kontextmaschine:

slatestarscratchpad:

Reading that NYT article on the intellectual dark web everyone is talking about.

Does it make sense to say that, abstracting out the opinions of these people, they’re also unique in their business model? IE mostly unaffiliated with normal institutions/media companies, doing podcast-like things, getting money on Patreon-type-stuff, and also being really successful / having big personality cults around them?

Does anyone know of anyone like this either on the left or the more conventional non-taboo National-Review-reading right? Am I right to think it’s at least pretty rare? I can’t think of anything, but I don’t know whether that’s just my limited perspective or a real fact about society.

@kontextmaschine, maybe?

My 2:30 am response is to point out that National Review reviewed Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as raw untutored bullshit unhelpful to the mid-20th century conservative cause, and even with Michael B Dougherty on board and getting past the NeverTrump stuff I wouldn’t look to them to divine where popular energy is going until after the fact

I remember reading them (sometimes on paper!) in the late ‘90s, and noticing that everyone was trying to pull this fake Buckley voice of writing like an upper-class British ponce, with the exception of John Derbyshire, who confident in the knowledge he was an upper-class British ponce allowed himself a personality

Then The Corner really was an innovation in group blogging (after the Budapest suck.com ex-expats at Reason) and Jonah Goldberg and them used it to backslap over shit Simpsons jokes

The Nation (or at least Michelle Goldberg) has been staking out a decent claim on the “last generation’s left-media stars tell the kids their leftism is mewling, toxic, illiberal shit” beat. (See for example) I won’t say it’s the last place I expected that from but it’s not the first. An open niche, I suppose. Before and into the dawn of the Internet I tried to live up to my pretensions of worldly knowledge by going to the library to read a “balanced diet” of The Nation and National Review. (I was, like, twelve, so this was a precocious pretension.) So my image of The Nation comes from its post-Cold War stumblings, all “Fuck, socialism isn’t even a *dream* anymore? Well I, uh… hm. Well how about – no. Hm. Fuck. Look, Adbusters!” The Zack de la Rocha era of American left media, before George W. Bush came along to rescue it. (My memory of ‘90s National Review was a bunch of indistinguishable columnists trying too hard at second-rate Buckley impersonations with the result that they all sounded like poncey British twits. The exception was John Derbyshire, who secure in the knowledge that he *was* a poncey British twit allowed himself a personality.) Anyway, it’s a noble fight, or at least an interesting one. Has me actually paying attention to The Nation for the first time in a while.