Yeah, we are a nation, but I can definitely see how we might look a bit dysfunctional from the outside.

First and foremost, remember that it is very rare for someone to write an article or post about things that are doing just fine. So you are mostly going to hear about disagreements or angry opponents or laws that are problematic. That kind of content gets more views.

I’ll also say that our 2 party system is practically designed to cause division and arguments. And it is always at its worst during presidential election years. But at the average citizen level, most of us are just going about our lives with no pent up malice for those who don’t see the world the same as us. We definitely have generalizations in our head about people from other areas of the country, but with a few radical exceptions, the vast majority of Americans view ourselves as a nation. Even if we don’t agree on a lot of the details.

It was definitely a journey and I know lots of things had an influence. Probably some that I didn’t even recognize were impacting me in the moment.

I can tell you that friends made a large difference. No one has more influence on you than someone that actually cares about you. So having several friends that cared about me despite my warped viewpoint was probably a fundamental fulcrum for shifting my views.

I also had the opportunity to befriend a lot of people who are often “othered” in conservative circles. It becomes a lot harder to accept someone painting a group in a negative light, when you actually know people that clearly don’t fit that narrative. It forced me to question the narrative.

Finally though, I think it was me starting to recognize the hypocrisy. An obvious one is that Christianity is strongly tied into the culture, but nothing about modern conservatism exemplifies “love your neighbor as yourself”. Another big point of hypocrisy for me was when Trump was made the candidate in 2016. I’m old enough to remember that one of the large talking points made against Bill Clinton in the 1992 election was a lack of character. And I just couldn’t comprehend how character was so important to the Republicans then, but clearly wasn’t an issue for their current candidate. Character and integrity are important attributes to me, and in retrospect Trump’s candidacy was really a final straw for me.

As for why I moved towards socialism specifically? Largely because I don’t believe capitalism scales well, and the free market leads to too many competing priorities that basically boil down to the Prisoner’s Dilemma (the best outcome for the individual versus the best outcome for the group). I think there has to be an authority external to the market who can intervene when advancements are clearly coming at the expense of the society.

As a former conservative republican turned socialist, I’ll say that it can happen. Certainly some will never change their minds or see the world any other way.

But some of us will. And some of us only will if we are exposed to thoughts and viewpoints outside our usual echo chamber.

I agree that I’d rather A24 wasn’t offering any financial boost to extreme conservative viewpoints. But I am hopeful that at least a few people in those audiences will be drawn to watch and that it will make them ask questions they never thought about before.

I did bad.

But I expected to do bad. AI generation has become too good.

You tell yourself you can identify them, because sometimes you notice weird artifacts and spot the AI quickly. But we’re really only noticing the bad ones. We’ll never even know the good ones were AI most of the time, so we can’t balance how good we think we are at spotting them against how often we were actually wrong.

This morning actually. I ran the sound system for a memorial service today. Young man lost to gun violence, not even 25 yet.

Felt weird for getting choked up, because I didn’t actually know him personally. Just hard to see all those people hurting because of a senseless and violent tragedy. And rough to know that his life ended so early and all that potential was just gone in a moment.