U.S. Politiks: The Manchin-ian Candidate

[Corvinus85]

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players"

"Words are wind"

[DireWolfSpirit]

4 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

@Fragile Bird,

Didn't you know that in America if you're white, the "I didn't know I couldn't do that defense" is iron clad?

 

Also "stand your ground" only applies if your white.

[Larry of the Lawn]

13 hours ago, Walter the Singing Wildcat said:

Most people in media are miserable, horrible, hateful people, and I say that as a center-leftist person.  

 

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-all-just-displacement

 

Money shot:

 

I

 

Lol apparently substack gave Freddie deBoer over $100k for a year to... whine?

Would love to know what he means by "woke" since in this context it's mostly to the imagination.  I guess he's bounced back from making those false rape accusations against a critic.  Dude has super thin skin.

There are lots of problems with the Washington Post and the Atlantic and NYT  but damn, looks like Freddie could really use an editor these days.  That was one of the whiniest pieces I've read in recent memory.

[Ran]

Funnily enough, heard of de Boer and some sort of false accusation drama for the first time this week, rather randomly. It led me to this, which provides explanation, takes responsibility, and talks rather openly about the impact mental illness can have on one's interactions with others.

[DMC]

34 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

That was one of the whiniest pieces I've read in recent memory.

I thought I was being generous reading just the entire first paragraph.

[Ran]

It's long but I think it's not remotely as whining as advertised. Dude is quite frankly saying that the slings and arrows sent at him just give him more clicks and more subscriptions, and he provides proof of that, while diagnosing the Twitter-led media sniping at Substack as being more of a symptom of the financial freefall much of the media (but not all -- the Grey Lady seems to manage to thrive, at least through last year) is currently finding itself in and the anxiety this has caused those who have tied themselves to the traditional media outlets.

I don't know about the quoted piece being "the" reason that Substack is gaining popularity, but I admit I follow one writer there (Matthew Yglesias) whose departure from Vox seems at least partially  motivated by his finding colleagues in his workplace being increasingly hostile to his particular brand of takes and discourse (as subsequent oblique remarks from him seems to have confirmed this impression), despite the guy being a pretty milquetoast liberal on "culture war" issues while focusing much of his Substack writing on pro-YIMBY policy. His latest free post is about buses, so seeing his name roped in with people who've made much more hay over ideological warfare within media makes me think that De Boer is probably more right than wrong about what's really going on. 

That said, I know some other writers left to Substack with more dramatic flame outs -- Greenwald angrily ditched The Intercept, which he founded, due to conflict with editors (he came off like an entitled, paranoid enfant terrible in the e-mails he chose to share to apparently back up his righteousness; he seems to have no self-awareness of how he comes off in general),  Andrew Sullivan took off from New York due to his feeling about the workplace atmosphere, and so on.

ETA: I will take issue with De Boer calling Ezra Klein a "ghoul". I have no idea what his beliefs about Klein are, but I've always found him an excellent reporter on health care, primarily, and his role as co-founder of Vox was, I think, a good one.

2nd ETA: Ah, an old blog post has something of a jeremiad against Yglesias, Klein, poor Kevin Drum, and other "centrist-y" liberals. And I just Googled and saw the other guy he named with Klein was a founder of Buzzfeed, so I presume his view was that Vox itself was a ghoulish operation that wasn't substantive and fiery enough. Or something. I don't read De Boer, except maybe I recall some article or interview in The Atlantic or The New Yorker about his writing on education.