Tag: rss_source

“It’s absolutely true that the tone and content of the videos people consume on TikTok or Instagram affect their understanding of the world around them–but so too do their non-phone experiences, their relationships, their jobs, their mental states, their social worlds, their spending habits, etc. Why do doomers and reactionaries so thoroughly dominate the feeds of young men? Is it something about the specific form of the TikTok feed? Is it billionaire astroturfing? Is it that videos like this are what that audience wants, for reasons largely external to TikTok?”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-tiktok-electorate

“What makes a belief enticing, in turn, seems to be some mixture of comprehensiveness (does it provide a lot of answers), intuitiveness (does it feel correct based on what you already know), flattery (does it make you feel superior for knowing), and relevance (does it allow you to do something in the real world). Beliefs and belief systems that check these boxes are very attractive when we’re young, because they can provide a shortcut to many of the things we crave in early adulthood — certainty, confidence, authority, independence”

https://jjmccullough.substack.com/p/on-political-naivete

“I’m sorry to constantly repeat this point, but politics is a game of tug-of-war, and the center is nothing but where the middle of the rope ends up. The extremes pull the middle. So if you’re someone with milquetoast liberal squish politics, you should hate Democratic triangulation and timidity as much as I do. Because Republicans relentlessly pulling the rope to the right, while Democrats refuse to pull the rope to the left, has gotten us to a place where conservative policy wins even as conservative candidates lose”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/on-the-occasion-of-this-election

“Theoretically, the mysterious “Algorithm” (which is nigh-on worshipped, despite the fact that it’s just a glorified ratings system that attempts to predict the future by looking at the past) can tell us what will be a hit and what won’t.

Hence the industry now spends hundred of millions of dollars on action movies that were apparently written in crayon, starring people called Chris, directed by project managers”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/dont-give-them-what-they-want

“The idea of a billionaire sugar daddy buying and “stewarding” your institution as a charitable legacy project sounds kind of nice compared with alternative ownership structures (private equity, Macanese gambling syndicate, the GRU). But it’s fatally condescending to those newspapers and magazines. A good rule of thumb is: If the billionaire that owns you is not trying to influence you to hurt his political enemies, it’s because you don’t matter very much”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/what-does-jeff-bezos-non-endorsement

“The political “lessons” are more or less insurmountable – in this unfortunate world, we have to live with the fact that big projects are going to be led by people who come across well at interview, and that this is very much less than perfectly correlated with ability to do the job.

But the really crucial lesson would be “if something is going wrong, review whether it is viable and don’t hesitate to reverse course; abandoning a failed idea early is a good thing which should be to your credit”. Instead, the UK policy structure seemed to learn “don’t attempt anything big, because if it fails you will be blamed”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/shadow-of-the-groundnut

“But the thing about grief I never got before is that it’s not a straight line, or a curve, but a wave form. I sort of imagined, before all this, that it would be linear: things would be bad, but gradually they would get better; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. But those stages don’t happen one after another, but pile onto you at random; you can be triggered by anything or nothing at all, and the pain of everything you’ve lost and the hole it left behind can still hit you like the first time again. Sometimes, when you think you’ve turned a corner, you run straight into a wall”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/good-grief

“A reader called to my attention that the recent Federal Election Commission filings showed one significant difference in the expenditures of the two presidential campaigns. The Harris campaign spent $34,550.02 on sign language interpreting services. The Trump campaign spent $0.00”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-23-2024

“I’ve never wanted to love a politician. I evaluate them entirely negatively – not by wondering what wonderful things they will achieve, but by embracing all the terrible things they might prevent. I am prepared to accept all sorts of compromises with my own values as long as the government is better than the alternative. Voting is not an expression of my soul. It is not a demonstration of my identity. It is my attempt to secure marginal improvements on what came before, regardless of all the various disappointments it will necessarily entail.

If there is a central principle that this government is all about, it is about this chief distinction in politics – between those who want pragmatism and sobriety and those who want a great zero-sum battle in the sky”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/starmer-deserves-a-better-class-of

“To be clear, Zuckerberg started dressing differently in May, yet he’s still getting headlines about it in October. This has been a successful — and loathsome — PR campaign, one where the media has fallen for it hook, line and sinker, all while ignoring the environmental damage of Meta’s pursuit of generative AI and the fact that the company fucking sucks.

This is a problem of focus and accountability, and illustrative of a continual failure to catch a conman in the act”

https://www.wheresyoured.at/rockstars/