But I see all the tough love cajoling as helpful, if in a backwards, semi-psychotic way. There's probably more caked-on bullshit than the nugget is worth to most people, but I light up at any advice that's something other than mindless boilerplate.

I'm going to build a wall. Mexico is going to pay for it.

See, that's insightful. It's novel. It's facile, it's idiotic, it's headstrong and it illustrates a pigheaded invulnerability to complexity and nuance, but fuckin' Clinton didn't think of it, did she?

There's a fundamental allure to simplicity. There's an attraction to insightful mavericks. There's a belief that things are the way they are not because the world is a complex place full of compromise but because there's an idiot somewhere and he's in charge. So the millennials aren't living with their parents because the world is experiencing inequality and structural unemployment at a historic level, it's because they weren't raised right. Innovation and growth aren't stymied through a collapse of productivity and a paucity of resources, it's because somebody else is a coward. The problems faced by young people aren't a long-standing inevitability due to the economic choices made an inch at a time over forty years, they're a lack of pluck.

insomniasexx and I had a discussion once about kidofspeed - an Estonian dude pretending to be a Ukranian chick riding through Chernobyl. Insom made the point that regardless of the artifice, she learned things about Chernobyl. I made the point that for those of us who want to learn more than what's presented, there's no jumping-off point because it's all false.

False insight is not insight.

There's a tale I like to tell about Leo Baranek. The basic point of it is this: trust the people who tell you they don't know. The ones that cop to not knowing easily are the ones you can believe without hesitation when they say they do. I make a point of not asserting things I'm not fairly certain of, and of couching my uncertainties in terms of hypotheses and educated guesses. If you are willing to be wrong, you learn. If you are willing to be proven wrong, you will be engaged with by smart people. If you speak from certainty you will only attract the unthinking.

There's a great deal of artifice surrounding social issues. We all speak to them, we all speak around them, we all acknowledge the framework within which we work and we all move through it without questioning it.

Renegades often disregard the framework. If you're young and inexperienced it looks like insight. If you're old and jaded it looks like bad manners.

Do you know who gets to be entrepreneurial? Rich kids. Folx bankrolled by a rich uncle. Every ridiculous kickstarter you've ever seen? There's a relative that pays the lagging 80% so that Johnny gets to make an iWatch or whatthefuckever. But you can't just skip the line and slag on social privilege because that's a dog whistle to lots of people and besides, what the fuck are you going to do about it?

Nobody wants to hear that they don't get to make movies because their daddy didn't make movies, but these opportunities will never be yours.

I have a friend. He wants to know what to do with his life. I told him I had no easy solutions. It was true, but it isn't what he wanted to hear.

And that's why people hate Hillary Clinton.