The Weekend in Foolish Attention
DATELINE: Saturday, January 29, 2022
I’m loving Substack.
Part of my daily reading is to go out and find writers whom I may disagree with on some issues, take a look at their arguments and then think through to see if they managed to change my mind. On other days, I seek out those I agree with but whom are far smarter than I am and devour their writing like a starving man leaps on a palette of Hot Pockets.
Here is my newest find in the latter category:
What Would the Working Class Say? (WWWCS)
The Liberal Patriot, a new site, newsletter, and community for political analysis and debate on elections, public opinion, policy, and ideology by co-editors John Halpin, Ruy Teixeira, Peter Juul, and Brian Katulis.
Thoughtful, data-driven, pragmatic stuff across the board. Subscribe to these cats because they make sense in a world dancing around the edge of chaos.
How a 28-year-old is fighting against ‘divisive’ anti-racism training
Meet Chloé Valdary. She is the bomb.
She has done away with unconscious bias training, segregating co-workers by race, and placing blame on abstract “systems.” Instead, she promotes stoicism and a self-love that leads to community love.
“Enchantment . . . is a state of being where you’re in a healthy relationship with yourself, which allows you to have a healthy relationship with others,” Valdary told me. “If we want to teach people how to love, we have to ask what people are already in love with. That’s why I use pop-culture references to reinforce my teachings.”
Her trainings promote three core principles: Treat people like human beings instead of political abstractions; criticize to uplift and empower rather than tear down or destroy; and, root everything you do in love and compassion — harking back to the Christian principles of Martin Luther King, Jr.
It’s a little bit “Here. Take these crystals and wave them around in front of your junk and become one with the universe” but, damn, it’s a sight better than the angry, racist antiracism of Kendi or DiAngelo so I’m in.
Holy shit. Meet Mr. Delicious.
Stephen Breyer is retiring from the SCOTUS and some rightwing squawk is in reference to Uncle Joe’s campaign promise to put a black woman on the court.
First, Breyer’s seat was traditionally known as the “Jewish” seat so take your race essentialism and stuff it up your ass. Second, it’s a Joe Biden Campaign Promise. Sure, not binding in any legal way it’d be goddamned nice to have a politician actually make good on a promise. Third, it’s freaking high-time for an African American woman to sit among the nine.
If for no other reason than we know from the confirmation hearings, nothing makes Kavanaugh cry faster than a black woman.
I’m not a devoted Rogan listener—I’ll catch his podcast when he has someone interesting on like Oliver Stone or Chuck Palahniuk—but I don’t find his ridiculous reach to be so mystifying.
The Fourth Estate is crumbling under the weight of what I’ll call the FOX NEWS MENTAL DISEASE OF THE NARRATIVE. There has been propagandized yellow journalism since dudes scrawled things on cave walls to warn others away from their mastodon hunting grounds but the most recent incarnation is FOX. Cherry-picking factoids, the use of “they say” and “we read” and strawman fallacies in the pursuit of connecting dots of info to tell the story they decided ahead of time was crucial is both obvious and pervasive. Effective, too.
Since the improbable election of Donald J. Trump, the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Wall Street Journal, Jezebel, Esquire, WIRED, you name the news org and they’ll be doing exactly the same thing.
Whether Rogan is right or wrong about anything, he is trustworthy. His foundation is to counter the narratives through a thorough and lengthy set of conversations with people not involved in spinning the mainstream narratives.
Of course, he’s popular. Too bad Neil Young will lose a massive amount of cash over this but we all have hills to die on.
That’s all I got this week.
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DH