Going meta on the discourse

My other internet hang out is a University of Michigan sports old school message board, which is now nearly 30 years old. Many of the posters have been there for the majority or even all of that time, so it’s safe to say that every classic Michigan football related topic has been discussed . . . extensively.

Naturally this kind of community is likely to morph into a place that discusses a lot of off-topic subjects, and indeed in the off season off topic posts predominate by a huge margin. One interesting sociological note is that after Trump’s initial election, all Trump supporters were more or less chased off by informal group ostracism and shaming. There’s one guy who still shows up regularly to get his head smashed into the turnbuckle for no doubt obscure masochistic reasons, but otherwise it’s a Trumper-free zone. And this is a board that used to have quite a few Republicans, but those who stayed post-Trump are all either Democratic converts and/or vociferously anti-Trump, although I suspect we may have a few closet cases.

Anyway mid-summer is the deadest time of the year for both college football and basketball, so the political posting tends to dominate, along with threads about whether the first six Black Sabbath albums are actually better than Led Zeppelin (I would guess the average age is around 60, given that it’s an old-style sports messageboard.)

One long time highly respected poster, who also happens to be a friend of mine in the so-called real world, posted this Bluesky thing this morning, along with a comment:

Seven threads in the last three hours. Every dumb fucking statement that comes out of Trump’s mouth gets posted and discussed, as if we don’t already know that he is a fucking moron who has absolutely no filter whatsoever. What need does it serve to make the same post repeatedly, only with a slightly different subject? Doesn’t Trump have enough actual power over the government that we should not also be giving him power over our mental well-being? Does it serve some psychological need to post about him every time he says something stupid, which is multiple times per hour?

Apropos of this, I checked and I mentioned Donald Trump on this blog a total of three times in the seven years I was front paging here before he announced his presidential run in June 2015. This was the case even though Trump was actually managing to make a lot of political or pseudo political news during these years, as he built up his Racist Birthers ‘R Us fan club so that he could run for president as a wacky The Producers-style publicity stunt.

And obviously LGM is primarily a political blog rather than primarily a sports blog, but my friend’s question still resonated for me in this context as well. Are we talking about Trump too much? I suspect that I am — I used to post about a much wider variety of things before he started infecting our little corner of the cyber-universe, along with everything else. He really is a mental and emotional plague on every decent person, and yes this has turned into another post about him so the irony is noted.

Anyway, please discuss.