Notes, references, & transcript: https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/dont-listen-to-bad-advice-on-civic
Transcript below references.
References:
Commemorating Earth Day with a Little Legislative History Jonathan Coppess Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics University of Illinois April 22, 2022 farmdoc daily (12):55 Forged in the wake of an oil spill and by the flames of a burning river, history demarks the origins of the modern environmental on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, amid the troubles and turmoil of the Vietnam War at the end of the tumultuous 1960s. Within the first four years of its existence, the movement achieved an unparalleled, impressive legislative and political trifecta. The National Environmental Protection Act (1970), the Clean Air Act (1970), and the Clean Water Act (1972) were all enacted by strong, bipartisan votes across two congresses. In addition, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 with Congressional acquiescence.
What you can do - Ten ways to resist Trump II - Robert Reich Jan 23, 2025
Democracy Docket - 10 Things We Can All Do to Protect Democracy - By Marc Elias - January 25, 2025
First NATO scientific meeting on Cognitive Warfare (France) — 21 June 2021 "The impairment of cognitive processes has two harmful consequences: i) Contextual maladaptation, resulting in errors, missed gestures or temporary inhibition; and ii) Lasting disorder, which affects the personality and transforms its victim by locking him or her into a form of behavioral strangeness or inability to understand the world. In the first case, it is a question of causing transitory consequences, circumscribed by a particular critical environment (cf. Figure 4-1 Figure 4-1 is a drawing that could be reversible a rabbit or a duck depending on how you look at it. ). The second concerns the transformation of the decision-making principles of individuals who then become disruptors or responsible for erroneous actions, or even non-action (cf. Figure 4-2 Figure 4-2 is A soldier sitting on a stump thinking with hand on chin and rifle at side, and the caption says A Thinker: what about the inhibition of action due to indecision or cognitive overload.)."
Politico - Les Moonves: Trump's run is 'damn good for CBS' By ELIZA COLLINS 02/29/2016 06:15 PM EST The 2016 campaign is a "circus," he remarked, but "Donald's place in this election is a good thing." "Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun," Moonves went on. "I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”
Psychology Today - Giving Up: Informational Learned Helplessness. It's exhausting when it’s hard to figure out what is true and what is false. December 23, 2021 | Susan A. Nolan, Ph.D., and Michael Kimball, Reviewed by Jessica Schrader The plodding repetition of conspiratorial lies can lead to “cognitive exhaustion.” But it goes deeper than that. Peter Pomerantsev, author of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, popularized the concept of “censorship by noise” in which governments “create confusion through information—and disinformation—overload.” In time, people become overwhelmed, and even cognitively debilitated, by the “onslaught of information, misinformation and conspiracy theories until [it] becomes almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, or trace an idea back to its source.” And so “censorship by noise,” particularly common in regions governed autocratically, leads people to experience crushing anxiety coupled with a markedly weakened motivation to fact-check anything anymore. They may then “like” or share information without critical review because they lack the energy and motivation to take the extra steps to check it out.
AP - Americans are exhausted by political news. TV ratings and a new AP-NORC poll show they’re tuning out By DAVID BAUDER and LINLEY SANDERS Updated 9:00 AM EST, December 26, 2024 “People are mentally exhausted,” said Aunallah, 45, of San Diego. “Everyone knows what is coming and we are just taking some time off.” Television ratings — and now a new poll — clearly illustrate the phenomenon. About two-thirds of American adults say they have recently felt the need to limit media consumption about politics and government because of overload, according to the survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Smaller percentages of Americans are limiting their intake of news about overseas conflicts, the economy or climate change, the poll says. Politics stand out.
Madore KP, Wagner AD. Multicosts of Multitasking. Cerebrum. 2019 Apr 1;2019:cer-04-19. PMID: 32206165; PMCID: PMC7075496. In fact, multitasking is almost always a misnomer, as the human mind and brain lack the architecture to perform two or more tasks simultaneously. By architecture, we mean the cognitive and neural building blocks and systems that give rise to mental functioning. We have a hard time multitasking because of the ways that our building blocks of attention and executive control inherently work. To this end, when we attempt to multitask, we are usually switching between one task and another. The human brain has evolved to single task.
North of 48 podcast interview about the election. I went on this Canadian podcast to talk about the recent US election. Chloe Humbert Nov 09, 2024 Note: this is just maybe 10% of my thoughts on the election as a garden variety progressive Appalachian genX lady in Scranton, Pennsylvania, as it focused mainly on the loss of my progressive Congressperson Matt Cartwright.
Fetterman Abandons Pledge to Protect Dreamers - AFL-CIO Releases Deportation Defense Guide - Shakir Outlines Bold DNC Plan Mike Elk Jan 22, 2025 Given that his wife had arrived here as a child of an undocumented mother, Fetterman always promised to never vote for a bill that would hurt the so-called “Dreamers,” immigrant youth, who arrived undocumented as minors and were backed by DACA. However, not only did Fetterman vote for the bill, but he co-sponsored it with Republican Alabama Senator Kate Britt, a close friend of his, who visited him while he was hospitalized last year.
Democracy Americana The Anti-Liberal Left Has a Fascism Problem Prominent leftwing intellectuals are allowing their singular, disdain-driven focus on (neo-) liberalism to completely distort their perspective on the Right THOMAS ZIMMER MAY 24, 2024 I’d be very interested to find out what happened here. Maybe I missed something, but I couldn’t find an acknowledgment anywhere in the anthology that the selected pieces might have been altered and updated. In the credits, it merely says “reprinted.” The update, clearly, has been made to reflect that something major had happened in between the original publication and the reprint, something that in many ways directly contradicted a key argument. Robin’s overall assessment in 2021 was that Liberals needed to calm down since the Right wasn’t ever exercising its power in the way Liberals decried, the liberal doomsday scenarios were never coming true. But in Dobbs, the Right did exercise power in a dramatic way, stripping half the population of bodily autonomy and equal rights.
Manufacturing MILD Chloe Humbert Aug 05, 2023
ACLU Washington - Timeline of the Muslim Ban
It Could Happen Here, podcast - About That Nazi Salute January 23, 2025 We could perhaps look at the airport protests from the first months of the original Trump administration, or masses of people, including a very young Mia who had not quite realized what gender she was, occupied airports all across the country to stop the implementation of Trump's Muslim ban by physically forcing the government to release the people had detained in the airports. The power of those protests was that they directly located the site where power was operating the airport and took them. The weakness of those protests was that people went home, and they went home because they had been told time and time and time again by the ACLU and by other legal organizations that the fight was over, that they could leave, and that the Muslim Bans would be defeated by the courts. Most of you lived through it. Some of you remember the Muslim ban was never defeated by the courts. It could possibly have been defeated in those moments, it wasn't. The contest was taken away from the real sight of power and into a domain largely ruled by the ruling class.
Trump Launches Blatant SCAM COIN 3 Days Before His Inauguration! | Bulwark Takes - The Bulwark Jan 18, 2025 JVL: “Paramount or Viacom I forget who the parent company is with CBS is considering settling the 60 Minutes lawsuit and so I don't know if you saw this but one of the ridiculous (not legal advice) lawsuits that Trump filed, there was the one against the pollster Ann Selzer from the Demoines register, one was against 60 Minutes for airing an edited version of the Kamala Harris interview and that this was election interference - it's the dumbest ___ thing anybody's ever heard okay and uh.” Tim Miller: “Yeah 60 Minutes edits every interview that they do, it’s the style of the 60 Minutes magazine interview.” JVL: “This what all television does right so but here's the thing you and I - and I'm going to give Trump credit for playing four-dimensional chess - you and I looked at that and said this is so stupid look at this he's going to get pantsed or we said this is so sinister look he's trying to chill things and intimidate the media but that's not what's going on. What's going on is that the CBS parent company has a perspective merger that is going to come before the Trump administration and so by having Trump the person, not the office of president, file a civil lawsuit against them, that gives them the opportunity to settle that lawsuit and to settle it with very strict non-disclosure terms to it, and who can say maybe that winds up helping their case for merger approval. Do you see, do you see what I'm saying here?” Tim Miller: “yeah we’re a banana republic is what you’re saying.” JVL: “Yes yes this is a ban but this is true innovation using civil litigation not for the purposes of intimidating or extorting people but like cooperatively with the plaintiff and the defendant working cooperatively to use that to transfer funds legally, totally legally, and to then lock that fund transfer behind an NDA so that nobody can ever see what happens, in order to then auction off core government services that's again I – slow clap, right this is I am like Ron Burgundy I'm not even mad - you ate the whole wheel of cheese - I'm impressed.”
Parallax Views w/ J.G. Michael - Our Broken Media System in the Era of Trump & How It Could Be Fixed w/ Victor Pickard Jan 18 2024 “We designed our public media from the get go to be relatively economically and politically weak. Those are structural problems that can be fixed. That's not inevitable that that's how our public media needs to look like. And that's why in a lot of my work I float these more kind of ambitious even utopian plans for building out an entirely new public media system that I think ultimately is something we're going to have to do if we're going to have any sort of especially local journalism which the market will never support. There is no commercial future for a lot of the kinds of journalism that we actually need to have a healthy democratic society. So we're going to have to find some kind of public model to do that but again one that I I would argue must be radically democratized, devolved down to the local level so that you have local ownership and control.” – Victor Pickard
MAGA Can't Run the Country To Save Its Life! (w/ Jonathan Martin) | Bulwark Podcast - The Bulwark Jan 3, 2025 Tim Miller: “Democratic strategist Chris hail tweeting this right now “it's remarkable how my party has ditched the Trump is a threat to democracy argument Agular didn't mention the word democracy once in his nomination of Hakeem Jeffries”. it is true I mean it sucks but it's true I as what maybe the biggest kerfuffle ever created on this podcast was when Ezra Klein was on and he said that his private convos with Democrats were that they didn't believe the Democracy message that they were pushing forth that they didn't believe that Trump was that great of a threat - this was last summer he said that - that seems to be bearing out in a way that's a little alarming for me.” Jonathan Martin: “If they thought he was a real threat to democracy then would the mayor of DC be taking meetings with him to talk about getting employees back five days a week into their cubes?”
January 19, 2024 - Professor Delivers URGENT WARNING Before Inauguration | The Weekend Show - MeidasTouch Jennifer Mercieca: “Social media platforms are not public spaces they are not used by officials to make decisions about policies that are affecting the public, right there's no way for us to directly communicate to politicians where they are listening to us and we know that they are and to have you know the sort of give and take there's the illusion of that right there's the promise of that we were we were told we were going to get that out of you know the sort of techno optimism of the 90s and the early 2000s but that's not what it it became it became this algorithmically controlled outrage machine” Anthony Davis: “and a business as well I mean it's a profitable business” Jennifer Mercieca: “big business right and so we think we're doing democracy when we go onto these platforms and we express our opinions but it would be much better for us to go out into the street and do that, that would be the kind of protected speech that you know the Constitution First Amendment protects it would be the kind that people pay attention to um and that is meaningful right gathering with others to express ourselves what we do on social media it isn't - it isn't the same thing.”
Curmudgucation The End of the Public Cyber-Square Peter Greene Jan 08, 2025 It's hard to say how close we came to an internet public square. There were always limitations, the FOMO was always greater than what you were actually missing, and if twelve people sign up for an online community, the thirteenth person is going to be some kind of troll. But the dream is hard to release. There may be real benefits. Social media often gives us the feeling that by engaging in an on line debate about an issue, we were really Doing Something. If the collapse of the public cyber-square gets more folks to log off and Do Something in their own communities, that's probably a net win. Also, once the dream dies, we can make use of the tools we have.
Hypernormalisation Documentary, 2016, by Adam Curtis.”The liberals were outraged at Trump. But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply — angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.”
The New Yorker Magazine: The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks. By Adrian Chen, July 27, 2016 The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space. One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed. “The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” the opposition activist Leonid Volkov told me.
Transcript:
Hello, I'm Chloe Humbert. I'm recording this on February 1st 2025. Don't listen to bad advice on civic engagement. If you want to engage in democracy, consider carefully about where you get the advice. Find actual people who know what they're doing and know what they're talking about. Look up stuff from movements and organizations who have put the time in to learn how power works and what individuals can do, organizations can do. I saw this op-ed from Marc Elias on Democracy Docket that really just, gosh, and don't get me wrong, lawyers can engage in lawsuits and what they're doing is very important and there's nothing wrong with that but they're not probably in the best position to like tell you what as you as an individual can do or should do to get the most bang for your buck so to speak before going into my criticisms I made a list and this is available blogged about this this is I have a list that I start out with about the things that you can do that I think, from what I have looked into, are effective ways individuals can engage in democracy and civic engagement that is known effectiveness. Are they perfect? No. No, nothing is. And, you know, we're in a world of trouble, so there's no denying that. But my list, this is my top ten list, and then I'll get into my complaints about that op-ed. My list is, number one, write your reps. Number two, bird dog your reps. Number three, write letters to the editor. Number four, write op-eds and pitch them to outlets if you have credentials or some kind of personal connection to a subject. Five, give public comments at public meetings and to public agencies. Six, sign up for legislation tracking alerts and search alerts for issues you care about. That way it'll help you write those op-eds, write those letters to the editor, and write to your reps. You'll know what's being introduced in government at the state and federal level. Seven, sign up for news from organizations that specialize in particular issues you care about. You know, it doesn't matter if you actually agree with these organizations or are totally on board. Maybe you're donating to them. Maybe you're volunteering, but not necessarily. I mean, but they could be a source of information on those topics because they're devoting the energy on those topics. Eight, organize your workplace, even if it's not unionized. Obviously, if there's a union, you join it, get involved. But just even just making sure you have connections to your coworkers, I think, is a big deal. And - do not trust the employer. They monitor communications. They watch people. Like, management, you know, makes... Behind the scenes, they're making notes of who's friends with each other. They're watching in most of these situations. Not all. Obviously, not all employers are like this, but many, especially the big ones are. And I just remember I worked somewhere where we actually suspected that there was a manager that was hiding in the bathroom and listening to conversations in the lavatory. And there were reasons that we thought this - because this person knew things. She knew things that had only been discussed in the lavatory, maybe. Yeah. And, yeah, so there was like an end bathroom stall that was kind of like nobody liked to use it because it was too cramped. And like, you know, you would hit your elbow on the toilet and we could see how and oh, and the toilet seat was broken, like it was all, you know, loose from the toilet. And my I thought it was like Roz in the movie "9 to 5". I think this person was up on the toilet seat so that if you looked under the stall, you wouldn't see feet. So you wouldn't think that there's anybody in there. And maybe you could talk privately, but she'd be up on that toilet seat, crouched up, listening. And one time, a co-worker actually tapped the door to see if it would open, and it didn't. So... Yeah, so hopefully that's not too common, but that's definitely a thing that happens. That's definitely a thing that happens. And don't rely on social media as the only means of connection to coworkers either. That's a bad idea. And of course, vote. Of course you should vote. Anybody telling you you shouldn't vote, that's a whole thing. That's a whole thing. The bottom line is that governance will happen and it'll happen with or without you. So, you know, are you going to leave that vacuum? And of course, demonstrations, but not everybody can do that. Protests are, you know, not even getting covered at this point in the news. They're not getting much attention. Obviously, there's risks. involved with that. So it's not the end-all be-all. And just so you know, a demonstration does not have to be a million people to be effective. Because if you look at the first Earth Day, it was not one huge protest. It was small gatherings throughout the United States. And that affected a big it put pressure on Congress and Nixon. And a lot of good came out of that. So Also, I will say that Robert Reich also has a list of ten things, and it's different than mine, and mostly he focuses on telling the truth, supporting the people in your community that are being targeted, which is good, supporting worker organizing, not propping up brands and not being a cheerleader. and getting your community around brands that are bad. So all those things are good. I like his list. His list is, you know, all very good things. So it's possible to have a list. I'm not saying my list is the only list. It's not the only thing. It's certainly not the, you know, but... But here's my gripes about the democracy docket ten things. All right. So number one is, quote, stay engaged when all the news is about Trump and pardons and lies It is easy to want to retreat and stop paying attention. Don't do it. It is precisely when things are hard that we must all lean into remaining vigilant and informed, unquote. No, do not lean into the madness. Do not lean into the madness. Holy shit, that is not the way to go. Remaining vigilant and constantly drinking in a fire hose of garbage, leaning into that is not healthy. It will not help us protect democracy. It won't even help somebody survive personally. You know who benefits if people stay engaged and remain vigilant? People who make money putting out the firehose of crap. Now, I'm not saying people shouldn't be reporting on every damn thing. Absolutely, that should be happening. But no, we do not need everyone stunlocked on all of it in a constant stream of everything being reported. No, no. You know who else benefits from people drinking in the firehose? Your opponents. Your opponents. The people who want you inactivated. This is a known warfare technique. It's been written about for centuries. Carl von Clauswitz pointed out, quote, the conqueror is always a lover of peace. He would prefer to take over a country unopposed, unquote. Humans cannot effectively multitask. That's been shown. So you've got to limit your exposure. You've just got to stick to, you know, the things you care most about, try to limit it, and then take care of yourself. You're not good to the rest of us if you Just drink in the firehose of stuff and then do nothing because you're stunned and you're in a state of informational learned helplessness and you're inactivated and unable to do anything because it's just so overwhelming and then you check out. So, no, you do not have to wear yourself out and make yourself sick in order to prove you care about what's happening. You just don't have to do that. So the other thing he says is, number two, quote, "Help Democrats. Next time you want to attack a Democrat for being too much or too little of that, realize that you are only helping the GOP." Okay. No. No. The idea is not – you cannot – no. This thing that you can never criticize a Democrat. Oh, please. Please. This is how we wound up where we are, with Democrats who can't win their fucking elections. Like, that's not what we need. We need people to pressure their Democrats. We need people out there pressuring the ones that are... For example, how am I helping the GOP for criticizing my senator in the Senate, John Fetterman, who is helping the GOP? How is... Opposing that and criticizing that, helping the GOP. It's not. I'm not the one helping the GOP. So, you know, make that make sense and then get back to me, bucko, because I'm not the one that's, you know, signing on to extremist right wing. stuff and saying, let's help Trump. No, I'm not the one that's saying that. So I'm not the one that's helping the GOP. There are some Democrats that are doing that. And it is absolutely normal to say, no, I'm not on board with that. So, OK, his three and five were, gosh, believe in the courts, trust in the courts. Trump is powerless and the courts will reject his efforts. What is this? Like, what? Isn't that what you all told us about Roe v. Wade being settled law? I mean, did Corey Robin write this list? I've written about this before. In 2021, Corey Robin had an essay published in The New Yorker magazine arguing that fear of fascism... And the overturning of Roe v. Wade was overblown and essentially alarmist. All these people said Roe v. Wade was settled law. Don't worry. Then a year after that was published, Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court. Historian Thomas Zimmer pointed out that after this happened, apparently the New Yorker magazine quietly changed the wording in Corey Robin's article. Apparently, to move the goalposts to keep chastising people as overreacting, even while acknowledging that they said that wouldn't happen and it absolutely happened. So to be clear, I'm the first person to say do not normalize bonkers stuff that Trump says and assume that it actually is something that he could do. That is true. He lies. And because it's absolutely true. He lies. He doesn't know what he's talking about or why not both. Nobody needs to manufacture normal on that. But he is the president of the United States and people will act upon his orders, illegal or not. And it takes time for stuff to go to the courts. So you can't just sit back and, you know, believe in the courts or trust in the courts and trust in the lawyers. No, that way lies madness. Haven't people had enough of that, like... Mueller was save us and Merrick Garland is coming to the rescue. Haven't we had enough for that for a lifetime? Remember the Muslim ban? The Muslim ban, it took years to get through the courts. It took years to overturn that. A lot of it even wasn't overturned in the end. And there's people who say that even when it was overturned, what Biden's removal did didn't even fix the harm. And... Like, no, there's you can't just trust in the courts. That's it's not. Oh, sit back. Things are happening behind the scenes. And, you know, there's some saver. Oh, this is so bad. No, don't do that. And then he also says, gosh, you know, support independent media. OK, yeah, that's great. But independent media, that's not going to save us like. Yes, a lot of independent media is good and a lot of corporate media is garbage. But, but, there's a problem with this idea that like, oh, just all we need is independent media subscriptions and we'll have all this thing. No, we need a media overhaul. As Victor Pickard said recently on a podcast, and I'll link to it, uh, Quote, "something we're going to have to do if we're going to have any sort of especially local journalism, which the market will never support. There is no commercial future for a lot of the kinds of journalism we actually need to have a healthy democratic society" unquote. Where he was interviewed, I think it was Parallax Views. I'm not trying to shit on independent journalists, but individual subscriptions will not save democracy by virtue of being independent in some marketplace of ideas concept. Institutions are able to give reporters more backing to take risks. There's all kinds of risks there. Okay, so yes, we have a situation where the big media corporations are not only just rolling over to Trump, they're eager to have Trump file lawsuits against them so then they could... do settlements and just funnel their money to them, I guess. I mean, I don't know. I'll link to a Bulwark podcast where the guy explains how that works. But there's been a few articles about that out on what's happening with that. So I'm not saying trust the big media corporations, not at all. But We've got problems here. There's not going to be one solution and it's not going to come easy. It's not just about finding a left Joe Rogan. That's just not – no. Because often all the money is dark money and it's on their side and they can – pay all these people to be sock puppets and run botnets and go around and hit like and subscribe on all these paid subscriptions and YouTubes and all of these things and substack subscriptions. And these PR outfits go and do that and they have a lot of money to do that. you know you can't compete with the fire hose of automated and paid trolls like you just can't like that's not the answer here because they're always going to win because they have all this money to you know astroturf it like that that's you can't play that game because you're just on your heels and in that so-called marketplace. It's just, it's really tough. The other thing he says is, oh, use the town square. Everyone has a town square. It may be your social media accounts or local book club. Now, the book club sounds good. I mean, yes, talk to your neighbors, all of that stuff, but your social media accounts are not the town square. They're not the town square. Again, You know, astroturfed. It's like all, you know, the Internet of fakes. That's a problem. Not a town square. Now, it's not wrong to engage with people generally and to communicate, even to use, you know, methods of communication. That's not wrong. I'm not saying that. But I'm afraid most people who are clicking on that op-ed on Bluesky and are, they're not going to see go to your actual square or go to your congressman's office with a picket sign. They're not going to, you know, they're not hearing point out objectively nonsensical and bad policies to republicans in your family. What they're hearing is sit all night on Bluesky and post into the void or get into a pissing match with your drunk uncle on Facebook. And that's not going to do anything. It's just not. So his nine and ten were actually pretty good. Prepare for the long fight. Prepare for the long fight. And don't give up hope. Those are good. You know, that's good. And I'm not saying it's all bad. And I'm not saying, actually, I'd be more interested in what he's doing. Like, he should be telling us, what are you doing? What are you doing dude? Just tell us. That might actually be more – and then we could say, well, is that something I could support or is that something I can do? And if not, well, I'm going to do something else, but good for him doing that. But one thing is that we're not going to win over – people who already get their hope from like QAnon and the right-wing crazy disinformation, you know, people who are hopelessly misinformed, they get their hope, you know, They might hate you, but they love each other and they're getting hope there. So our idea is if you want to spread hope to people, you want to reach the people who don't vote. Like they're the people who aren't in, you know, who just think that politics is too dirty. You know, the people who, you know, think that it's bad. So the way to win them over is to not touch the poo on social media. Don't be retweeting, you know, garbage, sick burn, you know, accounts, even if you think they're funny. Don't do that. Focus on something that's workable and practical. That's all I could say. Yeah, it's a tough one, but there are things to do and just get together. Even in small groups, Get together with a few people, talk about what you can do, set parameters on it. Is that like maybe you don't agree on everything, but like, hey, we're going to talk about this. And, you know, that that works. I'm in a local astronomy club that has like a group chat that's just about astronomy and like people post their pictures, their astrophotography pictures, and they talk about astronomical events. And that's great, you know. I may not have anything else in common with those people, right? Like some of them maybe, some of them maybe not. That's fine. You can have these groups. Another one is the Astronomy Magazine for subscribers they just came up with a forum. Just for subscribers to talk about astronomy. And this is the sort of thing I'm seeing this happen is I think it's because people realize that like something like Twitter is no longer viable. Maybe you used to talk about science, you know, on there, but these big platforms, it's just no longer the answer. It's just... And I think we're going to see a move back to, and I'm not, I don't know that it's going to be perfect, but I think we're going to see a move back to forming cohesive groups around a particular cause or a particular interest. And I don't think that's a bad thing. Seek it out and we'll see where it goes. And good luck. That's all I can say. Good luck to us all.
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