The groomer thing can be dumb, but can also have some validity especially when schools formalize policies of keeping parents in the dark. "Don't tell your mommy and daddy about our little secret" should never be something adults are saying to children.
That, and some of what passes for "all ages" and/or "family friendly" drag entertainment is pretty raunchy, so if you combine exposing kids to highly sexualized content, and encouraging them to keep secrets from their parents, that adds up to "groomer" not being an entirely inappropriate description. Still gets thrown around too cavalierly, but it's not like it's a total nothingburger; there is some there there.
There's plenty of actual groomer/abusers in any community. Plenty of straight men who will troll around online forums and try to contact depressed and anxious teens and take advantage of them. It's not hard to seen that happening in LGBT spaces.
But vast majority of activists don't want to groom kids. I think there was this kernel in acadameia that saw a lot of puritanical Christian thought as a grooming technique. Like if kids couldn't articulate what their genitals were, and were told not to talk about sex or stuff like that, they wouldn't be able to say that they were abused if someone did something to them. Then things started going overboard with an obsession about not putting any filter for age appropriate teaching. I think a lot of LGBT ideology or whatever you want to call it has roots in its reaction against the American puritanical Christianity that was so long used as a cudgel against them.
Most of the kids at drag time story hour are brought by parents. I think it's hard to marry the "teachers want to hide things from their parents" and "parents take kids to dqsh" into a unified theory of grooming.
I agree that a lot of what schools are doing is wrong. Some schools are getting too enmeshed in aiding transition without any idea of how their authority gets intertwined in the process.
I have a couple thoughts on "I think it's hard to marry the "teachers want to hide things from their parents" and "parents take kids to dqsh" into a unified theory of grooming."
First, schools are also losing any sense of age-appropriateness for both curriculum and books stocked in school libraries, and teachers are trying to provide psychiatric "affirmative care" that they're grossly unqualified to even attempt. So there's some merit to the claim of the "school to gender clinic pipeline". https://www.city-journal.org/gender-transistions-school-to-clinic-pipeline (DQSH just adds fuel to the fire)
Second, online activists are definitely cheering all of the above, and castigating anyone who criticizes any of it as hate-filled stochastic terrorists, so it's largely the activist community that's the glue holding the "unified theory" together.
But why do DQSHs exist in the first place? I'm not claiming they can't. Or that they're inherently bad. But the veneer of "giving back to the community" is quite thin.
I think the vast majority of people involved in those shows are straight white ladies trying to post social proof about how liberal they are and semi unemployable gay men who are just happy to have the revenue stream (although I did see a video where a drag queen clapped his hands over his fake boobs when he saw a kid in the audience and I swear in that moment he became a republican) and then if you went up the chain probably not a lot of steps my guess is you’d find a bunch of pedophiles. Those two things are true simultaneously when I think about this and when people look over that piece I just don’t get it. Maybe it’s a bunch of pedophiles with some apologetics about consent and freedom for minors but people who want to have sex with kids are in this production chain somewhere. This doesn’t just happen out of nowhere.
Drag went from gay men dancing for each other at bars, to gay men dancing for straight ladies at bars, to gay men dancing on TV, to gay men dancing in not bars to straight ladies, to gay men dancing or reading at not bars to straight ladies and their kids. I don't see how pedos fit that chain.
Abusers work their way into any community, but they tend not to be the movers and shakers who set the rules. It'd be like saying the Bible was written to promote pedophilia because of some church abuse scandals. Or that the institution of parenthood was invented to promote incest because some men do rape their daughters.
So, I’m in no way suggesting there’s a grand council of Illuminatus warlocks standing around waiting to set up schemes to molest kids. However, it’s kind of hard to say this stuff never happens. It’s all pressures and circumstances. Catholic Church as you mentioned. Seville stuff is insane. Epstein stuff is the craziest stuff I’ve ever heard. There is a group of people who want something they absolutely are not allowed to have, so they worm themselves into a situation where the barriers and watchfulness to make sure that thing doesn’t happen are much less. Pressures, incentives, and opportunity.
I’m sure there are all kinds of innocent drag queen story hours, held by people who just aren’t very smart and want people to know that they are liberal and somehow equate letting someone gyrate around in front of their child with being an advocate for gay marriage. But in ten or twenty years I’m sure we’ll hear all kinds of stories about abuse around these things (even though I do support the notion below a certain age that they are in themselves abusive). You can’t tell me that child drag queen that’s in the news isn’t already an abuse survivor. I can see it all over him.
The innocent DQSHs probably don’t involve gyration in the first place. From what I understand many (I would hope most) drag events for kids remove the blatantly sexualized stuff and focus instead on the exaggerated femininity.
Yeah I wouldn’t really have a problem with a program that was “Hey my name is Winnifred and I’ll be reading the Very Hungry Caterpillar today” and then a conservatively dressed trans woman read a story to some kids. That a lot of people seemingly can’t tell the difference between that and a bunch of risqué dancing is kind of alarming.
That’s a good reminder of what the drag scene was like a couple decades ago. I remember when the main gay bar in the downtown of my medium size liberal metropolitan city would complain about the frat boys and ladies invading their bar on weekends. Years later I guess the drag performers and show producers found that the ladies were more likely to pay for drag brunches.
The sketchy part is where parents present drag as costume. I guess explaining Camp as a concept snd the history of vaudeville and entertainment debauchery is a little much for a 6 year old.
I think there’s another important angle to consider on why some - please note I said *some* - people go down the unhealthy heterodox rabbit hole: it’s a reaction to feeling betrayed by the people and ideas they invested in or maybe even made sacrifices for. For example, you have always been a very vocally liberal person, one who has donated time and money to Democrat causes, publicly urged and scolded people to “do the right thing,” argued with and even distanced from conservative friends and relatives, and fully supported every policy and talking point even when you had concerns or questions because you believed you were following the science, reading the legitimate news sources, and are on the team that cares about people who have been hurt or are struggling and need compassionate support. But then one day, you find out it’s your son with myocarditis and just talking about it gets you attacked as a dangerous anti-vaxxer, or your teen daughter suddenly the 3rd girl in her friend group demanding a binder and testosterone, the school has been lying to you, and you’re being told by everyone from your liberal friends to the president you fought to get elected that you are a bad mother who must want her child to die if you ask any questions (and a TERF who should be punched in the throat on top of it) or any other situation where real life crashes into ideology. Then you start researching things in legitimate places - like the original research papers - and find that legitimate scientists and journalists- even liberal ones! - have documented *exactly what you are experiencing* and it’s only the “bad, conservative” media outlets that have reported on it. It can feel like a deep betrayal, like your foundation for how you figure out what’s true vs not true has been shaken in a truly frightening way. And All of this is happening while you are in a place of personal/family crisis and your friends and your “people” are turning against you. It can really shake a person up. It’s the perfect set-up for landing in another extreme circle or falling down a rabbit hole.
I really like buying vinyl and live theater and shopping and watching stuff about skincare and makeup. I think it’s important to do that stuff and live your life away from the internet. When I get too sucked in, it goes nowhere good.
Tell that to the women’s soccer teams wearing “protect trans kids” shirts 🙃 A local team was openly advocating for trans people to compete in whatever sports category they want. Never mind that would completely negate the need for “women’s” sports. I just want to watch women at peak performance kicking balls!
Let's not kid ourselves, the audience for women's sports is.....niche, to put it nicely. Bill Burr has a great segment on just how many feminists (or anyone else for that matter) actually bother to follow the WNBA.
'Real' sports (i.e. men's sports) should be as apolitical as possible.
I think of it as a low-budget activity you can engage in with your kids to pass an evening- kind of like semi-pro men’s sports and AAA baseball games. Parking is free! Hot dogs are $1! Good wholesome fun. Not multibillion dollar money makers.
I doubt online discourse will get any saner in 2023, but I appreciate you fighting the good fight anyway. It isn't just progressives either -- the same craziness goes on in other spaces as well, though with slightly different decorations. Everyone seems to have given up on actually accomplishing anything, or even believing in anything, and just want to fight about petty sub-issues for their own personal benefit.
I’ve appreciate you, Jesse because for too many people, heterodox means anti-democrats or just conservative rather than holding more independent views. I find myself so alienated from a lot of “heterodox” spaces because they all fall in line behind the same bullshit.
Jordan Peterson has recently put a lot of effort into formulating and expounding a modern conservative manifesto so I'm not sure how accurate it is to describe him as not actually a conservative.
I don’t mind listening to conservatives. I never have. But I feel like these spaces tend to have the same anxieties and heroes and don’t always interrogate their own views. I think Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Thomas Sowell suck and that has nothing to do with being in a smug bubble.
I thought it was really ironic that Eric Weinstein coined the phrase “audience capture” given that his brother Bret is a classic example of that, he started out opposing some pointless woke policy at a university, but now he defends wacko stuff like using ivermectin to treat Covid.
I think there's a risk in having an intense interest in something, be it wokeness, racism, Trump, Biden, etc., that really pisses you off. While I have serious concerns about certain censorious tendencies on the right and the left, I try to limit the amount of time I spend thinking about them because I don't think it's healthy to spend large amounts of time angry.
One of the things that's helped with my depression is to refocus my thoughts to something else when my thinking gets too negative. If I'm not careful, it can be easy to let a whole day of negative thinking bring me down. When I catch myself in a pattern of negativity, I mentally visualize a stop sign, think STOP, and try to refocus my thoughts on something else. This isn't some kind of slam-dunk solution to depression, but it has helped improve my functioning and mood. You don't need to, and probably shouldn't, try to banish all negative thoughts and should work to improve things you're unhappy about, but it's healthier to STOP and to go look up a recipe for saag paneer than to spend all day seething about the latest outrage.
There's a certain type of person who seems taken something they're very angry about from being one of many things thing they think about or do to making it one of the only things they think about or do. Given their lack of other interests, I'm not sure they'd actually be much happier if they got out of bed tomorrow and found out all the wokeness they were mad about was magically gone.
For me it also helps to remind myself, when an orthodox progressive has emitted a smelly little orthodoxy, of the totality of my own political outlook and the totality of theirs, and thus of how much there is that we agree on that is very important. For example, two of Australia's most ardent proponents of current Anglophone progressive orthodoxy on gender are a Senator who does excellent work on climate change and the environment, and an economist who does excellent work on labour issues, inequality, poverty, etc.
There is also the melancholy historical fact that no generation of the Left has proven to be immune to one or other irrational enthusiasm that was considered at the time to be a matter of the highest progressive principle, yet was subsequently recognised to be, at best, a well-meaning but foolish excess and, at worst, complicity in foul crimes. We need to become better at recognising such errors before we fall too far into them.
I like wood working/carpentry because I’m a pretty weird guy already (although I keep most of it to myself in real life) and it just gets me in touch with reality where I fuck something up and just have to sigh and rub my head and go back and fix it for longer than the prep time I avoided out of laziness that caused the error to start with. Just gives me a good chance to really productively hate on myself.
Very good advice. I hesitate to post this and risk getting tarred as one of the "deranged" who's waded too far into crazyland, but I do think a lot of legit questions about vaccine safety and efficacy (especially the new bivalent booster) have been swept under the rug. Check out UCSF epidemologist Vinay Prasad for a moderately skeptical/nuanced take and, for a more "extreme" but still based on medical studies POV, check this out: https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/philadelphia-2023?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web. Jesse, we really need skilled science reporters like you to wade into this stuff instead of presuming all questions to be rooted in insane conpiracism. Idk if somone like "Arkmedic" is reliable or not, but I do know you to be.
I would love to see Jesse do a deep dive on myocarditis. The sense I've got from other substacks I more or less trust (like Rav Arora) is that for older people the risk of covid outweighs the risk of the vaccine, but for young people and young men* in particular, the vaccine carries a myocarditis risk that outweights vaccination benefits. Hindsight is 20/20 but as a 31 year old guy who got rocked by myocarditis, it would be good to know if there's anything I could have done differently to lower my risk.
*By men I of course mean semen-shooters, not any self-ID horseshit
“a self-reinforcing feedback loop that involves telling one’s audience what they want to hear and getting rewarded for it.”
Is there a better description of mainstream news media? It's the de facto business model for both right-wing media (Fox) and the left (pretty much all the rest). "Give the customer what they want" is the mantra for successful businesses in a free-market economy. So it makes sense that would apply to independent media (Substack, podcasts) as well as the corporate variety.
I agree to a large extent. But I also think the tendency toward echo chambers is probably a feature of our policies on media technologies and businesses, more so than the techs themselves. What I mean by that is that if we didn’t have a super monopolized media space, both traditional and social, and we didn’t allow surveillance advertising, we’d have a fundamentally different structure underpinning our media, with different incentives, and we’d likely see much different results. I’m sure there are other things we could do too, like maybe revitalizing the fairness doctrine, etc.
I’m a fan of Matt Taibbi for many reasons, not least of which are his explanation of how the traditional media’s business model has changed, and for introducing me to Matt Stoller, who has helped me better understand how social media factors into this stuff. Hate, Inc., by Taibbi, and Goliath, by Stoller, are both excellent reads if you’re not familiar. And actually, Taibbi and Katie Halper’s second interview with Stoller a few years back on Useful Idiots is stellar.
I absolutely agree, Noah, and if I'd fleshed out my comment more, I'd have made a similar point. Contemporary media are fine tuned to exploit the psychological need for humans to be part of a tribe/community and it's wreaking havoc on society. I'm also a big fan of Taibbi and thought Hate, Inc. was brilliant in it's diagnosis. I have not read Stoller but will look into him. Thanks for the tip.
One factor in Online Derangement Syndrome that you might note is the anarchy. There's no system, as there is in a healthy democratic society, for bringing decisions to a head. It's a cacophony of atomised voices, never a true collective. So another thing that can help is to join (and work to influence) a democratic political party. Put your issue in perspective, negotiate it with other people, expose yourself to challenge from people you respect and trust ... and just maybe, put your POV to the test at the ballot box.
I was disappointed with Sam Harris's position on this, but I think where a lot of people went wrong was to dismiss EVERYTHING he's ever said about anything else. All because he made a bad call on one issue, as big as it was.
And even then, I understand the rationale behind his position - he viewed Trump as a uniquely awful person to run the country, and to stop a side issue from derailing the election, it was justifiable for a company to suppress the story. If I felt that an individual would spell absolute disaster for the nation, I'd probably suspend my rigid ethical beliefs as well to get rid of him or her.
That said, I didn't think Trump was a dictator in waiting, as terrible a leader as he was, so there was no imminent emergency to respond to. And more importantly, if a small group of powerful people can make a subjective decision that impacts millions right before an election, then that throws open the floodgates for other powerful people to make similarly arbitrary decisions based on their personal beliefs. That's what the Supreme Court did earlier in the year - what's to say that they're wrong for acting on a sincerely held belief about who regulates abortion in the US?
It's a pity that Harris sees it differently, particularly as he has acknowledged this risk when defending his position. But I'm not boycotting him over it - he's got so much more to offer, especially as a prominent and intelligent critic of woke insanity!
I agree boycotting someone over an inverse-broken-clock moment is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I still follow Sam Harris even given his TDS, and I follow Freddie De Boer even though he's made gender-critical issues into a sacred cow topic.
I mean, everything Sam Harris had to say about the Hunter Biden laptop was proven deadass wrong by the Twitter Files, and I've yet to see a mea culpa from him.
He said Twitter had legit reasons to believe at the time that the laptop was planted Russian disinformation, when internal Twitter communications showed they knew perfectly well that wasn't the case. That's the reality in which we live.
Not very easily from the Android app, but in the first dump from Taibbi, the alibi for censoring the NYPost story discussed in emails between Baker/Gadde/Roth is an alleged violation of their "hacked materials" policy, NOT that it was faked. Of course, they knew they had no evidence it was hacked either, because it wasn't.
There is another point to remember: there is no virtue in heterodoxy for its own sake.
If you find that a particular progressive orthodoxy that you support is not soundly based in evidence or logic, is morally problematic, leads to a bad place in your life or the lives of people you know, is one-sided on an issue that involves a conflict between right and right, etc, then of course you have a right and a duty to reconsider your position and formulate or adopt a better position. That better position will be heterodox - but it will be a better position because you have done the work of research, reflection, discussion, etc, to come up with a better position. It will not be a better position simply by virtue of being heterodox.
Thanks for this - especially the preference intensity tip. I'll weave that one into my own look forward to 2023.
Audience capture is a stone cold killer of useful commentators. I make it my business to offend all comers (not really). But when some anti-woke pieces did particularly well the temptation to do more was noticeable. I had nothing fresh to say, so it was easy not to succumb. I wish some other writers would take this view..
The groomer thing can be dumb, but can also have some validity especially when schools formalize policies of keeping parents in the dark. "Don't tell your mommy and daddy about our little secret" should never be something adults are saying to children.
That, and some of what passes for "all ages" and/or "family friendly" drag entertainment is pretty raunchy, so if you combine exposing kids to highly sexualized content, and encouraging them to keep secrets from their parents, that adds up to "groomer" not being an entirely inappropriate description. Still gets thrown around too cavalierly, but it's not like it's a total nothingburger; there is some there there.
There's plenty of actual groomer/abusers in any community. Plenty of straight men who will troll around online forums and try to contact depressed and anxious teens and take advantage of them. It's not hard to seen that happening in LGBT spaces.
But vast majority of activists don't want to groom kids. I think there was this kernel in acadameia that saw a lot of puritanical Christian thought as a grooming technique. Like if kids couldn't articulate what their genitals were, and were told not to talk about sex or stuff like that, they wouldn't be able to say that they were abused if someone did something to them. Then things started going overboard with an obsession about not putting any filter for age appropriate teaching. I think a lot of LGBT ideology or whatever you want to call it has roots in its reaction against the American puritanical Christianity that was so long used as a cudgel against them.
Most of the kids at drag time story hour are brought by parents. I think it's hard to marry the "teachers want to hide things from their parents" and "parents take kids to dqsh" into a unified theory of grooming.
I agree that a lot of what schools are doing is wrong. Some schools are getting too enmeshed in aiding transition without any idea of how their authority gets intertwined in the process.
I have a couple thoughts on "I think it's hard to marry the "teachers want to hide things from their parents" and "parents take kids to dqsh" into a unified theory of grooming."
First, schools are also losing any sense of age-appropriateness for both curriculum and books stocked in school libraries, and teachers are trying to provide psychiatric "affirmative care" that they're grossly unqualified to even attempt. So there's some merit to the claim of the "school to gender clinic pipeline". https://www.city-journal.org/gender-transistions-school-to-clinic-pipeline (DQSH just adds fuel to the fire)
Second, online activists are definitely cheering all of the above, and castigating anyone who criticizes any of it as hate-filled stochastic terrorists, so it's largely the activist community that's the glue holding the "unified theory" together.
But why do DQSHs exist in the first place? I'm not claiming they can't. Or that they're inherently bad. But the veneer of "giving back to the community" is quite thin.
I think the vast majority of people involved in those shows are straight white ladies trying to post social proof about how liberal they are and semi unemployable gay men who are just happy to have the revenue stream (although I did see a video where a drag queen clapped his hands over his fake boobs when he saw a kid in the audience and I swear in that moment he became a republican) and then if you went up the chain probably not a lot of steps my guess is you’d find a bunch of pedophiles. Those two things are true simultaneously when I think about this and when people look over that piece I just don’t get it. Maybe it’s a bunch of pedophiles with some apologetics about consent and freedom for minors but people who want to have sex with kids are in this production chain somewhere. This doesn’t just happen out of nowhere.
Drag went from gay men dancing for each other at bars, to gay men dancing for straight ladies at bars, to gay men dancing on TV, to gay men dancing in not bars to straight ladies, to gay men dancing or reading at not bars to straight ladies and their kids. I don't see how pedos fit that chain.
Abusers work their way into any community, but they tend not to be the movers and shakers who set the rules. It'd be like saying the Bible was written to promote pedophilia because of some church abuse scandals. Or that the institution of parenthood was invented to promote incest because some men do rape their daughters.
So, I’m in no way suggesting there’s a grand council of Illuminatus warlocks standing around waiting to set up schemes to molest kids. However, it’s kind of hard to say this stuff never happens. It’s all pressures and circumstances. Catholic Church as you mentioned. Seville stuff is insane. Epstein stuff is the craziest stuff I’ve ever heard. There is a group of people who want something they absolutely are not allowed to have, so they worm themselves into a situation where the barriers and watchfulness to make sure that thing doesn’t happen are much less. Pressures, incentives, and opportunity.
I’m sure there are all kinds of innocent drag queen story hours, held by people who just aren’t very smart and want people to know that they are liberal and somehow equate letting someone gyrate around in front of their child with being an advocate for gay marriage. But in ten or twenty years I’m sure we’ll hear all kinds of stories about abuse around these things (even though I do support the notion below a certain age that they are in themselves abusive). You can’t tell me that child drag queen that’s in the news isn’t already an abuse survivor. I can see it all over him.
The innocent DQSHs probably don’t involve gyration in the first place. From what I understand many (I would hope most) drag events for kids remove the blatantly sexualized stuff and focus instead on the exaggerated femininity.
Yeah I wouldn’t really have a problem with a program that was “Hey my name is Winnifred and I’ll be reading the Very Hungry Caterpillar today” and then a conservatively dressed trans woman read a story to some kids. That a lot of people seemingly can’t tell the difference between that and a bunch of risqué dancing is kind of alarming.
That’s a good reminder of what the drag scene was like a couple decades ago. I remember when the main gay bar in the downtown of my medium size liberal metropolitan city would complain about the frat boys and ladies invading their bar on weekends. Years later I guess the drag performers and show producers found that the ladies were more likely to pay for drag brunches.
The sketchy part is where parents present drag as costume. I guess explaining Camp as a concept snd the history of vaudeville and entertainment debauchery is a little much for a 6 year old.
That would be one smart six year old who could read Sontag's Notes on Camp :).
I think there’s another important angle to consider on why some - please note I said *some* - people go down the unhealthy heterodox rabbit hole: it’s a reaction to feeling betrayed by the people and ideas they invested in or maybe even made sacrifices for. For example, you have always been a very vocally liberal person, one who has donated time and money to Democrat causes, publicly urged and scolded people to “do the right thing,” argued with and even distanced from conservative friends and relatives, and fully supported every policy and talking point even when you had concerns or questions because you believed you were following the science, reading the legitimate news sources, and are on the team that cares about people who have been hurt or are struggling and need compassionate support. But then one day, you find out it’s your son with myocarditis and just talking about it gets you attacked as a dangerous anti-vaxxer, or your teen daughter suddenly the 3rd girl in her friend group demanding a binder and testosterone, the school has been lying to you, and you’re being told by everyone from your liberal friends to the president you fought to get elected that you are a bad mother who must want her child to die if you ask any questions (and a TERF who should be punched in the throat on top of it) or any other situation where real life crashes into ideology. Then you start researching things in legitimate places - like the original research papers - and find that legitimate scientists and journalists- even liberal ones! - have documented *exactly what you are experiencing* and it’s only the “bad, conservative” media outlets that have reported on it. It can feel like a deep betrayal, like your foundation for how you figure out what’s true vs not true has been shaken in a truly frightening way. And All of this is happening while you are in a place of personal/family crisis and your friends and your “people” are turning against you. It can really shake a person up. It’s the perfect set-up for landing in another extreme circle or falling down a rabbit hole.
Agree 100% with your comment!
Having normal interests and friends is very important in order to keep you from falling down a rabbit hole.
Following sports is a big one for me. It's the easiest way to escape the online culture war.
I really like buying vinyl and live theater and shopping and watching stuff about skincare and makeup. I think it’s important to do that stuff and live your life away from the internet. When I get too sucked in, it goes nowhere good.
Sports! Yes! But my problem is that I only care when “my” teams are winning 🤨
It shouldn't be
Tell that to the women’s soccer teams wearing “protect trans kids” shirts 🙃 A local team was openly advocating for trans people to compete in whatever sports category they want. Never mind that would completely negate the need for “women’s” sports. I just want to watch women at peak performance kicking balls!
Let's not kid ourselves, the audience for women's sports is.....niche, to put it nicely. Bill Burr has a great segment on just how many feminists (or anyone else for that matter) actually bother to follow the WNBA.
'Real' sports (i.e. men's sports) should be as apolitical as possible.
I think of it as a low-budget activity you can engage in with your kids to pass an evening- kind of like semi-pro men’s sports and AAA baseball games. Parking is free! Hot dogs are $1! Good wholesome fun. Not multibillion dollar money makers.
I doubt online discourse will get any saner in 2023, but I appreciate you fighting the good fight anyway. It isn't just progressives either -- the same craziness goes on in other spaces as well, though with slightly different decorations. Everyone seems to have given up on actually accomplishing anything, or even believing in anything, and just want to fight about petty sub-issues for their own personal benefit.
I’ve appreciate you, Jesse because for too many people, heterodox means anti-democrats or just conservative rather than holding more independent views. I find myself so alienated from a lot of “heterodox” spaces because they all fall in line behind the same bullshit.
I agree that Haidt is not a conservative.
Jordan Peterson has recently put a lot of effort into formulating and expounding a modern conservative manifesto so I'm not sure how accurate it is to describe him as not actually a conservative.
I don’t mind listening to conservatives. I never have. But I feel like these spaces tend to have the same anxieties and heroes and don’t always interrogate their own views. I think Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Thomas Sowell suck and that has nothing to do with being in a smug bubble.
I thought it was really ironic that Eric Weinstein coined the phrase “audience capture” given that his brother Bret is a classic example of that, he started out opposing some pointless woke policy at a university, but now he defends wacko stuff like using ivermectin to treat Covid.
I thought the exact same thing
I think there's a risk in having an intense interest in something, be it wokeness, racism, Trump, Biden, etc., that really pisses you off. While I have serious concerns about certain censorious tendencies on the right and the left, I try to limit the amount of time I spend thinking about them because I don't think it's healthy to spend large amounts of time angry.
One of the things that's helped with my depression is to refocus my thoughts to something else when my thinking gets too negative. If I'm not careful, it can be easy to let a whole day of negative thinking bring me down. When I catch myself in a pattern of negativity, I mentally visualize a stop sign, think STOP, and try to refocus my thoughts on something else. This isn't some kind of slam-dunk solution to depression, but it has helped improve my functioning and mood. You don't need to, and probably shouldn't, try to banish all negative thoughts and should work to improve things you're unhappy about, but it's healthier to STOP and to go look up a recipe for saag paneer than to spend all day seething about the latest outrage.
There's a certain type of person who seems taken something they're very angry about from being one of many things thing they think about or do to making it one of the only things they think about or do. Given their lack of other interests, I'm not sure they'd actually be much happier if they got out of bed tomorrow and found out all the wokeness they were mad about was magically gone.
Good advice, thanks Jesse.
For me it also helps to remind myself, when an orthodox progressive has emitted a smelly little orthodoxy, of the totality of my own political outlook and the totality of theirs, and thus of how much there is that we agree on that is very important. For example, two of Australia's most ardent proponents of current Anglophone progressive orthodoxy on gender are a Senator who does excellent work on climate change and the environment, and an economist who does excellent work on labour issues, inequality, poverty, etc.
There is also the melancholy historical fact that no generation of the Left has proven to be immune to one or other irrational enthusiasm that was considered at the time to be a matter of the highest progressive principle, yet was subsequently recognised to be, at best, a well-meaning but foolish excess and, at worst, complicity in foul crimes. We need to become better at recognising such errors before we fall too far into them.
I like wood working/carpentry because I’m a pretty weird guy already (although I keep most of it to myself in real life) and it just gets me in touch with reality where I fuck something up and just have to sigh and rub my head and go back and fix it for longer than the prep time I avoided out of laziness that caused the error to start with. Just gives me a good chance to really productively hate on myself.
Very good advice. I hesitate to post this and risk getting tarred as one of the "deranged" who's waded too far into crazyland, but I do think a lot of legit questions about vaccine safety and efficacy (especially the new bivalent booster) have been swept under the rug. Check out UCSF epidemologist Vinay Prasad for a moderately skeptical/nuanced take and, for a more "extreme" but still based on medical studies POV, check this out: https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/philadelphia-2023?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web. Jesse, we really need skilled science reporters like you to wade into this stuff instead of presuming all questions to be rooted in insane conpiracism. Idk if somone like "Arkmedic" is reliable or not, but I do know you to be.
I would love to see Jesse do a deep dive on myocarditis. The sense I've got from other substacks I more or less trust (like Rav Arora) is that for older people the risk of covid outweighs the risk of the vaccine, but for young people and young men* in particular, the vaccine carries a myocarditis risk that outweights vaccination benefits. Hindsight is 20/20 but as a 31 year old guy who got rocked by myocarditis, it would be good to know if there's anything I could have done differently to lower my risk.
*By men I of course mean semen-shooters, not any self-ID horseshit
I ha e a background in immunology and would be more than happy to provide him with background, assist him in evaluating any evidence.
“a self-reinforcing feedback loop that involves telling one’s audience what they want to hear and getting rewarded for it.”
Is there a better description of mainstream news media? It's the de facto business model for both right-wing media (Fox) and the left (pretty much all the rest). "Give the customer what they want" is the mantra for successful businesses in a free-market economy. So it makes sense that would apply to independent media (Substack, podcasts) as well as the corporate variety.
I agree to a large extent. But I also think the tendency toward echo chambers is probably a feature of our policies on media technologies and businesses, more so than the techs themselves. What I mean by that is that if we didn’t have a super monopolized media space, both traditional and social, and we didn’t allow surveillance advertising, we’d have a fundamentally different structure underpinning our media, with different incentives, and we’d likely see much different results. I’m sure there are other things we could do too, like maybe revitalizing the fairness doctrine, etc.
I’m a fan of Matt Taibbi for many reasons, not least of which are his explanation of how the traditional media’s business model has changed, and for introducing me to Matt Stoller, who has helped me better understand how social media factors into this stuff. Hate, Inc., by Taibbi, and Goliath, by Stoller, are both excellent reads if you’re not familiar. And actually, Taibbi and Katie Halper’s second interview with Stoller a few years back on Useful Idiots is stellar.
I absolutely agree, Noah, and if I'd fleshed out my comment more, I'd have made a similar point. Contemporary media are fine tuned to exploit the psychological need for humans to be part of a tribe/community and it's wreaking havoc on society. I'm also a big fan of Taibbi and thought Hate, Inc. was brilliant in it's diagnosis. I have not read Stoller but will look into him. Thanks for the tip.
One factor in Online Derangement Syndrome that you might note is the anarchy. There's no system, as there is in a healthy democratic society, for bringing decisions to a head. It's a cacophony of atomised voices, never a true collective. So another thing that can help is to join (and work to influence) a democratic political party. Put your issue in perspective, negotiate it with other people, expose yourself to challenge from people you respect and trust ... and just maybe, put your POV to the test at the ballot box.
I like your Substack. Happy new years
Great article, Jesse.
People are gonna come at you about the Sam Harris part of it, because they are dumb, but you are absolutely correct.
I was disappointed with Sam Harris's position on this, but I think where a lot of people went wrong was to dismiss EVERYTHING he's ever said about anything else. All because he made a bad call on one issue, as big as it was.
And even then, I understand the rationale behind his position - he viewed Trump as a uniquely awful person to run the country, and to stop a side issue from derailing the election, it was justifiable for a company to suppress the story. If I felt that an individual would spell absolute disaster for the nation, I'd probably suspend my rigid ethical beliefs as well to get rid of him or her.
That said, I didn't think Trump was a dictator in waiting, as terrible a leader as he was, so there was no imminent emergency to respond to. And more importantly, if a small group of powerful people can make a subjective decision that impacts millions right before an election, then that throws open the floodgates for other powerful people to make similarly arbitrary decisions based on their personal beliefs. That's what the Supreme Court did earlier in the year - what's to say that they're wrong for acting on a sincerely held belief about who regulates abortion in the US?
It's a pity that Harris sees it differently, particularly as he has acknowledged this risk when defending his position. But I'm not boycotting him over it - he's got so much more to offer, especially as a prominent and intelligent critic of woke insanity!
I agree boycotting someone over an inverse-broken-clock moment is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I still follow Sam Harris even given his TDS, and I follow Freddie De Boer even though he's made gender-critical issues into a sacred cow topic.
I mean, everything Sam Harris had to say about the Hunter Biden laptop was proven deadass wrong by the Twitter Files, and I've yet to see a mea culpa from him.
I mean, not in the reality in which we actually live, but go off.
He said Twitter had legit reasons to believe at the time that the laptop was planted Russian disinformation, when internal Twitter communications showed they knew perfectly well that wasn't the case. That's the reality in which we live.
To borrow a tool from Jesse's toolset, can you quote a part of the Twitter Files that actually shows this?
Not very easily from the Android app, but in the first dump from Taibbi, the alibi for censoring the NYPost story discussed in emails between Baker/Gadde/Roth is an alleged violation of their "hacked materials" policy, NOT that it was faked. Of course, they knew they had no evidence it was hacked either, because it wasn't.
That's not good enough. Just because something involves hacked materials doesn't mean that it doesn't involve intentional factual distortion as well.
Either you have the goods and can show it, or you don't. If you can't show the quote (s), I have no reason to take your claims seriously.
There is another point to remember: there is no virtue in heterodoxy for its own sake.
If you find that a particular progressive orthodoxy that you support is not soundly based in evidence or logic, is morally problematic, leads to a bad place in your life or the lives of people you know, is one-sided on an issue that involves a conflict between right and right, etc, then of course you have a right and a duty to reconsider your position and formulate or adopt a better position. That better position will be heterodox - but it will be a better position because you have done the work of research, reflection, discussion, etc, to come up with a better position. It will not be a better position simply by virtue of being heterodox.
Thanks for this - especially the preference intensity tip. I'll weave that one into my own look forward to 2023.
Audience capture is a stone cold killer of useful commentators. I make it my business to offend all comers (not really). But when some anti-woke pieces did particularly well the temptation to do more was noticeable. I had nothing fresh to say, so it was easy not to succumb. I wish some other writers would take this view..