914: That Bernie Chart

Attention marketplace reality

Lotta complaining the last two days about the “chart crime” in this Bernie Sanders post.

Matthew Yglesias

noted “The way social media works is that if you have a reasonable core point, which Bernie does in this case, it’s actually *better* to illustrate it with a bad chart (which this certainly is) because who don’t like you will dunk on it and the engagement soars.”

The great narrative gift and curse of the centrist is being defined only by what you are not. The question of what makes a centrist is both vital and the cause of endlessly frustrating group conversations. “You know it when you see it”¹ is true, but people need more than that.

At last check, more than 2,300,000 people saw the Bernie post. Largely driven by all the centrists pointing out how ridiculous the chart was.

Centrists typically don’t commit chart crime, but they still need to get attention - and not just be defined by what they are not.

914 days until the next presidential primary.

1. In 1964, the Supreme Court was deciding whether the French film The Lovers was obscene and therefore unprotected by the First Amendment. Justice Potter Stewart wrote a concurring opinion in which he admitted that defining “hard-core pornography” precisely was difficult, saying: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ‘hard-core pornography’; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”