a few exceptions,] all my family and friends... consider themselves 'reasonable, old school Democrats'".
My experience, too.
One piece of the puzzle may be the (on average) higher Agreeableness of women. Those closest to me have absorbed the Respectable Consensus on the issues you mention, and go with the flow.
E.g. I shared the following tweet with pro-gay-rights Mrs. AMac78. "LGB Courage Coalition" makes a principled and sensible case for rejecting the ongoing Legacy/Social Media celebration of transitioning children, from (as you would guess) an LGB perspective.
Key paragraph: "As gays and lesbians, we see this as fundamentally an issue of justice—because gays and lesbians are being harmed. The rush to medicalize gender nonconforming youth disproportionately affects same-sex attracted young people, many of whom might otherwise grow into healthy, whole LGB adults. Instead, these youth are often told their feelings mean they were 'born in the wrong body,' and are steered toward irreversible medical pathways. Justice demands that these children be safeguarded from unnecessary, irreversible procedures—not funneled into them under the banner of 'affirmation'.”
Crickets.
Changing One's Mind is hard.
https://x.com/LGBCourage/status/1958179075001926131
The gender activists are incredibly aggressive.
I met up with my "reasonable" Democrat in 2019. Despite Trump in office... zero politics came up. And that was the time period nearly every Dem was losing their mind; my sister in law disinvited us from Thanksgiving dinner in 2016, even. Then saw my friend in 2021; nothing came up. Now saw her in 2025 and that is when she exploded. I am truly at a loss.
Lots of Democrats thought Trump win in 2016 was a one-off. That it happened again set them boiling.
I think you hit the nail on the head with this. The fury of seeing more vote for him was probably more than they could ever reason with. Unfortunately, I think it is pointless to bother with them anymore. There will always be a resent from them.
The reason they respond with rage is that they have no reasoned basis for their pious beliefs, and since these beliefs constitute their sense of identity as a good person and member of what they imagine to be an enlightened consensus, drawing them into question is felt to be threatening. Better just to ask them questions gently. If they say "what about January 6," you might ask them how they characterize that event, and then ask whether they see anything that might draw that characterization into question, and so on in that vein. They are typically ignorant of the actual facts, and know only the media narrative. This procedure will not change their opinion, but will, if they don't insist on dropping the matter, instill the beginnings of doubt. If they insist on dropping the matter, it will have shut them up.
The reason for their pious believes is political religion. It's very difficult to argue with religion.
Two of my favorite comedians, Marc Maron and John Delany have done multiple routines on how bad it is that Trump is president...with zero policy examples. Maron just expressed his anxiety that he doesn't know what he's going to do (first term) and then said if it turns out not as bad, he'll admit it--but if it turns out much worse then republicans owe him an apology (clapter!). His joke example was something like waking up and learning it was now ok to hunt at zoos. I think Melany compared it to a horse loose in a hospital.
All of which is to say that the people who hate him most just hate him like you hate the devil. They just know that he is the source of all evil. Wait for some evil (OMG he's enforcing existing immigration laws!) and then freak out again.
I've also seen a small amount of making fun of him for being so stupid as to not know that economists and physicists have proven tariffs are bad.
But in summary, in contrast to how it was when I was a kid, political ID is almost policy dispute-free these days
They are very ignorant. They have no idea that videos exist of the Capitol police waving people in. Or that people standing outside on the grass were hunted down and charged with an offense months, even years later. No idea.
> They have no idea that videos exist of the Capitol police waving people in. Or that people standing outside on the grass were hunted down and charged with an offense months, even years later.
Floyd demonstrations: "Peaceful protesters should be respected and honored. If some protests were fiery and only mostly peaceful, well, in practical terms, there's not much any authorities could have or should have done about any hypothetical arsonists, rioters, looters, or CHAZ insurrectionists. It's only fair that sympathetic local governments compensated some of them."
January 6th: "Violent, armed, trespassing, and/or treasonous insurrectionists were correctly hunted down, charged, convicted, sentenced to long prison terms, and bankrupted. As criminals, violations of their civil rights didn't matter. If many peaceful protesters were waved in by the Capitol police or just stood outside on the grass, well, in practical terms, it served them right to be ensnared in the same dragnet and to suffer the same consequences."
"Reasonable" Democrats don't seem to think that a single policy could have been fair to Peaceful/Violent protesters of MAGA/BLM beliefs.
Thinking about it further, I can elaborate a bit:
1) I'm in my fifties, so the older generation for me is mostly my parents' age: in their seventies or eighties. Most of the men have already died, so that age cohort skews female, and therefore has the female's feelings-over-logic approach and herd instinct.
2) In the same way that they don't really understand what they are voting for, they also don't usually hold anyone else's vote against them, because to them it doesn't really mean anything. To them, voting is an arbitrary characteristic, like hair color, or a fashion accessory, like a hat. They are not policies with real world consequences. It's just random stuff in the landscape, so unless they step on something sharp that penetrates their (mental) skin, they don't bother about it too much.
3) By contrast, starting with people younger than me (especially women), even just slightly younger, if they discover a nonconforming political opinion, they will not hesitate to take retributory social action: disinviting guests, cutting off friendships, throwing a fit in public. They seem to believe that they really have reasoned their way to political truth and therefore that dissent is not merely divergent but actually dangerous and offensive. This is despite the fact that their "political truth" consists in reciting exactly the same false and absurd catechisms as their more indifferent elders. Indeed, they often have accumulated an even larger mental cache of deceptive narratives, which they identify with and hold more sacred then do their elders.
You're seeing the feminization of culture at work, with wokeness particularly pronounced among females, but also seen to a degree in feminized males. However, younger Gen Z males, sick of the verbal abuse, are turning right.
It's not that they are lost to reason. It's just that humans as a species usually do not think outside the bubble and do not rock the boat. If the Overton window inside your bubble is like that, you just follow. There are people who don't, but these are usually schizoid. That's why Soviet Psychiatrists had an easy time institutionalizing a lot of dissidents in the 1960s-1970s.
They don't start thinking outside the bubble until personally affected.
Yep - I commiserate but I think it is a human condition. I just wrote a reply to almost missouri on the same theme.
Trump represents a paradigm shift from ideology to territory. He practices Machiavellian and Schmittian politics: you reward your friends and punish your enemies; if you want policy you have to get power. Democracy is nothing less than counting up the rifles and agreeing to go home before the shooting starts.
Such stark realities are deeply upsetting to people who believe the glue holding it all together is the Holy 14th Amendment to the Konstatooshun of the United States of Amerikwa.
The Left of course has always known its about people and power. They fire everybody who doesn't toe the party line, protest in the streets, and manufacture votes with mail-in ballots, dead or incapacitated voters, and ballot harvesting. (That's why Democrats do nothing about armies of homeless camping in their districts.) They are already practicing political violence with widespread rioting and two assassination attempts on Trump and one on Josh Shapiro. This party is just getting started and January 6 was a walking tour.
Trump spotted the electoral $100 bill on the floor and picked it up. He knows the power is in tribal energy, not George Will-intellectual energy. The Alt-Right is right and David Brooks is and remains wrong. (He described himself as a "John McCain Republican" in an interview with Tyler Cowen a week ago, the absolute buffoon.)
The American Right's awakening to the realities of democratic politics is causing lots of heads to explode. The liberal (classical and otherwise) worldview was that humanity would advance endlessly along Obama's Moral Pant-Crease of the Universe while the Right politely cleared its throat. Now that the Right is signaling it's prepared to wield power and violence, people are shocked and frightened and lashing out.
I'd add that politics are a lot more umbilical than intellectual and there's probably a large hereditary component. Your liberal friends and relatives really REALLY do not want to talk to you. The New Right movement has split numerous families including my own.
Yes. The left can't stand that the right has stopped being nice and is playing the same ballgame now.
We were disinvited from my sister in law's Thanksgiving dinner in 2016 after Trump's election. The weird thing about it was that we never discussed politics any time before. The thing is... I never felt like they particularly liked us anyway. There is/was something about Trump that unleashed something in people to finally reveal if someone didn't like you. Why him, though? There were other polarizing political figures over the years... but the left just finally lost it. I truly don't get what made Trump the proverbial straw. I've never seen a reasonable explanation.
Not sure why Trump is some sort of tipping point either. Weirdly the angriest people i've seen have been the david french and george will types. I was at a neighborhood event talking politics with some other dads and mentioned I hadnt voted since 1996 but registered in 2015 to vote for Trump. One GW Bush-type was so angry he was shaking.
Things have gotten very real now that it's clear that white people are to be made a minority in their own homelands. It really is all about blood and soil. This is admittedly frightening and people get upset and lash out at the prospect that their skin is going to be their uniform. Lee Kuan Yew knew what was at stake in a city-state like Singapore. The stakes are way higher in a supersized country like the US.
https://youtube.com/shorts/_WQ2ib9Pqw0?si=KPEiNqtDX-tLxiNS
I suspect that for the bien pensant left the success of President Trump may have particularly unhinged them because it showed that what they had been told were and accepted as de rigueur opinions of those in the enlightened consensus were in fact not only rejected but their adherents were openly or discreetly disdained and even held in contempt by many or even most of their fellow citizens - too many and including many obviously decent and intelligent people to dismiss as a negligible fringe. Because most "liberals" have no more basis for their conventional left opinions and attitudes than what they believe to be socially acceptable, and their sense of identity is so weakly founded on this, they are herd animals for whom electoral repudiation came as a bewildering shock that understandably provoked rage.
The closest figure comparable to Trump to drive the Democrats crazy that I can think of is Nixon. He seems to have been a center-left president who gave us OSHA and the EPA and extracted American troops from Viet Nam, and was extremely popular with voters, but Dems just _hated_ him and managed to force him from office despite his overwhelming victory in the 1972 election.
Old lefty boomers almost have a stroke raging against him as if it were still 1970.
I think today's left thought they could "Nixon" Trump and their failure to do so is at the heart of their derangement.
Correct me if I'm wrong... but wasn't Nixon doing well in the polls? In other words, why do the Watergate shenanigans? With all the government corruption that has been unearthed, I wouldn't put it past our intelligence community to have been behind the "break in".
Nixon had misplaced loyalties. His subordinates did the Watergate stuff, and Nixon didn’t know about it. But when he found out, he should have cut them loose. A rare political misjudgment.
I’m not a leftist but Trump leaves me cold. For examples:
- Ronald Reagan wouldn’t be rolling out the red carpet (literally) for a brutal dictator like Putin. Today Trump was praising Kim Jong Un.
- Reagan wouldn’t be threatening Canada and Greenland
- Reagan wouldn’t be slapping tariffs on everyone but Putin’s Russia
Test
That's a thoughtful thing to promote. I love the old treasure hunt, personally. As a personal injury lawyer - kidding. But I like treasure. And maps.
I've got it on my bookshelf!
Are you Richard North of Turbulent Times?
No, afraid not.
You know what they say. The wheels of noticing grind slowly. Or that the lies are already on the other side of the world before the noticing has a chance to get out of bed and put its boots on.
The Kenai Peninsula is beautiful this time of year!
Dave Barry's column on how absurdly beautiful Alaska is is memorable.
Caught an 86lb King on the Anchor River a lifetime ago. Beautiful place.
I’ll donate one to the Missoula, Mt library & you can do a talk at Shakespeare’s Book store. I just attended one with Walter Kirn in his tour & it was standing room only. CJ Hopkins (currently living in Berlin) passes through next month on a tour. Maybe next summer if you plan ahead :)
The Cumberland County library in Fayetteville NC has it. I had added it to my future reading list a while back.
I’m fairly sure “Noticing” is the only banned book I ever read.
The choice of "Noticing," as the one-word main-title for the Sailer anthology, may not have satisfied one important factor in book-titles today: Uniqueness with an eye to very-easy findability.
A search of WorldCat for "Noticing" gives many results (many about math teachers, for some reason). It gets around to the Sailer book only by No.15. (See list further down in this comment.)
Many of the other "Noticing"-titled books high on the list post-date the first-run of the Sailer book. Several seem suspiciously similar to the Sailer anthology. Look at No.3, by Cass Sunstein. (The Sunstein book's audio-book, No.11, version also beats up the Sailer Noticing book.)
("Cass Sunstein is a constitutional scholar with the soul of a secret policeman," once wrote longtime Sailer-blog commenter Mr. Anon. Here is Steve himself, summarizing Cass Sunstein's work, in 2017: "There’s no need for free speech. Just ask Cass Sunstein, he’ll inform you what is an ugly view and what is a beautiful one. For example, beautiful views include Cass’s idea that the government should hire agents provocateur to 'cognitively infiltrate' online conspiracy theorist forums...")
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Here are No.1 to No.15 results of a WorldCat search for "Noticing":
(1.) NOTICING (2023). By Kobi Yamada, illustrated by Elise Hurst. Publisher: Compendium Inc. (Everett, Washington). "This is a story about noticing the little things, the grand big things, the imaginary, and sometimes, hidden things. It is about embracing what's possible. And that the incredible is everywhere, and in everything--waiting to be known, discovered, recognized." (P
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(2.) LANGUAGE TEACHER NOTICING IN TASKS (2021). By Daniel O. Jackson. Publisher: Channel Views Publications. "This book provides an accessible account of teacher noticing, the process of attending to, interpreting and acting on events which occur during engagement with learners, in contexts of language teacher education. It presents an innovative study of task-based interaction and emphasizes the role of reflective practice in professional development."
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(3.) LOOK AGAIN: THE POWER OF NOTICING WHAT WAS ALWAYS THERE (2024). By Cass Sunstein & Tali Sharot. Publisher: Atria Books (Simon & Schuster), New York. "A neuroscience professor and a Harvard law professor team up in this groundbreaking work, based on decades of research in the psychological and biological sciences, that shows how disrupting our routines can lead to seeing, feeling and noticing again--and embracing much-needed change to live happier, more fulfilling lives."
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(4.) DOING PROCESS RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONS: NOTICING DIFFERENTLY (2022). Barbara Simpson & Line Revsbaek, eds. Publisher: Oxford University Press. "This edited book takes up the challenge that process philosophy and process ontology pose to conventional, entity-based empirical research, even daring to question the relevance of 'methodology' in contemporary process organization studies...."
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(5.) DEVELOPING HABITS OF NOTICING IN LITERARY AND LANGUAGE CLASSROOMS: RESEARCH AND PRACTICE ACROSS PROFESSIONAL CULTURES (2020). Alyson Simpson, Francesca Pomerantz, Douglas Kaufman, & Sue Ellis, eds. Publisher: Routledge. "This is a book for education professionals who want to build the capacity of teachers and school leaders in meaningful ways. It draws together research and practice around professional learning that makes a difference and questions existing definitions of 'professional development'..."
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(6.) NOTICING (2019). By Ashleigh Wink. Published from an MFA thesis, Maryland Institute College of Art. "My current body of work is a direct response to being present - an exercise in noticing and notating existential occurrences that reveal the temporality and impermanence inherent in our existence. These existential occurrences present themselves in the form of light and its movement across a surface - ever changing in color, in intensity, in perception. How do I perceive the changes of the light which, much like the changes of life, may be subtle and slow, or obvious and quick?"
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(7.) THE ART OF NOTICING DEEPLY: COMMENTARIES ON TEACHING, LEARNING, AND MINDFULNESS (2016). Jan Buley, David Buley , & Rupert Clive Collister, eds. Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, England. "The theme of deeply noticing the world of teaching and learning around us unifies the collected commentaries celebrated in this book. The contributing storytellers, teachers, researchers, poets, photographers, writers, mentors, and guides are integral to sustaining 'the art of noticing deeply' to foster wide-awakeness (as Maxine Greene termed it years ago), and engagement in teaching and learning settings and beyond..."
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(8.) THE ART OF NOTICING: 131 WAYS TO SPARK CREATIVITY, FIND INSPIRATION, AND DISCOVER JOY IN THE EVERYDAY (2019). By Rob Walker. Alfred A. Knopf. "A handsome, beautifully produced compilation of meditations and exercises to inspire us to find joy and expand the ways we engage with the people and places, the objects and tasks we encounter in our everyday lives. Long-time workplace advice columnist for The New York Times, Rob Walker, draws from his annual School for Visual Arts course and from interviews he conducted with men and women from a wide range of disciplines..."
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(9.) THE POWER OF NOTICING: WHAT THE BEST LEADERS SEE (2014). By Max H. Bazerman. Publisher: Simon & Schuster. "Imagine your advantage in negotiations, decision-making, and leadership if you could teach yourself to see, and evaluate, information that others overlook. The Power of Noticing provides the blueprint for accomplishing precisely that..."
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(10.) MATHEMATICS TEACHER NOTICING: SEEING THROUGH TEACHERS' EYES (2011). Miriam Gamoran Sherin, Victoria R. Jacobs, Randolph A. Philipp, eds. Publisher: Routledge. "Mathematics Teacher Noticing is the first book to examine research on the particular type of noticing done by teachers---how teachers pay attention to and make sense of what happens in the complexity of instructional situations...."
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(11.) Audio-book of the Cass Sunstein "Noticing" book (see No.3).
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(12.) TEACHER NOTICING OF PRE-SERVICE AND IN-SERVICE SECONDARY MATHEMATICS TEACHERS: INFLUENCES OF TEACHING EXPERIENCE, COGNITIVE DEMANDS, AND TEACHING INTERNSHIPS ON PERCEPTION, INTERPRETATION, AND DECISION-MAKING (2024). By Anton Bastian. Publisher: Springer Spektrum, Wiesbaden, Germany. "In light of increasing demands on teachers and the need to develop teaching-related competences, this book examines the situation-specific skill of teacher noticing in pre-service and in-service secondary mathematics teachers. A video-based test instrument is used to measure teachers' noticing skills..."
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(13.) SERIOUS NOTICING: SELECTED ESSAYS, 1997-2019 (2020). By James Wood. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. "In Serious Noticing, Wood collects his best essays from the first three decades of his career, supplementing earlier work with autobiographical reflections from his book The Nearest Thing to Life and recent essays from The New Yorker on rising writers of extraordinary promise. The result is an essential guide to literature in the new millennium."
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(14.) TEACHER NOTICING: BRIDGING AND BROADENING PERSPECTIVES, CONTEXTS, AND FRAMEWORKS (2017). Edna O. Schack, Molly H. Fisher, & Jennifer Wilhelm, eds. Publisher: Springer. "This book reflects on the continuing development of teacher noticing through an exploration of the latest research."
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(15.) NOTICING: AN ESSENTIAL READER, 1973-2023 (2024). By Steve Sailer. Publisher: "Passage Publishing, [Los Angeles?]" (question-mark is in the WorldCat listing). "Noticing: An Essential Reader is the definitive collection of Steve Sailer's most incisive observations on culture, immigration, class, politics, and human biodiversity. Sailer's unique approach to the most controversial topics of our time, combining good old-fashioned common sense with a researcher's eye for data, has allowed him critical insights into American life that few others see and virtually no one else dares speak out loud."
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