Actually I don't think I've ever doomscrolled. For one thing, I don't have a smartphone. For another, I don't have social media feeds to scroll. I didn't even know they had notifications that chime or buzz. No wonder it makes people crazy.
I get my news and opinion journalism intentionally from subscription-based media and other credible sources. That includes a daily hard copy newspaper. I don't read everything in it because there's only so much I need to know about the Madigan trial, but I do get the gist of how far along the trial is. I spend varying amounts of time reading, but I choose content that I can learn something from; I don't go there to be angered, so I don't come away in that state. Call me crazy, but it works for me.
I've taken to backtracking a bit at the mothership. Two things: I don't feel as funny as before, so I have less to offer. 2nd, I'm rarely replying to comments, as most of the comments I'd want to respond are where I disagree with them. It just seems angrier, I don't wanna stoke it.
I even blocked KDW! 😳He insulted a commenter, and I asked myself "would I block this if it weren't the author"? Yup! So I blocked him. I wonder if he recognizes why?
I'll scan for comments from people I enjoy (who don't write doomsday stuff), but once I start seeing too much doom 'n gloom, I have to leave. Eeyore is tough for me, he's a talented writer, but he is pure doom 'n gloom. I imagine if there is a cancer breakthrough during the administration of 47, he'll wonder if that's bad news or not. 🤦♂️
Growing up, I was a fan of Charlie Chaplin; I studied how much he emoted with his face, how talented he was. One of his movie lines (from "The Kid") resonated with me. "A smile and perhaps a tear". So when I post I try to mix some humor and some personal in a way where they fit together.
The Internet is the fast food of journalistic cuisine..salty, sweet and full of "bad fat" half truths.
Snacking on this occasionally won't kill us right away, but as Roseanne pointed out, who can just eat a few potato chips??
Instant gratification seems to reduce us to our previous infantile state of nuzzling at mother's breast. We should be rightly wary of things that promise instant gratification, for fear that those turn off the adult in our brains. One of my former clients was the CEO of a large telecommunications firm that essentially invented the cell/mobile phone. He confessed that his company only produced these with the limited market of executive use. The company couldn't imagine it having a broader appeal. He had real concerns about it's broad use. Perhaps he finally got through to Kansas City, MO and state government, because a law has just gone into effect that will allow the arrests of any person driving while using a cell phone. The use that is the most distracting is doom scrolling the internet on one's phone, of course.
We have a fascination with fast action as humans, and a lot of fast stuff has an almost magical quality to it. We tend to forego logic when witnessing magic, because who wants the fun and awe to end too soon? We would all like to believe we could successfully ride the fast race horse or drive a race car, but the facts say otherwise. And the internet gambling folks are working hard to convince everyone that fast online gambling is safe and harmless.
DougAZ is right that this is another new frontier with all the inherent dangers and possible rewards of any frontier. The only good question with any frontier is this: Will the possible rewards outweigh both the known and unknown risks? I posit that we have not faced the
true depth of the risks to human minds and souls, perhaps because we fear the answers.
Congrats. Although the Luca Brasi quote comes to mind and I don't know the female equivalent "Don Corleone, I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your daughter's wedding...on the day of your daughter's wedding. And I hope their first child be a masculine child"
It’s 27 degrees and the 3 day deep freeze begins tomorrow. 🥶 Still no snow but it sure looks like there’s snow on the roads. Oh wait, that’s road salt detritus from the dusting we had two days ago.
Good morning. In the 20s here but slated to rise above freezing for much of the day -- the first time in at least two weeks. And we're supposed to get -- not snow, but rain -- tomorrow. (Then the freezer returns next week, dropping us to single digits).
The mothership is covering the first round of Senate conformation hearings for Trump's cabinet picks. FP's Friday potpourri called "TGIF" mentions Joe Biden's farewell speech.
It was all good and no perceived bad, in the beginning.
My friend, who invented the online multi-player gaming in 1973, took me to our schools Project MAC. Man and Computer or Machine Aided Cognition. We played MAZE for 10 to 30 hours straight. It was like landing on a new land or planet. DARPANET. the birth of SkyNET.
This was the school that had the first Electrical Engineering department. Alfred P Sloan was an 1895 grad. Ken Olson, DEC, Polaroid, blah blah.
But outside of school, it did not exist. The business world used big iron, tape drives, punch cards and COBOL. We wore ties to work.
But literally no one in business I saw, including BigCorp, had an iota of awareness in personal computers.
But. We got a very cool new toy for us commercial folks. Voicemail. This was the first cultural online medium IMHO. Group voicemails. VMX.
There were no rules in 1981. It was the wild west of non live, Group online interactions and it was well interesting.
In geek school, we had a term, flaming. Also new then as John Dean was telling tales. This was VMX. A single salesman had a quality or late shipment issue. 20 people were copied on a rant, full of demands and accusations and commercial "threats"... we're going to lose this order. If big, "they'll call Jack".
There was no decorum.
But, like the mighty "chicken the little", equilibrium arrived as tantrums didn't get the ship to respond...... any more than a more rational communication.
Until about 1983. Email.
We had email at school. It was invented there too. It's not Relativity, but it introduced Uncertainty.
Voicemail was still used because it was mobile. Sorta. Hanging outside a rolled down window using a pay phone on Gratiot Ave in Detroit in a 15F howling snow blizzard was modernity itself.
Email needed fixed to base monitors. And the flaming began. And 30 40 people copied, loudly, imminently, now!!! Fix my issue!!
There is a childish petulance to adulthood when matters of concern can be dealt with by remote means. In-person you rarely saw such. Unless you worked with me at BigCorp. Another story 🫣
Then the internet came home.
I had an IBM PC, then MACs. Dial up 1200 baud modems. Thats like a billion times slower than your IP speed now.
And AOL begat an age. Chat rooms organized by interests. Wasn't my jam. I'm addicted to online gaming. Online learning.
Endorphins. FOMO. Distraction. Escape. Achievements. Wins. Redo. Community. Team. Anonymity. Cheap. New. Novel. Curiosity. Learning. Discovery. Expressive. Inconsequential. Available. Amazing. Fascinating. Educational. Overwhelming. TMI. Not enough information. Want more. Learning can be its own "disease". Evolution. Singular. Communal.
Richard Halliburton on your phone.
Social media - Facebook for fam, friends, class of 72 HS. College friends don't. Interesting. Twitter for at first, BadDoug ha! Poltics sux. Now just sports. Which is only all Boston.
Summary. It has all changed over the half century. My journey, N=1 of me, watching X = 1000s I've known, says this.
It starts bad. Always. New is a frontier. There are always wars. So far, the wars burn out like a wildfire. But the time that takes I think, is correlated with the size of "The Group". Email and VMX at BigCorp has hundreds of users. It took months to settle out.
FB, X, Substack, and all the pundits will burn out to some less dynamic equilibrium. It might take another 10 years.
Because the more a thing gets known, it's orbiting far above the frontier. It's no longer a place to explore. It's settlement time.
I am pretty much an Excel power user. How did I get there. Long story short, I had a pulse.
I applied for a GA position in the B-school, working for my mentor. Then a Diva down the hall bullied the department chair, demanding it for his nephew. My mentor and he had an argument. To save the peace I visited the department chair and quietly withdrew, explaining why. He was grateful. I applied elsewhere on campus (believe it or not, many offices back then waited until the last minute).
The Friday night after the first week of school, I still didn't have a GA position. But I had a dream, where I heard "I haven't forgotten you". The next morning I helped my Dad roof a barn. When we were done I took a shower. 5 minutes in, Dad handed me to portable phone; it was the head of computing services offering me a GA position.
They had a Chinese student get denied his visa, and they feared they'd lose the line if they didn't fill it. He had called the business school, asking for a grad student; no computer experience necessary, all they needed was already admitted to BSU and they had a pulse. The department chair suggested my name. I actually got paid more than the B-school position! 😀
They had no clue what to do with me. But I stepped up with whatever they asked, I filled in here and there, etc. I worked with the budget officer, who kept the computing service budget in his head. After 6 weeks he had a heart attack (and for the record it wasn't my fault!). So I filled in for him the rest of the year. I developed the budget in Lotus 1-2-3. I learned how to use Lotus, and taught mini-courses within the department (and later to the B-school) on how to use it. That led to my career jobs, as well as my teaching (I taught Lotus-1-2-3 at a community college in 1986).
So many good things happened to me because I had a pulse! 😉
Microsoft will tell you they did streamline the interface. And with a straight face.
There issue is they think they know how people work, rather than observe how people work.
Here's an example. I use a lot of "fixed references" in excel (where you place a dollar sign in front of a cell address). It used to be you could hover over the cell, and tap F4. You could place it over the letter, the number, or both. Now, you first edit the cell and then do that. A little extra work when it wasn't needed. And they changed it with little notice.
One other warning. Excel on a Mac is not the same as on a Windows-based PC. Don't create on one and then switch to the other, it can get messed up real fast. They were developed by different teams within Microsoft, who are in different units.
I had my leading to marry my wife Pam 2 years before I met her (we married 5 years after meeting). I had my leading to adopt my daughter 5 years before she was born.
In both situations, it took years for me to understand the how and why of it all.
Remarkable gifts come to people who manage to keep their hearts and minds open. I don,t do as well as you do, but I try hard despite my temperamental inclination to the contrary.
Here’s a wonderfully told Jon Ronson BBC story from his 2021 series “Things Fell Apart” about the roots of the culture wars. This one was an early example of a cancellation campaign on Usenet from the ‘80s.
What makes it so good is that it’s so completely human: People bungle into a conflict by accident while pursuing different innocent goals, not with any malice.
Interesting. I worked for Compaq (later HP) and watched as email came on the scene and took off. Same with voice mail. By the end of my working days trying to keep up with incoming emails was a full time job. I didn’t always succeed. It was a great tool that unfortunately was easy to abuse with CYA behavior, where copying huge numbers of people on messages became a way of making the writer feel important and also positioned them to later say “You were copied on that email 3 months ago so you can’t say you didn’t know.” By then my company was huge and there was an entire email culture. I don’t miss it a bit.
Very entertaining. But you left off 300 baud, where you can watch - one - character - at - a - time - being received. My first modem was 1200 baud, but a BBS I accessed ws 300 baud.
And then there was Compuserve.
Fun times for a CompSci grad who learned programming in the '70s on a Big Iron IBM using punch cards, typed out on an IBM 029 keypunch. (Don't' drop your card deck!)
I didn't go into compsci, so my later programming was RPG if I recall and some Basic. I think the last program I wrote was a zoom able color Mandelbrot set for my Mac II and a color monitor.
Yeah, Filemaker Pro, a relational database with container fields. I like to collect facts, odds and ends, photos... and suddenly I had a tool for keeping it all organized. Sudden access to the entirety of human knowledge...that made an impression.
I briefly found FB interesting, with brief meaning a few months. Twitter seemed brilliant for about a month. Social media has never fascinated me. I found it, and still find it, vapid.
Same. Apple has its frustrations, but when I’ve gone to Windows, I’ve usually come to regret it.
The worst was the period when I was translating using translating macros in Word on a PC and would get interruptions for “Anti-Virus subscription ending soon!” or some system warning no human could understand as an app-seizing popup with the scalp-singeing options “Abort, retry, fail?” I reached the point where I just couldn’t take it anymore….
I went through a succession of Brother portable electric "word processors" with that little window that showed about 1/4 of the sentence you were typing as you typed it...with that cheesey printer so I could have paper output.
The original Dispatch comment section was a blessed relief from other comment sections: a generally pleasant, interesting social group. It was a haven of reasonableness during the pandemic. In the last couple of years it has grown and become challenging to navigate, not to mention a little meaner.
I remember when someone responded to one of my comments with “I know you’re lying about this” and I was a little shocked. I am sometimes hasty, often dense, but I never lie! ( Now, we did have Kevin Durant years ago and he could be outrageous but rarely mean).
It’s interesting that many of us were part of that original group.
One of the "tells" of a No Fun Person is a default to, "You're lying," rather than the far more reasonable, "You're mistaken," or the polite, "Are you sure that's correct? I thought (different facts)."
Are you sure that’s correct? I thought the definition of a No Fun person was a person who just looks blank upon hearing a truly excellent play on words.
Ah, Kevin Durant. He joined The Free Press and was notorious over there. His cynicism got the best of him and he’s been banned, I believe. He has his own substack but he rarely pens anything. He is coarse. There is another substack group that’s a spin off from The Free Press called Jotting in Purple where many of those who have been censored by TFP have gathered.
You lost me Doug. I haven’t seen a shred of evidence that they love MAGA. And writing “those Cons” sounds an awful lot like everyone in that group that’s different than you is awful. Sorry if this sounds harsh but what you wrote is evidence supporting the points today’s post makes.
I’m not in the least hostile to Jonah or KDW, but, like Allah Nick, a little of them for me goes a long way.
I don’t see any of them as encouraging MAGA, unless it’s as a challenge to self-styled MAGA enforcer types who think they’ll crack a few skulls and bring everyone onside.
I’ve seen comment sections on the left that were excruciatingly hostile to anyone from the right before, and it’s just downright hateful. So I wouldn’t want to be on the left in a comment section that was aggressively right-wing, either.
I agree. It gets to the point where maintaining your own political/moral/personal integrity against the commenting hostility is just too much trouble.
I certainly didn't see any of the editors/writers as MAGA (not by a long shot). There was a small handful of Trump supporters among the commenters but that didn't bother me at all. I almost welcomed the relief!
I do miss Charlotte Lawson,s reporting on the middle east. i thought she was terrific. Her photographs were wonderful too.
I don't get your meaning. I'm not fond of Jonah or KDW but both are non-MAGA cons. When I do go to the TMD comments section, I see lots of variation but not MAGA.
My neocortex must be tiny because the idea of 150 stable social relationships strikes me as fantastically large.
I am curious how many subscribers use this site - only to read? and how many to comment/react?
I'd also like to know how this site differs from "the mothership." I know it began as a reaction to Disqus, but I think that was not enough to sustain it. I find the 2 sites altogether different. (I no longer subscribe to TD.)
To add to Cynthia’s numbers, there’s about 50 to 60 out of 80-ish who register as having opened the emails on a given day, and roughly 50 that the Substack foo reckons are active (3/5 to 5/5 stars for “activity”). Maybe 10 to 15 comment regularly by my guess.
I'm curious, too, now that I think about it, about the number of subscribers.
The beginnings of CSLF were, if I remember correctly, twofold: 1) TD's decision to move off substack to their own site, which was, to put it kindly, glitchy in the extreme. It made commenting a chore; 2) The comments section, which had been pretty interesting, took on a confrontational tone and many of us could no longer abide it. CSLF has grown and changed but, to my mind, has never lost its founding spirit. We want to inform each other and have fun. Oh, and there are those of us who like to "pun."
"... what we’re doing here at CSLF. It’s about the interaction rather than fueling fear, anger, and loathing."
Lordy.
That *almost* sounds like a mission statement. But it doesn't address all the fueling of the punditry that goes on 'round here. So, it needs some work yet.
You're pretty good at that sort of thing, O. Maybe you could touch it up a bit?
I know, right? I don't want to say we've been sold short, but there's so much short selling goin' on farther down this thread that the SEC will probably show up at the CSLF corporate offices next week to start an investigation.
Lots of mean people pretending not to be mean. As the election grew nearer, most of them found it impossible to maintain the pretense. A lot of TDS which gets boring after a while. DT, for better or worse, is a fact to deal with and no amount of loathing will change that. It’s too bad it got out of control because there were some very smart and interesting people there who had things to say that got lost in the hostility. The effort to wade through the snark just got too much for me.
One of the editors(Steve?) commented just before I left that the founding target audience had been “regular” people who didn’t work in politics professionally. The readership ended up, to his surprise, greatly populated by the professional political class and its media spokesmen.
Many of the comments took on a preachy tone which I found off-putting. That maybe coincided with the large and active “Faith” section, which seeped over into the politics. David French indulged in a lot of overlap, and I don’t know how/if that affected the overall tone of the site.
these are only my own impressions - could be that I wasn’t there long enough to actually know what I’m talking about!
I’ve loved participating in the comment section but the last few months it has become pretty unbearable and I’m rethinking my subscription. I read Jonah’s latest last night and thought about jumping into discussions but didn’t. The hate for Trump is just incredible. I didn’t vote for him but he won and that gives him the right to try what he wants. Who was it who said “Elections have consequences?”😉 It’s surprising to see so many wishing for him to fail. Very sad.
All of our leaders have been humans with accompanying human faults, some larger than others. The greater danger to our constitutional republic is the growing number of people who seem to be both ignorant of real history, especially our own, and willing to embrace an authoritarian regime.
The people whining about Trump need to ask themselves how many real people they've talked with in small rural or urban "unimportant" areas. The only person on the left who "gets it" is Robert Reich, who warned about the MAGA phenomenon 30 years ago! And he is also the only one on the left with any compassion left for MAGA voters, who he feels should not be demonized merely for voting in what they perceive as their best interests.
I see no point in hating Trump, or wishing him ill, or wishing him to fail. All of those will not change Trump, but they might harm the American people,
and our collective soul. Criticizing Trump just elevates him in the public eye, and makes his followers cling tighter.
The real thing that needs to change here is our desire for a leader and a party or administration to dominate and trample over those who disagree with us. This is a rampant idea on both sides and it is both illogical and immoral. Our constitution rigorously defends our right to dissent--in public, as well as private.
Regarding any elected official, I always say that I want him to succeed at the things I think are good ideas, and I want him to fail at the things I think are bad ideas.
Build national defense capability and make aggressor states/groups decide that they'll just stay home? I want that to succeed. Raise tariffs and louse up global trade even more? I want that to fail.
The thing is, i'm open to the possibility that what I presently consider a bad idea might in fact end up to have been a good idea. I'm good with whatever produces a good result. I think American are a lot more divided as to means than to ends.
What about deep frying Hostess Twinkees or Snickers bars? Succeed or fail?
My test of competence for a politician is to invite them to do it and see if they try to hold Twinkee while they try to fry it. 😬 Some say it is a low bar, but ya gotta have standards!
Comment sections that are too busy or crowded become overwhelming for me, since I’m the type who feels obliged to read most/all of what else was said before commenting. I didn’t have time for that at TD.
Eventually I dropped the subscription because I was only getting around to reading about an article a month, and sometimes not even that much. I have to review subscriptions from time to time to find out where the money goes.
I like the publication and their project, but I can’t support them as a charity.
I haven't experienced what many of you apparently have. I don't find the "mothership" to be a hellhole. I'm still a big fan of Jonah. His solo podcasts are a must-listen for me, and I catch maybe half of the interview ones, depending on the topic and guest. I don't feel bullied or pushed around over there, and I deal with trolls by ignoring them. I read articles and comment there almost every day, and I have no intention of giving up my subscription--unless the Disgus malfunctions force me to. Is that OK?
I like Jonah too and read most of what he writes. He almost always makes me think, which is what I look for. Sometimes I don’t have enough self control to ignore the commenters who don’t deserve attention. I need to work on that.
My loyalty to TD has less to do with its comments section (to which I comment anymore maybe once a day, if that) and more to its editorial stance.
But (outside certain contributors like Nick and Kevin) I don't see that much never-Trumpism. TD is quite mild compared to The Bulwark, where TDS is a job qualification.
I let my subscription to TD lapse a year ago; the only things I miss are Nick and Kevin. Jonah's self regard is tiring. The Bulwark does have some good writers; one just has to pick and choose.
I read TMD, some of the articles, and the dispatch and Advisory Opinions podcasts. Jonah is an "acquired taste" which Cynthia seems to have acquired, but I have not, so I mostly ignore him.
At any news website, there are some people I would like more than others. I'm not on Free Press as much as TD (I subscribe to both), or I would have a list of writers to ignore there as well.
TD's straight news articles are generally reliable IMO. FP is a bit uneven, but when they are good, they are very very good. They had some great reporting on the LA fires, for example.
I find TFP much easier to pick and choose. TD, for me, is a much stickier web - lots of links, cross-references, repetition - once i was in there, much harder to get out of. I always ended up mad - often at myself!
I like Jonah; my husband can't go near him. He goes round and round and often ends up exactly where he started but covering a fair amount of ground in the meantime. Most things in life aren,t either/or and his perspective respects that, maybe to a fault for some. I loved the readers' dogs. There was an unforgettable golden with schoolgirl bows on the ends of her ears…
The Dispatch is constructed to foment outrage and ire. Just read some non paywall headlines of Williamson. Such an arrogant intellectual bully. Who makes 0.01% = 50%.
Takes the exception and makes it apply to a group.
Don't miss it at all.
But there were many on the left and right, who I loved as decent and respectful people
I will add tho that I never minded KW's opinions (many of which I share), but i did come to mind his gratuitously hurtful meanness in the interests of competitive cleverness. I do miss him despite myself. He's a brilliant stylist and very funny man.
No you pretty much got it right. I am left of the TD readership but I found it interesting and informative. Until it wasn’t. This is much more to my liking and I feel as if I’ve found a community. Even to doors 🚪 I get for punning don’t deter me.
Well, you almost got that right. It is those of us who make the puns and offer the occasional "bon mot" who are the hilarious ones (Blush. Pat on back). Phil is the community enforcer, but every once in a while he comes up with something very funny.
You know, I think that's true. I like politics a lot - I think it's fascinating, but more for the humanity of it all, the human strengths and foibles, the human comedy and tragedy. I don’t hang onto every detail, or attach myself to “sides." i don't find it fun or even useful to spend the little time I have left constructing elaborate justifications and defenses. i mostly like to know what other people think. When they all start sounding alike, I loose interest pretty quick. I prob stuck with TD as long as I did because I found KW, hateful as he surely is, a brilliant writer and shockingly funny. I didn't like myself for enjoying however - it was as close as I wanted to come to dancing with the devil.
Yes. To clarify my comment elsewhere, Kevin can be/is hateful, but as Kurt says, he is a brilliant writer and often mean/funny. Sort of like H.L. Mencken.
Yeah, that's me. I'm interested in politics to the extent it reveals humanity's predilections for self destruction, self dealing, how civilizations come to be and how they fade, and all that sort of stuff. Day to day "he said, they did" leaves me cold and the worst are those explaining how what's going to happen or the ones with the headlines asking a question, i.e., "What's Next For (insert topic du jour)?" As if some schmoe can tell the future...
Politics are just one aspect of any human being (at least any I'd care to spend a lot of time with). There are so many other things to know about anyone - things that more often than not make sense of the politics! Cultures are complicated and various, in the present time as well as in retrospect. The less future I have, the less I,m interested in the game of forecasts.
Hubby and I participate in a senior exercise group and one of the enforced rules is no political discussions. One of us wandered into politics the other day and when denial and agreement started I commented that all our problems are human problems. Unsaid was that we are all human...
Yes, MarqueG started the CSLF immediately following the first major revamp of The Dispatch. Substack, as people may have noticed, has a functioning commenting facility. The Dispatch's first independent effort was - I'm series - far worse than Disgus.
At first, the point was to discuss content from The Dispatch, but eventually, they got a little better, so you could comment there if you wanted to. MarqueG began writing independent content, and then he recruited other contributors.
We have 82 subscribers, but you don't have to be a subscriber to comment: you just need a Substack account. We try hard to have a cooperative and communitarian vibe, rather than an adversarial one.
Thank you for the feedback. I like to discuss issues and events with people who have a variety of experiences and perspectives. I think we learn through disagreement, if it is informative disagreement.
If a disagreement ends with nothing resolved and, "That was a fun talk, catch you later," that's good enough.
I have never joined any social media site, except LinkedIn, which my former company said was important to my business. Spoiler alert: It was not. And who is Dunbar?
I “deleted” FB in 2016 (scare quotes because you can’t delete it for real), never did Xitter, but I still occasionally get on IG, which has turned into a wasteland of posts I don’t care about, not to mention the nonstop attempts to entice me with soft porn nearly naked women writhing invitingly. It’s all wretched.
I do click around Substack and find writing that’s worth reading. And there’s this place, which is fun and often thought provoking.
I like scrolling my own Instagram account at times because I have some cool photos on there. Mostly nature and dogs. I purposely maintain it in such a way that it’s anonymous to people who don’t know me as it’s a public account.
That's a good idea. I liked it so much when it was new. We had a small crew of building science people, artists and photographers, and it was a great way to share pics and knowledge.
I might make a new account and do what you said; make it anonymous so I can put up China photos.
I’m arog81 for a glimpse in the life of BikerChick. I think there’s only one photo of me on there. I’ll probably delete that photo someday but it’s super cute and makes me smile.
"The chime or buzz of a social media notification gives us the quick thrill of social engagement."
I don't use any social media platforms, unless you count Substack. The sound I get when there's a reply on Substack (I'd turn it off if I could figure out how) is the same as the one for texts and WhatsApp notifications, so instead of a thrill, I get an instant of panic, "Don't let this be Drama Queen (or Brenda) with an emergency!"
Our internet's been fritzy since Christmas, and now that it seems stable for the time being, I'm *not* rooting through the bowels of Disqus for the earlier link over here you were kind enough to send me.
^ That's the PDF of the Christmas carol I mentioned with words I've translated into Spanish. While it's normal to take some license with syntax and so on in songs, I don't want to have it too wonky, have elisions a Spanish speaker just wouldn't use, or emPHAsis that's too badly off from natural sylLABle stress :-)
Because the PDF sits inside a Christmas-carol folder, it might not open till you request folder permission or something like that – if so, I can grant it. But it might also work first try, no problem – sometimes technology does!
Early in our Spanish choir adventure, we didn't have many actual Spanish church music resources. One Christmas, I took Spanish lyrics for some standard Christmas longs like "Oh Come, All Ye Faithful" and "Angels We Have Heard On High" and applied them to the English sheet music we had.
Later, when we got real Spanish sheet music, I found that the words were put with the notes quite differently from the way I had done it.
Looking at the PDF, I've just spotted a typo (amazing how invisible they are before sending!) – there's an instance where I transposed the accent from "qué" to "tan" in the phrase "qué tan".
I'm more worried about... deeper problems... with using a language I haven't been proficient in since high school.
How do you get a notification there’s been a reply on Substack? I get email notifications if a comment has been “liked.” I use the platform through gmail mostly unless that’s being wonky then I got through the app.
I go to the substack app and tap the little "bell" notification icon. Then replies and likes both pop up. You can then reply to a reply and like the reply
On an iPhone, you go into the phone’s settings under “notifications” and turn them off for the Substack app. Imagine it’s similar in the Android OS. Look for a YouTube how-to video.
My devices are blessedly silent (except for the phone when I remember to turn it back on) - lucky accident I guess because I have no idea how it happened.
Actually I don't think I've ever doomscrolled. For one thing, I don't have a smartphone. For another, I don't have social media feeds to scroll. I didn't even know they had notifications that chime or buzz. No wonder it makes people crazy.
I get my news and opinion journalism intentionally from subscription-based media and other credible sources. That includes a daily hard copy newspaper. I don't read everything in it because there's only so much I need to know about the Madigan trial, but I do get the gist of how far along the trial is. I spend varying amounts of time reading, but I choose content that I can learn something from; I don't go there to be angered, so I don't come away in that state. Call me crazy, but it works for me.
I've taken to backtracking a bit at the mothership. Two things: I don't feel as funny as before, so I have less to offer. 2nd, I'm rarely replying to comments, as most of the comments I'd want to respond are where I disagree with them. It just seems angrier, I don't wanna stoke it.
I even blocked KDW! 😳He insulted a commenter, and I asked myself "would I block this if it weren't the author"? Yup! So I blocked him. I wonder if he recognizes why?
I'll scan for comments from people I enjoy (who don't write doomsday stuff), but once I start seeing too much doom 'n gloom, I have to leave. Eeyore is tough for me, he's a talented writer, but he is pure doom 'n gloom. I imagine if there is a cancer breakthrough during the administration of 47, he'll wonder if that's bad news or not. 🤦♂️
Growing up, I was a fan of Charlie Chaplin; I studied how much he emoted with his face, how talented he was. One of his movie lines (from "The Kid") resonated with me. "A smile and perhaps a tear". So when I post I try to mix some humor and some personal in a way where they fit together.
Jay, you’re like a mushroom: a fungi who grows on people.
Another classic comic thanks to his facial expressions was Harpo Marx.
I hope that doesn't mean I look green with envy! 🟢
I love Harpo Marx for the same reasons.
The Internet is the fast food of journalistic cuisine..salty, sweet and full of "bad fat" half truths.
Snacking on this occasionally won't kill us right away, but as Roseanne pointed out, who can just eat a few potato chips??
Instant gratification seems to reduce us to our previous infantile state of nuzzling at mother's breast. We should be rightly wary of things that promise instant gratification, for fear that those turn off the adult in our brains. One of my former clients was the CEO of a large telecommunications firm that essentially invented the cell/mobile phone. He confessed that his company only produced these with the limited market of executive use. The company couldn't imagine it having a broader appeal. He had real concerns about it's broad use. Perhaps he finally got through to Kansas City, MO and state government, because a law has just gone into effect that will allow the arrests of any person driving while using a cell phone. The use that is the most distracting is doom scrolling the internet on one's phone, of course.
We have a fascination with fast action as humans, and a lot of fast stuff has an almost magical quality to it. We tend to forego logic when witnessing magic, because who wants the fun and awe to end too soon? We would all like to believe we could successfully ride the fast race horse or drive a race car, but the facts say otherwise. And the internet gambling folks are working hard to convince everyone that fast online gambling is safe and harmless.
DougAZ is right that this is another new frontier with all the inherent dangers and possible rewards of any frontier. The only good question with any frontier is this: Will the possible rewards outweigh both the known and unknown risks? I posit that we have not faced the
true depth of the risks to human minds and souls, perhaps because we fear the answers.
Such a good post!
Good morning. My family welcomed a new granddaughter yesterday. She and my daughter are doing well. Grandpa is happy.
Congratulations to everyone!
Congrats. Although the Luca Brasi quote comes to mind and I don't know the female equivalent "Don Corleone, I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your daughter's wedding...on the day of your daughter's wedding. And I hope their first child be a masculine child"
We haven’t figured out the masculine child thing. Three daughters and three granddaughters.
Congrats!
It’s 27 degrees and the 3 day deep freeze begins tomorrow. 🥶 Still no snow but it sure looks like there’s snow on the roads. Oh wait, that’s road salt detritus from the dusting we had two days ago.
Oh, Lord. I could park my car in a field and the cows would lick it clean for the salt!
We had to stop for a cow licking the centerline in 2024.
Since then, "licking the centerline" (delays caused by someone's odd proclivities) has become a family phrase. The kids think its hilarious.
This place has an interesting mix of folks knowledgeable about intriguing odds and ends with no apparent overbearing-ness in their knowledge.
Good morning. In the 20s here but slated to rise above freezing for much of the day -- the first time in at least two weeks. And we're supposed to get -- not snow, but rain -- tomorrow. (Then the freezer returns next week, dropping us to single digits).
The mothership is covering the first round of Senate conformation hearings for Trump's cabinet picks. FP's Friday potpourri called "TGIF" mentions Joe Biden's farewell speech.
A personal half century Internet journey
It was all good and no perceived bad, in the beginning.
My friend, who invented the online multi-player gaming in 1973, took me to our schools Project MAC. Man and Computer or Machine Aided Cognition. We played MAZE for 10 to 30 hours straight. It was like landing on a new land or planet. DARPANET. the birth of SkyNET.
This was the school that had the first Electrical Engineering department. Alfred P Sloan was an 1895 grad. Ken Olson, DEC, Polaroid, blah blah.
But outside of school, it did not exist. The business world used big iron, tape drives, punch cards and COBOL. We wore ties to work.
But literally no one in business I saw, including BigCorp, had an iota of awareness in personal computers.
But. We got a very cool new toy for us commercial folks. Voicemail. This was the first cultural online medium IMHO. Group voicemails. VMX.
There were no rules in 1981. It was the wild west of non live, Group online interactions and it was well interesting.
In geek school, we had a term, flaming. Also new then as John Dean was telling tales. This was VMX. A single salesman had a quality or late shipment issue. 20 people were copied on a rant, full of demands and accusations and commercial "threats"... we're going to lose this order. If big, "they'll call Jack".
There was no decorum.
But, like the mighty "chicken the little", equilibrium arrived as tantrums didn't get the ship to respond...... any more than a more rational communication.
Until about 1983. Email.
We had email at school. It was invented there too. It's not Relativity, but it introduced Uncertainty.
Voicemail was still used because it was mobile. Sorta. Hanging outside a rolled down window using a pay phone on Gratiot Ave in Detroit in a 15F howling snow blizzard was modernity itself.
Email needed fixed to base monitors. And the flaming began. And 30 40 people copied, loudly, imminently, now!!! Fix my issue!!
There is a childish petulance to adulthood when matters of concern can be dealt with by remote means. In-person you rarely saw such. Unless you worked with me at BigCorp. Another story 🫣
Then the internet came home.
I had an IBM PC, then MACs. Dial up 1200 baud modems. Thats like a billion times slower than your IP speed now.
And AOL begat an age. Chat rooms organized by interests. Wasn't my jam. I'm addicted to online gaming. Online learning.
Endorphins. FOMO. Distraction. Escape. Achievements. Wins. Redo. Community. Team. Anonymity. Cheap. New. Novel. Curiosity. Learning. Discovery. Expressive. Inconsequential. Available. Amazing. Fascinating. Educational. Overwhelming. TMI. Not enough information. Want more. Learning can be its own "disease". Evolution. Singular. Communal.
Richard Halliburton on your phone.
Social media - Facebook for fam, friends, class of 72 HS. College friends don't. Interesting. Twitter for at first, BadDoug ha! Poltics sux. Now just sports. Which is only all Boston.
Summary. It has all changed over the half century. My journey, N=1 of me, watching X = 1000s I've known, says this.
It starts bad. Always. New is a frontier. There are always wars. So far, the wars burn out like a wildfire. But the time that takes I think, is correlated with the size of "The Group". Email and VMX at BigCorp has hundreds of users. It took months to settle out.
FB, X, Substack, and all the pundits will burn out to some less dynamic equilibrium. It might take another 10 years.
Because the more a thing gets known, it's orbiting far above the frontier. It's no longer a place to explore. It's settlement time.
I am pretty much an Excel power user. How did I get there. Long story short, I had a pulse.
I applied for a GA position in the B-school, working for my mentor. Then a Diva down the hall bullied the department chair, demanding it for his nephew. My mentor and he had an argument. To save the peace I visited the department chair and quietly withdrew, explaining why. He was grateful. I applied elsewhere on campus (believe it or not, many offices back then waited until the last minute).
The Friday night after the first week of school, I still didn't have a GA position. But I had a dream, where I heard "I haven't forgotten you". The next morning I helped my Dad roof a barn. When we were done I took a shower. 5 minutes in, Dad handed me to portable phone; it was the head of computing services offering me a GA position.
They had a Chinese student get denied his visa, and they feared they'd lose the line if they didn't fill it. He had called the business school, asking for a grad student; no computer experience necessary, all they needed was already admitted to BSU and they had a pulse. The department chair suggested my name. I actually got paid more than the B-school position! 😀
They had no clue what to do with me. But I stepped up with whatever they asked, I filled in here and there, etc. I worked with the budget officer, who kept the computing service budget in his head. After 6 weeks he had a heart attack (and for the record it wasn't my fault!). So I filled in for him the rest of the year. I developed the budget in Lotus 1-2-3. I learned how to use Lotus, and taught mini-courses within the department (and later to the B-school) on how to use it. That led to my career jobs, as well as my teaching (I taught Lotus-1-2-3 at a community college in 1986).
So many good things happened to me because I had a pulse! 😉
Carpe diem x 100s
My first spreadsheet program was VisiCalc. Wrote a contract simulator...ha worked. Also built an orders analysis and forecasting model .
I liked Excel. But BSOD was a big curse.
The problem I have with Msft engineers is they don't have management telling them Better is the enemy of Good Enough.
Their User Interface is ridiculous. More and more uneeded buttons.
They should have a UI setup feature
Cjeck
A. If you are new to Excel
B. For just the primary basic tools and options
C. I'm an intermediate User
D. I'm an Expert User. Give me all
Microsoft will tell you they did streamline the interface. And with a straight face.
There issue is they think they know how people work, rather than observe how people work.
Here's an example. I use a lot of "fixed references" in excel (where you place a dollar sign in front of a cell address). It used to be you could hover over the cell, and tap F4. You could place it over the letter, the number, or both. Now, you first edit the cell and then do that. A little extra work when it wasn't needed. And they changed it with little notice.
One other warning. Excel on a Mac is not the same as on a Windows-based PC. Don't create on one and then switch to the other, it can get messed up real fast. They were developed by different teams within Microsoft, who are in different units.
Sounds like Congress re Mac and PC Excel 🤣🤣🤣🤣🐓🐓🐓
God works in mysterious ways, right?
That pretty much should be my epitaph.
I had my leading to marry my wife Pam 2 years before I met her (we married 5 years after meeting). I had my leading to adopt my daughter 5 years before she was born.
In both situations, it took years for me to understand the how and why of it all.
Remarkable gifts come to people who manage to keep their hearts and minds open. I don,t do as well as you do, but I try hard despite my temperamental inclination to the contrary.
Here’s a wonderfully told Jon Ronson BBC story from his 2021 series “Things Fell Apart” about the roots of the culture wars. This one was an early example of a cancellation campaign on Usenet from the ‘80s.
What makes it so good is that it’s so completely human: People bungle into a conflict by accident while pursuing different innocent goals, not with any malice.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0d7jxrd
Thanks for that link. It was well worth the 30 minutes.
Interesting. I worked for Compaq (later HP) and watched as email came on the scene and took off. Same with voice mail. By the end of my working days trying to keep up with incoming emails was a full time job. I didn’t always succeed. It was a great tool that unfortunately was easy to abuse with CYA behavior, where copying huge numbers of people on messages became a way of making the writer feel important and also positioned them to later say “You were copied on that email 3 months ago so you can’t say you didn’t know.” By then my company was huge and there was an entire email culture. I don’t miss it a bit.
A trip down memory lane. 😃
This is so interesting! So many great insights!
Thanks Ann!
Very entertaining. But you left off 300 baud, where you can watch - one - character - at - a - time - being received. My first modem was 1200 baud, but a BBS I accessed ws 300 baud.
And then there was Compuserve.
Fun times for a CompSci grad who learned programming in the '70s on a Big Iron IBM using punch cards, typed out on an IBM 029 keypunch. (Don't' drop your card deck!)
I still have my fortran cards for my thesis program in 2 shoe boxes.
I learned Fortran and COBOL but my first programming language was PL/1 -- IBM's attempt at a "universal" programming language.
I didn't go into compsci, so my later programming was RPG if I recall and some Basic. I think the last program I wrote was a zoom able color Mandelbrot set for my Mac II and a color monitor.
Yes !! I used Fortran to compute my data and plot it!! CalComp I think. For my BS thesis.
I enjoyed Fortran. The compiler. Program data. It was cool.
300 baud! Indeed.
I loved FORTRAN, not that I used it much after school. Spreadsheets did the hard work at that point. It was just so straightforward.
I missed punchcards by a semester.
That's an interesting history. I didn't pay attention until about '87-'88-ish, when I bought a Mac SE with a 20 megabyte INTERNAL hard drive.
Do remember some thrills you experienced in the new frontier?
Yeah, Filemaker Pro, a relational database with container fields. I like to collect facts, odds and ends, photos... and suddenly I had a tool for keeping it all organized. Sudden access to the entirety of human knowledge...that made an impression.
I briefly found FB interesting, with brief meaning a few months. Twitter seemed brilliant for about a month. Social media has never fascinated me. I found it, and still find it, vapid.
I “turned Mac” much later, maybe in the mid 2000s.
I was Mac, then deserted when it looked like Apple was tanking, then went back after Jobs made it beautiful again.
Same. Apple has its frustrations, but when I’ve gone to Windows, I’ve usually come to regret it.
The worst was the period when I was translating using translating macros in Word on a PC and would get interruptions for “Anti-Virus subscription ending soon!” or some system warning no human could understand as an app-seizing popup with the scalp-singeing options “Abort, retry, fail?” I reached the point where I just couldn’t take it anymore….
Yeah.... Windows 3.1.... It literally didn't work. I mean, you could make it work mostly, but it was insanely stupid.
In the early '80s I bought an Apple II Plus, with 48K memory. I splurged and bought, not one, but two, 5.25" floppy disk drives.
It was exhilarating!
I went through a succession of Brother portable electric "word processors" with that little window that showed about 1/4 of the sentence you were typing as you typed it...with that cheesey printer so I could have paper output.
Today is the birthday of Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1706.
It is also my birthday. I have always enjoyed sharing it with Ben
Happy Birthday. Being born the same day as Ben Franklin, any fun stories of growing up with him? 😉
Happy birthday! What a great date to share! All of us here owe a debt to ole Ben and his electronic experiments!
Happy birthday!
Happy Birthday!
Many happy returns!
Happy birthday!
Cool.
Good to know.
When the weather gets better, fly a kite in his honor (but not during a thuderstorm).
Shocking! Just shocking I say!
The original Dispatch comment section was a blessed relief from other comment sections: a generally pleasant, interesting social group. It was a haven of reasonableness during the pandemic. In the last couple of years it has grown and become challenging to navigate, not to mention a little meaner.
I remember when someone responded to one of my comments with “I know you’re lying about this” and I was a little shocked. I am sometimes hasty, often dense, but I never lie! ( Now, we did have Kevin Durant years ago and he could be outrageous but rarely mean).
It’s interesting that many of us were part of that original group.
One of the "tells" of a No Fun Person is a default to, "You're lying," rather than the far more reasonable, "You're mistaken," or the polite, "Are you sure that's correct? I thought (different facts)."
Are you sure that’s correct? I thought the definition of a No Fun person was a person who just looks blank upon hearing a truly excellent play on words.
That could just be a fit of cluelessness in an otherwise Fun person.
Now I am confused. 🧐I love play on words, but in college I had a reputation for being oblivious. Can I be both at once?
Maybe sequentially.
Maybe the best at word play are in fact oblivious. It requires a certain amount of living in one's own head.
Ah, Kevin Durant. He joined The Free Press and was notorious over there. His cynicism got the best of him and he’s been banned, I believe. He has his own substack but he rarely pens anything. He is coarse. There is another substack group that’s a spin off from The Free Press called Jotting in Purple where many of those who have been censored by TFP have gathered.
Often very witty, but extremely strange.
I thought the whole point of The Free Press was that it didn't censor. I am so naive…
They censor a lot!
Yes. It got meaner. As led by Williamson. And Goldberg often mean and stupid essays.
Those Cons are the root and now rooting MAGA.
They love MAGA. They built the foundation.
You lost me Doug. I haven’t seen a shred of evidence that they love MAGA. And writing “those Cons” sounds an awful lot like everyone in that group that’s different than you is awful. Sorry if this sounds harsh but what you wrote is evidence supporting the points today’s post makes.
I been around a long time Brian. We see them differently and that's perfectly fine.
I have 0.000001% of interest in arguing, persuading, debating this. I merely state how I feel and see them. N of 1.
Everyone is entitled to their own view.
I’m not in the least hostile to Jonah or KDW, but, like Allah Nick, a little of them for me goes a long way.
I don’t see any of them as encouraging MAGA, unless it’s as a challenge to self-styled MAGA enforcer types who think they’ll crack a few skulls and bring everyone onside.
I’ve seen comment sections on the left that were excruciatingly hostile to anyone from the right before, and it’s just downright hateful. So I wouldn’t want to be on the left in a comment section that was aggressively right-wing, either.
I agree. It gets to the point where maintaining your own political/moral/personal integrity against the commenting hostility is just too much trouble.
I certainly didn't see any of the editors/writers as MAGA (not by a long shot). There was a small handful of Trump supporters among the commenters but that didn't bother me at all. I almost welcomed the relief!
I do miss Charlotte Lawson,s reporting on the middle east. i thought she was terrific. Her photographs were wonderful too.
I don't get your meaning. I'm not fond of Jonah or KDW but both are non-MAGA cons. When I do go to the TMD comments section, I see lots of variation but not MAGA.
My neocortex must be tiny because the idea of 150 stable social relationships strikes me as fantastically large.
I am curious how many subscribers use this site - only to read? and how many to comment/react?
I'd also like to know how this site differs from "the mothership." I know it began as a reaction to Disqus, but I think that was not enough to sustain it. I find the 2 sites altogether different. (I no longer subscribe to TD.)
To add to Cynthia’s numbers, there’s about 50 to 60 out of 80-ish who register as having opened the emails on a given day, and roughly 50 that the Substack foo reckons are active (3/5 to 5/5 stars for “activity”). Maybe 10 to 15 comment regularly by my guess.
I'm curious, too, now that I think about it, about the number of subscribers.
The beginnings of CSLF were, if I remember correctly, twofold: 1) TD's decision to move off substack to their own site, which was, to put it kindly, glitchy in the extreme. It made commenting a chore; 2) The comments section, which had been pretty interesting, took on a confrontational tone and many of us could no longer abide it. CSLF has grown and changed but, to my mind, has never lost its founding spirit. We want to inform each other and have fun. Oh, and there are those of us who like to "pun."
Did I get that right, Marque and Cynthia?
"... what we’re doing here at CSLF. It’s about the interaction rather than fueling fear, anger, and loathing."
Lordy.
That *almost* sounds like a mission statement. But it doesn't address all the fueling of the punditry that goes on 'round here. So, it needs some work yet.
You're pretty good at that sort of thing, O. Maybe you could touch it up a bit?
I don’t even know if it’s worth it since we don’t get credit 😢
I know, right? I don't want to say we've been sold short, but there's so much short selling goin' on farther down this thread that the SEC will probably show up at the CSLF corporate offices next week to start an investigation.
"It was the Dukes! It was the Dukes!"
🤣🤣🤣
Lots of mean people pretending not to be mean. As the election grew nearer, most of them found it impossible to maintain the pretense. A lot of TDS which gets boring after a while. DT, for better or worse, is a fact to deal with and no amount of loathing will change that. It’s too bad it got out of control because there were some very smart and interesting people there who had things to say that got lost in the hostility. The effort to wade through the snark just got too much for me.
One of the editors(Steve?) commented just before I left that the founding target audience had been “regular” people who didn’t work in politics professionally. The readership ended up, to his surprise, greatly populated by the professional political class and its media spokesmen.
Many of the comments took on a preachy tone which I found off-putting. That maybe coincided with the large and active “Faith” section, which seeped over into the politics. David French indulged in a lot of overlap, and I don’t know how/if that affected the overall tone of the site.
these are only my own impressions - could be that I wasn’t there long enough to actually know what I’m talking about!
I’ve loved participating in the comment section but the last few months it has become pretty unbearable and I’m rethinking my subscription. I read Jonah’s latest last night and thought about jumping into discussions but didn’t. The hate for Trump is just incredible. I didn’t vote for him but he won and that gives him the right to try what he wants. Who was it who said “Elections have consequences?”😉 It’s surprising to see so many wishing for him to fail. Very sad.
All of our leaders have been humans with accompanying human faults, some larger than others. The greater danger to our constitutional republic is the growing number of people who seem to be both ignorant of real history, especially our own, and willing to embrace an authoritarian regime.
The people whining about Trump need to ask themselves how many real people they've talked with in small rural or urban "unimportant" areas. The only person on the left who "gets it" is Robert Reich, who warned about the MAGA phenomenon 30 years ago! And he is also the only one on the left with any compassion left for MAGA voters, who he feels should not be demonized merely for voting in what they perceive as their best interests.
I see no point in hating Trump, or wishing him ill, or wishing him to fail. All of those will not change Trump, but they might harm the American people,
and our collective soul. Criticizing Trump just elevates him in the public eye, and makes his followers cling tighter.
The real thing that needs to change here is our desire for a leader and a party or administration to dominate and trample over those who disagree with us. This is a rampant idea on both sides and it is both illogical and immoral. Our constitution rigorously defends our right to dissent--in public, as well as private.
Regarding any elected official, I always say that I want him to succeed at the things I think are good ideas, and I want him to fail at the things I think are bad ideas.
Build national defense capability and make aggressor states/groups decide that they'll just stay home? I want that to succeed. Raise tariffs and louse up global trade even more? I want that to fail.
The thing is, i'm open to the possibility that what I presently consider a bad idea might in fact end up to have been a good idea. I'm good with whatever produces a good result. I think American are a lot more divided as to means than to ends.
I'm not open to the possibility that tariffs are a good idea. The evidence is in and overwhelming. Same with rent control.
What about deep frying Hostess Twinkees or Snickers bars? Succeed or fail?
My test of competence for a politician is to invite them to do it and see if they try to hold Twinkee while they try to fry it. 😬 Some say it is a low bar, but ya gotta have standards!
Interesting how it’s developed.
Comment sections that are too busy or crowded become overwhelming for me, since I’m the type who feels obliged to read most/all of what else was said before commenting. I didn’t have time for that at TD.
Eventually I dropped the subscription because I was only getting around to reading about an article a month, and sometimes not even that much. I have to review subscriptions from time to time to find out where the money goes.
I like the publication and their project, but I can’t support them as a charity.
I haven't experienced what many of you apparently have. I don't find the "mothership" to be a hellhole. I'm still a big fan of Jonah. His solo podcasts are a must-listen for me, and I catch maybe half of the interview ones, depending on the topic and guest. I don't feel bullied or pushed around over there, and I deal with trolls by ignoring them. I read articles and comment there almost every day, and I have no intention of giving up my subscription--unless the Disgus malfunctions force me to. Is that OK?
I like Jonah too and read most of what he writes. He almost always makes me think, which is what I look for. Sometimes I don’t have enough self control to ignore the commenters who don’t deserve attention. I need to work on that.
Agree. Too wordy. And too repetitive.
My loyalty to TD has less to do with its comments section (to which I comment anymore maybe once a day, if that) and more to its editorial stance.
But (outside certain contributors like Nick and Kevin) I don't see that much never-Trumpism. TD is quite mild compared to The Bulwark, where TDS is a job qualification.
I let my subscription to TD lapse a year ago; the only things I miss are Nick and Kevin. Jonah's self regard is tiring. The Bulwark does have some good writers; one just has to pick and choose.
I read TMD, some of the articles, and the dispatch and Advisory Opinions podcasts. Jonah is an "acquired taste" which Cynthia seems to have acquired, but I have not, so I mostly ignore him.
At any news website, there are some people I would like more than others. I'm not on Free Press as much as TD (I subscribe to both), or I would have a list of writers to ignore there as well.
TD's straight news articles are generally reliable IMO. FP is a bit uneven, but when they are good, they are very very good. They had some great reporting on the LA fires, for example.
I find TFP much easier to pick and choose. TD, for me, is a much stickier web - lots of links, cross-references, repetition - once i was in there, much harder to get out of. I always ended up mad - often at myself!
I like Jonah; my husband can't go near him. He goes round and round and often ends up exactly where he started but covering a fair amount of ground in the meantime. Most things in life aren,t either/or and his perspective respects that, maybe to a fault for some. I loved the readers' dogs. There was an unforgettable golden with schoolgirl bows on the ends of her ears…
That sounds about right. I am not a Bari fan so I generally skip Free Press.
That's a very good observation Ann.
The Dispatch is constructed to foment outrage and ire. Just read some non paywall headlines of Williamson. Such an arrogant intellectual bully. Who makes 0.01% = 50%.
Takes the exception and makes it apply to a group.
Don't miss it at all.
But there were many on the left and right, who I loved as decent and respectful people
I don't think of KW as a bully, just a drug free version of Hunter S. Thompson, sober and now irritated.
I refuse to toss people just because their politics, religion or sex life is not mine. Food, on the other hand....
Funny and accurate comparison!
I will add tho that I never minded KW's opinions (many of which I share), but i did come to mind his gratuitously hurtful meanness in the interests of competitive cleverness. I do miss him despite myself. He's a brilliant stylist and very funny man.
No you pretty much got it right. I am left of the TD readership but I found it interesting and informative. Until it wasn’t. This is much more to my liking and I feel as if I’ve found a community. Even to doors 🚪 I get for punning don’t deter me.
Haha - I LOVE the doors!! They are hilarious!
I love the jokes and puns too - whatever brings up the doors. the whole process is delightfully entertaining!
I should start looking for a meme or emoji that is not so -- pleasing.
Well, you almost got that right. It is those of us who make the puns and offer the occasional "bon mot" who are the hilarious ones (Blush. Pat on back). Phil is the community enforcer, but every once in a while he comes up with something very funny.
"The readership ended up, to his surprise, greatly populated by the professional political class and its media spokesmen."
I'm not surprised. Anyone that desires daily immersion in all things political gravitate to that stuff.
You know, I think that's true. I like politics a lot - I think it's fascinating, but more for the humanity of it all, the human strengths and foibles, the human comedy and tragedy. I don’t hang onto every detail, or attach myself to “sides." i don't find it fun or even useful to spend the little time I have left constructing elaborate justifications and defenses. i mostly like to know what other people think. When they all start sounding alike, I loose interest pretty quick. I prob stuck with TD as long as I did because I found KW, hateful as he surely is, a brilliant writer and shockingly funny. I didn't like myself for enjoying however - it was as close as I wanted to come to dancing with the devil.
Yes. To clarify my comment elsewhere, Kevin can be/is hateful, but as Kurt says, he is a brilliant writer and often mean/funny. Sort of like H.L. Mencken.
Yeah, that's me. I'm interested in politics to the extent it reveals humanity's predilections for self destruction, self dealing, how civilizations come to be and how they fade, and all that sort of stuff. Day to day "he said, they did" leaves me cold and the worst are those explaining how what's going to happen or the ones with the headlines asking a question, i.e., "What's Next For (insert topic du jour)?" As if some schmoe can tell the future...
Politics are just one aspect of any human being (at least any I'd care to spend a lot of time with). There are so many other things to know about anyone - things that more often than not make sense of the politics! Cultures are complicated and various, in the present time as well as in retrospect. The less future I have, the less I,m interested in the game of forecasts.
Hubby and I participate in a senior exercise group and one of the enforced rules is no political discussions. One of us wandered into politics the other day and when denial and agreement started I commented that all our problems are human problems. Unsaid was that we are all human...
Yes, MarqueG started the CSLF immediately following the first major revamp of The Dispatch. Substack, as people may have noticed, has a functioning commenting facility. The Dispatch's first independent effort was - I'm series - far worse than Disgus.
At first, the point was to discuss content from The Dispatch, but eventually, they got a little better, so you could comment there if you wanted to. MarqueG began writing independent content, and then he recruited other contributors.
We have 82 subscribers, but you don't have to be a subscriber to comment: you just need a Substack account. We try hard to have a cooperative and communitarian vibe, rather than an adversarial one.
This is a wonderful place. Much appreciation to you and Kurt and MarqueG
What about Jay, MTrosino and moi? I want to speak to a manager!
Management bears no responsibility for Jay, MTrosino and toi.
After all these years, and this is the thanks moi gets. Harrumph.
I'm not a manager! 😬
Okay, I was a department chair for five years. I learned it's easier to negotiate with terrorists than tenured faculty.
There is the seed of a good joke in there somewhere (without a pun of course).
Hmm. You can’t spell manager without manger. Or anger.
Coincidence?
You have succeeded.
Thank you for the feedback. I like to discuss issues and events with people who have a variety of experiences and perspectives. I think we learn through disagreement, if it is informative disagreement.
If a disagreement ends with nothing resolved and, "That was a fun talk, catch you later," that's good enough.
I have never joined any social media site, except LinkedIn, which my former company said was important to my business. Spoiler alert: It was not. And who is Dunbar?
Dunbar is part of a comedy duo with Overton.
I tried to Google that phrase and got links to the bio of Bert Williams, a black vaudville performer in the 1920s.
I took it as: Dunbar has a number; Overton has a window… That buzzing sound might have been from the thing sailing over my head.
Well played!
I “deleted” FB in 2016 (scare quotes because you can’t delete it for real), never did Xitter, but I still occasionally get on IG, which has turned into a wasteland of posts I don’t care about, not to mention the nonstop attempts to entice me with soft porn nearly naked women writhing invitingly. It’s all wretched.
I do click around Substack and find writing that’s worth reading. And there’s this place, which is fun and often thought provoking.
I like scrolling my own Instagram account at times because I have some cool photos on there. Mostly nature and dogs. I purposely maintain it in such a way that it’s anonymous to people who don’t know me as it’s a public account.
That's a good idea. I liked it so much when it was new. We had a small crew of building science people, artists and photographers, and it was a great way to share pics and knowledge.
I might make a new account and do what you said; make it anonymous so I can put up China photos.
I’m arog81 for a glimpse in the life of BikerChick. I think there’s only one photo of me on there. I’ll probably delete that photo someday but it’s super cute and makes me smile.
When I first saw your handle, I thought you were one of those women riding pilion on a Harley in Sturgis.
I’m a kinder gentler BC.
"The chime or buzz of a social media notification gives us the quick thrill of social engagement."
I don't use any social media platforms, unless you count Substack. The sound I get when there's a reply on Substack (I'd turn it off if I could figure out how) is the same as the one for texts and WhatsApp notifications, so instead of a thrill, I get an instant of panic, "Don't let this be Drama Queen (or Brenda) with an emergency!"
Cynthia!
Our internet's been fritzy since Christmas, and now that it seems stable for the time being, I'm *not* rooting through the bowels of Disqus for the earlier link over here you were kind enough to send me.
But...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vppZ2UwAm-UwBJS9ARUAZHoLCnwFh68f/view?usp=drive_link
^ That's the PDF of the Christmas carol I mentioned with words I've translated into Spanish. While it's normal to take some license with syntax and so on in songs, I don't want to have it too wonky, have elisions a Spanish speaker just wouldn't use, or emPHAsis that's too badly off from natural sylLABle stress :-)
Because the PDF sits inside a Christmas-carol folder, it might not open till you request folder permission or something like that – if so, I can grant it. But it might also work first try, no problem – sometimes technology does!
I just sent you a request.
Early in our Spanish choir adventure, we didn't have many actual Spanish church music resources. One Christmas, I took Spanish lyrics for some standard Christmas longs like "Oh Come, All Ye Faithful" and "Angels We Have Heard On High" and applied them to the English sheet music we had.
Later, when we got real Spanish sheet music, I found that the words were put with the notes quite differently from the way I had done it.
Looking at the PDF, I've just spotted a typo (amazing how invisible they are before sending!) – there's an instance where I transposed the accent from "qué" to "tan" in the phrase "qué tan".
I'm more worried about... deeper problems... with using a language I haven't been proficient in since high school.
Can I see the English lyrics for comparison?
Yes –
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UlSwjwI-JWR0VW8Qf0kBtZG9uUTIJ3o3/view?usp=drive_link
How do you get a notification there’s been a reply on Substack? I get email notifications if a comment has been “liked.” I use the platform through gmail mostly unless that’s being wonky then I got through the app.
I do not get any emails for "reply". Only likes
I go to the substack app and tap the little "bell" notification icon. Then replies and likes both pop up. You can then reply to a reply and like the reply
Only way I know.
The app buzzes me and puts it a little flag on the screen when sign on to my phone.
On an iPhone, you go into the phone’s settings under “notifications” and turn them off for the Substack app. Imagine it’s similar in the Android OS. Look for a YouTube how-to video.
My devices are blessedly silent (except for the phone when I remember to turn it back on) - lucky accident I guess because I have no idea how it happened.
Same here except for text messages.