The two big stories of the last 36 hours – The Key Bridge and Ronna McDaniel – both emphasize how much we hide inside our bubbles.  But they are different bubbles and for different reasons.

The bubble around the Key Bridge disaster has to do with time and technology.  It will take a long time for the investigation to be completed and all the facts known.  Once the search for survivors is complete and all the dead known, the public will lose interest.  The story, when it is told, will be deeply technological looking at the particular bridge design, what went wrong on the ship and particularly with its power and computer systems.  In the end it will be a very human story. from engineers to operators – and a thousand little errors along the way.  But people will not care because people fundamentally don’t want to understand tech – they just want to use it.

Tech failures are actually amazing teaching opportunities.  Anyone that has every studied anything about physics and bridges knows about Galloping Gertie.  It has attracted many people to look into the field of study, but once it gets into the details of wave mechanics, they walk away.  Just a crying shame.

The Ronna McDaniel/MSNBC story is no engineering disaster and the bubble that it illustrates has nothing to do with boredom, but rather with fundamental human failure. The bubble itself is simple to understand – the Left want nothing to do with the Right, but that is how we will end this post.

This is first and foremost a leadership failure, the executives are not in control of the network.  That’s because the execs live in an executive bubble and are unaware of the people they are supposedly managing.  I have reflected a lot lately on how being able to major in management has created huge problems.  Knowing how to manage an organization, but having no fundamental understanding of what the organization does, or how it does it, leads to this sort of thing.  I have seen it happen in countless organizations in my career.

This is a human failure.  At the bottom of this is Trump hatred.  Hatred exists only when you can dehumanize the object of the hatred, which requires wrapping yourself in a bubble, so you do not see the other fully.  The host has carried on quite a bit this morning about how ugly this event is on a human level – and it is.  His sympathies run to Ms. McDaniel, as do mine.  But I also have sympathy for the perpetrators of this hatred – they are people fundamentally alone and unable to connect on a simple human level.  Isolated in their bubbles, they are apart from humanity and embittered by that isolation.

Which brings me back to the Left/Right thing.  The Left has become unsupportable.  Their hatred alone disqualifies them from serious consideration, but that aside, as we have discussed here endlessly, their stances have become so radical that they are untenable.  They fly in the face of reality – from pandemic policies that shuttered religious practice to forcing us into EVs – they have grown completely out-of-touch with reality.  The presence of a realist, which is all being on the right means anymore, threatens the misshapen world in which they think they reside.  Put simply Ronna McDaniel was a threat and they reacted like a cornered animal.

Ronna McDaniel will be, I think, fine.  This incident should do nothing but polish her cred at someplace like Fox.  I think she is smart enough not to take the utter bile that poured forth from the MSNBC crowd personally.   But I worry about all those MSNBC haters.  All they have accomplished here is they have increased their isolation, thus increasing their bitterness.  They will crow about victory, but they alone will look at what has happened and see victory.  Let’s not return their hate, let’s invite them to reality, and welcome them should they make the journey.  We don’t need them, but they desperately need us.