Think Uncomfortable Thoughts
Good Trouble for the Week of 3.28.25
Benjamin Franklin is said to have remarked, “All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are unmovable, those that are movable, and those that move.” Your task, then, is to find those who are movable and get them to join you.- Blueprint for Revolution
This week: Good Trouble for Apathy
How provocative art and ideas are forcing us all to confront some hard truths
At the start of…
Any comms project, there is typically that question to answer.
What is the barrier to overcome?
The attitude, bias or prevailing force that is preventing the audience from behaving the way you would like for them to.
Let me make it easy for you. APATHY and(or) FEAR
Fear is easy to comprehend as an emotional barrier. Deer in the headlights afraid to act is one we all know.
Apathy is a bit harder. Because we think of apathy as indifference. Just not caring. If only they could see, then they would care.
But there’s also apathy, which is the suppression of concern. To not consider the truths we don’t want to consider, that are uncomfortable. Or that we’re afraid to (Fear again).
How do you get someone to think about something they don’t want to think about?
Such as…
What ideas may your son be fed online, and how could those ideas shape him beyond your parental guidance?
Perhaps that’s why Netflix’s Adolescence is provoking so much conversation today.
From London Times: Adolescence: the TV drama that every parent should watch
From BBC: British PM Keir Starmer 'worried' about toxic masculinity after Adolescence drama
From NY Times: ‘Adolescence’ Has People Talking. Its Writer Wants Lawmakers to Act.
It’s a 4-part series in which a 13-year-old boy is suspected of killing a girl in his class.
Without giving too much away, there’s a powerful scene in which the young accused parrots back the grim arithmetic of the incel worldview — the belief that 80 percent of women are attracted to just 20 percent of men, so boys must manipulate girls if they want to find sexual partners.
The artistic ‘hook’ of each episode being shot in one-take may help draw in attention, but the message is getting delivered:
We’ve turned a blind eye for too long to what our kids are seeing in social and, as a consequence, our boys aren’t right. This comes after Jonathan Haidt’s book ‘The Anxious Generation’ which has renewed discussion about the effects of social media on young people of both sexes.
And the results of elections around the world which have shown a big divide between young men and women politically. Bringing awareness to the ‘manosphere’ of online chat forums, influencers, and podcasts which seem to be filling a vacuum for ‘how to act like a man’ for so many impressionable and lost young boys.
What makes for great commercial art is its ability to confront while still entertain. Adolescence on Netflix is showing this to be true as it becomes a ‘must watch’ for parents and legislators on the dark side of the internet and our boys
“Ten people who yell make more noise than ten thousand who keep silent.” - Napoleon
Speaking of Fear…
The current playbook for the Trump administration is one of instilling fear.
From the Atlantic The United States of Fear
In the two months since Trump returned to power, there have been scattered acts of dissent. But they seem only to accentuate the broader silence within major American institutions.
But as Drezner points out, pluralistic ignorance may help explain some of this. The feeling that your pov may be alone and that speaking out may single you out for retribution. However, rightfully, the cracks of the fear playbook are starting to show.
30,000+ are showing up to Bernie Sanders and AOC’s Fight Oligarchy Tour, being held in swing state areas.
Tesla dealerships have become the Planned Parenthood of the Left as activists make it you a pariah for going in to shop.
And as poll analyst Nate Silver points out, Trump’s net approval rating has declined by 13.8 points, so around 7 points per month. A president can’t afford that rate of decline for long
The key to activating these like-minded but unsure minds is to demonstrate to them that what they’re feeling isn’t alone. And that there’s nothing to fear in voicing your dissent.
As Srdja Popovic writes in BluePrint for Revolution,
Tactics like these, Chileans used to say, made people realize that “we are the many and they are the few.” 
My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation. — Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation
"Well, when I talked about oligarchy over the years, I think for some people it was an abstraction…Now though, people understand you have to be blind not to see that what we have today is a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires." - Bernie Sanders
Good Trouble For Abundance
Scarcity Is a Choice This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis. It reads, even to us, as too simple. And yet, the story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities.
Will this book have the same effect on progressive ideals?
Ezra and Derek are asking the tough questions of the progressive left.
Questions such as, why is it in places like California where Democrats control the state and many of the local governments, is it still so hard to enact progressive programs? To create housing and make it more affordable to live, while professing that the cost of living and building more housing is of the utmost importance?
Why does it seem that Red States are better equipped to build clean energy, housing, and infrastructure than Blue states?
‘Don’t make America like California’
It’s an important one for the Left to grapple as the past election put places like California up as a ‘warning’ for what Progressive governorship looks like. And one to solve before the next election cycle.
Related:
“When you talk to rich people who pay off their balance, they think that credit-card companies are losing money on them, and they’re the ones subsidizing the people who carry a balance. It’s the exact opposite.”From the Atlantic: There Are Two Kinds of Credit Cards
Those reward points and perks don’t just come for nothing. They’re financed through the heavy interest rates and late fees levied on lower-income borrowers or ‘revolvers’ who tend to use credit cards as ‘short-term loans’ to cover expenses until they get paid.
From CNN: DoorDash will let users buy now, pay later for fast food, a possible worrying sign for the economy
Dating is the only thing you can put 10,000 hours into and end up right where you started.
For Men and Women, and AI?
American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage
The share of women ages 18 to 40 who are single—that is, neither married nor cohabitating with a partner—was 51.4% in 2023, up from 41.8% in 2000.
48% of women said that being married was not too or not at all important for a fulfilling life, up from 31% 2019.
The Bisexual Revolution: Why are so many people now identifying as bisexual?
Is it important that your lover be a biological human instead of an A.I. or a robot, or will even asking this question soon feel like an antiquated prejudice?The Global AI Girlfriend App Market size is expected to be worth around USD 24.5 Billion By 2034, from USD 2.7 Billion in 2024,
Other Headlines
DELETE YOUR 23ANDME DATA RIGHT NOW with the sale of the genetic company your data could end up in someone else’s hands and be used for who knows what… highly unlikely it’ll be so that you can show off you are 1% Ashkenazi Jewish
Lest We Forget the Horrors: An Unending Catalog of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes. McSweeneys is documenting the head-spinning misdeeds of this 2nd Trump administration
After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers
This can’t come to Miami fast enough
Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI
Is it time for a second passport? Americans Are Buying an Escape Plan
Actively ‘shopping’ Madrid as we speak
Collective action can meaningfully reshape political preferences, though success depends on timing relative to elections, media framing, and, plausibly, protest tactics (violent versus non-violent).Black Lives Matter movement had a significant and decisive impact on US politics, study finds Counties which had BLM protests experienced a 1.2-to-1.8 percentage increase in Democratic voter share.
Study finds prosocial behavior predicts shifts in political views People’s tendency to act in cooperative and generous ways may influence their political views in the long run. Making them more likely to develop political attitudes favoring social equality and income redistribution over time.
Later in the meal, when my grandfather went to the restroom, she slipped into the booth across from me and leaned in close. “You’re perfect just the way you are, kid,” she said.
86 percent of the products Amazon delivers today weigh five pounds or lessFrustrated by the Treasury Dept’s decision to walk back replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, Dano Wall created the Harriet Tubman Stamp to transform Jackson anyways
“Obsessions make my life worse and my work better.”
The fact that it takes a beauty brand to provide affordable groceries is sad. Beauty brand The Ordinary fights soaring US egg prices with ‘ordinarily priced’ cartons available for less than $4 in their NYC store locations
I’m obsessed!: Why following fixations makes our creative work better
YouTube is making Shorts views go up Beginning March 3 there will be no “minimum watch time requirement.” Any time a video loads in your Shorts feed — even if it only plays for a moment before you swipe past — YouTube will add a view.
Stay Interested. Stay Interesting