High annoying, medium bad

Is this a bad thing, or does it just bug me?

Quick note

You may have seen that I am a contributor to The Argument, a new publication which just launched. I am very excited about this. I started blogging because I was lightly bullied by some friends into posting more, and it’s gone better than I could have ever expected. It is wild to be listed next to people whose work I read and respect. I look forward to not subtweeting them and instead getting in fights in public like a respectable contributor.

On to the post!

The Bad/Annoying Scale

I tend to group things I run into, especially online, into a handy 2 dimensional scale. Axis 1 is: is this thing annoying? It’s usually obvious when stuff is annoying. Many things are annoying. Axis 2: is this thing bad? Like, actually bad, impacts the world bad? Thing you’ll worry about for more than 2 seconds bad?

Annoying, but not bad: Most replies on Bluesky mad about me not criticizing Trump more (guys I don’t know how much more clear I can be that I think he sucks and his policies are awful). Most posts, really.

Bad, but not annoying: The quiet demolition of healthcare and the safety net by Republicans

Not annoying, and not bad: Most things in daily life. My friend’s instagram pages. Normal stuff.

Bad AND Annoying: Using shoddy evidence in discussions about political tactics. Misuse of polls. Not acting in good faith.

This helps me because I get annoyed very easily, and most things I get annoyed about are not important. Ideally, I don’t want to get spun up about something that doesn’t matter. Do I actually manage that always? LOL NO but like, maybe 50% of the time.

Anyways, here’s some stuff that’s high-annoying medium-bad which I didn’t want to do a whole article about.

Beefposting

Mostly this has been around Matt Yglesias with the chain of articles replying to articles talking about him and people’s various loathing for him, loathing for his critics, etc etc. CHH had a great piece on the phenomenon of instigating beef as a way to get views. I don’t think that’s the goal of most people I run across on twitter posting about their long held beefs. I think they’re just legit mad. And to them, I would say: You all know you can just mute people, right?

You really do not have to see people who annoy you every day. Especially when they’re people who agree with you on many things, fixating on their annoying personality or 10% disagreement is wildly unhealthy. Mute, block, move on.

A particular flavor of beefposting that I hate is the beef-by-association. Ganz had a spectacular example of this a bit ago, which I wrote about at length, where he passed through being mad at a couple irritating guys who do polls to being mad at the entire concept of polling. “This guy is in the same field as a guy I don’t like!” is frustrating logic that would get you laughed at in a social setting. Block! Mute! Move on! (and before you ask yes I DID mute John Ganz, thank you)

Bad Evidence For Points I Agree With

Adam Bonica, frequent purveyor of things I almost agree with that fall apart on inspection, is at it again. He’s got a new piece about how PACs fundraise by deceiving seniors. This is, to be clear, a thing I fully believe happens and should be banned. I don’t have great evidence for that belief right now, other than vibes about the content of fundraising messages that I’ve seen, so I was interested to see this piece.

Unfortunately! He wanders beyond his evidence almost immediately. He starts with a graph showing that donors to what he’s categorized as spam PACs tend significantly older than the general population of ActBlue donors. This is a plausible indication that something is wrong, if these PACs specifically are pulling an older population in a way no other group is.

However, he goes on to immediately illustrate how wide the variation in donor age is between ordinary candidates. This graph is presented like it’s a ding on Jeffries and Pelosi and such, but to my eyes, it mostly illustrates that some candidates draw from radically younger audiences than is typical. *Of course* Sanders donors are disproportionately young. There have been many pages written about his young audience and strong national brand. For all my disagreements with him, the guy is incredible at having a national audience to fundraise from. One of the other examples here is AOC, whose donors also skew older. Sure she’s got a proportion of young people in there, but the skew is quite visible, and you could see how 2055 AOC might have an old donor base.

Later on he provides examples of this graph for extremely standard Democratic groups. They look pretty much exactly like the Jeffries/Pelosi graphs above, maybe a hair younger. There’s two possible readings of this. 1. All these groups are manipulating seniors, and the fact that the distributions of donor age look identical is evidence they’re all doing the same thing. 2. This old-skewing age distribution is just what Democratic donations look like if you aren’t a superstar candidate with a national brand.

My annoyance is that nothing in the article would let you decide between those two positions. Bonica really clearly believes (1), and is taking this all as evidence for (1), but it doesn’t actually let you make that conclusion unless you already believe it. I don’t like it when people produce bad evidence for things I support, because it just makes everything harder. It is important to say true things, and to back up your conclusions. This bugs me, etc.

The Democratic Love For Having Reporters At Everything

There was recently a DNC meeting. There was a lot of talk about avoiding internal fights, and a lot of pressure to solve problems and change things. There were also (obviously!) internal fights. For some reason reporters were enthusiastically invited to cover all this.

I do not understand the desire to have your messy internal party meetings heavily covered by media. Who is this helping. Is this enabling better conversations? Nah. Is this improving the party brand? Nope! Is this persuading people who think the party isn’t transparent enough? Also no!

Why. What is the point of this. It would be more dignified to have one single party conversation in private. I do not want to hear about Democratic Party events unless I am being invited. Smoke filled rooms forever.

Not waiting for evidence

Those “actually voters moved to the couch, not to trump” posts were wrong. Womp Womp. Now that we actually have data (CES validated vote), instead of guessing at voter churn and vibes, we know that nonvoters leaned Republican. For the first time ever, which is pretty painful.

I’m not annoyed about this conclusion (it matches what I said at the time), but I’m frustrated we spent so long discussing it when the answer was very obviously “wait for data”. I wrote a whole post on how the theory that turnout would have helped Harris was probably wrong, and while I like being right, I hate wasting time more.

No one is going to learn anything from this, and the people who have been proven wrong here aren’t going to say much about it. Anyways! Time moves on!

The End

I hope the annoying/bad scale helps you. It clearly doesn’t stop me from posting, but I like to think it helps me post slightly less.