Hard not to conclude that actually caring about publishing standards and being editorially measured isn't all just a big dumb joke when what the people really want is "EVERY PERSON I TALK TO TELLS ME THE VACCINE CAUSED THEM TO GROW A SIXTH TESTICLE"
My heartfelt plea to anyone who supports either of the Weinstein Bros is: please stop. They don't deserve your patronage. They are griftpilled tinfoil take merchants who LARP as reasonable and science-minded intellectuals.
Why do I bother publicly denouncing the Weinsteins? Because they style themselves as sensible, reasonable, antitribalist voices—the very thing that is underserved in media—yet discredit and subvert that approach with everything they do. This matters to me.
This is what I'm talking about. Bret is not now, nor has he ever been, a leader of the "Coalition of the Reasonable." But the degree to which other people take him to be ends up desecrating the possibility of a genuine coalition of that sort ever forming.
Stalin, a campfire companion, once lent me his ear as I, inspired by the flames caressing my smores into a perfect bronze, regaled him with tales of how I burned political enemies alive.
MFers will tell you I idolize the man. That is flatly false. Is there a shrine to Stalin in literally every room in my house? Yes, but that is because I am a furniture minimalist and I had to use the empty space for something.
The vaccines have obliterated Covid in our country. What thanks do they get? IDW reactionaries masquerading as objective thinkers drumming up brainless propaganda campaigns against them.
Seeing a lot of hot takes on this. Mine is lukewarm by comparison.
I think content that is packaged in the garb of, and aiming for, *persuasion* should be very careful not to take its rhetorical cues from academic/activist spaces.
A lot of what this says about society's structural racial dynamics is correct and innocuously so. The idea that whites—their customs, prerogatives—have functioned like a kind of default in society, and unwittingly perpetuating this impedes and even harm nonwhites, is easy to get.
The problem with offerings like this is they operate with a braindead incapacity to grasp how the presentational decision to build out this message via the frame of demonizing "whiteness" is hugely inimical to the very cause being championed.
Isn’t a core concern over “cancel culture” the idea that failure to conform to “woke orthodoxy” carries with it significant professional penalties and is not just a matter of “being called names”?
This tweet either (a) denies this more serious component of cancel culture, in which case we shouldn’t worry so much about it, or (b) is troublingly insensitive to its real costs, which renders it useless as a piece of advice.
I think the advice in the initial tweet is generally good, but I'm poking at it a bit because I'm mounting an internal critique: the advice is somewhat in tension with a view of cancel culture as constituting an intolerable threat to people's livelihoods and reputations.