I got accepted into the Young Atlanticist Working Group, which is co-run by the Atlantic Council and the German Marshall Fund. It’s a neat concept but they made a fatal mistake: they made participation in the Atlantic Summit in Bratislava and the NATO Summit in Chicago contingent on “participation.”

This sounds awesome until you realize that they’re using Facebook to measure participation. Which means content and interest do not actually count: liking a post is the same as leaving a comment to a post, and leaving a two-word comment to a post is the same as leaving a 500 word comment (or serial comments).

What this means is, there are a lot of young, upwardly mobile and hyper-ambitious people on this thing saying all sorts of frivolous empty crap that more or less reinforces the conventional Euro-wisdom, and they’re doing it in such volume that I’m actually being turned into a skeptic of NATO as a consequence of all the shallow thinking.

Which isn’t surprising. It’s just… I don’t know, really annoying. I’m not sure what my expectations were, either, so maybe this is my fault for hoping it would be substantive and not a rehash of everything I hate about undergraduate IR classes.