Substack Notes Vol. 5.8
Feb. 23rd - Mar. 11th
More Substack Notes…
Feb. 23, 2024
It takes self-possessed people to run a healthy democratically-arranged nation.
It takes a lot of scars and risk and fights to make someone self-possessed.
And if a child is to get those scars, and take those risks, and have those fights, their parents must look the other way.
People who are scared of every shadow also have the right to vote—and, if history is anything to go by, they will always vote to turn the State into their parents. They think it’s a kind of freedom. They call it “freedom from fear,” “freedom from hate,” and “freedom from threat.” They want to be safe, because they’ve never tasted the joy of danger, of escaping by the skin of their teeth.
Responding to:
James Mills - A Locked Room, Feb 23
I think that all of the apps and platforms and information avenues we're able to wander down do open up the possibilities for learning and interactions. I can encounter and integrate far more useful information on Twitter and watching brief YouTube videos that I can sitting down and reading books start-to-finish, for example.
However, that kind of multi-tasking isn't just not optimal for humans. It's actually antithetical to they way we usually operate in the world. There's no online equivalent to sitting down and reading for two hours, losing yourself in the flow state. Similarly, there's no online equivalent to the nuance and social cues and neurotransmitter release and pheromones and tactility of spending time with people, in person. I think this a lesson that most 'online' people are beginning to learn. I fear it's one that the young will require decades to learn... and by the their damage may be irreparable.
Thanks for this piece Holly.
The answer, of course: it’s for rich and well-educated white and nonwhite people to feel as though they’re crusading, without having to actually do much or sacrifice anything themselves. It’s for those people to generate cheap social status, and signal to like-minded people that they are, indeed, the in-group. Black and brown people and their needs simply don’t enter into the equation. They never have.
I wish I could reassure my Leftist and progressive readers: there is very little explicit bigotry at work on the moderate right these days. I am in no coherent sense a racist or a xenophobe or a transphobe. I also have enough verbal acuity and nose for subtlety that I think I could detect such sentiments if they were there. YET THEY REMAIN CONVINCED SUCH BIGOTRY IS NOT JUST EXTANT, BUT ENDEMIC. When I ask for examples I get a few half-hearted misquotations or blanket policies (in which the intent is PRESUMED to be malign... which really doesn't count). They don't believe me and they can't find any evidence of it for themselves... but they're sure it's out there. Of course they are: their worldview largely depends upon it. The media has been telling them it's a problem for years. What... are they just going to trust their own lying eyes?
I haven’t been the least bit surprised that Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Harvard President Claudine Gay, and now Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion officer Sherri Ann Charleston have turned out to have past records of plagiarism and/or academic misconduct. What’s surprising is that the hollow credentialism and politicized infotainment that define so much of today’s academic establishment are at last coming to light.
It’s been a long time coming: I’ve spent much of my career feeling queasy about a lot of the content I’ve had to package and sweeten for the market as it is, regardless of when I’ve strongly suspected it to be empirically shaky at best. In terms of the struggle to land jobs and funding and tenure from a stagnant or shrinking pie, even honest scholars with the best of intentions face constant temptation to simply deliver the goods.
From what I’ve seen in public broadcasting and at Columbia Journalism School, that dynamic often incentivized artful incorporation of consistently slanted narratives on hot-button political issues. At Columbia Law, it seemed to be a top priority to help codify talking points into statute—particularly when it came to expansive definitions of “equity.” In nearly a decade of reporting for Columbia Engineering, I watched the school move from sleepy backwater to enthusiastic cheerleader and enabler for whatever the sexier fields desired. And at the School of Public Health, in my final job for Columbia, I helped celebrate striving technocrats testing the outer limits of their authority since, during Covid, almost any social problem could be framed as an “epidemic.”
-Jesse Adams
Mothers will always be praised for working 16 hours EVERYDAY. I am single with no kids and never have been married and i work sometimes 18 hours a day/night. And i work everyday with no days off. What do i get? Nothing. He’s a hard worker. That’s it. But mothers, working 16 hours a day.. and who has the kids? So really, they are just women who are hard workers and they have children someone else is responsible for getting from school, dressing, feeding, playing with, cleaning up after, teaching, etc. 16-17 hours a day and the MOTHER gets all the credit because she has a job. Un-fukhing believable.
My reply:
I doubt you get nothing… if you do you should consider finding another job. You probably get whatever wage you’ve negotiated with your employer.
You also get the silent gratitude of millions of Americans. Believe me <3
J. Daniel demonstrating why democracy can't work long term.