Tough question, because there are some great ones.

A recent favorite from the Netflix era has been “Cry Wilderness”. The movie was laughably bad in the first place, but that just made it great for the MST3k treatment.

So many great lines in there. Like the old man talking about how all the animals and nature are his family and friends and they voice the bird responding with “He’s not my friend. I’m not indigenous to this area. Please call the police.” That cracked me up so bad the first time I didn’t hear anything else for at least the next few minutes.

And also the running gag around terribly unsafe firearm handling: “BANG!”

That now goes through my head whenever a show just waves a gun around like an obvious prop instead of at least pretending it could be dangerous.

I think the hard part is, almost no one realizes that they felt that way until they are finally on the outside.

I remember a really interesting article I read a few years ago that indicated the best way to change someone’s viewpoint was to welcome them into your community or group without requiring a change of mind first.

Turns out our social and emotional needs will trump our rational or logical side almost every time.

So you’re 100% right. What people need is a caring group of family and friends who encourage each other to question themselves in an effort to learn and grow.

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.