Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

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so you can know what all the fuss is about. I think all of this is indicative of our first

discussion about common sense because, you know, we've been saying for a decade that satire is dead.

And I think that a lot of satire sort of depends on a version of common sense where, like,

you kind of, like, you get the premise.

It's pretty clear.

And then the satire sort of like stirs it up a bit.

Now we've completely lost the thread on common sense,

and a few writers have caught on to this. So the first quote I'm going to read is from

the New York Times, where we first came across this, but we're actually going to hear more

from a different article

in the conversation to have this discussion. But the Times says, in the political arena,

common sense is seductive, offering solutions that are both simple and obvious, not just

acceptable to the people, but emanating from them. It can often be right,

but its rightness does not fully account for its allure. Common sense manages to be knee-jerk

and authoritative at once, satisfying precisely because it seems so self-evident. Something becomes common sense, not when we thoroughly

understand it, but when we just know it, which is the perfect recipe for whatever you already

believe is the definition of common sense. You don't have to understand basically anything, but whatever you just know to be true is true.

Well, it kind of reminded me of something that we talked about.

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