Their choices have created consequences we all have to deal with. I don’t really care to judge or punish or exact revenge myself (a very unscorpio thing about me is I’m not at all vengeful; I simply drop people I don’t want in my life... win-win or no deal).
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Somewhere between next week and 2024, their turn at bat will end. Everything comes to an end, even the agency of conspiratorial and ignorant revenge seekers out to destroy institutions many like and rely on. The question then is: what next?
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I think 15% of anti-Trumpies will seek to heal and re-engage. Futile. The only thing worse than people out for revenge is people who get revenge but realize they’re as miserable as ever.
The instinct to forgive, heal, and re-engage in thus case will only deepen the resentment.
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Maybe 30% will be in a mood for their own revenge, triggering a vendetta cycle. They’ll fail. The modern world is simply not set up to sustain indefinite vendetta cycles. It’s just not worth it and too many people have better things to do with their lives.
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That leaves 55%, including me, who have lost faith in anyone who voted Trump or enabled him, and will simply disengage. Ghost. Flip the bozobit. Build defenses against a repeat, but otherwise fork off a reality where they are unwelcome and will need to overcome hostility to join.
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That will all shake out as it will, but to bring it back to the problem of media, that’s one institution Biden won’t be able to buy time for if he wins. Whatever the outcome, the media has to reform now or die. Nobody cares enough about them, or needs them enough, to save them.
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The media lost its sweet cash cow information markets thanks to the internet. They created Trump as part of the effort to survive, with a little help from Russia and a LOT of help from revengeful Trumpies (don’t get confused about the centrality of bad voters). Everything burned.
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I find Greenwald’s holier-than-thou flounce from Intercept kinda cringe-hypocritical🙄.
He’s been as much part of the problem as anyone. Media people pointing fingers at each other and moving around (old or new doesn’t matter: Vox=Infowars=Fox=NYT) is just shit stirring itself.
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There’s a certain equivalence now between news media and mere commentariat writers like me. Greenwald is now on Substack like me. Substack is now full of news media refugees. Several levels of influence up from me, but we can at least stop pretending they are a saintly priesthood
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One way to view this exodus is: the upside of shit stirring itself is gone now. It’s now flushing itself down the toilet. What’s left has to compete with no special status. We’re now at the starting line of the real new media. Everybody has the same tech stack, nobody is special.
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If you still think you’re better than anyone else with a laptop, you’ll have to show it through what you do. You can no longer ride the cred of a distinguished class that in hindsight was distinguished only by unearned access to high capex Heidelberg presses and telecom equipment
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I sometimes wonder if I’m more moral than the average journalist 🤔
It’s not as academic as the comparison upthread to politicians. I have no interest in being a politician. But I’m clearly adjacent to news media. The main difference being unwillingness to do fieldwork.
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Laziness has saved my soul, but...
Under the incentives journalists operate under, would I succumb to clickbait? Access-journalism deals with the devil? Epstein-Weinstein enablement circuses? Fox-level mad-crowd-fu?
Probably not tbh. I differ in ways besides laziness.
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I lack a certain sense of moral self-importance I think all journalists who consider themselves “good” seem to share. Something that infuses the pompous phrase “the public has a right to know.” A tendency towards public-interest inquisitorial self appointment.
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I think “the public” is an ass, like the law, that I’m a part of it, and that it has no more right to anything than elites. The only reason the public doesn’t do self-dealing is that it lacks the opportunity and cunning. You get no halo from representing it.
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Self-appointing yourself to represent its interests doesn’t lend you any sort of halo. You’re basically no better than Trump spokespersons representing Trump’s right to not be held accountable. Or a neoliberal corporate shill like me representing corporations right to profit 🤣
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Another thing I wonder is: when everything across the board has been going to hell, why has news media been going there double quick? Is it because Trump has been attacking and undermining them with extra vigor as the Red Resentment Revenge Emissary in Chief?
No, that’s too easy
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I think it’s because they’ve been the only institution truly above judgment and accountability so far. To the point it took a populist near-coup to make them even notice there were issues beyond the internet eating their lavish 3-martini lunch.
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While most of my own personal interactions with journalists have been positive, a few times yeah... the sense of being judged by a priest themselves above judgment. And unaware of their own distinct lack of saintliness.
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