Week One: First Impressions

By the second day of this experiment I had already realized it was going to be really difficult to make it through the full two weeks. I’m now a little over a week into it and not much about that initial realization has changed. At first I thought two weeks would be no problem; in fact I was worried that it would be too little time to produce any measureable effect and was actually considering extending it to a full month. But I’m so glad I didn’t do that because it would have surely driven me insane.

So what’s the problem? Why is it so difficult for me to only consume conservative media for two weeks?

Well, I decided at the beginning that my only outlet for political discussions during these two weeks would be through online forums and blog comments at conservative websites. This raises a number of problems for me. First, it sets me up with a handicap because any time I try to make an argument on one of those forums, I either have to rely on my memory of facts that I accumulated before the experiment began, or I have to try to dig up data from an impartial source (usually the primary source), which is extremely time-consuming. For instance, if I want to make the point that the reason why poor people can’t afford health insurance is NOT because they waste their money on expensive cars, televisions, and lottery tickets (yes, I was challenged on this!), I have to dig through census data or some other objective source. My opponent just has to cite a Heritage Foundation article in which the author claims to have culled the census data and found that poor people buy all of these things, which proves that they have the disposable income to purchase health insurance if they desire. (Nevermind the possiblility that they may have a piece of shit car and an inexpensive tv, the costs of which pale in comparison to the costs of health care) I’m sure there’s a liberal think tank out there that has contested this assertion, but my self-imposed rules won’t allow me to seek it out.

The second problem is that I can’t bitch to anyone about the assholes I was just arguing with online because that a) would provide confirmation that I am in the right, which is against my rules, and b) would invariably turn into a conversation about political issues, which is also against my rules. (I have to admit that I’ve slipped on this a couple of times, but I quickly caught myself and changed the topic of conversation)

The third problem I’m encountering is that right now I have ZERO motivation to follow the news. This is a real issue because the central question of this experiment is whether regular exposure to conservative media will push me towards conservative views. When I planned this out I figured that if I kept up something resembling my usual routine of religiously checking headlines throughout the day (and clicking on interesting ones), listening to NPR in the morning, and watching The Daily Show or Olbermann at night (making the appropriate conservative substitutions for all of these, of course), that would be a pretty big immersion. The problem I’m finding is that I now dread doing all of these things. It has ruined my ability to procrastinate on the work that I should be doing, which has had the desireable side-effect of making me much more productive at work. So my advice to you is if you have a major project that needs to get done, like say a PhD, just emulate my experiment and you’ll finish in no time.

Fortunately there’s less than a week of this to go….