The first half of the post feels like news (honest inquiries by a biased person) rather than editorialising. You can easily skip the editorialising paragraph, and the remainder feels more committed to reporting facts than CNN or the NY Times. That’s a cause for hope - if anyone has a link to something similar on the right, I’d feel like together they’d paint a decent picture of American politics.
Comic Book writer/artists took off within the past year on Substack after Substack gave some industry stars a bunch of money. I follow You and Bari - and then like 10 comic book substacks. Substack is a huge disruptive force in the comic book industry.
The Number-1 by subscriber count is a Universe building serialized comic by Hickman and friends called 3 Worlds 3 Moons - typically just called 3W3M.
The Number-2 by subscriber count is Tiny Onion by current comics golden boy James Tynion IV.
Brian K Vaughan (of Y the last Man, Runaways, Paper Girls, and Saga fame) has one called Exploding Giraffes that has a fantastic (but NSFW) serialized comic in it right now called Spectators (new episodes every Monday).
Chip Zdarsky has one that is good.
Tini Howard has one.
Scott Snyder has one.
even Grant Morrison has one (his annotations of past comics are particularly worthwhile)
If you're interested in the comic book industry in general, its' really fascinating watching James Tynion IV build his brand and cater to all aspects of the comic book buying public via his substack (collectors, readers, casuals, etc.)
I"m sure i'm forgetting some. BUt yes, start with BKV via Exploding Giraffe. Though remember - very NSFW!
No. Grant has said very specifically, as recently as last week in LA, that he does not care what pronouns people use to describe him. He even encouraged people to make up their own. Grant is 100% not the type of person to police other people's language and get authoritarian about things like this. He/She/they/Auslander/XEnomorph- whatever. Grant is a chill person. Please refer to recent discussion on this topic on FBOOK group page Morrison's Acolytes for quotes and videos of Grant saying exactly this.
Huh. Er, I'm afraid that link's to a private group — I can't see it. But it does sound like something Morrison would say; not doubting your good faith!
I was going off the italicised note at the top of this article, cited by Wikipedia for Morrison specifically preferring the singular "they".
I'm sorry man, I probably sounded like an ass. (You know how you read a comment the next day, and you're like, - whoops, didn't moderate tone well enough.) - THank you for your patience.
Yes, you're definetly a Morrison fan if you can tell that being an authoritarian pronoun police a-h**le doesn't sound like Morrison at all.
It's clear that CBR chose to run with a "Comes Out" headline because that generates clicks. But the actual article they're swipping from only containts this quote:
"When I was a kid there were no words to describe certain aspects of my own experience. I've been non-binary, cross-dressing, 'gender queer' since I was 10 years old, but the available terms for what I was doing and how I felt were few and far between.""
Absolutely nowhere does Morrison request that people use they/them, nor does he identify himself as a they/them. Nor does he even 'come-out' and announce he's now 'non-bianary' ala Demi Lavato. In Morrison's view he's always been cross-dressing and non-binary, and it's just nice that the kids nowadays have more language that matches their experience. That's what his quote is talking about. He's had several interivews in the past discussing his crossdressing and about feeling more like a metaphysical spirit trapped in a physical plane... yadda yadda.
My point is more, it's very en vouge for a certain segement of the media to trip over themselves to start using they/them pronouns. And I think anyone who goes around correcting other people's usage should do some introspection about their motivations. But Morrison himself (or his XenobiologicalAsparaguself (I made up a pronoun just like Grant suggested!)) has never requested any specific pronouns and has said, specifically, that he doesnt' care what people call him.
I actually think he said that the media has "foisted" they/them upon him against his wishes.
I know you're a cool guy (you're on here!) so I symphathize with you. Let's all reread The Invisibles and go to Katmandu.
Spectators by Brian K Vaughan and Niko Henrichon is the cream of the crop. The comic pages themselves you can read for free. It has a fascinating premise which I won't spoil. It's on page 33 now.
in an effort to help some of the non-rich get middle-classer, allow me to plug with a deep shame and sadness in my heart, the comedy writings on Both Are True - Absurd, honest comedy delivered twice a weekish through the vulnerable personal essays of Alex Dobrenko: friend to all, father to one, and tv actor+writer to anyone hiring.
It's in the Humor category and definitely not first but routinely in the top 20 or whatever so hey, why not try!
Will this bold shilling be respected as a great example of one man shooting his shot amidst a sea of idk what, or will this post be swiftly deleted and perhaps the writer even banned? Time will tell, dear friends, but until then, allow me to just say it has been a priv and hon to spend a little time with all of you
It does, frankly, annoy me that politics so dominates Substack, social media, the news, whatever. Perhaps because it's not my specific main interest. Or at least not the kind that gets reported on. A question I've never gotten a satisfactory answer to: Why does broad politics seem to dominate news so much?
I imagine there is a complex array of factors, but I think the most straightforward answer goes something like this:
In the modern media landscape, attention = money. This has always been true to some extent, but before free media there were various mitigating factors, now publishing entities just want engagement at all costs.
In order to attract and sustain attention, you need engagement; the best way to generate engagement is by provoking strong emotions. The most reliable provoker of strong emotions is politics, partisan politics in particular (many believe that this is one of the drivers of increasing partisanship).
I think it's basically that way by definition - the issues that are "political" are exactly the ones that a lot of people have strong differences of opinion on. And people love to read about that stuff to try to get a sense of whether they are winning or losing.
It's actually not *broad* politics, but *narrow* politics, meaning electoral politics. It's rare to hear about organizations working for or against political change except insofar as they interact with elected officials. No one talks about the Koch brothers or George Soros except insofar as they intervene in elections - they'd much rather talk about Ted Cruz or Bernie Sanders.
I suspect this is an unexpected failure aspect of electoral politics, that might work out differently with a system where legislators are selected randomly like jury duty. I think that most members of the government get much less coverage in an autocracy, even if there's no media restrictions on that coverage (though the autocrat themself probably gets a lot of coverage).
> No one talks about the Koch brothers or George Soros
I feel the total opposite: the leftists used to complain so much about Koch brothers and still do (that was before Trump), and all the right-wing social media is about Soros and (more recently) Klaus Schwab and World Economic Forum.
What I mean is that the *only* thing you ever hear about these people is about their involvement in electoral politics. I have some sense that the Koch brothers made money on fossil fuel and Soros on financial bets, and I’ve seen some arts organizations with Koch on the donor plaque, but have never heard a story about any recent business decision they made, or even about what they do in their spare time. Just their politics side.
And I, at least, never know whether to believe what I hear about their doings, and know of no reliable way to check.
To me it seems like gossip columnists talking about which movie stars are having affairs with who. (Do they still do that?) Perhaps it's true, perhaps not. Why should I believe either way?
OTOH, the electioneering is generally pretty believable AND pretty uninformative. It's basically "Those other guys are bastards, so vote for us.". It's almost never about why they are a good choice.
Entirely reasonable (probably preferable) not to know, but it is an amusing week to ask that, as US Twitter/BuzzFeed/et al. are digesting a meal of the almost-simultaneously-revealed (separate) indiscretions of a pop star and a YouTube celebrity, both with the public image Guy Who Loves His Wife SO MUCH YOU GUYS!!! The progression of events has been so unsurprising that it's practically an homage to the formula. All parties—cheaters, spouses, colleagues, and fans—are hitting their marks with aplomb.
(That is, yes, they certainly do, and I'm trying to make the best of being involuntarily aware of it.)
Speculative answer: Arguing about politics is becoming our shared culture. It used to be that we had things like tv programs with high enough viewership that people would discuss and share opinions on them with their peers as a way of forming connections, where there wasn't a lot of uncertainty in the process of finding people who also watched them. Now, our popular culture is much more fragmented, targeting many, much smaller niches. What sort of mass culture still reaches most of the population, allowing us to exchange opinions with people who we barely know, but can assume also consume it? Politics. I've read that national politics didn't used to hold this position so much several decades ago, but it has for most of my life at least, and other forms of mass culture have receded from prominence.
"Why does broad politics seem to dominate news so much?"
This seems like an odd question to me, Erusian, because I think of public "news" as being intrinsically about politics. Go back a couple of centuries and "the news" was "the press," and the political nature of "the press" was so intrinsic to the term that no one had to ask why the Bill of Rights bothered to guarantee freedom of the press as a poltical right. It wasn't to protect access to recipes and book reviews.
Look at magazine stands in the supermarket. "The press" in a more global sense is all about Couture, Cuisine, Cars, Movie Stars, Rock Stars, Guns, Porn, and Sports Sports Sports. But the big city stands still have a rack of newspapers in front with politics on page 1. (But then come the recipes, sports sections, business reports, and so forth. . . . Different in the boonies now: my local paper exercises freedom of the press primarily to pump up local high school and college teams--politics is usually page 3 stuff, after the obits.)
None of which is to say I'm not as tired of politics as you seem to be.
It's uncanny seeing this when just an hour ago I have seen an e-mail from one of the journals I am subscribed to which is asking for funds to help to cover the costs of now 3 lawsuits by 3 (much bigger) companies asking for several articles to be taken down because they violate their business secrets. (And two other journals I am subscribed to as well as 2 I used to be seem to be pursued too !)
The reason is actually much simpler than many other people have noted. Substack provides a good service with marketing, particularly for politics, of major writers who were forced out of traditional media for w/e reason. This includes a wide variety of factions since Scott, Freddie, MattY, and Zaid Jilani, and even Greenwald are from relatively different parts of the spectrum.
If you want to write an amazing column or even newsletter about non-controversial topics you have plenty of space in mainstream media. Food, music, books, etc. All quite open to tons of different ideas and very little cancelling and most people get scrubbed due to political stuff rather than having terrible opinions on pizza or w/e.
That would be an explanation if Substack was clearly more dominated by politics than other media, but major news organizations are largely devoted to electoral politics as well, and it fills social media too.
I can think of two attributes that contribute to a content having lots of readers:
* does not require specialized knowledge or high intelligence; therefore, it has many potential readers;
* drives people crazy, thus making them spend more time online reading this type of content.
The winner is politics, of the worst kind -- because the better kinds of political discussion are less mindkilling and may require more intelligence. Other candidates are sport and celebrity gossip.
Sport, obviously, is symbolic conflict. Celebrities are a hyperstimulus for "important people". (I do not mean that they are important per se. It's just that our outdated instincts are screaming at us that if so many people know who someone is, of course that person must be very important. Or something like this.)
The interesting thing is that on paper, politics, sport, and celebrity gossip seem quite balanced, but online, politics in a clear winner. My guess would be that this is a difference between a read-only medium and an interactive medium. Anyone can read about sport or celebrities, but few can provide their own comments that other would find similarly interesting. With politics, anyone can yell something and get an applause from their tribe.
Yep, everybody is an expert on politics, religion, and celebrity culture. Religion, sports and showbiz are fractured these days, with no particular domain being pre-eminent in the mainstream culture as they once may have been. So this leaves politics as the clear winner for the universally appealing tribalistic death spirals to generate around.
> With politics, anyone can yell something and get an applause from their tribe.
Isn't this true of sports too? Maybe the appeal of politics is that there are fewer teams, so each fandom is much bigger, so you get a bigger pool of people agreeing with you when you cheer on the team.
Plenty of people enjoy divisive topics, almost nobody enjoys politics - because you've already heard all of the arguments and nobody has anything new to contribute.
Hmmm, are you sure you're not cherry picking? After all, the entire purpose of this article besides the comedy is how funny and shockingly unreal other bubbles can be to those not in them, yet how utterly serious and concrete and emergency-like they seem to those embroiled in them. Maybe politics dominate your bubble, but to a sports fan those fucking $SOME_OPPONENT_FANS dominate *all* the news, to an Instagram influencers follower this slutty whore whatever-Kardashian absolutely sucks the air out of the room, etc...
Politics, like absolutely any topic or field or walk of life, has its vanilla parts and its spicy parts. Sure, on some absolute scale, $LATEST_TRUMP_SCANDAL might be more spicy than the latest String Theory Ordeal or some nerd shit like that, but don't ever underestimate the effect of hedonic scale. To people absorbed in nerd shit, it's so utterly beyond belief how those fucking String Theorists will never admit how wrong they are, and that trumps everything else currently happening. Other fields have spicier things even by Politics' standards : Biology has sex differences, genetics has race and IQ research, History has.... history. None of this is proper Politics, although they're often the start point for policy discussions. Politics also has some pretty vanilla things : $RANDOM_GROUP_OF_NATIONS has agreed on some $VAGUELY_MUTUALLY_BENEFICIAL_THING, that type of things. The Music Industry has far more going on than who fucked whom and with exactly how much consent.
So a better question would be : why does rage bait work? Why do we find things to get mad at no matter how many vanilla things to argue about we have nearby? Why is rage almost always the most participatory and memorable emotion? Why are scissor statements so ubiquitous across domains? I won't speculate because this has been done to death and I can't compete with the state of the art, but I will note that the phenomena has a Greek Prophecy vibe to it : you can't resist falling into it no matter how much you know, you can feel yourself falling into the trap before you take the first step and you still willingly go. I know all about the Toxoplasma of rage and etc etc etc, and still the fucking outgroup gets me so riled and worked up every damn time, I Can Tolerate Anything Except Them.
Politics dominates your life even if you aren't interested in it. (I'm not.)
Food only dominates your life if you can't get enough of it, unless you're just interested.
Even sex only dominates your live if you're interested in it.
But politics, like the military, dominates your life when you encounter it. And politics is nearly everywhere. If you're fortunate, you can avoid the military.
Your influence over the political process is a rounding error. You should perhaps pay attention to signals that your chosen option is not as good as you think, and you should vote for someone else - or that your hated enemy is not so terrible so perhaps you should consider voting for them after all. Still, you should spend exactly as much attention on it as is warranted to make an informed decision in an election.
Of course, people do the exact opposite, because confirming their bias gives them fuzzies.
"But you can became an activist / run for office / etc" - realistically though, will you? Because most of us have enough going on in our lives. If you are already precommitted to not doing it, you don't need to bother keeping informed on the issue at hand.
The only reason to care about "politics being interested in you" is knowing how to mitigate it - avoid the new tax, take advantage of a stupid loophole just introduced, or just when to emigrate to a saner jurisdiction. Everything else is just helplessly getting frustrated at a process outside of your control.
Dylan's answer about politics getting attention is good, but I'd also mention that everyone has political opinions. You can't really get everyone talking about the nuances of microeconomic theory, 19th century French art movements, etc. These things take a certain level of knowledge.
But politics? Everyone has an opinion on the subject, so everyone can freely contribute even if they have nothing of value to say or no method of saying it constructively.
I'm not convinced this is true. I think alot of people intentionally don't follow politics becuase they find it so pointless and vapid. It's much more spirtually rewarding for alot of people to intentiaonlly not have an opinion on politics.
Hm, this doesn't feel quite right to me unless we mean like, detailed opinions about national-level party politics. I think almost everyone has "a thought or two about how we oughta do things around here", though, and that seems like politics. Ask people about how they'd deal with property crime or homeless encampments, or what they think about those higher/lower car registration fees or property taxes, or if they have kids *literally anything about schools.* I think most adults who seem to be devoid even of those opinions are probably performing humility (which is not unreasonable).
I think you're right. But I also don't think I'm wrong. :) I don't think most people would consider "how they'd deal with property crime or homeless encampments" to be politics.
THe definition of politics has changed dramatically in the post 2008 (cough cough twitter cough) era.
Those are let's call them physical issues, whereas politics is is a non-physical concept nowadays. Where is that fantastic post about that concept...........
A substack piece! It's on topic. :) - "Politics" is all a game the virtuals play. The Physicals go about fixing problems, and don't think of it as politics.
Because most of what you see is not “politics” (coalition-building, negotiation, strategizing), it is gossip for people who want to pretend they are too fancy for gossip.
Instead of talking to their friend about what Rihanna wore to the Oscars (like a commoner!) they can talk to those friends about what Biden said at some luncheon…
I understand your point, but I think we're the old fuddy duddies who still think politics means "(coalition-building, negotiation, strategizing)" - I don't think that's what it means anymore.
that might politick-ing............. but that's not what politics is anymore in the social media outreach panopticon.
That's an argument about terminology, not about content!
You call it "politics", I call it "gossip", but my term helps with understanding (and clarifies why, regardless of what your high school teacher told you, you're better off ignoring "news"); your term does neither.
It has become the primary means of social signaling. You need to keep up to date with the latest events in order to better signal within your group.
This I would say is the biggest change in politics from 30 years ago. A lot of people were also brought into politics due to the Iraq war and have stayed.
Until maybe the late 80s it was the cool thing among the supposed elite to brag about how you didn't have a TV or were not aware or some popular movie. We'd all be better off if the cool response to "Did you hear what Biden/Trump/Ted Cruz just said" was "Sorry, I don't follow domestic news".
Your point is, however, interesting! Chuck Klosterman's latest book, The Nineties (HIGHLY recommended!) talks about this, saying that in the 90s the cool stance was not to have opinions. Shortly after I read that, a plumber I hired (probably early 50s) as we were talking said something similar, along the lines of "when we were young, we didn't feel we had to have an opinion about every damn thing all the time". Now you're saying the same. So it must be true!
There probably is something there, though I'm not sure what. It's not exactly that people didn't have opinions in the 90s (certainly they did about, eg music or movies!) Perhaps it's more that there was an expectation that your opinions were just that, *your opinions*, not the word of god channeled through you, and that anyone who disagreed in the slightest was satan in disguise?
You're probably right that the Bush/9-11/Iraq2 storyline crystalized this.
Was the internet an essential component? That's less clear to me. Certainly what's available of the 60s (ie writings by a certain class) suggests a similar attitude at the time; but I need to look at more real material from the time (as opposed to what people say about the time 50 years later) to see how widespread it was.
- identitarians would claim that identity has ALWAYS been the driving force in human society (basically Marx w/ class replace w/ identity.)
- if we think this is nonsense then we need to explain why proclaiming your identity loudly became so important over the past 20 yrs
I think identity in some form (“I’m a hot chick”, “I’m a metal head”) has always been with us. What’s happened in our time is that the “allowed” identities have drastically shrunk. It’s not OK to insist that your identity is based on your music taste and that’s all you care about; you have to also project a political identity, and refusal to project such will have one imposed upon you.
This is not unique; there have been earlier such totalizing societies; but they are not so common that there is nothing to explain here. Why did the US flip from the previous state to this total using state?
"I suspect that much of this has to do with social power as a growing force. While I’ve stuck to the Left, I implied (and am now saying outright) that social power is also becoming more common on the Right. There are certain obvious reasons for this: social states are seemingly more inclusive, they’ve much more likely to provide one with a sense of identity, etc. They’re also *constant* affirmations of identity in a way that voting or paying taxes or writing letters to your senator is not. This allows them to provide frequent reassurance *that you are who you think you are*, which is to say, you are who you identify with. Retweet [political slogan] and your friends will know who you are, march, wear a shirt, listen to the music, etc.[1] Needless to say everything is interpreted accordingly, from Beyonce to the Dixie Chicks.
“There have always been tribes.” Imagining past forms of identity, we get something like this (this is super ahistorical, don’t quote me): Johnny was a Christian and a blacksmith and an Aquitanian and a [blank]. Maybe one of those took precedence, but it didn’t apply to *everything*, i.e. blacksmithy had nothing to do with the Cross, and the Cross was not against Aquitania. There may be political struggles from any one of those, but they aren’t at their core political. Those intrigues were directed towards *goals* rather than identities, if not simply because there were several given identities competing for that spot.
In contrast, modern identity is increasingly a) known through identity markers (signals); b) holistic (lesser identity markers are subordinated to one big one); and, c) entirely political (hence, subordinated to Political Party).
Let me explain (a) slightly more. There have always been signals, duh. But when the personal became political, the political became our identity’s sole foundation. Any given “thing” (likes, preferences, diction, etc.) is politicized, which turns any given thing into a potential political signal. Political party coordinates with morals, affiliation with valuation, etc. which gives us the infamous phrase “virtue signalling”. I’m going to avoid using it, ironically to avoid signalling. But the point of this is that *identity* tends to elevate signal over action, and to make what action exists simply performative."
(Also, for my part I would note that the Marxist class divide was invented in liberal democratic societies : ones where the 3 quite rigid estates (clergy, nobility, commoners) had been abolished, and all ~~humans~~ ~~men~~ landowners were supposedly deemed equal (at least before the law). Marx and Engels (and others) have pointed out how much this still wasn't true in practice. And before industrial revolution, there wasn't much sense to separate citizens = richer bourgeois from other citizens = poorer bourgeois, since the differences weren't *that* huge and they were all a minority part of the estate with the least power anyway.)
Let me counter (or perhaps agree?) with a slightly different theory: we are present at the creation of something new in human society, something akin to the invention of lying. What is this new thing?
I *think* that one of the ways our times (meaning say post-2000, with weaker versions of the claim going back 50, then 100, then 200 years) is that we no longer say “I dislike X”, we say “I dislike X because…”.
These may seem the same, but they are very much not!
The former statement has no power, it’s simply an assertion of opinion or preference. But the second statement gives you control, it gives you superiority, it gives you deference.
With the use of the word “because” we see a social technology that works on people almost magically, without much self-defense. You think I exaggerate?
Whereas in the past one might have said “I find something about dog ownership depressing/icky/unpleasant” (fair enough, I pretty much agree) in modern times we say “Dog ownership is wrong because…” and once because is in there, we are forced to make up theories and justifications. These don’t have to be (and usually are not…) good theories and justifications, they simply have to be words that aren’t clearly (very extremely clearly! “I have to make copies because I have to make copies”!!) nonsense.
Now dog ownership is not a pressing concern of our time. (Though who knows, maybe it will form the basis of the culture wars of 2122? Would anyone in 1922 have seriously thought that the political faultlines of 2022 would revolve around who gets to call themself a woman or a man?)
However what is a huge problem in our time is people unwilling to simply say “I find X icky” (where X can be anything: old men with younger women? calling 16-yr old women girls? behavior by a particular rich person towards a particular non-rich person?) Rather this becomes a “because” claim, at which point it takes on a life of its own.
And thus we get to 2022 where public political life has lost its mind because of an incoherent web of mutually contradictory statements, everyone of which we are supposed to believe and affirm (as the justification for some “because”.)
We’re supposed to believe that there is no mental difference between men and women AND that it’s precisely because men and women have different minds that some ostensibly male humans might identify as female.
We’re supposed to believe that who owned land many years ago determines moral worth (US, Australia) AND that who owned land many years ago has no relevance to moral worth (Crimea, Israel).
We’re supposed to believe that any difference in the number of categories of people in any particular occupation is ipso facto evidence of racism/sexism – except in sports.
And so on and so on and so on.
You and I clearly can’t fix the mania of our times. But what we can do is try to track and check our own behavior. Try to be careful about when we use the word “because” and try to limit it to cases where we’re actually laying out some sort of logical argument, not merely trying to win allies to an opinion. That’s probably a little strong, but I think we are not yet aware of the harm that is being done by spurious claims of “X because Y”.
(And yes, I am WELL aware of how the above applies exactly to the argument I have been making! What can I say? Read my points and make up your own mind. Just try to remember, every time you use “because”, would this fit Kant’s categorical imperative? Can I find an example that goes against my tribal loyalties for which my “because” argument also works? If so, then the argument is surely a tribal argument, not the universal logic I am trying to claim it to be.)
Note that "X because [I feel] Y" can happen too, though I'll have to pay some attention as to how often these different versions are used...
P.S.: Copy machines are still very much in use (and still have queues because even though they might (?) be used less than in the 70's, the universities adapted by lowering the number of machines and/or limiting the number of copies you can make per month and/or asking you to pay for the copies).
For instance when my printer broke (scanner still works), I didn't get a new one (and if I do, it will be laser rather than goddamn inkjet), because there's also a commercial reprography between me and the university (well, was, until COVID killed it, I'm kind of hoping it will pop up back again...).
And my university has, even for the students, several reprographies : one in the library, one in the computer building (though maybe not anymore, since that building was destroyed ?? probably just moved though..?), and even a central one for non-students even though each department *also* has its own...
Yeah, you'd think that we'd use paper copies less, but chalkboard and paper are still better than computers (and diapositives, even digital ones) for most courses,
while for documents a lot of people seem to be stuck on using paper-centered pdfs, as if (m)html (=eml) had never been invented !
(I kind of blame LaTeX (if not TeX), these tools *still* tend to be very pdf-centric...)
I have my own substack and have to say that another fun way to explore the site is through the Recommendations. It's like a wikipedia race where you start out in the short story realm (my realm) then you get to writing...then travel...then cooking...then the shadow realm of politics...
For me, the business one didn't feel very parallel universey (I went and read the article as well). Which ones of these felt in-universe for other people?
Honestly the first one felt very in-universe - I didn't know about the latest "explosion" on IG live but I know who Ray J and Kris Jenner are, and none of the verbiage felt incomprehensible.
The Ray J sex tape thing is *the whole reason Kim Kardashian is famous*. Like, the central criticism of her is that she's "just famous for having had a sex tape leaked". It's mildly surprising to me that people know who she is and don't know that.
And the bit about Blackfishing on IG felt as tired to me as the "Always On Society" post felt to Scott. Like yeah, yeah, that's a central part of the Discourse.
TBQH the whole House Inhabit review felt very "I do not understand the humans because I am so very Different and Weird" to me.
I vaguely knew she had a sex tape leak but didn't know that's why she was famous, and also didn't know who it was with or who Ray J is. Different universes indeed!
I didn't know Kim Kardashian had had a sex tape leaked. All I really knew about the Kardashians is that they exist and are seen as tacky by high-brow people.
My understanding of Kim Kardashian before reading this post honestly consisted entirely of "she's a celebrity who has something to do with reality television". I have a vague sense that some celebrities are known for having sex tapes, but I wouldn't have been able to say with any certainty whether Kardashian was one of them. I've also never head the term "Blackfishing" or of any of the other people mentioned in the article.
It may be that people like Scott and myself are out of touch with celebrity culture to a really bizarre extent, but from my own experience, I don't think he was being disingenuous. Knowing next to nothing about celebrities is definitely a thing, even for very online people in the US.
Heck, I don't even know if Kim Kardashian is a musician or just some other kind of celebrity. *looks it up* Apparently not a musician, TIL. (I don't expect to be able to retain this information, mind, since it's completely outside of my interests, so if I make this same category error in a few years, don't be too surprised.)
Same here. As far as I know, Kardashian is some kind of "person famous for being famous", and that automatically makes the topic uninteresting for me. I even don't know if there is only one Kardashian or more of them. No idea what they actually do.
I don't watch TV. I don't talk to people who talk about topics like this. So I am not passively exposed to information on this topic. I suspect that if people watch TV, knowing a lot about Kardashian may be inevitable.
The TV show came later, though to my surprise only by a few months. Wikipedia says she first came to public attention as a friend of Paris Hilton, who had her own reality show with Nicole Richie. And of course her dad was one of OJ Simpson's lawyers.
I did not know Kim K had a sex tape. But somehow I think I do know that Kris is her mom, right? So the mom leaked her daughter’s sex tape!?! That’s so messed up!!
> It's mildly surprising to me that people know who she is and don't know that.
I only know her as Kanye West's (ex) wife, since I listen to his music and sometimes see news articles in google results when searching lyrics or info about an album or something.
I do see how you could know who Kim Kardashian is and not know about the sex tape thing (the Kardashians are fucking omnipresent). But it feels incredibly ignorant, especially if you're old enough you were around when they got famous.
I had never heard of blackfishing, and having looked it up am mostly just intrigued by the bit where (for example) Christina Aguilera is apparently white, not Hispanici. Which I don't even necessarily disagree with, but boy does it demonstrate the problems with oversimplifying these things (is Shakira culturally appropriating for singing in English with blonde hair? It's kind of the obvious next step).
Half of me is like "she's worth millions, was married to someone worth billions, is internationally famous, and is gorgeous. I think she's more of a dominant group than multiple of me."
The other half of me is just thinking up jokes about Shakira dominating me.
Well, I, also, was around when she got famous, and never happened to/bothered to find out why she was famous. To me she/they were just a name. Now I (temporarily) know that one of them is named Kim and had a sex tape. Perhaps I'll try to look for it, but probably not.
As someone with a nodding interest in pop culture, I know some basic facts about the Kardashians, but I don’t remember hearing about the sex tape. As for their relationships and antics, I care almost as much about theirs as they care about mine *shrug*
This has already worked to put me visible on the leaderboard for "international". I'm screwing around with the other two to see if I can get anything going.
If you don't disagree with *some* of my politics, you are broken. I'm like a hair from supporting three-strikes-and-you're-dead policies for vandalism.
Big news: Substack protects those categories! They found it overnight (either through normal oversight or because they read the comments here) and removed me from the international leaderboard.
What makes substack a community of substackers that is different from people using wordpress or ghost or insert-the-thousands-other-blogging platforms?
This touches on how Substack is different from Ghost, from a professional writer perspective: https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/full-stack-economics-is-back. Basically, Ghost is cheaper but involves a non-trivial amount of work and doesn't have a built-in commenting system. I suspect Ghost communities are more isolated.
From a reader perspective:
For the old blogging platforms, I almost exclusively used Google Reader and now Feedly, and so often didn't read comments. Also true about SSC.
For Substack, the reading experience IMO is better on the website (or app) than in email or RSS. So I tend to read on the website, and inevitably end up "interacting" a few times per week -- clicking like, scanning some comments, posting a comment myself. Consequently I recognize some active commenters, once in a while checkout their own substacks or things they read, etc. For me this is the most "social media" I have used in more than a decade.
Substack still sucks compared to Wordpress - I blame over-reliance on Javascript, hijacking standard browser interaction...
Google Reader actually had a whole social media built around commenting ! Then (as you know) Google killed it, probably because it was not growing fast enough, and they wanted to focus people on only using Google+...
15-20 years ago I used to have blogs on Blogger and WordPress. I liked WordPress more. But early this year when I wanted to get back to blogging, I was overwhelmed by WordPress. I didn't like that the free plan meant ads, that there were certain banners (login) I couldn't get rid of on Personal paid plan, and when I checked out the Premium plan it felt like an explosion of customization options. Probably because it has become a software aimed for any kind of sites.
I decided to go with Substack because I was already using the account actively for reading newsletters, and its default options to start writing were good enough -- like Medium but much better.
I knew Google Reader had options to share and to take notes, but didn't know about the comment things. Makes me nostalgic. I know this wasn't/isn't usually Google's business strategy, but I wish they could have just made it a paid service.
"I asked a friend who is more up-to-date on evangelical culture, and she tells me yes - it is normal for evangelical pastors to claim divine inspiration for their sermons and other religious works."
As an "evangelical," I bristle at this. Maybe there is a more accurate descriptor for those who claim this, like "charismatic" or some less kind terms I could think of.
My church does do this to a degree, but it’s probably worth noting that (as far as I know) “evangelicals” usually refers to nondenominational or baptist. Nondenominationals are going to obviously have a pretty big spread in views, unlike say Presbyterians that are all tied by the same general doctrine (though churches still vary in how tightly they keep to it).
In other words, saying that “evangelicals do this” is sort of like stereotyping Americans about smiling at strangers; many of them do it, and they’re well known for doing it, but it’s also a diverse population that’s hard to make sweeping statements about
Am I the only one who hears "evangelicals" as a slur? The only Christians I've ever known to use it are people who are just about to either stop going to church or switch to a hipster church called "Mosaic", and almost everyone else who uses it means "those evil guys over there that it's OK to dislike".
I don't actively disbelieve this - just because I don't see something doesn't mean it doesn't happen, or whatever. But I really don't see anyone do it, to the point where I suspect it would trigger reflexive distrust if I did. So here more I'm trying to levelset, if that makes sense.
As a Christian, evangelical seems like kind of a vague or useless term, since we all believe the Euangelion. I don't actively identify with the term, but I have gradually figured out that people are talking about me when they use it. I feel much more of a sense of identity with my denomination (Primitive Baptist), and I imagine that's true for many others.
There are two uses of "Evangelical" by Christians:
1) "Our church has evangelism (outreach) as a core part of its mission" --in other words, the dictionary definition. These Christians don't tend to use this word to describe themselves anymore, but you'll find it in their denomination names.
2) The new wave of people who use it as an excuse to scream homophobic slurs, because they're "evangelizing" by being loud and annoying.
It sounds like in your experience, you've met more of the latter than the former.
I went to an Evangelical church for much of my childhood and teens. The denomination was officially called "Evangelical Free," and the pastor would occasionally joke about that, but never did explain the odd word order. It has since expanded into at least one more church, and that one is still there, full of Evangelicals I generally like, even if I could not and cannot say things like "you're either a missionary or a mission field" with any seriousness.
FWIW I ended up becoming Eastern Orthodox, and know others who did as well. This may or may not be hipster adjacent, it's hard to say. We're the homeschooling adjacent cottage core fancy bookstore having branch of the Orthodox Church...
I actually went to an evangelical free church in Estes Park for a while. This will sound odd, but the usage of "Evangelical" in the sense the news is saying it is so removed from the denomination in my head that I didn't even think of the latter when bringing this up. And I'm supposed to be a words guy.
I think that's probably a little less weird when you consider that they pretty much couldn't be talking about evangelical in that usage; there's like six of them.
Eastern Orthodox is, for the record, not a church I think about as hipster; this isn't relevant to anything but I didn't want you to worry.
It kind of depends on which ethnic Orthodoxy. I am Serbian Orthodox and we find the OCA to be pretty hipsterish.
There is a whole subculture of Orthodoxy now that is all into organic foods and not using deodorant or whatever. They are here for the novelty of it and will leave eventually because Orthodoxy is really hard.
As a self-identified evangelical, I'd say it's a bit of both. It's a very real term used in Christianity with specific meanings that's fairly widely used as a self-description.
It does tend to be used (both by non-evangelical Christians and those outside the faith) as a slur, usually more in reference to political views and "evangelical culture" than actual religious views. A lot of "ex-evangelicals" have actually changed their religious views fairly little, but have simply changed political views.
"Fundamentalist" is the more obvious slur, unlike "evangelical" the term is very rarely used internally - the original "five fundamentals" are not an extreme set of views but are a pretty banal set of beliefs that basically every mainline denomination subscribes to. In practice "fundamentalist" basically means "conservatives" or "red tribe" just with a religious focus.
Strongly disagree on Fundamentalist; in the circles I grew up in and my wife still is in, fundamentalist is a badge of pride. I concur on evangelical being applied to them exclusively by others.
If you mean what it sounds like, infallible and/or verbal inspiration anywhere close to that which produced the Bible, no, that's foreign to me. Maybe charismatic prophetic types do this, but that's a much smaller niche than how I understand "evangelical."
I'm a charismatic prophetic type, and you have to get WAY the heck out on the lunatic fringe before anyone would dare claim that their prophecy is "inspired" in the same sense that the Bible is the "inspired word of God". That's almost exclusively a cult leader thing.
It's not universal at all, and there's some complexity to how the claims are made even when they are. Imagine three guys:
Bob doesn't claim divine inspiration at all. He sometimes feels like God wants him to say things, so he says them; he also acknowledges he's subject to pride, bad incentives and self-deception like everyone else so he just does as he's told so long as it doesn't conflict with scripture in some clear way.
Dave sometimes feels like God wants him to say things, and says "I felt led by The Lord to tackle this subject this week." But this differs both in what he's saying and what the congregation hears from "every word of this is the inspired word of the lord".
Joel says "God has told me to tell you these exact words, and they are 'please give me enough money to buy six learjets.'"
Dave and Bob are both pretty common; you run into them. Joel is rarer and would give most churchgoers I've known (and I've known SEVERAL) the willies.
Well said. Scott's friend may have been thinking of the Dave type of "leading"–inspiration, and I'll grant that that's commonly felt, subject to the qualifiers you put on both Dave and Bob.
A person, living in the human body, can experience communications from the One. I don't call it G_d due to negative connotations and a horrible history of being exploited by 'religion', of which I am not a fan, in general. Are you curious as to how this is done? I would suggest starting with, in no particular order, Cosmic Consciousness by Maurice Burke, The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, and one of my new favorites, although I don't completely agree with his interpretations (but it's nice and sciencey and I love all things quantum), William Blake vs the World by Higgs. Have fun
"the One" could also be your imagination. If you think about the number of inventor-type people and the stories they tell about what inspired them to invent as they did, the main impetus came from a dream, a feeling, a gut hunch. Is it G-d? The One? Or is it just the creative force within you? The answer, I suppose, depends on your cultural conditioning.
People inside and outside the church perceive different frequencies of this, because Bob and Dave probably say it to their Bible study group or their congregation, while Joel probably says it to a TV camera.
And some people do both. In 1st Corinthians 7, Paul explicitly says that what he writes is not inspired, but his own opinion (/gnomon/, which meant "mere opinion and not true knowledge" in Paul's Platonic jargon, despite attempts by fundamentalists to explain this away as "actually still inspired" by sophistic arguments that begin by interpreting its use here as "judgement").
EDITED TO ADD: Paul has pointed out to me that I've completely misread his post, and then misrepresented what he was saying in it and (my words not his) being a really big dick. This is all accurate; everything past this point is a response to a post that wasn't made here.
It's worth clarifying what Phil is saying here, because read as-is it seems the intended messaging is that Paul says "everything I say, at any point in any letter, is just me talking and not God and can be safely discounted". Moreover, the fundamentalist/sophist language here is apparently meant to make the reader go "Oh, I see, they are just dishonest".
He then goes to Greek to say that a word that would be read mostly the same in both cases is read the wrong way by his opponents, and implies this misreading is dishonest and changes the significantly changes the message in the passage. The implication is, basically, that if they were honest on this word they'd know the entirety of Paul's work is safely ignored, or at least have a harder time arguing it needed to be listened to.
You will also note that Phil didn't give you the verse he's talking about. Here it is, with two important parts emphasized:
25 ***Now concerning the betrothed***, I have no command from the Lord, but I give my **&judgment*** as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy.
The first emphasized section is important. Note that even among fundamentalists, the belief that Paul is expressing his opinion here is *extremely common* because the whole thing about being a fundamentalist is to read things fairly literally. And Paul is literally, by almost any read, saying that *his words on this particular topic* are his and not God's.
Where the deviation from literalism comes in to play, then, is not with the fundamentalist but Phil, who at least seems to be saying you can discount all of Paul's words due to him saying here that in relation to one particular topic his words are not from God. But it doesn't take Sophism to discount this as being broadly applicable to all his writing; it just takes noticing that he specified that it's about a small part of it.
The second emphasized section is important because changing the word to "opinion" here would have a very limited effect on the meaning of the passage as a whole. Judgment might carry a bit more "I thought about this hard, based on stuff I saw" connotation and opinion might seem a bit more knee-jerk, but it isn't demanded. More importantly, the word choice here doesn't interact with the idea that Paul's words outside of this section are inspired or not - at most, they imply how much you should trust his explicitly non-inspired works within it.
Atheist friends:
This doesn't mean I think I've proven that Paul's work is inspired to you. Doing so would take much more than showing that Paul claimed it, anyway. The point of me saying all this is that you at least deserve to reject or accept a section based on what it actually says.
Phil kept carefully away from showing you the actual text, and it makes sense why: If you read it, you'd very likely immediately say "Well, yeah, but he's specified he's talking about a specific topic, right?" and it would ruin his point. I don't suspect that seeing this text is going to convert anybody, but if you are going to be convinced to reject the inspiration of Paul it's probably a good idea to do it based on an honest, complete argument.
No, you're just assuming that I'm hostile to your statements, when I'm not. I agree with everything you wrote, and what you wrote in response is maximally uncharitable.
I didn't mean that Paul said none of his words were inspired. He very obviously was NOT saying that. I said "some do both" because Paul sometimes claims inspiration, at least once denies inspiration, but most of the time doesn't clarify.
"Moreover, the fundamentalist/sophist language here is apparently meant to make the reader go "Oh, I see, they are just dishonest"." -- I was specifically thinking of https://answering-islam.org/Shamoun/q_paul_inspiration.htm . That person is intellectually dishonest, because he's using a long, sophistic argument to deny what Paul himself is clearly saying--that he was about to say something not inspired by God.
"He then goes to Greek to say that a word that would be read mostly the same in both cases is read the wrong way by his opponents, and implies this misreading is dishonest and changes the significantly changes the message in the passage." -- The misreading isn't dishonest, but ignorant. Paul often uses Platonist dog-whistles to signal to the educated reader his Platonist metaphysics; for this reason, I believe we should use the Platonist meaning of "gnomon", which is also the general ancient-Greek-philosophy meaning of it, and the meaning which makes the word useful where Paul put it.
"The implication is, basically, that if they were honest on this word they'd know the entirety of Paul's work is safely ignored, or at least have a harder time arguing it needed to be listened to." -- Absolutely not. The bit in 1st Corinthians 7 clearly refers to the particular passage it precedes. Paul wrote it in a way which implies that being inspired by God is the default assumption he expects people to make regarding his letters.
"And Paul is literally, by almost any read, saying that *his words on this particular topic* are his and not God's." -- YES; that's what I thought I said. That is what the person I took issue with was denying. That's why I preceded it with "Sometimes they do both" (or whatever my exact words were). My only purpose in that line was to show that Paul didn't ALWAYS say he was inspired. Your initial examples implied that each person always claims the same authority for everything he/she says, and I just wanted to show, canonically, that that isn't the case. I should not have digressed into the issue about interpreting gnomon; I just always like to anticipate objections, and that is an objection raised to the claim that Paul did in fact mean he was about to say something not divinely inspired.
I have reread your first post in light of this one and I'll actually apologize and back off of everything I said. I read the post too quickly and pattern-matched it to another kind of argument I run into a lot. But not the one you were making.
The reason you should feel especially wronged here is that when I went back and read the post I had read it poorly enough before I responded that I *was sure you had edited* it for a second, before realizing I just hadn't read it thoroughly/well.
I'm editing the original response I made to reflect this if I can and I sincerely apologize.
I grew up evangelical. Many claim divine inspiration for sermons, missionary travels, and songwriting. But in such cases, it is locally and time bounded divine inspiration. The Bible has divine inspiration that is eternal and all-encompasing.
I think most would refer to what you're describing as a calling: e.g. "God called me to missionary work" or "I felt called to give a sermon on this issue", whereas "inspiration" has a much stronger, much more specific meaning, that in protestant circles is generally reserved only for the Bible itself.
To me, as someone quite distant from that culture, it seems as if that is one of the main meanings of evangelical in English, though I believe it used to just mean "One who preaches to the heathen", but that meaning way preempted by "missionary".
And, FWIW, I have a definition of "god" that makes that a reasonable claim. I believe that everyone has communications from the "gods" (my definition) nearly constantly, and that those can frequently be translated into language, sometimes with a bit of effort. This is one of the meanings of "inspired", though I see it as arising from a pre-verbal layer within. (I used to say from the archtypes, but then I read Jung.)
I am inclined to agree with you, Ch Hi. As one who follows the Dao inwardly, and other things, I would like to hear more about your thoughts and/or experiences
OK. Well, my first relevant thought is that there was a reason I used the plural form "gods". And it's because they aren't a unified whole. Even within a specialized subcategory, e.g. "love goddess" I notice several incompatible executing threads. A part of what consciousness does is chose between them. (As the phrasing may indicate, this is partially based on trying to model what a parallel executing AI would have for a mind.)
As an evangelical, I'd say it's very non-central. At least the "inspired blog bit": evangelicals tend to be pretty hard in the Sola Scriptura camp and strongly Cessationist (believing that things like prophesy and speaking in tongues ended after the early church era). So a blog claiming to be "inspired" in the sense of prophesy or containing any sort of unique truth would be considered pretty heretical in any evangelical church I've been in.
---
That's not to say that "this is how [current event] proves that we're in the End Times" is not a depressingly common genre of evangelical thought nowadays. That much, I'd say it's an extreme example but not entirely non-representative.
I'd group this in with things like Joel Osteen-style Prosperity Gospel. They're very popular, and loosely "evangelical", but they're largely scorned by the evangelical community as a whole. If you went to an evangelical seminary and tried to tell them that Monkeypox is the Second Horseman or something, you'd probably get an eye-roll and a quoting of Matthew 24:36.
Evangelical Christian here. Although all pastors will always pray (sometimes publicly) for divine guidance/inspiration in giving a sermon, I haven't heard anyone claim of a sermon that it was divinely inspired the way Scripture is divinely inspired. It would be normal for a pastor to say that he feels a pull (or maybe a "wind" or "prompting") from the Holy Spirit to say or do something specific, or to pray for somebody or something particular -- but that pastor would be astonished and aghast if anybody took down those words and added them to the Bible.
There are degrees of divine inspiration. We distinguish between prophetic and canonical, which creates some of the confusion around this issue. Prophecy is a message from God for the upbuilding of the Church. It ranges from seeing the sun rise and knowing that God loves you (like in Psalm 19) to hearing an audible voice telling you to do something specific. The canon is the set of divinely inspired texts which are not only true themselves, but can be used to judge whether other things are true. A prophecy might be true, and yet, because it's not canonical, you wouldn't use it to judge the truth or falsehood of anything else.
In this world, people interpret things, and it creates confusion. So if pastor (or anybody) messes up and claims something was divinely inspired that turns out to have been harmful and wrong, the damage is limited. You stop trusting them when they start to contradict canonical Scripture. And if two people prophecy two contradictory things, well, you know, different blind men will tell you different stuff about an elephant, too.
Within Evangelical tradition, there's a pretty wide spread of opinion about prophecy; whether it currently happens; how to judge it; whether you should try it yourself; it's all very complicated. Some Evangelical churches (more toward the Charismatic side) will have prophets who lead services where they prophecy for the people of the church. Some churches would be very suspicious of that.
I find the tone of thunderdome much less irritating than the "just the news without the bias" letter from an american et al. Thunderdome guy is obviously a loon but its out there in the open to see. Promoting a demented ideological claim (not being okay with uncontrolled immigration into your state that blue states won't let you effectively prevent is basically the same as being a secessionist slave holder) while acting like you're the sane and rational adult in the room is kind of nauseating.
If rationality is winning, then which approach you think is more likely to succeed in advancing its 'loon' values? In 2015 the answer would've been obvious to me, but Trump's success with flagrant defiance of elites and decorum does imply that it's not that simple.
Heather Cox Richardson explains current events through the informed lens of History. As such, she has no bones to pick, but just puts everything into context. It is immensely comforting to learn that many of the stupid things we see politicians doing are recycled versions of stupid things politicians have been doing for decades, and sometimes centuries. Her fans are literate and love her, and the comments are often wonderful in and of them selves. After reading Letters from and American for about 6 months, I was able to stop subscribing to the New York Times, and I don’t miss it. Reading her regularly will improve your outlook on life. Really.
I felt the opposite way. It is interesting that you mention there being some comfort in seeing parallels with the past, because we overcame difficult scenarios then. I think that’s a more valuable takeaway than is typical.
"Heather Cox Richardson explains current events through the informed lens of History. As such, she has no bones to pick, but just puts everything into context."
There is no "informed lens of History", at least not in some objective sense that you seem to be implying. Heather Cox Richardson is specifically highlighting a chosen context in which to put a chosen current event. It is not some politically neutral choice. Every single column of hers ends in bashing Republicans, which is not necessarily wrong, but she clearly does have a bone to pick, and doesn't even hide it.
She could just as easily pick some controversial Democratic current event, and compare it to something in the past, but she doesn't do that because that's not her bone, and that's not her audience.
I wonder what “controversial Democratic current event” is equivalent, in your perception, to corrupting the legal system and dismantling the framework of free and fair elections, which have been the basis for our stable form of government?
I would say that would be the corruption of the Constitutional restriction on the federal government's power using the Commerce Clause as a weapon to beat about their enemies
Indeed, the democrats have a very bad habit of deciding that their own pet causes, like ending racism or poverty, are of *overriding importance*, and then when the constitution stops them, instead of trying to amend the constitution the way both sides agreed on back at the beginning, now they just look for loopholes that let them violate the constitution
I'd say both the new deal and the commerce clause alabama bbq stuff were examples of equivalents, or at least, they both feel as obviously evil to me as whatever you are talking about feels to you, and they were perpetrated by democrats.
But the whole point is that I've got an ax to grind about constitutional validity and abiding by your agreements and stuff. You clearly have an ax to grind too. If you can't notice that, that's a really bad problem, and is probably why you can't notice Richardson's ax either. Or are pretending not to notice, or something.
Please don't do that thing where you act like your own specific political views are so obviously correct that you just assume everyone else agrees with you. That won't really be taken well on this comment section.
A non-trivial number of the people recommended in Scott's old blogroll are now, like Scott himself, writing here. You may enjoy the Substacks of, for instance, Aceso Under Glass, Razib Khan, Bryan Caplan, Sarah Constantin, Zwi Mowshowitz, and possibly others I've missed. There is a Substack writer called 'Zac Davis', whose output, from a quick glance, is pretty far out, but I don't think it's the same person as the ratsphere Zach Davis.
I worry it says something about me that I actually get the newsletters from *two* of these blogs (Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American & Ted Gioia's The Honest Broker). FWIW, I had read books by each before subscribing to their substacks...
I also subscribe to both of those, and had found them through channels independent of whatever discovery feature Scott was using. I feel pretty ok about given I found them through essentially friend-of-a-friend style recommendation chains through other newsletters/blogs/articles.
FYI, Ted Gioia has a claim to being one of The Most Interesting Writers in the World (in a personal sense; his actual writing is good but not unbelievable.)
Following him online is a mix of "well, in this class I had with GEM Anscombe when I was doing philosophy at Oxford" and "when I was literally a spy" and "Here's me and Stan Getz playing jazz together!" and "my brother is the poet laureate of California" (Dana Gioia; Tyler Cowen has an excellent interview with him).
All true, but the regular sprinkling of anecdote-driven conspiracy theories tends to push me away. (I've read a lot of Gioia over the years because he is a renowned historian of jazz which is a strong interest of mine.)
Yeah Ted Gioia is definitely one of the few people on the internet that I find quite consistently interesting and unique. His big topic of focus - the subversive, near-magical power of music - is also not at all fashionable, so it's not like you find lots of other people writing in the same area. It resonates with me - music definitely has power in my life. His new book is being published by chapters on his Substack, and so far the 1st chapter is a blast. His previous book, in traditional book form, is called "Music, a subversive history", and is well worth reading.
Re Scott's comments, I don't see such a big divide between metaphorical and magical readings of Ted's writing. Writing about arts and music often it takes a subjective point of view, with no strict regard for maintaining a kind of scientific objectivity, and for good reasons - it works better this way. The power of music is experiential.
I was lucky to find Ted's substack shortly after it started, and knew I would be a regular because I had read his excellent book "Music, a Subversive History". I have since read most of his other books, and think anyone who is into music should read him. Thanks to our host for the plug.
I have a response for that, but it was small of me to make my comment in the first place. I already know it won't change anyone's minds, nor produce anything but bad feelings. Sorry for trolling you.
Thanks for taking the time to reflect on your post and changing directions. Your original post gave me a vibe of 2007, but I'm genuinely happier having seen your follow-up.
Well, I don't remember that claim from either the Old Testament (I didn't read all of it) or the first 5 books of the New Testament (which is all I was compelled to read).
FWIW, Gehenna was a valley outside Jerusalem where garbage was burned, and were earlier some really unpleasant things happened. Metaphorically it probably means if you end up there, you are cast away garbage. There doesn't seem to be any implication of eternal suffering. I think that got added by the Roman Church. (Who knows what the Nazarenes believed. The Romans killed them all, under the leadership of a Roman Christian general.)
My favorite treatment of the afterlife is something I learned in Eastern Orthodoxy. There I was taught that heaven and hell are technically the same place: the all-consuming Love and presence of God. Those who are oriented toward Love and Goodness experience this as heavenly bliss. Those oriented toward Hate and Selfishness experience this as a hellish suffering.
So God isn't the one making anyone suffer; he loves us all the same, and it's what we do and choose that makes the difference. Also under this worldview, acceptance of Jesus specifically or worship of the Christian god is not strictly necessary. Rather, a commitment to being loving, selfless, and principled is what makes the difference.
I don't know if this would jive with the theology of the blog writer Scott was quoting though.
A shadowy figure stops you on the road one night and says, “Give me your soul and I shall make you rich and powerful.” Good thing you read ACX, you think, as you thank God for his generous offer.
Maybe the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing us that such pacts are with the devil, depriving God of all those souls of violin players over the years?
I’m not sure what it says about my cultural upbringing, but The Devil Went Down to Georgia is honestly the only “somebody agrees to a wager with the devil” story I’m familiar with outside of Faust.
I can only second your question. And what, if any, is the important difference between this stew and other ones? Or is it that the "cooking community", contrary to all those chef shows, is more generous with "like"s?.
Probably that it was made by Alison Roman, who has a huge following and is really good at making recipes go viral. (They're good recipes! I have one of her books.)
The interesting part about the stew is fried onions as topping. Obviously, fried onions on top make every stew more delicious, as does dill.
Minus the fried onions, I've been cooking almost the same thing for years. Cannelini, cabbage, something acidic, meat base, and dill is a no-lose proposition.
There are certain topics I am willing to read an indefinite number of articles on. For example, right now I will read any number of detailed breakdowns of why what Russia is doing is dumb, even though there are really only a few things to say about this and every article says most of them. There are a lot of Scott Alexander type topics in this category too. I bet for some people, articles about being in this "always on" environment are like that.
That seems true to experience. "We read to know we are not alone" or something.
It makes sense for an Always On sports blogger to be interested in the experience and reception of an even more Always On sports tweeter, since it's personal in a way that other similar articles might not be. .
Yeah, it's gluttony. Fortunately, every now and then I eat so much of a thing at once that I become disgusted by that kind of food and regain perspective.
Ethan Strauss has been dabbling in broader political and cultural topics and cross-podcasting with Rob Henderson and Razib Khan; I'm not surprised about the size of his audience. He is the only sports commentator I could name.
Other than that, I recall reading a bit of Gioia and trying to read Richardson but quickly starting to wonder what the fuss was supposed to be about (I always thought her claim to fame was getting on Substack early, but now I'm not sure this is actually the case).
My media habits are super weird, but to keep myself from completely losing touch with “who is famous right now”, I’ve continued reading a celebrity blog called Dlisted for the past 15 years. So I understood that whole “culture” paragraph from House Inhabit.
I’ve stuck with Dlisted because it’s stayed lighthearted and the writers can be genuinely funny. I was particularly grateful for having read it one time when I was on my way to an ACX meetup and the local rail system froze up, leaving me and two other ladies stranded at my suburban train station. I had my car and gave them both rides home, and on the long drive their topic of choice was the Kardashians. I have zero actual interest in the Kardashians, but I felt palpably more “normal” for at least having a rough count of them.
Scott didn’t mention fiction as a category in the body or the look-ahead, which I’ll take optimistically to mean that that space isn’t saturated yet. Seems like as good a context as any I’m likely to get in which to un-lurk and plug my periodical fiction blog - https://open.substack.com/pub/ghostsinglasshouses?r=b9xg2&utm_medium=ios. Just got it going with the plan to post books in chapters with blog-like frequency and formatting. If anyone would try it out I’d appreciate it!
> "But under the circumstances I finally signed up for the seven-day free trial."
Where the circumstances are that you were concerned there was a not-insignificant probability that God would have another line after that and it was, "You, of all people, after seeing those sevens..." and hold you responsible for not taking that action?
> Political Substacks tend to have names that suggest stability - “The Bulwark”, “North Star”, “Steady” - or reasonableness - “Common Sense”, “Civil Discourse”, “Lucid”. They all have taglines like “Just the news, the way it should be, without the craziness and partisan bias”. Their articles are all things like “WATCH how the FASCIST ultra-MAGA Republicans ABUSE women and CHILDREN because THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT!!!”
I think this extends out to criticism/media/news in general. I've can't think of an extremely partisan news source that didn't have that kind of name.
Love this! Yes please keep exploring. Besides the topic categories, are there emotional/psychological benefit categories like “get your tribal fix,” “conspiracy stuff,” “pump those anger fluids,” (Sorry I don’t what the amygdala makes). Not sure what emotion is attached to the business blog. A self-improvement related emotion?
How do we learn which substacks are popular with people who don’t like to read? Are we in a bubble of readers?
"Their articles are all things like “WATCH how the FASCIST ultra-MAGA Republicans ABUSE women and CHILDREN because THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT!!!”
I think you're being unfair to Bari Weiss. I'm actually a paid subscriber there, despite being a registered Republican - and it's not because I'm masochistic.
He's specifically listing her name in the previous paragraph, and her blog "Common Sense" in the same paragraph as the sentence I quoted. If I was Bari Weiss, I'd be annoyed.
I don't agree about carrying water. I think Bari Weiss and her contributors genuinely have a lot of views that a lot of people on both sides - actually maybe most of the country - can relate to. They are also being civil to conservatives, which I suppose these days can count as carrying water for them.
How do you distinguish "carrying water for conservatives" from "advocating for my own beliefs in places where they happen to coincide with those of many conservatives?" Or from "reporting the facts of a controversy accurately even when those facts look better for conservatives than liberals?"
Telling the truth and nothing but the truth, while impossible for fallible mortals, is imaginable and an excellent thing to aspire to. But telling the whole truth obviously isn't; unprompted speech - even when it's completely factual and devoid of explicit value judgment - comes with an implicit value judgment that /those/ things are worth bringing to people's attention and all the other things you don't say are not.
"Carrying water for" is an obviously perjorative phrase, but I think the factual core of the accusation is "she spends a lot of time advocating for her beliefs in places where they happen to coincide with those of conservatives, and not much time advocating for her beliefs in areas where they happen to coincide with those of liberals, and this calls into question her claim that the latter are more significant".
Also, of course, as well as "topic selection", there are a bunch of things like selection of framing (which out of "killed", "murdered", "executed", "assassinated" do you use; when do you use child/youth/teenager/man, broader points of how you present things), which again, from what I've seen of Weiss's writing, lead me to think that while she may tell herself she's a liberal, she's mostly actually trying to make the world more right-wing.
Could you not do the media criticism thing of labeling the migrant stunt as just anti Republican? Like what are your feelings about the actual occurrence. Yes, it looks bad to some people while it looks good to other people.
What does Scott Alexander think about it? Was it a cruel waste of Florida tax payer dollars or a necessary action to break blue America out of its tribal bubble?
Can you help me understand how flying a bunch of migrants at tax payer expense to an island has any relationship to changing blue America in any way?
Is it because you think Blue America actually doesn’t like migrants if they’re within a few miles of them? If so, that doesn’t match my experience. Everyone I know in Blue America is firmly in the Yglesias camp that migrants are good, and we really don’t mind living next door to migrants.
The locus of argument in Blue America is whether we should be collectively willing to allow our neighbors to sell their land to people who might build housing rich people would move into, making older housing affordable enough that those migrants could live in.
The people who were flown to Martha's Vinyard were asylum seekers, part of a recent wave largely coming from Venezuela. Asylum seekers who are released in the US pending review of their cases, such as this group of people, represent only a fraction of the total numbers crossing the southern border, either illegally (in which case most are immediately expelled) or legally (seeking asylum, but who may also be detained rather than released pending a hearing).
According to the Refugee Processing Center, funded by the Dept. of State, the ten states that received the most refugee asylum seekers in the first 11 months of Fiscal Year 2022 (Oct. 2021- through Aug. 2022) are the same ten that received most in FY 2021. Here is the FY 2022 list, with the total number in parens (the national total is 19,919):
Together, these ten states have received 55% of the national total this FY to date. There are four red states, which received 22% of the national total, three blue states, which received 20%, and three purple states, which received 13%.
Obviously, the states on the southern border with Mexico (which do not include Florida) have a distinct problem when it comes to illegal entries, and various types of detention centers create a burden, even if Washington provides funds. But the idea that released refugees, such as those sent to Massachusetts, is a "red state problem" that blue states evade to stay in their "tribal bubble" is simply untrue. Immigration Services schedules asylum hearings in courts across the country. You may have noticed that one of the refugees transported from Texas to Martha's Vinyard who was interviewed at length said that his asylum hearing had originally been scheduled in Philadelphia, which he was planning to reach. (It was altered to Boston in light of his having been lured to Massachusetts).
Ohio beats California in new refugees per capita, according to your data (populations of 12 million vs 40 million). Can you re-run your analysis on a per capita basis?
That would a little too OCD even for me, Gres. But if the per capita crown caps any state among these ten, then clearly Kentucky is at the head.
(Vermont, with 81 refugees, outpaces California too--and has over 4x Florida's rate--while Alabama, with 23, is at a tenth of California's rate . . . Red and blue all mixed up.)
Oh, thanks for the interesting comment. Who said, “Those who don’t know the mistakes of the past, are doomed to repeat them”? Heather Cox Richardson’s ability to place current events into the timeline and context of events that have gone before is why I read her with a sense of relief, you know?
I notice that my readers overlap with the readerships of the Substacks I read a surprising amount. It’s been interesting to watch a bubble emerge in real time because the last time it happened (on Twitter) I was too stupid to notice for a long time.
The "International" Substack landscape reminds me of the prayer rooms in Abu-Dhabi airport. You can have large, clearly marked gender-separate traditional prayer rooms (at least a pair per terminal), or a single, much smaller "Multi-Faith Prayer Room" near the bus gates at Terminal 3.
I can't even blame them for anything; the difference in sizes probably reflects the difference in demand very accurately.
Grateful. Amused. But also sad: The kings&queens of substack at 250 likes for their top-posts. Thousand of rather unknown guys on twitter get 10K of likes for a tweet (if it has a cute pic).
Not that many readers of longer pieces, no surprise. And some magnitudes less of good-enough-to-follow-writers.
And here I am, spending the better parts of my life reading Scott, Erik, Zvi & such.
When Twitter first launched it was marketed as a "microblogging platform". It was a clear hit, and was also more successful in attracting people than LiveJournal/Blogger/WordPress ever were. I think major reasons are the parasocial interactions and the highs people get from numbers about followers/likes/retweets/quotes.
I think the unexpected negative consequence was that it more or less killed off amateur blogging (definitely among people in my circles). Back when it acquired Posterous, I was momentarily hopeful about a revival, but on hindsight it was probably an aqui-hire or to ward off competition, and they just shut it down in less than a year. I also had some hopes on Medium, but it could never figure out a viable business strategy.
The thing I most like about Substack is that it is reviving some of the old blogging culture. Surely there are all these popular writers able to make money, and I myself read some of them, and that's all great. But the most positive aspect to me is to run into totally random amateur blogs (or even better, from people I know). I wish Substack had better features to increase their visibility -- it currently shows some recommendations, but they are all in the same network bubble.
It's still a platform, hence structurally evil. I would like to be more hopeful, but I have been disappointed too many times... Benjamin Bayart saw it clearly : protocols, not platforms !
I have to admit to being a bit disappointed here Scott.
You praise Richardson's post, despite acknowledging that she's blatantly anti-Republican in a very harsh way (you describe it as comparing all Republicans to Antebellum slave holders, which certainly doesn't match your normal approach of "necessary, true, or kind"), giving her a 2/3 and high praise. For the Spiritual/Faith category, you give the same description, which I would think would elicit the same "hey it's got 2/3" response, but instead you make up a bunch of things you wish you had seen in the post to mock, that wasn't there, and you move on.
That's not your normal style and I'm bothered by why you might feel the need to praise an explicitly left politics post and make up things to dunk on a spirituality post that from the rest of your review are quite similar.
Here's how you described Richardson: "Still, all of her posts are like this. A daily discussion of one timely issue, a lot of useful context and explanation, and a paragraph or two about why it proves that the Republicans are the party of hatred and bigotry."
Here's what you say about the Faith post: "The most common type of article is the Tipping Point Quick Hits, which is oddly similar to Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters. It’s a few of the day’s biggest news stories, some well-written and useful context on each, and then a few paragraphs on why it means we are living in the End Times."
I can guess why you have such a double-standard on reviewing them, but the two most obvious answers are personal bias and signaling to a certain ingroup, and I would be disappointed if either of them were accurate. If, in fact, Richardson's writings are just simply better, you did a poor job of explaining that.
My concern is that I follow Scott because he wrote posts like "I can tolerate anything but the outgroup" and it resonated with me. Here's a guy who can look at complex issues and separate the object level from what we're really talking about, which is often ingroup/outgroup dichotomy. Then he writes a post where he casually dunks on his outgroup while generally praising and giving a pass to noted problems of someone else (I wouldn't say Richardson is his ingroup, but maybe he's trying to build credibility with people who like her writing?).
Anyway, in some ways it's worse that this happened on a jokey post, because he is either using this post to pander and build credibility with certain groups, or he let the mask slip and this is pretty much how he feels, but he only let it be seen because he was less cautious. Either way, that's pretty worrisome for me and others who read Scott's posts because of a certain understanding of the content we expect to read here, and the trust built up over years of him recognizing the pros and cons of many different viewpoints.
EDIT: Reading comprehension fail. I think you’re saying you agree the top level descriptions are the same you’re objecting to all the pseudo-religious-text joking Scott made, with various references to “expected more of …”. I confess that I immediately skipped those paragraphs, because I have exactly as much interest in Scott’s religious-text references as I do in devout people’s religious text references. Now that I read them, I do agree there’s asymmetry. If Scott was being symmetric, he would’ve made up elaborate implausible historical parallels he was expecting Richardson to make, and he didn’t, he accepted that the topic of history was just fine, whereas religious thinking is silly. Of course this matches my priors perfectly, so I was blind to it. My apologies.
Original comment follows:
I am genuinely confused. How was the juxtaposed comment about Faith in any way more or less dunking than the Richardson post?
It seemed deliberately, precisely, *ritually* symmetric in tone with the Richardson post.
“ it proves that the Republicans are the party of hatred and bigotry” == “here’s a a way of poking fun at people who think all Republican leaning people are a caricature”.
“a few paragraphs on why it means we are living in the End Times“ == “here’s a way of poking fun at people who have beliefs that seem implausible to most non-Christians”
To state it even more clearly: I am extremely lefty, rabidly anti-religious, and I found the Richardson posts I read through *appalling*. Here’s some cool historical stuff, followed by eschatology on how everything Republicans think is obviously inherently evil, and how that’s so obvious that it needs no justification.
I found Richardson’s stuff worse in almost every way than heartfelt religious voices speaking about religious texts as if they are obviously true, and I really don’t like religious people talking about their texts.
Like the early blogs (many of which developed tremendous readership despite content that was just so-so), the top Substacks include more than a few people who were there early and publish consistently. I put Letters from an American in this group.
She delivers a well-written summary of what's going on through a comforting lens for liberal readers in which their priors are rarely challenged. She's published more or less daily for three years and rode the Trump preoccupation wave much like Haberman et al.
But it's surprising that a liberal-bubble blog got to the top first. There's an entire mainstream media landscape providing exactly this sort of content through dozens of outlets, whereas there's a dearth of readable rightist sources. And a big part of Substack's stated mandate was having its writers be cancellation-immune.
It's a good point, but I think Substack became that, but was not that at first. She also started her Substack almost exactly at the time of Trump's first impeachment, IIRC. The original top Substacks had a very liberal skew (hers, also Popular Information). The medium has definitely shifted pretty far to the radical centrists and the otherwise-cancelled.
Surely the goal here is to make it easy to read what you want to read and support the people who write that stuff. That isn't ideological, it only seems like it in a world where some ideologues are trying pretty hard to make sure that some things you might want to read are not available or that nobody can be paid for writing them.
> I think the right genre for Trump is “outlaw prince” - like Robin Hood, or Song Jiang, or your better class of pirate captain. Realistically he’s just out to enrich himself. But he defeats and embarrasses so many people along the way that he becomes a legend, inextricably tied to the idea that the establishment can be beaten. He develops a cult following, his relatively meager real accomplishments get exaggerated in song and legend, and everyone assumes that he was only stealing from the rich in order to give to the poor or something. He can’t be caught, he can’t be defeated; like Elvis, he won’t even be able to die.
This kind of thing is why I always read Scott posts to the end even when I'm not that interested in the subject; you just might find an unrelated gem like this.
Scott's previous post happens to be about forecasting and misunderstanding. One thing I don't think he has commented on is whether a humorous aside counts as a forecast. If humorous asides count, then Scott seems like the first to predict that there will, eventually, be some Trump death deniers. (See also: a few European royals, a few Middle Eastern religious figures, and Australian PM Harold Holt.)
>”The hook of seeing other single people on campus for the first time (and knowing if they’re interested in you) went viral.”
I’m reminded of that Louis CK bit from his first leaked show after his canceling. He realized after finding out who is real friends were that he never wanted to find out who his real friends were.
Re The Honest Broker: hmmmm, I am pretty sure this is not the first time Scott writes about singers being a persecuted underground rebel movement who use mysticism, magic and wisdom from ancient texts to fight the cold uncaring power that rules the world. TINACBNIEAC.
I can't figure out if you are trying to make a joke about unsung, or if you are straight-facedly asking wtf is going on here (spent 5 min trying to parse TINACBNIEAC). In which case. Unsong.
> I found myself imagining the scene after my death. I would arrive at the Pearly Gates, and God would say: “Depart from Me, for you did not serve Me, but followed false prophets and wolves in sheep’s clothing.”
> And I would answer: “Look, I was going to read the blog post on how to distinguish between the the Spirit of God and the Antichrist spirit, but it required a $7/month subscription, and I just really don’t like paying for online content.”
> God would ask me “But why didn’t you take the seven day free trial?”. I would answer “You know how those things work, they’re just banking on you forgetting to cancel after seven days and getting auto-charged forever.” God is merciful, I think He would understand.
Kinda, sorta about the origins of the industrial revolution? But also about how and why innovation happens kinda live-blogging all of the research (and rabbit holes) that goes into writing a non-fiction book.
If anyone wants to dive into a bit of a more whacky, random, interesting substack, I'd be grateful if you joined around 1000 others and took a look at Pryor Thoughts, always glad to have another eyeball or two
“Fair decision, but Politics remains the core of Substack. Here we have such famous names as Bari Weiss, Michael Moore, and Matt Taibbi. 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson has a Substack, as does leading ivermectin advocate Dr. Pierre Kory.”
Why would Dr. Kory’s substack or ivermectin advocacy be classified as a political stack?
You would have to ask him, he self-tagged it that way. He does describe it as "exploring the dysfunction in American medicine & the effects of the captured health agencies' relentless war on generic drugs" - though I don't see anything about generic drugs other than for COVID, even though this actually is a really interesting topic.
Also, apparently he was the expert witness pulmonologist in the George Floyd case, which . . . sure is something.
"I guess this is the QAnon thing (though he has some kind of complicated objection to that terminology)."
It's actually not a complicated objection. It's the slogan that "There is no QAnon, there is Q and there are Anons", with the meaning that anyone using the term QAnon is ignorant about the subject. The only problem with this is that this slogan is actually just taken directly from Q, who started saying it, after the media started writing a lot about QAnon, so as to prove that the media was ignorant. Before this happened, Q had referred to himself as "QAnon" many times.
Can confirm that the stew is delicious. I made a batch without beans for my legume-sensitive girlfriend, and it was still good, though more of a simple soup. It really needs the beans to be thick enough for stew. And my reluctantly vegetarian roommate ate a lot of it (which generally means a vegetable dish is good.) I think the butter + onion combo is key—makes a good base for anything.
Warning that the cabbage makes a LOT of stew—I used maybe half of a head for one batch.
The first half of the post feels like news (honest inquiries by a biased person) rather than editorialising. You can easily skip the editorialising paragraph, and the remainder feels more committed to reporting facts than CNN or the NY Times. That’s a cause for hope - if anyone has a link to something similar on the right, I’d feel like together they’d paint a decent picture of American politics.
Comic Book writer/artists took off within the past year on Substack after Substack gave some industry stars a bunch of money. I follow You and Bari - and then like 10 comic book substacks. Substack is a huge disruptive force in the comic book industry.
What are some good ones?
Dropping a comment in this thread because I would like to hear the comic recs!
The Number-1 by subscriber count is a Universe building serialized comic by Hickman and friends called 3 Worlds 3 Moons - typically just called 3W3M.
The Number-2 by subscriber count is Tiny Onion by current comics golden boy James Tynion IV.
Brian K Vaughan (of Y the last Man, Runaways, Paper Girls, and Saga fame) has one called Exploding Giraffes that has a fantastic (but NSFW) serialized comic in it right now called Spectators (new episodes every Monday).
Chip Zdarsky has one that is good.
Tini Howard has one.
Scott Snyder has one.
even Grant Morrison has one (his annotations of past comics are particularly worthwhile)
If you're interested in the comic book industry in general, its' really fascinating watching James Tynion IV build his brand and cater to all aspects of the comic book buying public via his substack (collectors, readers, casuals, etc.)
I"m sure i'm forgetting some. BUt yes, start with BKV via Exploding Giraffe. Though remember - very NSFW!
*they for Morrison
No. Grant has said very specifically, as recently as last week in LA, that he does not care what pronouns people use to describe him. He even encouraged people to make up their own. Grant is 100% not the type of person to police other people's language and get authoritarian about things like this. He/She/they/Auslander/XEnomorph- whatever. Grant is a chill person. Please refer to recent discussion on this topic on FBOOK group page Morrison's Acolytes for quotes and videos of Grant saying exactly this.
I found the relevant discussion for you. Cause i'm Swell like that. https://www.facebook.com/groups/2054183994810820/permalink/3343464075882799/
Huh. Er, I'm afraid that link's to a private group — I can't see it. But it does sound like something Morrison would say; not doubting your good faith!
I was going off the italicised note at the top of this article, cited by Wikipedia for Morrison specifically preferring the singular "they".
https://www.cbr.com/the-green-lantern-grant-morrison-non-binary/
I wonder if Morrison changed his/their mind at some point, vs. whether there was some kind of misunderstanding with CBR.
I'm sorry man, I probably sounded like an ass. (You know how you read a comment the next day, and you're like, - whoops, didn't moderate tone well enough.) - THank you for your patience.
Yes, you're definetly a Morrison fan if you can tell that being an authoritarian pronoun police a-h**le doesn't sound like Morrison at all.
It's clear that CBR chose to run with a "Comes Out" headline because that generates clicks. But the actual article they're swipping from only containts this quote:
"When I was a kid there were no words to describe certain aspects of my own experience. I've been non-binary, cross-dressing, 'gender queer' since I was 10 years old, but the available terms for what I was doing and how I felt were few and far between.""
Absolutely nowhere does Morrison request that people use they/them, nor does he identify himself as a they/them. Nor does he even 'come-out' and announce he's now 'non-bianary' ala Demi Lavato. In Morrison's view he's always been cross-dressing and non-binary, and it's just nice that the kids nowadays have more language that matches their experience. That's what his quote is talking about. He's had several interivews in the past discussing his crossdressing and about feeling more like a metaphysical spirit trapped in a physical plane... yadda yadda.
My point is more, it's very en vouge for a certain segement of the media to trip over themselves to start using they/them pronouns. And I think anyone who goes around correcting other people's usage should do some introspection about their motivations. But Morrison himself (or his XenobiologicalAsparaguself (I made up a pronoun just like Grant suggested!)) has never requested any specific pronouns and has said, specifically, that he doesnt' care what people call him.
I actually think he said that the media has "foisted" they/them upon him against his wishes.
I know you're a cool guy (you're on here!) so I symphathize with you. Let's all reread The Invisibles and go to Katmandu.
Spectators by Brian K Vaughan and Niko Henrichon is the cream of the crop. The comic pages themselves you can read for free. It has a fascinating premise which I won't spoil. It's on page 33 now.
in an effort to help some of the non-rich get middle-classer, allow me to plug with a deep shame and sadness in my heart, the comedy writings on Both Are True - Absurd, honest comedy delivered twice a weekish through the vulnerable personal essays of Alex Dobrenko: friend to all, father to one, and tv actor+writer to anyone hiring.
It's in the Humor category and definitely not first but routinely in the top 20 or whatever so hey, why not try!
Will this bold shilling be respected as a great example of one man shooting his shot amidst a sea of idk what, or will this post be swiftly deleted and perhaps the writer even banned? Time will tell, dear friends, but until then, allow me to just say it has been a priv and hon to spend a little time with all of you
http://botharetrue.substack.com/
also let me tell you about several other humor / great writings that deserve not only your time but also your attention:
https://annekadet.substack.com/
https://michaelestrin.substack.com/
https://janeratcliffe.substack.com/
https://myqkaplan.substack.com/
https://chrisduffy.substack.com/
https://www.garbageday.email/
https://lizadonnelly.substack.com/
https://www.todayintabs.com/
Thanks for sharing this here! I just read Doing Crimes with my Dad and it made me laugh many times. It's also really sweet. Subscribed.
Dang, that made me cry a little. Really sweet!
It does, frankly, annoy me that politics so dominates Substack, social media, the news, whatever. Perhaps because it's not my specific main interest. Or at least not the kind that gets reported on. A question I've never gotten a satisfactory answer to: Why does broad politics seem to dominate news so much?
I agree. It gets sooo tiresome. Seems like everything is devoted to politics.
I imagine there is a complex array of factors, but I think the most straightforward answer goes something like this:
In the modern media landscape, attention = money. This has always been true to some extent, but before free media there were various mitigating factors, now publishing entities just want engagement at all costs.
In order to attract and sustain attention, you need engagement; the best way to generate engagement is by provoking strong emotions. The most reliable provoker of strong emotions is politics, partisan politics in particular (many believe that this is one of the drivers of increasing partisanship).
I think it's basically that way by definition - the issues that are "political" are exactly the ones that a lot of people have strong differences of opinion on. And people love to read about that stuff to try to get a sense of whether they are winning or losing.
It's actually not *broad* politics, but *narrow* politics, meaning electoral politics. It's rare to hear about organizations working for or against political change except insofar as they interact with elected officials. No one talks about the Koch brothers or George Soros except insofar as they intervene in elections - they'd much rather talk about Ted Cruz or Bernie Sanders.
I suspect this is an unexpected failure aspect of electoral politics, that might work out differently with a system where legislators are selected randomly like jury duty. I think that most members of the government get much less coverage in an autocracy, even if there's no media restrictions on that coverage (though the autocrat themself probably gets a lot of coverage).
> No one talks about the Koch brothers or George Soros
I feel the total opposite: the leftists used to complain so much about Koch brothers and still do (that was before Trump), and all the right-wing social media is about Soros and (more recently) Klaus Schwab and World Economic Forum.
What I mean is that the *only* thing you ever hear about these people is about their involvement in electoral politics. I have some sense that the Koch brothers made money on fossil fuel and Soros on financial bets, and I’ve seen some arts organizations with Koch on the donor plaque, but have never heard a story about any recent business decision they made, or even about what they do in their spare time. Just their politics side.
And I, at least, never know whether to believe what I hear about their doings, and know of no reliable way to check.
To me it seems like gossip columnists talking about which movie stars are having affairs with who. (Do they still do that?) Perhaps it's true, perhaps not. Why should I believe either way?
OTOH, the electioneering is generally pretty believable AND pretty uninformative. It's basically "Those other guys are bastards, so vote for us.". It's almost never about why they are a good choice.
> (Do they still do that?)
Entirely reasonable (probably preferable) not to know, but it is an amusing week to ask that, as US Twitter/BuzzFeed/et al. are digesting a meal of the almost-simultaneously-revealed (separate) indiscretions of a pop star and a YouTube celebrity, both with the public image Guy Who Loves His Wife SO MUCH YOU GUYS!!! The progression of events has been so unsurprising that it's practically an homage to the formula. All parties—cheaters, spouses, colleagues, and fans—are hitting their marks with aplomb.
(That is, yes, they certainly do, and I'm trying to make the best of being involuntarily aware of it.)
Speculative answer: Arguing about politics is becoming our shared culture. It used to be that we had things like tv programs with high enough viewership that people would discuss and share opinions on them with their peers as a way of forming connections, where there wasn't a lot of uncertainty in the process of finding people who also watched them. Now, our popular culture is much more fragmented, targeting many, much smaller niches. What sort of mass culture still reaches most of the population, allowing us to exchange opinions with people who we barely know, but can assume also consume it? Politics. I've read that national politics didn't used to hold this position so much several decades ago, but it has for most of my life at least, and other forms of mass culture have receded from prominence.
This is at least one part of what is going on, but there would be a question why politics can so reliably fill that role!
"Why does broad politics seem to dominate news so much?"
This seems like an odd question to me, Erusian, because I think of public "news" as being intrinsically about politics. Go back a couple of centuries and "the news" was "the press," and the political nature of "the press" was so intrinsic to the term that no one had to ask why the Bill of Rights bothered to guarantee freedom of the press as a poltical right. It wasn't to protect access to recipes and book reviews.
Look at magazine stands in the supermarket. "The press" in a more global sense is all about Couture, Cuisine, Cars, Movie Stars, Rock Stars, Guns, Porn, and Sports Sports Sports. But the big city stands still have a rack of newspapers in front with politics on page 1. (But then come the recipes, sports sections, business reports, and so forth. . . . Different in the boonies now: my local paper exercises freedom of the press primarily to pump up local high school and college teams--politics is usually page 3 stuff, after the obits.)
None of which is to say I'm not as tired of politics as you seem to be.
It's uncanny seeing this when just an hour ago I have seen an e-mail from one of the journals I am subscribed to which is asking for funds to help to cover the costs of now 3 lawsuits by 3 (much bigger) companies asking for several articles to be taken down because they violate their business secrets. (And two other journals I am subscribed to as well as 2 I used to be seem to be pursued too !)
The reason is actually much simpler than many other people have noted. Substack provides a good service with marketing, particularly for politics, of major writers who were forced out of traditional media for w/e reason. This includes a wide variety of factions since Scott, Freddie, MattY, and Zaid Jilani, and even Greenwald are from relatively different parts of the spectrum.
If you want to write an amazing column or even newsletter about non-controversial topics you have plenty of space in mainstream media. Food, music, books, etc. All quite open to tons of different ideas and very little cancelling and most people get scrubbed due to political stuff rather than having terrible opinions on pizza or w/e.
That would be an explanation if Substack was clearly more dominated by politics than other media, but major news organizations are largely devoted to electoral politics as well, and it fills social media too.
Do yourself a favor and don't follow any politics substacks.
I do follow Bari but I skip alot of posts if they're too depressing or partisan.
The most common reader is the least intelligent.
I can think of two attributes that contribute to a content having lots of readers:
* does not require specialized knowledge or high intelligence; therefore, it has many potential readers;
* drives people crazy, thus making them spend more time online reading this type of content.
The winner is politics, of the worst kind -- because the better kinds of political discussion are less mindkilling and may require more intelligence. Other candidates are sport and celebrity gossip.
Sport, obviously, is symbolic conflict. Celebrities are a hyperstimulus for "important people". (I do not mean that they are important per se. It's just that our outdated instincts are screaming at us that if so many people know who someone is, of course that person must be very important. Or something like this.)
The interesting thing is that on paper, politics, sport, and celebrity gossip seem quite balanced, but online, politics in a clear winner. My guess would be that this is a difference between a read-only medium and an interactive medium. Anyone can read about sport or celebrities, but few can provide their own comments that other would find similarly interesting. With politics, anyone can yell something and get an applause from their tribe.
Yep, everybody is an expert on politics, religion, and celebrity culture. Religion, sports and showbiz are fractured these days, with no particular domain being pre-eminent in the mainstream culture as they once may have been. So this leaves politics as the clear winner for the universally appealing tribalistic death spirals to generate around.
> With politics, anyone can yell something and get an applause from their tribe.
Isn't this true of sports too? Maybe the appeal of politics is that there are fewer teams, so each fandom is much bigger, so you get a bigger pool of people agreeing with you when you cheer on the team.
And yet political discussion is frowned upon in real-world circles - not even because it is divisive, but because it's boring.
No, it's because it's divisive. The weather is much more boring than politics, but talking about it is not frowned upon.
Plenty of people enjoy divisive topics, almost nobody enjoys politics - because you've already heard all of the arguments and nobody has anything new to contribute.
Hmmm, are you sure you're not cherry picking? After all, the entire purpose of this article besides the comedy is how funny and shockingly unreal other bubbles can be to those not in them, yet how utterly serious and concrete and emergency-like they seem to those embroiled in them. Maybe politics dominate your bubble, but to a sports fan those fucking $SOME_OPPONENT_FANS dominate *all* the news, to an Instagram influencers follower this slutty whore whatever-Kardashian absolutely sucks the air out of the room, etc...
Politics, like absolutely any topic or field or walk of life, has its vanilla parts and its spicy parts. Sure, on some absolute scale, $LATEST_TRUMP_SCANDAL might be more spicy than the latest String Theory Ordeal or some nerd shit like that, but don't ever underestimate the effect of hedonic scale. To people absorbed in nerd shit, it's so utterly beyond belief how those fucking String Theorists will never admit how wrong they are, and that trumps everything else currently happening. Other fields have spicier things even by Politics' standards : Biology has sex differences, genetics has race and IQ research, History has.... history. None of this is proper Politics, although they're often the start point for policy discussions. Politics also has some pretty vanilla things : $RANDOM_GROUP_OF_NATIONS has agreed on some $VAGUELY_MUTUALLY_BENEFICIAL_THING, that type of things. The Music Industry has far more going on than who fucked whom and with exactly how much consent.
So a better question would be : why does rage bait work? Why do we find things to get mad at no matter how many vanilla things to argue about we have nearby? Why is rage almost always the most participatory and memorable emotion? Why are scissor statements so ubiquitous across domains? I won't speculate because this has been done to death and I can't compete with the state of the art, but I will note that the phenomena has a Greek Prophecy vibe to it : you can't resist falling into it no matter how much you know, you can feel yourself falling into the trap before you take the first step and you still willingly go. I know all about the Toxoplasma of rage and etc etc etc, and still the fucking outgroup gets me so riled and worked up every damn time, I Can Tolerate Anything Except Them.
Politics dominates your life even if you aren't interested in it. (I'm not.)
Food only dominates your life if you can't get enough of it, unless you're just interested.
Even sex only dominates your live if you're interested in it.
But politics, like the military, dominates your life when you encounter it. And politics is nearly everywhere. If you're fortunate, you can avoid the military.
You may not be interested in politics, but politics is certainly interested in you.
That's the worst of mainstream takes.
Your influence over the political process is a rounding error. You should perhaps pay attention to signals that your chosen option is not as good as you think, and you should vote for someone else - or that your hated enemy is not so terrible so perhaps you should consider voting for them after all. Still, you should spend exactly as much attention on it as is warranted to make an informed decision in an election.
Of course, people do the exact opposite, because confirming their bias gives them fuzzies.
"But you can became an activist / run for office / etc" - realistically though, will you? Because most of us have enough going on in our lives. If you are already precommitted to not doing it, you don't need to bother keeping informed on the issue at hand.
The only reason to care about "politics being interested in you" is knowing how to mitigate it - avoid the new tax, take advantage of a stupid loophole just introduced, or just when to emigrate to a saner jurisdiction. Everything else is just helplessly getting frustrated at a process outside of your control.
So what are you, personally, going to do about it, once you talk it over?
It's not about your influence, but more about knowing enough to dodge the elephant's foot when it comes down.
On a second reading (and thus reading further into your comment than the first paragraph), I guess we're talking about the same thing.
Nope. Politics does not give a fat fuck about me.
Dylan's answer about politics getting attention is good, but I'd also mention that everyone has political opinions. You can't really get everyone talking about the nuances of microeconomic theory, 19th century French art movements, etc. These things take a certain level of knowledge.
But politics? Everyone has an opinion on the subject, so everyone can freely contribute even if they have nothing of value to say or no method of saying it constructively.
I'm not convinced this is true. I think alot of people intentionally don't follow politics becuase they find it so pointless and vapid. It's much more spirtually rewarding for alot of people to intentiaonlly not have an opinion on politics.
Hm, this doesn't feel quite right to me unless we mean like, detailed opinions about national-level party politics. I think almost everyone has "a thought or two about how we oughta do things around here", though, and that seems like politics. Ask people about how they'd deal with property crime or homeless encampments, or what they think about those higher/lower car registration fees or property taxes, or if they have kids *literally anything about schools.* I think most adults who seem to be devoid even of those opinions are probably performing humility (which is not unreasonable).
I think you're right. But I also don't think I'm wrong. :) I don't think most people would consider "how they'd deal with property crime or homeless encampments" to be politics.
THe definition of politics has changed dramatically in the post 2008 (cough cough twitter cough) era.
Those are let's call them physical issues, whereas politics is is a non-physical concept nowadays. Where is that fantastic post about that concept...........
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back
A substack piece! It's on topic. :) - "Politics" is all a game the virtuals play. The Physicals go about fixing problems, and don't think of it as politics.
Because most of what you see is not “politics” (coalition-building, negotiation, strategizing), it is gossip for people who want to pretend they are too fancy for gossip.
Instead of talking to their friend about what Rihanna wore to the Oscars (like a commoner!) they can talk to those friends about what Biden said at some luncheon…
I understand your point, but I think we're the old fuddy duddies who still think politics means "(coalition-building, negotiation, strategizing)" - I don't think that's what it means anymore.
that might politick-ing............. but that's not what politics is anymore in the social media outreach panopticon.
That's an argument about terminology, not about content!
You call it "politics", I call it "gossip", but my term helps with understanding (and clarifies why, regardless of what your high school teacher told you, you're better off ignoring "news"); your term does neither.
fair enough man, it's been a couple days and i don't really remember what we were talking about. It's all good.
It has become the primary means of social signaling. You need to keep up to date with the latest events in order to better signal within your group.
This I would say is the biggest change in politics from 30 years ago. A lot of people were also brought into politics due to the Iraq war and have stayed.
But we can change things!
Until maybe the late 80s it was the cool thing among the supposed elite to brag about how you didn't have a TV or were not aware or some popular movie. We'd all be better off if the cool response to "Did you hear what Biden/Trump/Ted Cruz just said" was "Sorry, I don't follow domestic news".
Your point is, however, interesting! Chuck Klosterman's latest book, The Nineties (HIGHLY recommended!) talks about this, saying that in the 90s the cool stance was not to have opinions. Shortly after I read that, a plumber I hired (probably early 50s) as we were talking said something similar, along the lines of "when we were young, we didn't feel we had to have an opinion about every damn thing all the time". Now you're saying the same. So it must be true!
There probably is something there, though I'm not sure what. It's not exactly that people didn't have opinions in the 90s (certainly they did about, eg music or movies!) Perhaps it's more that there was an expectation that your opinions were just that, *your opinions*, not the word of god channeled through you, and that anyone who disagreed in the slightest was satan in disguise?
You're probably right that the Bush/9-11/Iraq2 storyline crystalized this.
Was the internet an essential component? That's less clear to me. Certainly what's available of the 60s (ie writings by a certain class) suggests a similar attitude at the time; but I need to look at more real material from the time (as opposed to what people say about the time 50 years later) to see how widespread it was.
Because it became a way to signal identity, which also became much more important ??
https://samzdat.com/2017/03/14/identity-is-the-enemy-finale/
Perhaps true but
- identitarians would claim that identity has ALWAYS been the driving force in human society (basically Marx w/ class replace w/ identity.)
- if we think this is nonsense then we need to explain why proclaiming your identity loudly became so important over the past 20 yrs
I think identity in some form (“I’m a hot chick”, “I’m a metal head”) has always been with us. What’s happened in our time is that the “allowed” identities have drastically shrunk. It’s not OK to insist that your identity is based on your music taste and that’s all you care about; you have to also project a political identity, and refusal to project such will have one imposed upon you.
This is not unique; there have been earlier such totalizing societies; but they are not so common that there is nothing to explain here. Why did the US flip from the previous state to this total using state?
"I suspect that much of this has to do with social power as a growing force. While I’ve stuck to the Left, I implied (and am now saying outright) that social power is also becoming more common on the Right. There are certain obvious reasons for this: social states are seemingly more inclusive, they’ve much more likely to provide one with a sense of identity, etc. They’re also *constant* affirmations of identity in a way that voting or paying taxes or writing letters to your senator is not. This allows them to provide frequent reassurance *that you are who you think you are*, which is to say, you are who you identify with. Retweet [political slogan] and your friends will know who you are, march, wear a shirt, listen to the music, etc.[1] Needless to say everything is interpreted accordingly, from Beyonce to the Dixie Chicks.
“There have always been tribes.” Imagining past forms of identity, we get something like this (this is super ahistorical, don’t quote me): Johnny was a Christian and a blacksmith and an Aquitanian and a [blank]. Maybe one of those took precedence, but it didn’t apply to *everything*, i.e. blacksmithy had nothing to do with the Cross, and the Cross was not against Aquitania. There may be political struggles from any one of those, but they aren’t at their core political. Those intrigues were directed towards *goals* rather than identities, if not simply because there were several given identities competing for that spot.
In contrast, modern identity is increasingly a) known through identity markers (signals); b) holistic (lesser identity markers are subordinated to one big one); and, c) entirely political (hence, subordinated to Political Party).
Let me explain (a) slightly more. There have always been signals, duh. But when the personal became political, the political became our identity’s sole foundation. Any given “thing” (likes, preferences, diction, etc.) is politicized, which turns any given thing into a potential political signal. Political party coordinates with morals, affiliation with valuation, etc. which gives us the infamous phrase “virtue signalling”. I’m going to avoid using it, ironically to avoid signalling. But the point of this is that *identity* tends to elevate signal over action, and to make what action exists simply performative."
(Also, for my part I would note that the Marxist class divide was invented in liberal democratic societies : ones where the 3 quite rigid estates (clergy, nobility, commoners) had been abolished, and all ~~humans~~ ~~men~~ landowners were supposedly deemed equal (at least before the law). Marx and Engels (and others) have pointed out how much this still wasn't true in practice. And before industrial revolution, there wasn't much sense to separate citizens = richer bourgeois from other citizens = poorer bourgeois, since the differences weren't *that* huge and they were all a minority part of the estate with the least power anyway.)
Let me counter (or perhaps agree?) with a slightly different theory: we are present at the creation of something new in human society, something akin to the invention of lying. What is this new thing?
I *think* that one of the ways our times (meaning say post-2000, with weaker versions of the claim going back 50, then 100, then 200 years) is that we no longer say “I dislike X”, we say “I dislike X because…”.
These may seem the same, but they are very much not!
The former statement has no power, it’s simply an assertion of opinion or preference. But the second statement gives you control, it gives you superiority, it gives you deference.
With the use of the word “because” we see a social technology that works on people almost magically, without much self-defense. You think I exaggerate?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-wise/201310/the-power-the-word-because-get-people-do-stuff
Whereas in the past one might have said “I find something about dog ownership depressing/icky/unpleasant” (fair enough, I pretty much agree) in modern times we say “Dog ownership is wrong because…” and once because is in there, we are forced to make up theories and justifications. These don’t have to be (and usually are not…) good theories and justifications, they simply have to be words that aren’t clearly (very extremely clearly! “I have to make copies because I have to make copies”!!) nonsense.
Now dog ownership is not a pressing concern of our time. (Though who knows, maybe it will form the basis of the culture wars of 2122? Would anyone in 1922 have seriously thought that the political faultlines of 2022 would revolve around who gets to call themself a woman or a man?)
However what is a huge problem in our time is people unwilling to simply say “I find X icky” (where X can be anything: old men with younger women? calling 16-yr old women girls? behavior by a particular rich person towards a particular non-rich person?) Rather this becomes a “because” claim, at which point it takes on a life of its own.
And thus we get to 2022 where public political life has lost its mind because of an incoherent web of mutually contradictory statements, everyone of which we are supposed to believe and affirm (as the justification for some “because”.)
We’re supposed to believe that there is no mental difference between men and women AND that it’s precisely because men and women have different minds that some ostensibly male humans might identify as female.
We’re supposed to believe that who owned land many years ago determines moral worth (US, Australia) AND that who owned land many years ago has no relevance to moral worth (Crimea, Israel).
We’re supposed to believe that any difference in the number of categories of people in any particular occupation is ipso facto evidence of racism/sexism – except in sports.
And so on and so on and so on.
You and I clearly can’t fix the mania of our times. But what we can do is try to track and check our own behavior. Try to be careful about when we use the word “because” and try to limit it to cases where we’re actually laying out some sort of logical argument, not merely trying to win allies to an opinion. That’s probably a little strong, but I think we are not yet aware of the harm that is being done by spurious claims of “X because Y”.
(And yes, I am WELL aware of how the above applies exactly to the argument I have been making! What can I say? Read my points and make up your own mind. Just try to remember, every time you use “because”, would this fit Kant’s categorical imperative? Can I find an example that goes against my tribal loyalties for which my “because” argument also works? If so, then the argument is surely a tribal argument, not the universal logic I am trying to claim it to be.)
Interesting !
Note that "X because [I feel] Y" can happen too, though I'll have to pay some attention as to how often these different versions are used...
P.S.: Copy machines are still very much in use (and still have queues because even though they might (?) be used less than in the 70's, the universities adapted by lowering the number of machines and/or limiting the number of copies you can make per month and/or asking you to pay for the copies).
For instance when my printer broke (scanner still works), I didn't get a new one (and if I do, it will be laser rather than goddamn inkjet), because there's also a commercial reprography between me and the university (well, was, until COVID killed it, I'm kind of hoping it will pop up back again...).
And my university has, even for the students, several reprographies : one in the library, one in the computer building (though maybe not anymore, since that building was destroyed ?? probably just moved though..?), and even a central one for non-students even though each department *also* has its own...
Yeah, you'd think that we'd use paper copies less, but chalkboard and paper are still better than computers (and diapositives, even digital ones) for most courses,
while for documents a lot of people seem to be stuck on using paper-centered pdfs, as if (m)html (=eml) had never been invented !
(I kind of blame LaTeX (if not TeX), these tools *still* tend to be very pdf-centric...)
Such a great idea for a post!
It would be fun to start from the random tweets and try to make it back to your homeland Wikipedia-race style.
> they’re just banking on you forgetting to cancel after seven days and getting auto-charged forever.
Temp-mail.org + privacy.com you can have a burner account for a free trial in about 60 seconds, that you don't need to remember to cancel
omg what I knew about temp-mail but privacy.com is a revelation thank you!!
Only for US residents, ouch!
Revolut has the same, for europeans. And it's all around a great service.
You're doing god's work
Revolut also gives unlimited one-shot CCs on their premium plan.
Coincidentally, scam artists love Revolut because a lot of businesses begin and end their anti fraud philosophy with "1 CC = 1 person".
I just set a reminder on my phone to cancel…
TIL that crypto has its own Substack category.
I have my own substack and have to say that another fun way to explore the site is through the Recommendations. It's like a wikipedia race where you start out in the short story realm (my realm) then you get to writing...then travel...then cooking...then the shadow realm of politics...
For me, the business one didn't feel very parallel universey (I went and read the article as well). Which ones of these felt in-universe for other people?
Honestly the first one felt very in-universe - I didn't know about the latest "explosion" on IG live but I know who Ray J and Kris Jenner are, and none of the verbiage felt incomprehensible.
The Ray J sex tape thing is *the whole reason Kim Kardashian is famous*. Like, the central criticism of her is that she's "just famous for having had a sex tape leaked". It's mildly surprising to me that people know who she is and don't know that.
And the bit about Blackfishing on IG felt as tired to me as the "Always On Society" post felt to Scott. Like yeah, yeah, that's a central part of the Discourse.
TBQH the whole House Inhabit review felt very "I do not understand the humans because I am so very Different and Weird" to me.
I vaguely knew she had a sex tape leak but didn't know that's why she was famous, and also didn't know who it was with or who Ray J is. Different universes indeed!
I didn't know Kim Kardashian had had a sex tape leaked. All I really knew about the Kardashians is that they exist and are seen as tacky by high-brow people.
My understanding of Kim Kardashian before reading this post honestly consisted entirely of "she's a celebrity who has something to do with reality television". I have a vague sense that some celebrities are known for having sex tapes, but I wouldn't have been able to say with any certainty whether Kardashian was one of them. I've also never head the term "Blackfishing" or of any of the other people mentioned in the article.
It may be that people like Scott and myself are out of touch with celebrity culture to a really bizarre extent, but from my own experience, I don't think he was being disingenuous. Knowing next to nothing about celebrities is definitely a thing, even for very online people in the US.
Heck, I don't even know if Kim Kardashian is a musician or just some other kind of celebrity. *looks it up* Apparently not a musician, TIL. (I don't expect to be able to retain this information, mind, since it's completely outside of my interests, so if I make this same category error in a few years, don't be too surprised.)
Same here. As far as I know, Kardashian is some kind of "person famous for being famous", and that automatically makes the topic uninteresting for me. I even don't know if there is only one Kardashian or more of them. No idea what they actually do.
I don't watch TV. I don't talk to people who talk about topics like this. So I am not passively exposed to information on this topic. I suspect that if people watch TV, knowing a lot about Kardashian may be inevitable.
I know almost nothing about her but was she not famous for her TV show?
The TV show came later, though to my surprise only by a few months. Wikipedia says she first came to public attention as a friend of Paris Hilton, who had her own reality show with Nicole Richie. And of course her dad was one of OJ Simpson's lawyers.
I did not know Kim K had a sex tape. But somehow I think I do know that Kris is her mom, right? So the mom leaked her daughter’s sex tape!?! That’s so messed up!!
...Dude. The woman just publicly passed a lie detector test saying she didn't.
I feel like in that circumstance, your comment REALLY needs the words "may have." lol
> It's mildly surprising to me that people know who she is and don't know that.
I only know her as Kanye West's (ex) wife, since I listen to his music and sometimes see news articles in google results when searching lyrics or info about an album or something.
I mean...yeah.
I do see how you could know who Kim Kardashian is and not know about the sex tape thing (the Kardashians are fucking omnipresent). But it feels incredibly ignorant, especially if you're old enough you were around when they got famous.
I had never heard of blackfishing, and having looked it up am mostly just intrigued by the bit where (for example) Christina Aguilera is apparently white, not Hispanici. Which I don't even necessarily disagree with, but boy does it demonstrate the problems with oversimplifying these things (is Shakira culturally appropriating for singing in English with blonde hair? It's kind of the obvious next step).
Knowledge is useful, even the useless stuff.
"is Shakira culturally appropriating for singing in English with blonde hair?"
No, because the explicit rule of these things is that they can never happen to the "dominant group".
Half of me is like "she's worth millions, was married to someone worth billions, is internationally famous, and is gorgeous. I think she's more of a dominant group than multiple of me."
The other half of me is just thinking up jokes about Shakira dominating me.
Well, I, also, was around when she got famous, and never happened to/bothered to find out why she was famous. To me she/they were just a name. Now I (temporarily) know that one of them is named Kim and had a sex tape. Perhaps I'll try to look for it, but probably not.
As someone with a nodding interest in pop culture, I know some basic facts about the Kardashians, but I don’t remember hearing about the sex tape. As for their relationships and antics, I care almost as much about theirs as they care about mine *shrug*
Ted Giola sounds like he's REALLY into The Birth of Tragedy.
His name is Ted Gioia, not Giola. (Attn: Scott)
Wow, that's not even a typo, I must have read his name a few dozen times and misread it each time. Thanks.
You fixed all the Giola instances, but a Giolla remains. Tyler Cowen's interview of Ted Gioia is fantastic, by the way.
I was certain it was just an instance of the the thing you sometimes do.
+1
I read this and then immediately went and changed every tag on my blog.
Changed from what to what?
I think it was "politics culture science" before. Guess who is now the proud owner of an international family humor blog - it's me!
Edited to add: I'd feel bad about this, but honestly it's about as accurate as the old tags were.
Smart move.
This has already worked to put me visible on the leaderboard for "international". I'm screwing around with the other two to see if I can get anything going.
Haha! Good job! I disagree with your politics, but I am rooting for you.
If you don't disagree with *some* of my politics, you are broken. I'm like a hair from supporting three-strikes-and-you're-dead policies for vandalism.
Laughing out loud here.
Some French friends have a brutally heavy stoner rock band and they tag their music as for children on Bandcamp
Taking a lead, perhaps, from Scottish slam metal (?) band Party Cannon?
https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2015/10/01/15/deathmetalposter.jpg?width=982&height=726
My life is enriched for seeing this
Big news: Substack protects those categories! They found it overnight (either through normal oversight or because they read the comments here) and removed me from the international leaderboard.
I'm just here to say that your columns are usually really great, but this one with the snark was simply the best. That's all. Please keep on rocking.
What makes substack a community of substackers that is different from people using wordpress or ghost or insert-the-thousands-other-blogging platforms?
This touches on how Substack is different from Ghost, from a professional writer perspective: https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/full-stack-economics-is-back. Basically, Ghost is cheaper but involves a non-trivial amount of work and doesn't have a built-in commenting system. I suspect Ghost communities are more isolated.
From a reader perspective:
For the old blogging platforms, I almost exclusively used Google Reader and now Feedly, and so often didn't read comments. Also true about SSC.
For Substack, the reading experience IMO is better on the website (or app) than in email or RSS. So I tend to read on the website, and inevitably end up "interacting" a few times per week -- clicking like, scanning some comments, posting a comment myself. Consequently I recognize some active commenters, once in a while checkout their own substacks or things they read, etc. For me this is the most "social media" I have used in more than a decade.
Substack still sucks compared to Wordpress - I blame over-reliance on Javascript, hijacking standard browser interaction...
Google Reader actually had a whole social media built around commenting ! Then (as you know) Google killed it, probably because it was not growing fast enough, and they wanted to focus people on only using Google+...
15-20 years ago I used to have blogs on Blogger and WordPress. I liked WordPress more. But early this year when I wanted to get back to blogging, I was overwhelmed by WordPress. I didn't like that the free plan meant ads, that there were certain banners (login) I couldn't get rid of on Personal paid plan, and when I checked out the Premium plan it felt like an explosion of customization options. Probably because it has become a software aimed for any kind of sites.
I decided to go with Substack because I was already using the account actively for reading newsletters, and its default options to start writing were good enough -- like Medium but much better.
I knew Google Reader had options to share and to take notes, but didn't know about the comment things. Makes me nostalgic. I know this wasn't/isn't usually Google's business strategy, but I wish they could have just made it a paid service.
Yeah, WordPress is a platform too, so, ideally, to be avoided :
https://framalibre-org.translate.goog/recherche-par-crit-res?keys=wordpress&_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fr&_x_tr_pto=wapp
(Sadly, I'm not aware of an alternative to Google Translate to make links of already translated web pages... which is somewhat surprising.)
"I asked a friend who is more up-to-date on evangelical culture, and she tells me yes - it is normal for evangelical pastors to claim divine inspiration for their sermons and other religious works."
As an "evangelical," I bristle at this. Maybe there is a more accurate descriptor for those who claim this, like "charismatic" or some less kind terms I could think of.
Do evangelicals in fact not do this?
My church does do this to a degree, but it’s probably worth noting that (as far as I know) “evangelicals” usually refers to nondenominational or baptist. Nondenominationals are going to obviously have a pretty big spread in views, unlike say Presbyterians that are all tied by the same general doctrine (though churches still vary in how tightly they keep to it).
In other words, saying that “evangelicals do this” is sort of like stereotyping Americans about smiling at strangers; many of them do it, and they’re well known for doing it, but it’s also a diverse population that’s hard to make sweeping statements about
Am I the only one who hears "evangelicals" as a slur? The only Christians I've ever known to use it are people who are just about to either stop going to church or switch to a hipster church called "Mosaic", and almost everyone else who uses it means "those evil guys over there that it's OK to dislike".
FWIW, I know people in real life who identify as Evangelicals...
I don't actively disbelieve this - just because I don't see something doesn't mean it doesn't happen, or whatever. But I really don't see anyone do it, to the point where I suspect it would trigger reflexive distrust if I did. So here more I'm trying to levelset, if that makes sense.
As a Christian, evangelical seems like kind of a vague or useless term, since we all believe the Euangelion. I don't actively identify with the term, but I have gradually figured out that people are talking about me when they use it. I feel much more of a sense of identity with my denomination (Primitive Baptist), and I imagine that's true for many others.
There are two uses of "Evangelical" by Christians:
1) "Our church has evangelism (outreach) as a core part of its mission" --in other words, the dictionary definition. These Christians don't tend to use this word to describe themselves anymore, but you'll find it in their denomination names.
2) The new wave of people who use it as an excuse to scream homophobic slurs, because they're "evangelizing" by being loud and annoying.
It sounds like in your experience, you've met more of the latter than the former.
Hey! I follow your Substack. Forgot to add you to my list of, Scott, Bari, Max Read........ and a whole bunch of comic book substacks.
Ha, no worries. I'm still young enough to be surprised anyone reads at all: you are doing plenty with just that.
I went to an Evangelical church for much of my childhood and teens. The denomination was officially called "Evangelical Free," and the pastor would occasionally joke about that, but never did explain the odd word order. It has since expanded into at least one more church, and that one is still there, full of Evangelicals I generally like, even if I could not and cannot say things like "you're either a missionary or a mission field" with any seriousness.
FWIW I ended up becoming Eastern Orthodox, and know others who did as well. This may or may not be hipster adjacent, it's hard to say. We're the homeschooling adjacent cottage core fancy bookstore having branch of the Orthodox Church...
I actually went to an evangelical free church in Estes Park for a while. This will sound odd, but the usage of "Evangelical" in the sense the news is saying it is so removed from the denomination in my head that I didn't even think of the latter when bringing this up. And I'm supposed to be a words guy.
I think that's probably a little less weird when you consider that they pretty much couldn't be talking about evangelical in that usage; there's like six of them.
Eastern Orthodox is, for the record, not a church I think about as hipster; this isn't relevant to anything but I didn't want you to worry.
> Eastern Orthodox is, for the record, not a church I think about as hipster; this isn't relevant to anything but I didn't want you to worry.
Hipsters reject the "mainstream"; whether Eastern Orthodox is mainstream very much depends on where you are.
It kind of depends on which ethnic Orthodoxy. I am Serbian Orthodox and we find the OCA to be pretty hipsterish.
There is a whole subculture of Orthodoxy now that is all into organic foods and not using deodorant or whatever. They are here for the novelty of it and will leave eventually because Orthodoxy is really hard.
As a self-identified evangelical, I'd say it's a bit of both. It's a very real term used in Christianity with specific meanings that's fairly widely used as a self-description.
It does tend to be used (both by non-evangelical Christians and those outside the faith) as a slur, usually more in reference to political views and "evangelical culture" than actual religious views. A lot of "ex-evangelicals" have actually changed their religious views fairly little, but have simply changed political views.
"Fundamentalist" is the more obvious slur, unlike "evangelical" the term is very rarely used internally - the original "five fundamentals" are not an extreme set of views but are a pretty banal set of beliefs that basically every mainline denomination subscribes to. In practice "fundamentalist" basically means "conservatives" or "red tribe" just with a religious focus.
Strongly disagree on Fundamentalist; in the circles I grew up in and my wife still is in, fundamentalist is a badge of pride. I concur on evangelical being applied to them exclusively by others.
If you mean what it sounds like, infallible and/or verbal inspiration anywhere close to that which produced the Bible, no, that's foreign to me. Maybe charismatic prophetic types do this, but that's a much smaller niche than how I understand "evangelical."
Thanks; I've edited it to a weaker claim.
I'm a charismatic prophetic type, and you have to get WAY the heck out on the lunatic fringe before anyone would dare claim that their prophecy is "inspired" in the same sense that the Bible is the "inspired word of God". That's almost exclusively a cult leader thing.
It's not universal at all, and there's some complexity to how the claims are made even when they are. Imagine three guys:
Bob doesn't claim divine inspiration at all. He sometimes feels like God wants him to say things, so he says them; he also acknowledges he's subject to pride, bad incentives and self-deception like everyone else so he just does as he's told so long as it doesn't conflict with scripture in some clear way.
Dave sometimes feels like God wants him to say things, and says "I felt led by The Lord to tackle this subject this week." But this differs both in what he's saying and what the congregation hears from "every word of this is the inspired word of the lord".
Joel says "God has told me to tell you these exact words, and they are 'please give me enough money to buy six learjets.'"
Dave and Bob are both pretty common; you run into them. Joel is rarer and would give most churchgoers I've known (and I've known SEVERAL) the willies.
Well said. Scott's friend may have been thinking of the Dave type of "leading"–inspiration, and I'll grant that that's commonly felt, subject to the qualifiers you put on both Dave and Bob.
A person, living in the human body, can experience communications from the One. I don't call it G_d due to negative connotations and a horrible history of being exploited by 'religion', of which I am not a fan, in general. Are you curious as to how this is done? I would suggest starting with, in no particular order, Cosmic Consciousness by Maurice Burke, The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, and one of my new favorites, although I don't completely agree with his interpretations (but it's nice and sciencey and I love all things quantum), William Blake vs the World by Higgs. Have fun
"the One" could also be your imagination. If you think about the number of inventor-type people and the stories they tell about what inspired them to invent as they did, the main impetus came from a dream, a feeling, a gut hunch. Is it G-d? The One? Or is it just the creative force within you? The answer, I suppose, depends on your cultural conditioning.
The interpretation is up to you
For those with a scientific bent, I think that this fellow is really onto something: http://www.philobster.com/
People inside and outside the church perceive different frequencies of this, because Bob and Dave probably say it to their Bible study group or their congregation, while Joel probably says it to a TV camera.
And some people do both. In 1st Corinthians 7, Paul explicitly says that what he writes is not inspired, but his own opinion (/gnomon/, which meant "mere opinion and not true knowledge" in Paul's Platonic jargon, despite attempts by fundamentalists to explain this away as "actually still inspired" by sophistic arguments that begin by interpreting its use here as "judgement").
EDITED TO ADD: Paul has pointed out to me that I've completely misread his post, and then misrepresented what he was saying in it and (my words not his) being a really big dick. This is all accurate; everything past this point is a response to a post that wasn't made here.
It's worth clarifying what Phil is saying here, because read as-is it seems the intended messaging is that Paul says "everything I say, at any point in any letter, is just me talking and not God and can be safely discounted". Moreover, the fundamentalist/sophist language here is apparently meant to make the reader go "Oh, I see, they are just dishonest".
He then goes to Greek to say that a word that would be read mostly the same in both cases is read the wrong way by his opponents, and implies this misreading is dishonest and changes the significantly changes the message in the passage. The implication is, basically, that if they were honest on this word they'd know the entirety of Paul's work is safely ignored, or at least have a harder time arguing it needed to be listened to.
You will also note that Phil didn't give you the verse he's talking about. Here it is, with two important parts emphasized:
25 ***Now concerning the betrothed***, I have no command from the Lord, but I give my **&judgment*** as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy.
The first emphasized section is important. Note that even among fundamentalists, the belief that Paul is expressing his opinion here is *extremely common* because the whole thing about being a fundamentalist is to read things fairly literally. And Paul is literally, by almost any read, saying that *his words on this particular topic* are his and not God's.
Where the deviation from literalism comes in to play, then, is not with the fundamentalist but Phil, who at least seems to be saying you can discount all of Paul's words due to him saying here that in relation to one particular topic his words are not from God. But it doesn't take Sophism to discount this as being broadly applicable to all his writing; it just takes noticing that he specified that it's about a small part of it.
The second emphasized section is important because changing the word to "opinion" here would have a very limited effect on the meaning of the passage as a whole. Judgment might carry a bit more "I thought about this hard, based on stuff I saw" connotation and opinion might seem a bit more knee-jerk, but it isn't demanded. More importantly, the word choice here doesn't interact with the idea that Paul's words outside of this section are inspired or not - at most, they imply how much you should trust his explicitly non-inspired works within it.
Atheist friends:
This doesn't mean I think I've proven that Paul's work is inspired to you. Doing so would take much more than showing that Paul claimed it, anyway. The point of me saying all this is that you at least deserve to reject or accept a section based on what it actually says.
Phil kept carefully away from showing you the actual text, and it makes sense why: If you read it, you'd very likely immediately say "Well, yeah, but he's specified he's talking about a specific topic, right?" and it would ruin his point. I don't suspect that seeing this text is going to convert anybody, but if you are going to be convinced to reject the inspiration of Paul it's probably a good idea to do it based on an honest, complete argument.
No, you're just assuming that I'm hostile to your statements, when I'm not. I agree with everything you wrote, and what you wrote in response is maximally uncharitable.
I didn't mean that Paul said none of his words were inspired. He very obviously was NOT saying that. I said "some do both" because Paul sometimes claims inspiration, at least once denies inspiration, but most of the time doesn't clarify.
"Moreover, the fundamentalist/sophist language here is apparently meant to make the reader go "Oh, I see, they are just dishonest"." -- I was specifically thinking of https://answering-islam.org/Shamoun/q_paul_inspiration.htm . That person is intellectually dishonest, because he's using a long, sophistic argument to deny what Paul himself is clearly saying--that he was about to say something not inspired by God.
"He then goes to Greek to say that a word that would be read mostly the same in both cases is read the wrong way by his opponents, and implies this misreading is dishonest and changes the significantly changes the message in the passage." -- The misreading isn't dishonest, but ignorant. Paul often uses Platonist dog-whistles to signal to the educated reader his Platonist metaphysics; for this reason, I believe we should use the Platonist meaning of "gnomon", which is also the general ancient-Greek-philosophy meaning of it, and the meaning which makes the word useful where Paul put it.
"The implication is, basically, that if they were honest on this word they'd know the entirety of Paul's work is safely ignored, or at least have a harder time arguing it needed to be listened to." -- Absolutely not. The bit in 1st Corinthians 7 clearly refers to the particular passage it precedes. Paul wrote it in a way which implies that being inspired by God is the default assumption he expects people to make regarding his letters.
"And Paul is literally, by almost any read, saying that *his words on this particular topic* are his and not God's." -- YES; that's what I thought I said. That is what the person I took issue with was denying. That's why I preceded it with "Sometimes they do both" (or whatever my exact words were). My only purpose in that line was to show that Paul didn't ALWAYS say he was inspired. Your initial examples implied that each person always claims the same authority for everything he/she says, and I just wanted to show, canonically, that that isn't the case. I should not have digressed into the issue about interpreting gnomon; I just always like to anticipate objections, and that is an objection raised to the claim that Paul did in fact mean he was about to say something not divinely inspired.
I have reread your first post in light of this one and I'll actually apologize and back off of everything I said. I read the post too quickly and pattern-matched it to another kind of argument I run into a lot. But not the one you were making.
The reason you should feel especially wronged here is that when I went back and read the post I had read it poorly enough before I responded that I *was sure you had edited* it for a second, before realizing I just hadn't read it thoroughly/well.
I'm editing the original response I made to reflect this if I can and I sincerely apologize.
I grew up evangelical. Many claim divine inspiration for sermons, missionary travels, and songwriting. But in such cases, it is locally and time bounded divine inspiration. The Bible has divine inspiration that is eternal and all-encompasing.
I think most would refer to what you're describing as a calling: e.g. "God called me to missionary work" or "I felt called to give a sermon on this issue", whereas "inspiration" has a much stronger, much more specific meaning, that in protestant circles is generally reserved only for the Bible itself.
To me, as someone quite distant from that culture, it seems as if that is one of the main meanings of evangelical in English, though I believe it used to just mean "One who preaches to the heathen", but that meaning way preempted by "missionary".
And, FWIW, I have a definition of "god" that makes that a reasonable claim. I believe that everyone has communications from the "gods" (my definition) nearly constantly, and that those can frequently be translated into language, sometimes with a bit of effort. This is one of the meanings of "inspired", though I see it as arising from a pre-verbal layer within. (I used to say from the archtypes, but then I read Jung.)
I am inclined to agree with you, Ch Hi. As one who follows the Dao inwardly, and other things, I would like to hear more about your thoughts and/or experiences
OK. Well, my first relevant thought is that there was a reason I used the plural form "gods". And it's because they aren't a unified whole. Even within a specialized subcategory, e.g. "love goddess" I notice several incompatible executing threads. A part of what consciousness does is chose between them. (As the phrasing may indicate, this is partially based on trying to model what a parallel executing AI would have for a mind.)
As an evangelical, I'd say it's very non-central. At least the "inspired blog bit": evangelicals tend to be pretty hard in the Sola Scriptura camp and strongly Cessationist (believing that things like prophesy and speaking in tongues ended after the early church era). So a blog claiming to be "inspired" in the sense of prophesy or containing any sort of unique truth would be considered pretty heretical in any evangelical church I've been in.
---
That's not to say that "this is how [current event] proves that we're in the End Times" is not a depressingly common genre of evangelical thought nowadays. That much, I'd say it's an extreme example but not entirely non-representative.
I'd group this in with things like Joel Osteen-style Prosperity Gospel. They're very popular, and loosely "evangelical", but they're largely scorned by the evangelical community as a whole. If you went to an evangelical seminary and tried to tell them that Monkeypox is the Second Horseman or something, you'd probably get an eye-roll and a quoting of Matthew 24:36.
Evangelical Christian here. Although all pastors will always pray (sometimes publicly) for divine guidance/inspiration in giving a sermon, I haven't heard anyone claim of a sermon that it was divinely inspired the way Scripture is divinely inspired. It would be normal for a pastor to say that he feels a pull (or maybe a "wind" or "prompting") from the Holy Spirit to say or do something specific, or to pray for somebody or something particular -- but that pastor would be astonished and aghast if anybody took down those words and added them to the Bible.
There are degrees of divine inspiration. We distinguish between prophetic and canonical, which creates some of the confusion around this issue. Prophecy is a message from God for the upbuilding of the Church. It ranges from seeing the sun rise and knowing that God loves you (like in Psalm 19) to hearing an audible voice telling you to do something specific. The canon is the set of divinely inspired texts which are not only true themselves, but can be used to judge whether other things are true. A prophecy might be true, and yet, because it's not canonical, you wouldn't use it to judge the truth or falsehood of anything else.
In this world, people interpret things, and it creates confusion. So if pastor (or anybody) messes up and claims something was divinely inspired that turns out to have been harmful and wrong, the damage is limited. You stop trusting them when they start to contradict canonical Scripture. And if two people prophecy two contradictory things, well, you know, different blind men will tell you different stuff about an elephant, too.
Within Evangelical tradition, there's a pretty wide spread of opinion about prophecy; whether it currently happens; how to judge it; whether you should try it yourself; it's all very complicated. Some Evangelical churches (more toward the Charismatic side) will have prophets who lead services where they prophecy for the people of the church. Some churches would be very suspicious of that.
I find the tone of thunderdome much less irritating than the "just the news without the bias" letter from an american et al. Thunderdome guy is obviously a loon but its out there in the open to see. Promoting a demented ideological claim (not being okay with uncontrolled immigration into your state that blue states won't let you effectively prevent is basically the same as being a secessionist slave holder) while acting like you're the sane and rational adult in the room is kind of nauseating.
If rationality is winning, then which approach you think is more likely to succeed in advancing its 'loon' values? In 2015 the answer would've been obvious to me, but Trump's success with flagrant defiance of elites and decorum does imply that it's not that simple.
Heather Cox Richardson explains current events through the informed lens of History. As such, she has no bones to pick, but just puts everything into context. It is immensely comforting to learn that many of the stupid things we see politicians doing are recycled versions of stupid things politicians have been doing for decades, and sometimes centuries. Her fans are literate and love her, and the comments are often wonderful in and of them selves. After reading Letters from and American for about 6 months, I was able to stop subscribing to the New York Times, and I don’t miss it. Reading her regularly will improve your outlook on life. Really.
I felt the opposite way. It is interesting that you mention there being some comfort in seeing parallels with the past, because we overcame difficult scenarios then. I think that’s a more valuable takeaway than is typical.
"Heather Cox Richardson explains current events through the informed lens of History. As such, she has no bones to pick, but just puts everything into context."
There is no "informed lens of History", at least not in some objective sense that you seem to be implying. Heather Cox Richardson is specifically highlighting a chosen context in which to put a chosen current event. It is not some politically neutral choice. Every single column of hers ends in bashing Republicans, which is not necessarily wrong, but she clearly does have a bone to pick, and doesn't even hide it.
She could just as easily pick some controversial Democratic current event, and compare it to something in the past, but she doesn't do that because that's not her bone, and that's not her audience.
I wonder what “controversial Democratic current event” is equivalent, in your perception, to corrupting the legal system and dismantling the framework of free and fair elections, which have been the basis for our stable form of government?
Are there any other questions you're interested in begging?
I would say that would be the corruption of the Constitutional restriction on the federal government's power using the Commerce Clause as a weapon to beat about their enemies
Indeed, the democrats have a very bad habit of deciding that their own pet causes, like ending racism or poverty, are of *overriding importance*, and then when the constitution stops them, instead of trying to amend the constitution the way both sides agreed on back at the beginning, now they just look for loopholes that let them violate the constitution
I'd say both the new deal and the commerce clause alabama bbq stuff were examples of equivalents, or at least, they both feel as obviously evil to me as whatever you are talking about feels to you, and they were perpetrated by democrats.
But the whole point is that I've got an ax to grind about constitutional validity and abiding by your agreements and stuff. You clearly have an ax to grind too. If you can't notice that, that's a really bad problem, and is probably why you can't notice Richardson's ax either. Or are pretending not to notice, or something.
Please don't do that thing where you act like your own specific political views are so obviously correct that you just assume everyone else agrees with you. That won't really be taken well on this comment section.
You know who else was loved by their followers? Hitler.
Am I an outlier? This is the only substack I read.
It’s 98% of my reading
Statistically you clearly are. Inside-view, you're not
The vast majority of people don't read any, and most of those who do, read only a single one, I'd guess.
I only read this one. If not for this one, I never would have heard of Substack.
I’d never heard of Substack before Scott set up shop here, but now I may take a look around and pick up a new blog or two
A non-trivial number of the people recommended in Scott's old blogroll are now, like Scott himself, writing here. You may enjoy the Substacks of, for instance, Aceso Under Glass, Razib Khan, Bryan Caplan, Sarah Constantin, Zwi Mowshowitz, and possibly others I've missed. There is a Substack writer called 'Zac Davis', whose output, from a quick glance, is pretty far out, but I don't think it's the same person as the ratsphere Zach Davis.
I started out only reading this one, but now I read a few. All the substacks I read were originally linked to by Scott though.
I'm up to 5 regulars, and have checked out at least a dozen more.
I worry it says something about me that I actually get the newsletters from *two* of these blogs (Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American & Ted Gioia's The Honest Broker). FWIW, I had read books by each before subscribing to their substacks...
I also subscribe to both of those, and had found them through channels independent of whatever discovery feature Scott was using. I feel pretty ok about given I found them through essentially friend-of-a-friend style recommendation chains through other newsletters/blogs/articles.
FYI, Ted Gioia has a claim to being one of The Most Interesting Writers in the World (in a personal sense; his actual writing is good but not unbelievable.)
Following him online is a mix of "well, in this class I had with GEM Anscombe when I was doing philosophy at Oxford" and "when I was literally a spy" and "Here's me and Stan Getz playing jazz together!" and "my brother is the poet laureate of California" (Dana Gioia; Tyler Cowen has an excellent interview with him).
All true, but the regular sprinkling of anecdote-driven conspiracy theories tends to push me away. (I've read a lot of Gioia over the years because he is a renowned historian of jazz which is a strong interest of mine.)
True enough, but he is at least humbler than most people that dabble in that kind of speculation.
(I first got into him for jazz history as well.)
Yeah Ted Gioia is definitely one of the few people on the internet that I find quite consistently interesting and unique. His big topic of focus - the subversive, near-magical power of music - is also not at all fashionable, so it's not like you find lots of other people writing in the same area. It resonates with me - music definitely has power in my life. His new book is being published by chapters on his Substack, and so far the 1st chapter is a blast. His previous book, in traditional book form, is called "Music, a subversive history", and is well worth reading.
Re Scott's comments, I don't see such a big divide between metaphorical and magical readings of Ted's writing. Writing about arts and music often it takes a subjective point of view, with no strict regard for maintaining a kind of scientific objectivity, and for good reasons - it works better this way. The power of music is experiential.
I was lucky to find Ted's substack shortly after it started, and knew I would be a regular because I had read his excellent book "Music, a Subversive History". I have since read most of his other books, and think anyone who is into music should read him. Thanks to our host for the plug.
"The method for discerning God from the Antichrist is helpful (God wants your worship to be freely given, the Antichrist wants to compel it)."
So presumably he believes the one who says He'll make sure you suffer for eternity if you don't worship Him is the Antichrist.
That's not how it goes for most Christians; God doesn't "make sure you suffer", the suffering is the default, and God wants to save us from it.
I have a response for that, but it was small of me to make my comment in the first place. I already know it won't change anyone's minds, nor produce anything but bad feelings. Sorry for trolling you.
+1 on this kind of introspection!
Thanks for taking the time to reflect on your post and changing directions. Your original post gave me a vibe of 2007, but I'm genuinely happier having seen your follow-up.
Well, I don't remember that claim from either the Old Testament (I didn't read all of it) or the first 5 books of the New Testament (which is all I was compelled to read).
FWIW, Gehenna was a valley outside Jerusalem where garbage was burned, and were earlier some really unpleasant things happened. Metaphorically it probably means if you end up there, you are cast away garbage. There doesn't seem to be any implication of eternal suffering. I think that got added by the Roman Church. (Who knows what the Nazarenes believed. The Romans killed them all, under the leadership of a Roman Christian general.)
My favorite treatment of the afterlife is something I learned in Eastern Orthodoxy. There I was taught that heaven and hell are technically the same place: the all-consuming Love and presence of God. Those who are oriented toward Love and Goodness experience this as heavenly bliss. Those oriented toward Hate and Selfishness experience this as a hellish suffering.
So God isn't the one making anyone suffer; he loves us all the same, and it's what we do and choose that makes the difference. Also under this worldview, acceptance of Jesus specifically or worship of the Christian god is not strictly necessary. Rather, a commitment to being loving, selfless, and principled is what makes the difference.
I don't know if this would jive with the theology of the blog writer Scott was quoting though.
A shadowy figure stops you on the road one night and says, “Give me your soul and I shall make you rich and powerful.” Good thing you read ACX, you think, as you thank God for his generous offer.
Maybe the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing us that such pacts are with the devil, depriving God of all those souls of violin players over the years?
I’m not sure what it says about my cultural upbringing, but The Devil Went Down to Georgia is honestly the only “somebody agrees to a wager with the devil” story I’m familiar with outside of Faust.
In that spirit, I really enjoyed your joke, here.
Which category does Astral Codex Ten fall under?
Science
It used to be tech at the beginning, right?
You are right. 2 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/l2zij5/astral_codex_ten_is_now_1_in_the_technology/
If it's not Eschatology I'd be surprised
Loved this post.
The section on the stew was the funniest thing i've read all year.
Alright, has anyone tried making The Stew? How good is it?
I can only second your question. And what, if any, is the important difference between this stew and other ones? Or is it that the "cooking community", contrary to all those chef shows, is more generous with "like"s?.
Probably that it was made by Alison Roman, who has a huge following and is really good at making recipes go viral. (They're good recipes! I have one of her books.)
I'll definitely be making that after this. I'll be sure to report back. Assuming I haven't ascended to a higher plane, that is.
The interesting part about the stew is fried onions as topping. Obviously, fried onions on top make every stew more delicious, as does dill.
Minus the fried onions, I've been cooking almost the same thing for years. Cannelini, cabbage, something acidic, meat base, and dill is a no-lose proposition.
There are certain topics I am willing to read an indefinite number of articles on. For example, right now I will read any number of detailed breakdowns of why what Russia is doing is dumb, even though there are really only a few things to say about this and every article says most of them. There are a lot of Scott Alexander type topics in this category too. I bet for some people, articles about being in this "always on" environment are like that.
That seems true to experience. "We read to know we are not alone" or something.
It makes sense for an Always On sports blogger to be interested in the experience and reception of an even more Always On sports tweeter, since it's personal in a way that other similar articles might not be. .
Yeah, it's gluttony. Fortunately, every now and then I eat so much of a thing at once that I become disgusted by that kind of food and regain perspective.
Ethan Strauss has been dabbling in broader political and cultural topics and cross-podcasting with Rob Henderson and Razib Khan; I'm not surprised about the size of his audience. He is the only sports commentator I could name.
Other than that, I recall reading a bit of Gioia and trying to read Richardson but quickly starting to wonder what the fuss was supposed to be about (I always thought her claim to fame was getting on Substack early, but now I'm not sure this is actually the case).
My media habits are super weird, but to keep myself from completely losing touch with “who is famous right now”, I’ve continued reading a celebrity blog called Dlisted for the past 15 years. So I understood that whole “culture” paragraph from House Inhabit.
I’ve stuck with Dlisted because it’s stayed lighthearted and the writers can be genuinely funny. I was particularly grateful for having read it one time when I was on my way to an ACX meetup and the local rail system froze up, leaving me and two other ladies stranded at my suburban train station. I had my car and gave them both rides home, and on the long drive their topic of choice was the Kardashians. I have zero actual interest in the Kardashians, but I felt palpably more “normal” for at least having a rough count of them.
Scott didn’t mention fiction as a category in the body or the look-ahead, which I’ll take optimistically to mean that that space isn’t saturated yet. Seems like as good a context as any I’m likely to get in which to un-lurk and plug my periodical fiction blog - https://open.substack.com/pub/ghostsinglasshouses?r=b9xg2&utm_medium=ios. Just got it going with the plan to post books in chapters with blog-like frequency and formatting. If anyone would try it out I’d appreciate it!
> "But under the circumstances I finally signed up for the seven-day free trial."
Where the circumstances are that you were concerned there was a not-insignificant probability that God would have another line after that and it was, "You, of all people, after seeing those sevens..." and hold you responsible for not taking that action?
Very good point
> Political Substacks tend to have names that suggest stability - “The Bulwark”, “North Star”, “Steady” - or reasonableness - “Common Sense”, “Civil Discourse”, “Lucid”. They all have taglines like “Just the news, the way it should be, without the craziness and partisan bias”. Their articles are all things like “WATCH how the FASCIST ultra-MAGA Republicans ABUSE women and CHILDREN because THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT!!!”
I think this extends out to criticism/media/news in general. I've can't think of an extremely partisan news source that didn't have that kind of name.
>I can't think of an extremely partisan news source that didn't have that kind of name.
InfoWars and CounterPunch would be two examples off the top of my head.
Unicorn Riot.
“Jacobin” is pretty honest.
Love this! Yes please keep exploring. Besides the topic categories, are there emotional/psychological benefit categories like “get your tribal fix,” “conspiracy stuff,” “pump those anger fluids,” (Sorry I don’t what the amygdala makes). Not sure what emotion is attached to the business blog. A self-improvement related emotion?
How do we learn which substacks are popular with people who don’t like to read? Are we in a bubble of readers?
I want an AI that will automatically detect the categories you mentioned, and attach the labels to the blogs.
Could possibly do it with plain old principal component analysis (according to how many people are subbed both of to each pair of blogs)
We will get those categories if Netflix acquires Substack.
That was really entertaining. Thank you!
I have one nitpick, though:
"Their articles are all things like “WATCH how the FASCIST ultra-MAGA Republicans ABUSE women and CHILDREN because THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT!!!”
I think you're being unfair to Bari Weiss. I'm actually a paid subscriber there, despite being a registered Republican - and it's not because I'm masochistic.
Bari Weiss is like a 10% Glenn Greenwald. Like "I'm a total liberal... But watch me carry a lot of water for conservatives"
I.e not who Alexander was talking about.
He's specifically listing her name in the previous paragraph, and her blog "Common Sense" in the same paragraph as the sentence I quoted. If I was Bari Weiss, I'd be annoyed.
I don't agree about carrying water. I think Bari Weiss and her contributors genuinely have a lot of views that a lot of people on both sides - actually maybe most of the country - can relate to. They are also being civil to conservatives, which I suppose these days can count as carrying water for them.
If you make trans discourse central to this decade’s politics, Bari Weiss is firmly on the conservative side of the discussion.
She also has quite a bit of vitriol for various figures I code as “not conservative”.
But to a liberal transported to our time from either Bush presidency, she seems like a reasonably civil Democratic Party bastion, I agree.
How do you distinguish "carrying water for conservatives" from "advocating for my own beliefs in places where they happen to coincide with those of many conservatives?" Or from "reporting the facts of a controversy accurately even when those facts look better for conservatives than liberals?"
One possible answer would be "topic selection".
Telling the truth and nothing but the truth, while impossible for fallible mortals, is imaginable and an excellent thing to aspire to. But telling the whole truth obviously isn't; unprompted speech - even when it's completely factual and devoid of explicit value judgment - comes with an implicit value judgment that /those/ things are worth bringing to people's attention and all the other things you don't say are not.
"Carrying water for" is an obviously perjorative phrase, but I think the factual core of the accusation is "she spends a lot of time advocating for her beliefs in places where they happen to coincide with those of conservatives, and not much time advocating for her beliefs in areas where they happen to coincide with those of liberals, and this calls into question her claim that the latter are more significant".
Also, of course, as well as "topic selection", there are a bunch of things like selection of framing (which out of "killed", "murdered", "executed", "assassinated" do you use; when do you use child/youth/teenager/man, broader points of how you present things), which again, from what I've seen of Weiss's writing, lead me to think that while she may tell herself she's a liberal, she's mostly actually trying to make the world more right-wing.
Scott seems to have run out of things to write about . . .
A Fukuyama prediction if I've ever seen one.
Could you not do the media criticism thing of labeling the migrant stunt as just anti Republican? Like what are your feelings about the actual occurrence. Yes, it looks bad to some people while it looks good to other people.
What does Scott Alexander think about it? Was it a cruel waste of Florida tax payer dollars or a necessary action to break blue America out of its tribal bubble?
Why didn't you allow him option c), a silly publicity stunt unworthy of attention one way or another.
In the context of the FL state budget it isn't really worth noticing. Was a stupid stunt though.
Can you help me understand how flying a bunch of migrants at tax payer expense to an island has any relationship to changing blue America in any way?
Is it because you think Blue America actually doesn’t like migrants if they’re within a few miles of them? If so, that doesn’t match my experience. Everyone I know in Blue America is firmly in the Yglesias camp that migrants are good, and we really don’t mind living next door to migrants.
The locus of argument in Blue America is whether we should be collectively willing to allow our neighbors to sell their land to people who might build housing rich people would move into, making older housing affordable enough that those migrants could live in.
The people who were flown to Martha's Vinyard were asylum seekers, part of a recent wave largely coming from Venezuela. Asylum seekers who are released in the US pending review of their cases, such as this group of people, represent only a fraction of the total numbers crossing the southern border, either illegally (in which case most are immediately expelled) or legally (seeking asylum, but who may also be detained rather than released pending a hearing).
According to the Refugee Processing Center, funded by the Dept. of State, the ten states that received the most refugee asylum seekers in the first 11 months of Fiscal Year 2022 (Oct. 2021- through Aug. 2022) are the same ten that received most in FY 2021. Here is the FY 2022 list, with the total number in parens (the national total is 19,919):
California (1822)
Texas (1633)
New York (1211)
Kentucky (950)
North Carolina (921)
Washington (902)
Michigan (896)
Pennsylvania (881)
Arizona (851)
Ohio (816)
https://www.wrapsnet.org/documents/Refugee%20Arrivals%20by%20State%20and%20Nationality%20as%20of%2031%20Aug%202022.pdf
Together, these ten states have received 55% of the national total this FY to date. There are four red states, which received 22% of the national total, three blue states, which received 20%, and three purple states, which received 13%.
Obviously, the states on the southern border with Mexico (which do not include Florida) have a distinct problem when it comes to illegal entries, and various types of detention centers create a burden, even if Washington provides funds. But the idea that released refugees, such as those sent to Massachusetts, is a "red state problem" that blue states evade to stay in their "tribal bubble" is simply untrue. Immigration Services schedules asylum hearings in courts across the country. You may have noticed that one of the refugees transported from Texas to Martha's Vinyard who was interviewed at length said that his asylum hearing had originally been scheduled in Philadelphia, which he was planning to reach. (It was altered to Boston in light of his having been lured to Massachusetts).
Ohio beats California in new refugees per capita, according to your data (populations of 12 million vs 40 million). Can you re-run your analysis on a per capita basis?
That would a little too OCD even for me, Gres. But if the per capita crown caps any state among these ten, then clearly Kentucky is at the head.
(Vermont, with 81 refugees, outpaces California too--and has over 4x Florida's rate--while Alabama, with 23, is at a tenth of California's rate . . . Red and blue all mixed up.)
To be honest, this is sort of why I have mostly been avoiding anything on the internet and just doing crossword puzzles.
Oh, thanks for the interesting comment. Who said, “Those who don’t know the mistakes of the past, are doomed to repeat them”? Heather Cox Richardson’s ability to place current events into the timeline and context of events that have gone before is why I read her with a sense of relief, you know?
> This blog is mostly locked, but I was able to find Adam Scheffer And The Problem Of On-Ness.
should be "Schefter"
I notice that my readers overlap with the readerships of the Substacks I read a surprising amount. It’s been interesting to watch a bubble emerge in real time because the last time it happened (on Twitter) I was too stupid to notice for a long time.
That looks like a really good bean stew recipe... thanks
The "International" Substack landscape reminds me of the prayer rooms in Abu-Dhabi airport. You can have large, clearly marked gender-separate traditional prayer rooms (at least a pair per terminal), or a single, much smaller "Multi-Faith Prayer Room" near the bus gates at Terminal 3.
I can't even blame them for anything; the difference in sizes probably reflects the difference in demand very accurately.
None of the blogs on substack are international. Every post was written in a place. No such thing as not being on a boat and all that.
Grateful. Amused. But also sad: The kings&queens of substack at 250 likes for their top-posts. Thousand of rather unknown guys on twitter get 10K of likes for a tweet (if it has a cute pic).
Not that many readers of longer pieces, no surprise. And some magnitudes less of good-enough-to-follow-writers.
And here I am, spending the better parts of my life reading Scott, Erik, Zvi & such.
Good you are there. Good you get rewarded.
When Twitter first launched it was marketed as a "microblogging platform". It was a clear hit, and was also more successful in attracting people than LiveJournal/Blogger/WordPress ever were. I think major reasons are the parasocial interactions and the highs people get from numbers about followers/likes/retweets/quotes.
I think the unexpected negative consequence was that it more or less killed off amateur blogging (definitely among people in my circles). Back when it acquired Posterous, I was momentarily hopeful about a revival, but on hindsight it was probably an aqui-hire or to ward off competition, and they just shut it down in less than a year. I also had some hopes on Medium, but it could never figure out a viable business strategy.
The thing I most like about Substack is that it is reviving some of the old blogging culture. Surely there are all these popular writers able to make money, and I myself read some of them, and that's all great. But the most positive aspect to me is to run into totally random amateur blogs (or even better, from people I know). I wish Substack had better features to increase their visibility -- it currently shows some recommendations, but they are all in the same network bubble.
It's still a platform, hence structurally evil. I would like to be more hopeful, but I have been disappointed too many times... Benjamin Bayart saw it clearly : protocols, not platforms !
I have to admit to being a bit disappointed here Scott.
You praise Richardson's post, despite acknowledging that she's blatantly anti-Republican in a very harsh way (you describe it as comparing all Republicans to Antebellum slave holders, which certainly doesn't match your normal approach of "necessary, true, or kind"), giving her a 2/3 and high praise. For the Spiritual/Faith category, you give the same description, which I would think would elicit the same "hey it's got 2/3" response, but instead you make up a bunch of things you wish you had seen in the post to mock, that wasn't there, and you move on.
That's not your normal style and I'm bothered by why you might feel the need to praise an explicitly left politics post and make up things to dunk on a spirituality post that from the rest of your review are quite similar.
Here's how you described Richardson: "Still, all of her posts are like this. A daily discussion of one timely issue, a lot of useful context and explanation, and a paragraph or two about why it proves that the Republicans are the party of hatred and bigotry."
Here's what you say about the Faith post: "The most common type of article is the Tipping Point Quick Hits, which is oddly similar to Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters. It’s a few of the day’s biggest news stories, some well-written and useful context on each, and then a few paragraphs on why it means we are living in the End Times."
I can guess why you have such a double-standard on reviewing them, but the two most obvious answers are personal bias and signaling to a certain ingroup, and I would be disappointed if either of them were accurate. If, in fact, Richardson's writings are just simply better, you did a poor job of explaining that.
How about the bias of favoring things that are more true?
Another point for Faith.
I think you're taking this post too seriously.
I might be, I'll admit.
My concern is that I follow Scott because he wrote posts like "I can tolerate anything but the outgroup" and it resonated with me. Here's a guy who can look at complex issues and separate the object level from what we're really talking about, which is often ingroup/outgroup dichotomy. Then he writes a post where he casually dunks on his outgroup while generally praising and giving a pass to noted problems of someone else (I wouldn't say Richardson is his ingroup, but maybe he's trying to build credibility with people who like her writing?).
Anyway, in some ways it's worse that this happened on a jokey post, because he is either using this post to pander and build credibility with certain groups, or he let the mask slip and this is pretty much how he feels, but he only let it be seen because he was less cautious. Either way, that's pretty worrisome for me and others who read Scott's posts because of a certain understanding of the content we expect to read here, and the trust built up over years of him recognizing the pros and cons of many different viewpoints.
EDIT: Reading comprehension fail. I think you’re saying you agree the top level descriptions are the same you’re objecting to all the pseudo-religious-text joking Scott made, with various references to “expected more of …”. I confess that I immediately skipped those paragraphs, because I have exactly as much interest in Scott’s religious-text references as I do in devout people’s religious text references. Now that I read them, I do agree there’s asymmetry. If Scott was being symmetric, he would’ve made up elaborate implausible historical parallels he was expecting Richardson to make, and he didn’t, he accepted that the topic of history was just fine, whereas religious thinking is silly. Of course this matches my priors perfectly, so I was blind to it. My apologies.
Original comment follows:
I am genuinely confused. How was the juxtaposed comment about Faith in any way more or less dunking than the Richardson post?
It seemed deliberately, precisely, *ritually* symmetric in tone with the Richardson post.
“ it proves that the Republicans are the party of hatred and bigotry” == “here’s a a way of poking fun at people who think all Republican leaning people are a caricature”.
“a few paragraphs on why it means we are living in the End Times“ == “here’s a way of poking fun at people who have beliefs that seem implausible to most non-Christians”
To state it even more clearly: I am extremely lefty, rabidly anti-religious, and I found the Richardson posts I read through *appalling*. Here’s some cool historical stuff, followed by eschatology on how everything Republicans think is obviously inherently evil, and how that’s so obvious that it needs no justification.
I found Richardson’s stuff worse in almost every way than heartfelt religious voices speaking about religious texts as if they are obviously true, and I really don’t like religious people talking about their texts.
Like the early blogs (many of which developed tremendous readership despite content that was just so-so), the top Substacks include more than a few people who were there early and publish consistently. I put Letters from an American in this group.
She delivers a well-written summary of what's going on through a comforting lens for liberal readers in which their priors are rarely challenged. She's published more or less daily for three years and rode the Trump preoccupation wave much like Haberman et al.
But it's surprising that a liberal-bubble blog got to the top first. There's an entire mainstream media landscape providing exactly this sort of content through dozens of outlets, whereas there's a dearth of readable rightist sources. And a big part of Substack's stated mandate was having its writers be cancellation-immune.
It's a good point, but I think Substack became that, but was not that at first. She also started her Substack almost exactly at the time of Trump's first impeachment, IIRC. The original top Substacks had a very liberal skew (hers, also Popular Information). The medium has definitely shifted pretty far to the radical centrists and the otherwise-cancelled.
Surely the goal here is to make it easy to read what you want to read and support the people who write that stuff. That isn't ideological, it only seems like it in a world where some ideologues are trying pretty hard to make sure that some things you might want to read are not available or that nobody can be paid for writing them.
Can't wait for the ACX review of Doomberg (top finance pub written by a green chicken)
I want Universe Hopping Thurdays
I second this
I third this.
> I think the right genre for Trump is “outlaw prince” - like Robin Hood, or Song Jiang, or your better class of pirate captain. Realistically he’s just out to enrich himself. But he defeats and embarrasses so many people along the way that he becomes a legend, inextricably tied to the idea that the establishment can be beaten. He develops a cult following, his relatively meager real accomplishments get exaggerated in song and legend, and everyone assumes that he was only stealing from the rich in order to give to the poor or something. He can’t be caught, he can’t be defeated; like Elvis, he won’t even be able to die.
This kind of thing is why I always read Scott posts to the end even when I'm not that interested in the subject; you just might find an unrelated gem like this.
Scott's previous post happens to be about forecasting and misunderstanding. One thing I don't think he has commented on is whether a humorous aside counts as a forecast. If humorous asides count, then Scott seems like the first to predict that there will, eventually, be some Trump death deniers. (See also: a few European royals, a few Middle Eastern religious figures, and Australian PM Harold Holt.)
So you're claiming Trump is still alive? Trump death denier!!! I found one boys.
[insert joke about Trump's hair being the actual thing alive] ?
This is hilarious. Please do more. Although the kabbalah stuff made me miss Unsong :(
Good post, I LOL'd several times.
>”The hook of seeing other single people on campus for the first time (and knowing if they’re interested in you) went viral.”
I’m reminded of that Louis CK bit from his first leaked show after his canceling. He realized after finding out who is real friends were that he never wanted to find out who his real friends were.
Re The Honest Broker: hmmmm, I am pretty sure this is not the first time Scott writes about singers being a persecuted underground rebel movement who use mysticism, magic and wisdom from ancient texts to fight the cold uncaring power that rules the world. TINACBNIEAC.
I can't figure out if you are trying to make a joke about unsung, or if you are straight-facedly asking wtf is going on here (spent 5 min trying to parse TINACBNIEAC). In which case. Unsong.
> I found myself imagining the scene after my death. I would arrive at the Pearly Gates, and God would say: “Depart from Me, for you did not serve Me, but followed false prophets and wolves in sheep’s clothing.”
> And I would answer: “Look, I was going to read the blog post on how to distinguish between the the Spirit of God and the Antichrist spirit, but it required a $7/month subscription, and I just really don’t like paying for online content.”
> God would ask me “But why didn’t you take the seven day free trial?”. I would answer “You know how those things work, they’re just banking on you forgetting to cancel after seven days and getting auto-charged forever.” God is merciful, I think He would understand.
Absolutely pealing with laughter.
I’m glad you thoroughly considered the ramifications
If we are allowed to plug random non-politics substacks I really enjoy both
1) Cocktails with Suderman https://cocktailswithsuderman.substack.com/
The art, philosophy and techniques of cocktail making.
2) Age of Invention https://antonhowes.substack.com/
Kinda, sorta about the origins of the industrial revolution? But also about how and why innovation happens kinda live-blogging all of the research (and rabbit holes) that goes into writing a non-fiction book.
I'm only subscribed to two substacks. Your substack and Ted Gioia's Honest Broker. Beware the man of one substack, marvel in awe at the man of two.
If anyone wants to dive into a bit of a more whacky, random, interesting substack, I'd be grateful if you joined around 1000 others and took a look at Pryor Thoughts, always glad to have another eyeball or two
Your thought process is delicious ❤️
“Fair decision, but Politics remains the core of Substack. Here we have such famous names as Bari Weiss, Michael Moore, and Matt Taibbi. 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson has a Substack, as does leading ivermectin advocate Dr. Pierre Kory.”
Why would Dr. Kory’s substack or ivermectin advocacy be classified as a political stack?
Anything mentioning ivermectin is political. That's how it works now.
You would have to ask him, he self-tagged it that way. He does describe it as "exploring the dysfunction in American medicine & the effects of the captured health agencies' relentless war on generic drugs" - though I don't see anything about generic drugs other than for COVID, even though this actually is a really interesting topic.
Also, apparently he was the expert witness pulmonologist in the George Floyd case, which . . . sure is something.
I do love Heather Cox Richardson. Very funny.
blogger REACTS to substack!!
Music rec: Bad Sandwich, which is the personal diary of a famous musician, except he *does* say more than "I am on tour".
He has your sense of humor, but much cruder subject matter. Good stuff.
https://badsandwich.substack.com/
This made me laugh out loud
"I guess this is the QAnon thing (though he has some kind of complicated objection to that terminology)."
It's actually not a complicated objection. It's the slogan that "There is no QAnon, there is Q and there are Anons", with the meaning that anyone using the term QAnon is ignorant about the subject. The only problem with this is that this slogan is actually just taken directly from Q, who started saying it, after the media started writing a lot about QAnon, so as to prove that the media was ignorant. Before this happened, Q had referred to himself as "QAnon" many times.
I am looking forward to the next installment, where Astral Codex Ten is the top blog in Philosophy, and Astral Codex Ten reviews Astral Codex Ten.
Can confirm that the stew is delicious. I made a batch without beans for my legume-sensitive girlfriend, and it was still good, though more of a simple soup. It really needs the beans to be thick enough for stew. And my reluctantly vegetarian roommate ate a lot of it (which generally means a vegetable dish is good.) I think the butter + onion combo is key—makes a good base for anything.
Warning that the cabbage makes a LOT of stew—I used maybe half of a head for one batch.