Resisting processed food and speculation
I can't do it every day.
I love speculating as much as I like eating boxed macaroni and cheese.
Once I think about boxed macaroni and cheese, it is only a matter of time before I eat an entire box. I can picture where the box is in the pantry, what additions (olives or sausage or canned oysters) I am going to mix in. Until I sit down and churn through the last elbow, I am on the mac train.
Speculation and mac & cheese can take over my thinking. Once I think about stringing a couple facts together to come up with a narrative that suits my wishcasting or doom flinging (mood dependent) and forming it in language that wanly alludes to some possible objective research or years of close study that I may have done, it is very hard not to complete it.
I don’t seem to be alone in my love of addiction to speculating. I have an email inbox that brims with newsletters I signed up for in some weak moment when the tiny “no thanks” text lost out to the big Please Listen To Me1 button. These newsletters are speculation plantations; the apparent requirement that they send me a new writing every 48 hours does not suggest that they are deeply researched or exhaustively reported.
They are largely speculation. Red yarn connecting grainy photographs on a bulletin board in a poorly lit basement room.
After the recent primaries, there is a lot of narrative around who won and why. The astute “analysis” (speculation) tends to be that voters across the country are speaking to a national trend towards…
Democratic Socialists of America
Corporate Democrats
Independents
Electability
Anti this
Pro that
I got really jealous of all the delicious macaroni and cheese that all of these newsletter writers got to eat. I presume that network talking heads are eating similar meals, as that is a vocation of constant speculation to elevate the blood pressure of their viewers.
I could do that! I should start a newsletter and just eat delicious speculation every 48 to 72 hours. All I need is two points that are similar, such as an election in Michigan and an election in Seattle. I can pick what defines them as similar. In such a case, they are similar in that they are elections.
With just two data points and the ability to search the internet2 for the exact thing I want to believe, I can find enough evidence for a sizzling 1200 words that will confirm the bias of my readers.
Is there a growing schism in the Democratic Party?
Are corporate Democrats actually cyborgs formed out of leftover macaroni and cheese?3
Are all independent candidates for national office actually Marvel superheroes?
Now I even have supporting links (not evidence. That would not be any fun) and links to other people who share my views. These articles likely have as much credibility as an AI chatbot prompt. In fact they may well be the output of an AI chatbot.
“Write me an article that reassures me that the DSA is taking over the Democratic Party and that evil Corporate Democrats are doing terrible things to try to stop them.”
“Write me an article that shows how stupidly simplistic the DSA fans are using electoral data from previous elections and a Pew poll or two.”
I regret that I have not been following Republican primaries very closely across the nation. Would it take me much longer to come up with speculation on what those elections mean? Nah.
MAGA Republicans continue to choke out any sense of sanity in the Republican Party through electoral dominance.
The MAGA coalition is collapsing, as evidenced by this one thing this one person said that I found in an article that came up when I searched for “The MAGA coalition is collapsing.”
Today is not a day for me to dine on macaroni and cheese, however delicious it will be.4 I know that all of these elections have a ton of nuance. They are the outcome of the unique demographics of the district, on how the campaigns are run, on the nature of the candidates.
Broad stroke, dramatic changes across the board are for a propaganda blurb about something 50 years past in an eighth grade history book.
In the newsletter ecosystem, they are for people too afraid or lazy to get involved in their local politics who desire to read something that reassures them that nothing they do can stop some inevitable wave that they have brilliantly identified so they can now just sit around eating delicious cheesy pasta while the world does what it inevitably does.
If I can resist the processed meal, I don’t speculate. I help.
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Nothing is made of leftover macaroni and cheese. This is fallacious. There is never any leftover macaroni and cheese.
Hopefully you understand that this is a metaphor. After writing so much about mac and cheese, a box meal dinner is just about inevitable. Sorry that I am lying to you. It is for the sake of the allegory.