Paywalls Are Closing Off the Internet

I have exactly three digital subscriptions, to the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. (I go for hard news, even if it's biased sometimes; the New York Times is an amazing paper despite it's identity as a far-left broadsheet: and, frankly, for straight news the Wall Street Journal is just the best all around.) I also subscribe to a few Substack newsletters --- like Andrew Sullivan's --- but I go for the free reader model, where you just get the minimum level of content. I'm not going to be in the business of having $6.00 pulled from my checking account monthly by dozens of writers, many of dubious ability. 

In any case, see Fortune, "Paywalls are here to stay, but they’re closing off the internet. Crypto can fix that."

Can the Biden Presidency Be Saved?

From Andrew Sullivan, "If he can sustain the deal-making, why not?":

Now we’re talking.

The entire promise and rationale of a Biden presidency was not, I hate to break it to my lefty friends, a total transformation of the country in favor of green energy and “social justice.” It was a return to constitutional normalcy, and the kind of legislative deal-making that offers gradual progress on the biggest challenges of the day.

We wanted a better rollout of vaccines, competent economic management of the bust-and-boom cycle of the pandemic, progress on the urgent question of climate change, and responsibility again on the world stage. Biden gets a B on the first, a C- on the second, a B+ on climate, and a solid B in foreign policy.

That B+ on the climate depends of course on whether the Schumer-Manchin deal struck this week can get to the president’s desk. It looks like it can, if Senator Sinema doesn’t blow it up, and some geezers can recover from Covid quickly enough. And it represents what a Biden presidency promised to a center-right voter like me.

It’s an old-fashioned political deal between two Senators, with Biden on the sidelines. Manchin gets some goodies for the carbon industries in exchange for the biggest federal investment in clean energy ever. There’s a tax on the super-rich. There’s even some incentives for keeping nuclear plants alive. There’s a popular move to reduce Medicare drug prices; and more secure access to healthcare for the less privileged.

And this popularist package is branded as an inflation reduction measure! That’s a bit of a stretch, of course, but it may have a mild deflationary effect in a couple of years. The widely detested Larry Summers — see the Dishcast below — reassured Manchin on the inflationary impact this past week, and, as Chait details today, Summers has credibility on the issue after his sane and prescient warnings about inflation a year and a half ago. It comes after a bipartisan computer chips bill to better compete with China.

It’s not a New Green Deal; and it’s not socialized medicine. It’s what we used to call pragmatic progress...

 RELATED: At NYT, "Manchin, in Reversal, Agrees to Quick Action on Climate and Tax Plan."

The Meaning of Patriotism

From Andrew Sullivan, "This July Fourth, two Republican women are keeping the flame of this republic alive":

To see what is in front of our noses is a constant challenge, and perhaps never more so in a time of such awful post-truth polarization. But what happened in the January 6 hearings this past week will, in my view, be seen one day as a watershed moment either in the history of this country’s revival as a liberal democracy or in this republic’s rapid collapse.

Two women, Liz Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson, went back and forth, asking and answering questions, slowly, calmly, and methodically laying out a story of an actual attempt by a president of the United States to rally and lead an armed mob to assault the Congress to overturn an election. Yes, I just wrote that sentence.

Hutchinson’s testimony added critical facts to the record: that Trump knew full well what the mob was intending to do in advance; and knew that they were armed: “You know, I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not there to hurt me.” He knew what he was attempting was criminal; tried physically to lead the mob in their rampage; and when he was foiled, egged on the attack, and refused to quiet or quell the mob for hours — even as it threatened to kill his own vice president. There is no way now to deny that Trump was behind all of it, uniquely responsible.

In the face of this, so many Republican men have kept quiet, caved, slunk away, equivocated, or changed the subject. So many, like Tucker Carlson, have responded with smears and foul lies. So many have refused to testify, or dodged subpoenas. These sickening cowards wouldn’t vote to impeach after the grossest attack on the Constitution in history; and wouldn’t cooperate with the committee.

But two Republican women faced our hideous reality this week — even if it meant the obliteration of their careers, and being subject to real threats of violence. And let us pause to note just how Republican these two women are. Cheney is the daughter of the former vice president, a man who once defined Republicanism; she represents Wyoming, the most Republican state out of 50; she’s pro-life, defended torture, never saw a war she didn’t want to start; opposed even her own sister’s same-sex marriage; and voted with Trump 93 percent of the time, more than the woman who ousted her from House leadership, Elise Stefanik.

Hutchinson, for her part, was at the heart of the Trump world. She ascended from mere intern — working in the offices of both Ted Cruz and the House minority whip — to become the primary assistant to Trump’s chief-of-staff, Mark Meadows. If she dyed her hair blonde, she could read the news on Fox.

Hutchinson had a lot to lose by testifying — as women seem to in general compared to men:

[T]here is evidence that women suffer more direct retaliation as whistleblowers. One study in 2008 found that women who reported wrongdoing within their organizations experienced more retaliation than men who did the same. And, while higher-ranking men who reported wrongdoing experienced less retaliation, higher-ranking women were not as insulated.

And notice the tone of the exchange between the two women. In a world of hyperbolic, pontificating males, Cheney asked clear, direct, empirical questions, and Hutchinson replied with the same attention to detail, the same surety of voice, the same care not to exaggerate, and to get things right. Yes, some of it was hearsay — but Hutchinson herself took pains to note when it was. And both, it seemed to me, understood their grave responsibility.

This is the Republican Party I used to respect. This is the conservatism I believe in. A conservatism whose first tasks are the defense of the Constitution, the rule of law, and a belief in objective truth.

Like Margaret Thatcher in her day, Liz Cheney has a steel stronger than most men, and similar courage. In her superb speech at the Reagan Library this week, Cheney also emphasized the feminine qualities that made this week historic:

I come to this choice [between Trump and the Constitution] as a mother, committed to ensuring that my children and their children can continue to live in an America where the peaceful transfer of power is guaranteed.

And she paid tribute to the women, often low on the DC totem pole, who rose to the challenge of citizenship, when so many powerful men failed:

I’ve been incredibly moved by young women who have come forward to testify, some who worked on the Trump campaign, some who worked in the Trump White House, some who worked in offices on Capitol Hill, all of whom knew immediately that what had happened must never happen again … Little girls across the country are seeing what it really means to love your country, what it really means to be a patriot. And so I want to speak to every young girl who may be watching tonight. The power is yours and so is the responsibility.

Listen to it all...

 

The Problem With Jon Stewart

I cant't block quote this one. You gotta read the whole thing.

From Andrew Sullivan, at the Weekly Dish, "How painfully, cringingly super-woke must a comedian get to stay relevant?"

Joe Rogan Speaks the Way Men Do With Each Other in Private

And that's the fundamental basis of his appeal, which is gargantuan with 11 million viewers. 

Andrew Sullivan has thoughts:

No, the left is not calling all masculinity toxic. But they get pretty quiet when you ask for a definition of non-toxic masculinity that doesn’t end up sounding like being a woman. And, no, they’re not explicitly denying that there are biological differences between men and women — they just speak and act on the premise that there aren’t, that boys do not need a different kind of education than girls, that all-male groups are problematic, and that finding a way to direct masculinity to noble ends is somehow enabling the oppression of women, or gay people. The result is that men are subject to left derision, right machismo, and complete cultural derailment.

And that’s where Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson come in. They too, of course, are mocked constantly, demeaned as chauvinists or white supremacists, etc. But what Rogan does is speak and talk the way men do with each other in private, which, in this media era, is a revelation. He doesn’t entertain the woke bromides of gender theory because he’s lived a life, clearly loves being a man as much as Adele says she loves being a woman, and believes, as he once put it, that “bad men are just bad human beings who happen to be men.”

He lifts weights, watches fights, eats elk meat, smokes pot, dabbles in DMT, and asks the kind of questions normie men might ask of experts. Which is why they listen. They feel at home with him. Unlike so much of the MSM, he feels real: not a throwback to patriarchy but an opening to a kind of brotherhood that feels sane to many disoriented men in America — especially the majority who haven’t yet bent the knee to the doctrines of the successor ideology.

He’s in no way a bully or blowhard. Just listen to him: his tone is mellifluous, curious, amused. His masculinity is unforced, funny and real. He’s genuinely ingenuous — the way most humans are, possessing the kind of credulousness journalists are trained out of. But that’s why he has 11 million listeners and CNN has a little over 500,000. One of his most frequent guests is the brilliant comic Tim Dillon — openly gay and stereotypically male.

Rogan’s politics are eclectic, but they reflect a male concern with practical things, straightforward people, and solutions. The idea that he is a right-wing ideologue is silly and untrue. He readily admits when he’s wrong and often self-deprecates. He’s not afraid to show emotion and choke up — whether it’s over the triumph of female fighters or putting down a puppy or the death of Chadwick Boseman. Rogan is simply not the brutish caricature that left-Twitter and CNN would have you think.

The same goes for Peterson. The Canadian prof and clinical psychologist is cantankerous, yes, but also compassionate...

RTWT: "Between the World and Men Truckers, Rogan, Peterson and the revolt of masculinity."

How Biden Lost the Plot

 It's Andrew Sullivan, at the Weekly Dish, "Listening to interest groups and activists is no way to get re-elected":

If I were president (I know, I know) I’d take an hour or two each week and observe a focus group. Presidents never get the full truth talking directly with the public, let alone the nuances of the feelings behind various positions — but if the prez is behind a one-way mirror, people are much less intimidated or showboaty. And because a president is constantly surrounded by like-minded people in politics, he can easily drift into internalizing the priorities of his peers and pleasing his activists and forget what ordinary people actually wanted when they elected him.

That’s my best take on why Biden had such a terrible first year — his marination in Democratic politics and his distance from moderate voters are the problem — and why his long presser this week was so starkly out of touch with political reality.

The NYT just published the transcript of a fascinating focus group — with Americans who voted both for Obama and Trump at least once. And they’re not happy with Biden. They’re sick of Covid restrictions, frightened by inflation, and unsettled by rising crime and social disorder. Here’s one quote from a member of the group:

I think they’ve taken us back to cave man time, where you would walk around with a club. “I want what you have.” You’re not even safe to walk around and go to the train station, because somebody might throw you off the train, OK? It’s a regression.

Another old white man? Nope. That’s a statement from a 60-year-old Latina woman. The group takes a rather complacent view of January 6, 2021, and when asked about their concern for democracy, one respondent said: “You see how the Democrats in power, they seem to be wanting — changing the rules, you know. Voting rights, we can’t win free and fair elections, so let’s change some rules there.”

Of those who said they’d vote Republican in November, there were two reasons given: “I just want to send a message. I think the Democratic Party is nuts at the moment, and the only way I can send that message is with my vote,” and “Yeah, the progressives have taken over the Democratic Party.”

Now imagine these people watching Biden’s press conference on Wednesday.

It would have said absolutely nothing to them. It would show that the president doesn’t share their priorities, that he sees no reason to change course, that he has no real solution to inflation, and that his priority now is a massive voting rights bill that represents a Christmas tree of Dem wishes, opposition to which he categorized as racist as Bull Connor. Biden was, as usual, appealing as a human being: fallible, calm, reasonable, and more “with it” than I expected. I can’t help but like him and want the best for his administration.

But the sheer gulf between the coalition that voted for him and the way he has governed became even wider as the time went by. Joe Biden can say a million times that he’s not Bernie Sanders. But when his priority has been to force through two massive bills full of utopian leftist dreams, and conspicuously failed to pass either, while also embracing every minor woke incursion in American life, he’s just a Bernie Sanders without the conviction or mandate. Which is … well, not great.

Voting rights matter, obviously. The filibuster is a very mixed blessing — capable of creating complete gridlock when the country is so deeply divided. I favor the anti-majoritarian ethos of the Senate, but there’s a decent case that the filibuster renders the minority far too powerful. I think most people are open to reforms on both, and I sure am.

But is this really what Americans want their president to be focused on right now? And the way in which Biden framed the question — as about the core legitimacy of future elections, and about racism — seems wildly off-base. In 2020, we had record turnout in an election that made voting far easier than at any time in history (and the GOP picked up seats in the House). If we are in a crisis of voter suppression, it’s a very strange one. The evidence that Republican vote-suppression tactics actually work in practice is absent; the assumption that higher turnout always benefits Democrats is highly dubious; and many Democratic states have appallingly cumbersome electoral systems, like New York’s. Does that make Chuck Schumer a “white supremacist”?

More to the point, laws — like that recently passed in Georgia — are far from the nightmares that Dems have described, and contain some expansion of access to voting. Georgians, and Americans in general, overwhelmingly support voter ID laws, for example. Such laws poll strongly even among allegedly disenfranchised African-Americans — whose turnout in 2012, following a wave of ID laws, actually exceeded whites’ in the re-election of a black president. In fact, the normalization of ID in everyday life has only increased during the past year of vax-card requirements — a policy pushed by Democrats.

And Biden did something truly dumb this week: he cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election in November now that his proposal for a federal overhaul has failed: “I’m not going to say it’s going to be legit.” No sitting president should do this, ever. But when one party is still insisting that the entire election system was rigged last time in a massive conspiracy to overturn a landslide victory for Trump, the other party absolutely needs to draw a sharp line. Biden fatefully blurred that distinction, and took the public focus off the real danger: not voter suppression but election subversion, of the kind we are now discovering Trump, Giuliani and many others plotted during the transition period. Reforming the Electoral Count Act could, in fact, help lower the likelihood of a repeat of last time. And if the Dems had made that their centerpiece, they would have kept the legitimacy argument and kept the focus on Trump’s astonishing contempt for the rules of the republic.

So why didn’t they? For that matter, why did the Democrats design massive cumbersome bills in 2021 — like BBB and the voting rights legislation — which are so larded up with proposals they are impossible to describe in simple terms? Why did they not break out smaller, simpler bills — such as the child tax credit — and campaign on one thing at a time?

And why have they wildly inflated the threat to election security and engaged in the disgusting demagoguery of calling this “Jim Crow 2.0”? The WSJ this week tracked down various unsavory GOP bills to suppress or subvert voting in three states — three states Obama singled out for criticism — and found that they had already died in committee. To argue as Biden did last week in Georgia that the goal of Republicans is “to turn the will of the voters into a mere suggestion — something states can respect or ignore,” is to add hyperbole to distortion.

One explanation, perhaps, for Biden’s dense and hard-to-sell legislative juggernauts is that if he’d broken them up and prioritized any single policy, he’d have split his own party. Look what happened when infrastructure passed the Senate first: the left went nuts. In that sense Biden is not so much governing the country as trying to keep the Democrat coalition together, and in the end, achieving neither.

Another aspect of the problem is that so many Dem activists and groups have deeply imbibed the notion that America in 2022 is a “white supremacist” country, designed to suppress non-whites, and that we are now living in a system of de facto “legal fascism,” with a minority “white” party holding the country in its undemocratic grip, perhaps forever. The Democrats and elite liberals really seem to believe that we are back in the 1960s or 1890s or even 1860s, that we live in a black-vs-white world of good vs evil, and that the choice today is literally, in Biden’s words, between backing Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis. This is as self-righteous as it is ludicrous. It’s MLK envy. It’s an attempt to recreate the moral clarity of the civil rights movement, in a country no one from 1964 would begin to recognize...

 

Substack! Holy Crap!

This blows my mind. 

My tweets are set to private, but in response to Steven Perlberg's tweet, linking his Business Insider piece (which is behind a paywall, of course), I quote-tweeted: 

.@MelissaTweets Elizabeth Bruenig's a freakin' self-declared communist? Did she take the 100 percent boost in pay? Or did she decline on principle? Can't say, because the article's behind a paywall, hence, capitalism. I can't even. *Man facepalming.*

Now, while you probably can't read the article to which Perlberg is linking, it turns out Mediaite did read it, and they've written up a piece that reveals the mind-blowing information. See, "Substack Offered NYT Reporter Taylor Lorenz $300,000: Report." 

Now that's why I yelled holy crap! when I saw that headline. You may not recall, but Ms. Lorenz is a very bad terrible person, and Tucker Carlson called her out a few weeks back, and it was glorious. But I knew how bad and terrible a person she was long ago, because, for one reason, she's been an awful no-good person for a long time, and Robert Stacy McCain wrote about her years ago, after Ms. Lorenz doxxed Pamela "Atlas Shrugged" Geller's daughters. You can't make this stuff up. (And Ms. Lorenz has of late been accused of stalking teenagers for inside interviews without the kids' parents permission, she's that bad.)

But no! She's getting offered a $300,000 advance to quite the Old Gray Lady and start her own newsletter? Well, I guess you gotta love free-market competition, which is why the New York Times is so freaked and has basically declared all-out war on the newsletter hosting platform, and this Sulzberger fellow, the publisher (or at least he used to be), is putting up some big bucks to go after top talent (some at Substack!) and have his own "by-line" bigwig writers up their game to meet the challenges of the day. Hoo boy, this is interesting.

At NYT, "Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack":

Danny Lavery had just agreed to a two-year, $430,000 contract with the newsletter platform Substack when I met him for coffee last week in Brooklyn, and he was deciding what to do with the money.

“I think the thing that I’m the most looking forward to about this is to start a retirement account,” said Mr. Lavery, who founded the feminist humor blog The Toast and will be giving up an advice column in Slate.

Mr. Lavery already has about 1,800 paying subscribers to his Substack newsletter, The Shatner Chatner, whose most popular piece is written from the perspective of a goose. Annual subscriptions cost $50.

The contract is structured a bit like a book advance: Substack’s bet is that it will make back its money by taking most of Mr. Lavery’s subscription income for those two years. The deal now means Mr. Lavery’s household has two Substack incomes. His wife, Grace Lavery, an associate English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who edits the Transgender Studies Quarterly, had already signed on for a $125,000 advance.

Along with the revenue the Laverys will bring in, the move is good media politics for the company. Substack has been facing a mutiny from a group of writers who objected to sharing the platform with people who they said were anti-transgender, including a writer who made fun of people’s appearances on a dating app. Signing up two high-profile transgender writers was a signal that Substack was trying to remain a platform for people who sometimes hate one another, and who sometimes, like Dr. Lavery, heatedly criticize the company.

Feuds among and about Substack writers were a major category of media drama during the pandemic winter — a lot of drama for a company that mostly just makes it easy to email large groups for free. For those who want to charge subscribers on their email list, Substack takes a 10 percent fee. “The mindshare Substack has in media right now is insane,” said Casey Newton, who left The Verge to start a newsletter on Substack called Platformer. Substack, he said, has become a target for “a lot of people to project their anxieties.”

Substack has captivated an anxious industry because it embodies larger forces and contradictions. For one, the new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers, even as journalists turn increasingly to labor unions to level out pay scales.

This new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about “cancel culture” — for instance, in New York Magazine’s firing of Andrew Sullivan — are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once were. (Only Twitter retains that power.) Big media cancellation is often an offramp to a bigger income. Though Substack paid advances to a few dozen writers, most are simply making money from readers. That includes most of the top figures on the platform, who make seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers — among them Mr. Sullivan, the liberal historian Heather Cox Richardson, and the confrontational libertarian Glenn Greenwald.

This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn’t just transforming journalism. It’s also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it’s marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels. And Silicon Valley investors, eager to disrupt and angry at their portrayal in big media, have been gleefully backing it. Substack embodies this cultural shift, but it’s riding the wave, not creating it.

And despite a handful of departures over politics, that wave is growing for Substack. The writers moving there full time in recent days include not just Mr. Lavery, but also the former Yahoo News White House correspondent Hunter Walker, the legal writer David Lat and the columnist Heather Havrilesky, who told me she will be taking Ask Polly from New York Magazine to “regain some of the indie spirit and sense of freedom that drew me to want to write online in the first place.”

(Speaking of that spirit: Bustle Digital Group confirmed to me that it’s reviving the legendary blog Gawker under a former Gawker writer, Leah Finnegan.)

And a New York Times opinion writer, Charlie Warzel, is departing to start a publication on Substack called Galaxy Brain. (Substack has courted a number of Times writers. I turned down an offer of an advance well above my Times salary, in part because of the editing and the platform The Times gives me, and in part because I didn’t think I’d make it back — media types often overvalue media writers.)

The Times wouldn’t comment on his move, but is among the media companies trying to develop its own answer to Substack and recently brought the columnist Paul Krugman’s free Substack newsletter to the Times platform. And newsrooms can offer all sorts of support that solo writers don’t get. Jessica Lessin, the founder and editor in chief of The Information, a newsletter-centric Silicon Valley subscription publication, said part of its edge was “sophisticated marketing around acquiring and retaining subscribers.”

Substack’s thesis is, in part, that media companies underpay their most prominent writers. So far, that seems to be bearing out. Mr. Warzel isn’t taking an advance, and many of the writers who took advances now regret doing so: They would have made more money by simply collecting subscription revenue, and paying Substack 10 percent, than making the more complex deals with money up front.

The former Vox writer Matthew Yglesias calculated that taking the advance wound up costing him nearly $400,000 in subscription revenue paid to Substack. The writer Roxane Gay told me she earned back her advance within two months of starting The Audacity ($60 a year) with an audience of 36,000, about 20 percent of them paying. She also wrestles with what she sees as Substack “trying to have it both ways” as a neutral platform and a publisher that supports writers she finds “odious,” she said, but has concluded that her dislike of someone’s work is “not enough for them to not be allowed on the platform.”

Isaac Saul, who told me his nonpartisan political newsletter Tangle brought in $190,000 in its first year, wrote recently that he came to Substack “specifically to avoid being associated with anyone else” after being frustrated by readers’ assumptions about his biases when he worked for HuffPost...

 

'And it's just sometimes an excruciatingly heightened awareness of being, loving being alive..."

Caitlin Flanagan wrote "I Thought Stage IV Cancer Was Bad Enough" at the Atlantic in June. Not many people, myself included, know her story. It's riveting. 

Well, she did a podcast with Sully, and this short segment is so existential. She's such a graceful woman. It's really inspiring:

'Andrew Sullivan detects anti-gay bigotry: "So you agree not wanting to have sex with someone because they have a vagina is a form of bigotry, right?...'

 At Althouse:

Does genitalia matter? I can see thinking that a person's inner being matters far more than what's on the outside, and that "gender identification" is part of what's on the inside, but when it comes to sexual attraction, we're not required to go solely by what's on the inside, and indeed, if only the inside — the mind — counts, why are we having sexual intercourse at all? How can you say genitalia is irrelevant when what you're talking about is something you do with your genitalia?

More.

 

We Are All Algorithms Now

 Andrew Sullivan is so damn good. It's freaky, too, since he's such a weird guy. 

But this is really good. I look forward to Fridays, when I can read his column. I think Matt Taibbi posts his big pieces on Friday as well, so I'm going to go troll over there for a while, to see what he's got going. 

Here's Sully, "Is that what's really destroying the legitimacy of our democracy?":

Remind yourself that hefty chunks of our society still insist that Covid19 is a hoax, perpetrated for the sake of social control. Re-read Richard Hofstadter. Remember how vast numbers of white liberals drastically shifted their view of America — almost overnight — from a flawed but vibrant multiracial democracy to a version of apartheid South Africa because of a single video of a brutal arrest and murder. This week, I watched videos of people literally burning Harry Potter books, like latter-day Nazis, in the cause of transgender liberation. It’s safe to say, I think, that many of these people have lost their minds — just by staying online. And they not only think they’re perfectly sane; they think they’re heroes.

And online is increasingly where people live. My average screen time this past week was close to ten hours a day. Yes, a lot of that is work-related. But the idea that I have any real conscious life outside this virtual portal is delusional. And if you live in such a madhouse all the time, you will become mad. You don’t go down a rabbit-hole; your mind increasingly is the rabbit hole — rewired that way by algorithmic practice. And you cannot get out, unless you fight the algorithms to a draw, or manage to exert superhuman discipline and end social media use altogether.

But the thing about algorithms and artificial intelligence is that they don’t rest, they have no human flaws, they exploit every weakness we have, and have already taken over. This is not a future dystopia in which some kind of AI robot takes power and kills us all. It is a dystopia already here — burrowed into our minds, literally disabling the basic mental tools required for democracy to work at all. 

If you watch video after video of excessive police force against suspects, for example, and your viewing habits are then reinforced by algorithms so you see no countervailing examples, your view about the prevalence of such excessive force will change, regardless of objective reality. A new study shows how this happens.

RTWT.

Andrew Sullivan to Revive 'The Dish'

I wondered where he was going to wind up. The editors told him not to publish a few weeks back.

Sully had a piece up two Fridays ago, and this yesterday, "See You Next Friday: A Farewell Letter":

Dishness lives. All we’re waiting for is you.https://t.co/X02Q5258iA

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 17, 2020

What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here...

RTWT and stay tuned!

Andrew Sullivan on George Will (REVIEW)

Andrew Sullivan is pretty much psycho, but he's a dang good writer.

This review, at NYT, is worth your time.

Will's book is at Amazon, The Conservative Sensibility.

In a 600-page book on conservatism George Will does not mention Donald Trump, which tells you something about what he thinks of recent political developments https://t.co/fLRKNRvthz

— New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) June 20, 2019

We All Live on Campus Now

From Andrew Sullivan, a.k.a, "RawMuscleGlutes," at New York Magazine:

"The goal of our culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke."https://t.co/iHY9xqjNps via @intelligencer

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) February 9, 2018

The Hateful Ideology and Rhetoric of Homosexual Rights

I get some mean and nasty homosexuals at my college. And to think, it's been 10 years since Proposition 8. Maybe a deep backlash is setting in, and none too soon.

Read Andrew "Milky Loads" Sullivan, at New York Magazine:

Andrew Sullivan: Since achieving marriage rights, there’s been a radicalization of the gay rights movement’s ideology and rhetoric https://t.co/naGSy5UjH4

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) January 28, 2018

"The sewer of most of Twitter is now so rank that even addicts have begun to realize that they are sinking in oceans of shitholery."

https://t.co/emm9BvPYSw via @intelligencer

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 26, 2018

"Social media has turned journalism into junk, has promoted addictive addlement in our brains, is wrecking our democracy, and slowly replacing life with pseudo-life."

https://t.co/emm9BvPYSw via @intelligencer

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 26, 2018

RAWMUSCLEGLUTES to Quit Blogging: Will Devote Full Energies to 'Getting Healthy...'

Headlining currently at Memeorandum, "A Note To My Readers."

A strangely fascinating man, I couldn't care one whit about his blogging retirement. Lots of people are getting a kick out of this, no doubt.

I'll turn it over to AceofSpadesHQ for the gloating smackdown. Here: "Andrew Sullivan Will Stop Blogging 'In the Near Future'."

Now Sully can invest the time needed for "getting healthy." Whether that includes more intellectual repose than rim-station repose remains to be seen. He denies he's dying of AIDS, but the hard-life of homosexual abandon and licentiousness catches up with you.

So, Alex 'Ping Pong Balls' Pareene Is Blogging at Andrew Sullivan's?

Alex Pareene, some might recall, is the Salon alumnus who attacked Michelle Malkin with racist Asian "ping pong balls" jokes back in 2006.

So, I guess there's ample irony in his posting --- as an invited guest blogger, no less --- at Andrew "Trig Truther" Sullivan's the Dish.

See, "A Second Look At The Giant Garbage Pile That Is Online Media, 2014."

Birds of a feather.

If you work in the media, you need to bookmark this @pareene story and read it tomorrow after you've sobered up. http://t.co/u6xUdZTZTQ

— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) September 6, 2014

RawMuscleGlutes: 'Jesus was on the side of love...'

Aww.

Isn't that sweet?

Andrew "RawMuscleGlutes" Sullivan says "Jesus was happy today," at AC360 last night:

FLASHBACK: At AoSHQ, "Don't Go Over There, But Sullivan Is Pushing (of Course!) Trig Trutherism Now":

Is trolling for "Milky Loads" from anonymous sex partners really the best medical practice? People have a right to know.

And back at Sully's dish, "I Believe":

Some final thoughts after so many years of so many thoughts. Marriage is not a political act; it’s a human one. It is based on love, before it is rooted in law. Same-sex marriages have always existed because the human heart has always existed in complicated, beautiful and strange ways. But to have them recognized by the wider community, protected from vengeful relatives, preserved in times of illness and death, and elevated as a responsible, adult and equal contribution to our common good is a huge moment in human consciousness. It has happened elsewhere. But here in America, the debate was the most profound, lengthy and impassioned. This country’s democratic institutions made this a tough road but thereby also gave us the chance and time to persuade the country, which we did. I understand and respect those who in good conscience fought this tooth and nail. I am saddened by how many failed to see past elaborate, ancient codes of conduct toward the ultimate good of equal human dignity. I am reminded of the courage of a man like Evan Wolfson who had the vision and determination to change the world.

Aww.

I think I'm gonna cry. Waaaaahhhh!!

Libertarian Populism and Its Limits

See Ross Douthat, at the New York Times (and the links therein).

It's a debate about "reform conservatism," whatever that is. I recall going through this back in 2008 when the Barackalypse was first elected. And this latest iteration too shall pass.

Meanwhile, see the Other McCain for more, "Damn You, Josh Barro!"

@jbarro Hey, I'm not exactly president of the @ewerickson Fan Club, but ... "derpy"? That's all you got, "derpy"? businessinsider.com/erick-erickson…
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 4, 2013

Yeah, that was a bit much with the "derpy."

And speaking of "derpy," click through for some "derpy" RAWMUSCLEGLUTES at the link:

Wow, I just got my second "Malkin Award" nomination of the year. dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/06/04/mal… I must be doing something right.
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 4, 2013

Online Pay Models in 2013

I don't care for Andrew Sullivan, obviously, but this piece by Ann Friedman points out why the Daily Dish is a special case: "Journalism is Personal." Very few people will have the kind of personal brand that Sullivan has, and thus very few people will ever be able to establish on online business model that he's initiating. So far he's off to a good start: "Sullivan's new Dish raises $333,000 from over 11K people in first 24 hours." (Via Mediagazer.)

And here's where I cribbed the title above: "The Atlantic Will Experiment With Online Pay Models In 2013."

Andrew Sullivan, the Left's Leading Forensic Gynecologist, on Suicide Watch!

Boom!

That Pew Research poll put RAWMUSCLEGLUTES into meltdown mode.

Here's the headline at Jammie Wearing Fool, "Andrew Sullivan on Suicide Watch." Folks can click through at the link, but here's the opening graf at RMG's:

The Pew poll is devastating, just devastating. Before the debate, Obama had a 51 - 43 lead; now, Romney has a 49 - 45 lead. That's a simply unprecedented reversal for a candidate in October. Before Obama had leads on every policy issue and personal characteristic; now Romney leads in almost all of them. Obama's performance gave Romney a 12 point swing! I repeat: a 12 point swing.

It's an AIDS-related freak-out, no doubt. RMG can't believe Romney's got the advantage among women, and here's the chart on Romney's gains on helping  even greater likelihood to help the middle class:

It's terrible, just terrible.

Jammie snarks: "Just roll one up and get stoned, Andy."