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TheDag  Per Aspera ad Astra  1yr ago (text post)   2766 thread views

Calling all Lurkers: Share your Dreams of Effortposting

It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.

I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.

This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!

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My practical experience in local youth politics basically indicates that almost everyone drawn towards politics is a bit "special" in some way, but generally speaking more popular one was, more likely they're simply to be drawn towards mainstream centrist politics, not any of the extremes.

My experience in the US is that any youths with political interests are a bit nerdy, but at least for boys the more popular, the more likely to be on the right, with a major confound that artsy needs are usually to the left of math nerds.

I think it depends how you’re interested. The nerdy types tend to (and this seems to generalize across most domains, actually) be the deep divers. A political nerd can talk endlessly about policies, the contents of various bills or laws or Supreme Court decisions. They can Also usually handicap a political race using polling data.

Most people, regardless of political opinions, cannot actually do that. The normies might have various opinions on abortion, but they don’t understand the laws, or that the supreme court’s decision didn’t actually ban anything. They remanded it to the states and the legislature. I heard the wrong takes on that one from people who want abortions legal and from abortion abolitionists.

I'd say that "politics nerds" and other special types turn up in numbers in all parties I've encountered, but in the mainstream centrist parties they'd be more than offset by normie types who got into politics because they wanted, for instance, to fix some particular local issue (of course local-issue stalwarts can also go pretty weird and feral over their particular issue), or who just "felt the need to serve" or whatever. Often the mechanism for latter seems to be that they participate in one of the youth councils set up in municipalities to "give the youth a voice" and then gravitate to the party that rules their municipality (or where they have a family background, or which simply annoys them the least), which almost always tends to be a milquetoast centre-right-to-centre-left party.

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