Discover and Read the Best of Twitter Threads by @KillerMartinis

I actually start to downgrade my estimate of your intelligence if you use the word “epistemological” at all in normal conversation

I assume you’re just repeating words you’ve learned to pronounce if you also say “dialectic” in the same clause.

This has been tonight’s episode of “Linda Speaks To Academics”

Reasons I am 1000000000% never damn well paying these people to certify that I’m capable of thinking number #3728462684

I don’t rock up to strangers and hit them with those silver dollar words to prove to them that I know how to think.

Hey everyone, this is the agent from that thread I did last night. So y’all remember that tweet about how some guidelines are reasonable? This would be considered reasonable.

So let me briefly expand, with a respectful gesture towards @KSonnack at the top.

https://twitter.com/ksonnack/status/1051173359222906880

So here’s the crux of the problem: unrepresented writers are basically at the mercy of the buyers’ market, which has led to a state of affairs in which it’s not at all unusual to have a fifty page spreadsheet of all the submission guidelines for various agencies and such.

And here’s the thing: it’s nearly impossible to get published if you’re not a standard white guy. That doesn’t m,ran it doesn’t happen; clearly it does. But publishing is a market industry, which means that it reflects society, which means that the closer you are to white guy...

Hi hello writers

I’m published with a major US imprint and a major UK imprint and I’ve been translated a fair amount

Never trust an agent who claims dibs on your work before they represent it. If an agency claims exclusivity on unsigned work, run.

A thread on etiquette:

https://twitter.com/ksonnack/status/1050789605077745665

So, publishing is a business. Writing is not. Be real clear on the difference.

An agent (I have one, she’s amazing) represents your work to publishers. Each and every one of them wants to own the next blockbuster.

Understand that an agent is a partner, not an employer.

Also understand that every agent and agency has about a million writers trying to get their attention.

So it isn’t at all unreasonable to have submission guidelines. Don’t think I’m not aware.

Goddamn it must be nice to be a staff writer and be able to pretend like a staff job is what makes one a writer.

https://twitter.com/bernstein/status/1050837916073771009

Anyway I’m a working writer and the reason @Bernstein can’t find a decent essay to read is that the people who’ve been “synthesizing this moment” don’t get published.

IOW welcome to the end result of gatekeeping. Shitty thinkpieces.

After all this data about how we exclude working class writers and writers of various colors and they still keep thinking the problem is some kind of lack of talent

Physician heal thyself and go report on the damn industry then. Don’t complain you gotta look for talent.

I hope that y’all have been organizing your communities locally for the last couple years.

I hope you know which of your neighbors can be counted on for what, good or ill.

I hope you weren’t one of the people so arrogant as to think you already knew what you needed to know.

Things are about to go super-south with a quickness and I hope you already planned for this like we’ve all been told to.

I hope you made friends with local food producers and you know which of your neighbors calls the cops on strangers.

I hope you already know who to trust. From here, ain’t gonna be no trusting anyone new.

Least not for anyone savvy.

I think the thing that’s confusing me is that these men seem to think that women are kind and docile

And like

Some of us are quite happily violent shrieking harridans and just keep that shit in check most days

Like I hold the power of creation in my abdomen every day, do you not think that I can easily destroy you?

Anyway y’all city ladies might not know this song but I vote we make it inescapable

Just to make em nervous

Aww look you guys they thought they could destroy the rule of law and people wouldn’t get lawless on them

This is gonna be fun to watch

https://twitter.com/TomFitton/status/1048315130105221120

Them, running around screaming THERE ARE NO RULES thinking they had the house to themselves

And then just thousands of pissed off leftists melt silently out of the shadows and say oh really now?

Anyway here’s hoping every right winger is going to bed terrified that they might have to meet us in public. May they never rest easy and may they increasingly become trapped in their own paranoia until they develop debilitating agoraphobia.

I am so tired of people telling me how difficult changing the fate of a nation would be.

I wrote an actual book about what you can’t afford to do on low wages. It was a memoir.

Now is when you strike. It will never not be sacrifice so you save it until you need it.

That’s now.

https://twitter.com/nazani14/status/1048689249208426496

There is no easy way to stop the collapse of a nation. There is no path that doesn’t involve risk and sacrifice. You cannot comfortably upend a society.

Stop looking for ways that people can fix the apocalypse in their spare time without spending or sacrificing. Can’t happen.

You know who will absolutely blow up their own futures on principle alone when they get fed up? Poor people.

If you’re out there working on low wages you don’t have that much to lose. But you damn well know how much you can lose for them, how much you can cost them.

I’ve not the foggiest. Make friends with farmers, maybe, or call your Senator and register your discontent.

There’s plenty we *should* be doing, but we’re not going to. We are collectively keep waiting for a good plan, while they bankrupt the nation.

https://twitter.com/cler_morgaine/status/1048684436454342658

(I continue to ask why, exactly, we don’t just not go to work on Wednesday. Yes, it’s a harmful thing for a lot of people, but one considers that that is precisely the point, and maybe we should think about just staying home on fucking Wednesday and crashing their markets.)

(I keep asking myself why we don’t just go fucking occupy things. Clearly we can get millions of people out to march for a thing if it’s bad enough, and one would think that we’d be able to find enough people to just stop them doing business.)

For some reason that I can’t put my finger on, people who get paid money to run campaigns would like you to please “use your anger” and vote for them

This is fucking silly. Please feel free to ignore anyone whose sole big idea right now is to pull out last cycle’s GOTV slogans.

Obviously you go vote, but you’re madder than a barking birdhouse if you think that voting is an affirmative fix at this point instead of a potentially useful last-ditch opposition move.

You recall, of course, the last election and that popular vote thing, we presume

Use your anger to scorch things and disrupt things and smash things. Don’t waste it on procedure.

Use your powerless feelings to vote with. Save the anger and go make some motherfuckers uncomfortable.

So there are protests that I cover actively, and then there are those where I choose a perch from which to observe

This Kavanaugh protest, I’m just watching

So there’s this woman has walked out of her office building and she’s just chilling across the street, chanting silently

She doesn’t know anyone is watching her. She’s in a suit, probably late fifties. Mid-level exec at some company that shares an office building with the ABA. She’s just watching, can’t help dancing to the beat. Mouthing the words until a taxi comes for her.

Across the street is a bunch of kids, this protest is all college students. Maybe I’m reading in here, but also maybe this is just being a woman

I see the younger version superimposed on the suit, I’m watching that younger soul emerge

I’m watching 1991 watch 2018.

I suppose today is as good a time as any to reminisce about the bar fights I’ve been in?

Younger me didn’t like seeing men harass women in bars, and drunk younger me had trouble with impulse control. That’s how that story goes.

In my defense I always waited until the men in question had set the precedent that they were totally cool with strangers touching each other in private areas in said bar on said evening

Not my fault I usually overestimated the force needed

Anyway ladies start more bar fights when dudes get handsy

Really is therapeutic tbh

I’ve been trying to describe what “viral” is like, by which I mean the subject of many stories all at once

I’ve said it was like being stripped naked on live TV while people clapped

I’ve said it was like having one’s flesh taken off one’s bones while people flashed scorecards

I’ve said it was like being chained to a table against your will as an art installation, so that no matter how much you struggled or screamed people commented approvingly about how meaningful it was to see you panicked

I guess the thing is that I can’t think of anything that quite expresses what it is that doesn’t include torture.

Because it’s torture. It just is.

I’m just enough bourbon in to be able to consider writing this piece about how all these dudes keep talking about the trauma of public repudiation

Because, actually, the thing they’re going through and describing is basically hell. They’re not wrong about that part.

We have not in this millennium stopped to consider how important we’ve made one’s virtual reputation, nor the cost someone pays when we collectively rescind someone’s good name.

I’ve honestly never been through anything more abjectly terrifying.

I don’t know how, even if it was justified, you go through that without being scarred. I have spent years trying to explain what it’s like, and I can’t say that I have a good comparison.

I’ve been through bad things, but this is somewhat unique and not a common experience.

Weezer apparently made a cover of Toto’s Africa and this makes as much sense as anything else that I’ve learned this year

It’s a very bad cover

Also wtf Spotify telling me about new releases and I’m pretty sure And Justice For All is not new

Idgaf how many remasters Ulrich muscles through for residuals

Hi city people

Can anyone explain to me why twenty frat bros trying to get laid justifies a shitty DJ that you can’t escape within a five block radius of the bar they’re playing at

Is there not a law about noise pollution where if you’re loud you have to be good?

I also have a Casio keyboard and a mixer from circa 1994

I’m a dj now

Y’all I am not calling the cops over a noise complaint are you kidding this is chicago

Might be worth starting a thread for “men discover sexism” as well.

https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1045645358817320961

Do you know, the worst part of Rape Month, But All Year Long isn’t the times I relive bad things. Those memories have worn smooth from all the times I have taken them out and examined them for what I did wrong or clues about why me. They’re not sharp anymore.

The worst part is that I had after years gotten to a place where, when I met a man, I wouldn’t necessarily register his threat profile before noting anything else about him.

I could have friendships with men in which I trusted them fully. I could smile on the street on good days

I’m really pissed that I don’t have that anymore, that I’m back to scanning everyone who looks male even as we’re being introduced by a mutual acquaintance to see whether he’s got a weird vibe to him. It’s so fucking tiring.

I do too, but here’s the thing: this is now a war of attrition. The more evidence stacks up against this guy the more they have to confirm him; that’s the only way to kill the scandal now. Sure he’ll be under a cloud, but they’ll control the Court.

https://twitter.com/atpacy/status/1044987668298444800

At this point, they could pull him and replace him with someone else but how many people you think they got that *aren’t* in some skeevy boys’ club? Any new nominee would be immediately dragged into Kavanaugh’s wake, so it’d have to be an actually chaste kind of dude or a lady

All signs point to “this will overwhelm his nomination” but this is 2018 and there is no regular order. Given that the GOP typically goes with the worst option these days, my bet is they hold an early vote and buy off Collins again with some pork for the tolerance.

Well it’s officially “lecture your waitstaff about politics” time of year again

I just saw a woman very proud of herself because she talked to a waitress about working for low wage and man if the worker’s shitty life didn’t remind this nice lady to be sure to get that vote out and tell the waitress to get registered to change things!

(The lady did not mention whether or how much she tipped.)

I keep coming back to thinking about how we as a society put all this importance on pre/Post Millennial divides but it’s all to do with work and tech. People really do not stop to think that we come of age with The New Dems and Bush v Gore and it’s never been good or normal since

https://twitter.com/TheDJValkyrie/status/1044589943849406465

Like when speaking to us as political actors I find that frequently, even older people who know that I’m speaking in good faith will get frustrated that I have zero trust in the leaders they’ve always supported

And like, cool, but I’ve never seen them actually lead really.

I think that a 36 year old still seems like a mewling kid to someone in their sixties and that’s fine and the way of the world, but we *have* been voting and watching for eighteen years now. And every single one of those years has been increasingly unhinged.

In my DM there is a woman decades my senior telling me how I just don’t understand why Hillary might, in the late 90s when she was over fifty years old, have felt obligated to publicly shred the 22-year-old intern her husband got busted fucking

Your feminism sucks, lady. Grow.

Like I’m 36 and if I found out a partner of mine was out with women who were barely old enough to buy wine you bet I’m not only running, I’m warning ladies about that guy

I can’t imagine thinking to myself “best outcome we light this kid up and hope America hates her most”

I sure as fuck can’t imagine being twenty years older than I am now and finding out my partner was into chicks who could barely buy wine

That’s not okay in any universe and frankly I don’t care about anything past that.

Actually it’s late and I’m ill and I can’t sleep and let’s review 2016, from the perspective of a woman what didn’t automatically love Hillary Clinton

You see because she was a lady and this was groundbreaking and we all had uterii based contracts to therefore love her blindly

In 2016 there were only two acceptable political narratives for women: you were 1000% for Hillary or you loved the GOP

One was not allowed to express reservations or mixed feelings; anything less than unreserved excitement for Hillary was read as vicious critique/GOP support.

More insidiously, any critique of Hillary was entirely written off as ahistorical, something one might only have picked up from the right wing

Hi hello welcome to the wilderness

I promise you that nobody with a consistent position on consent and power will be elevated to “public life” the way it’s typically meant

So the imperative is null.

https://twitter.com/BrendanNyhan/status/1044413936760754177

Like bring me the woman whose career wasn’t derailed when she wrote about the Lolita Express

That’s because there isn’t one. Because that plane flew high-ranking men from both parties, which would include both Clinton and Trump.

Also lol let’s talk about the way we treated women who thought that maybe in 2008 or 2016 we could or should discuss Bill

Y’all remember that we were called self-loathing hidden misogynists and tools of the right wing

I was called everything but a child of God in 2016 for that.