These are publications that often include articles that I like. But I try not to go overboard linking to pieces that I agree with, so I tend to read them a lot more than I write about them.
1. Quillette.
2. New Discourses.
Quillette is the broader of the two. New Discourses is mostly James Lindsay.
Just one example from Quillette is Reflections on Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address, by Sergiu Klainerman. Just one example from New Discourses is Critical Race Theory’s Jewish Problem, by Lindsay.
Perhaps instead of complaining about what Twitter or Facebook are promoting or blocking, we ought to be grateful to these sorts of sites.
Spoiler alert: the non-HEEs on the right have no clue that these sites exist.
In their world, it’s Fox News vs. the MSM, Hollywood, social media and academia. And, the latter groups view and treat them as deplorables.
So, I’m thinking that their complaining is more than justified from their vantage point and they aren’t likely to award any gratitude points to these inconsequential mom-and-pop websites.
I am an HEE and I wasn’t aware these sites existed. No one knows everything. Arnold’s point about ignoring Twitter and Facebook is spot on. Don’t patronize them. If enough people do they will become nothing but echo chambers and ultimately become irrelevant.
>—“So, I’m thinking that their complaining is more than justified from their vantage point and they aren’t likely to award any gratitude points to these inconsequential mom-and-pop websites.”
So then their very unwillingness to access these sites (which can be reached by anyone in seconds) makes “more than justified” their complaining about the absence of such vantage points. Now that is some impressively bulletproof circular logic.
The reason that these sites are not yet more consequential has everything to do with such people’s unwillingness to expand their media diets in a healthy way.
You had to do quite a lot of verbal gymnastics to get from my original text (which is not circular) to the text that you’d wished I’d written (which is circular, but it’s also a strawman). Even the feeble minded non-HEEs like myself can see through this.
BTW – it’s not about being able to access the sites within seconds that’s important, it’s about being able to discover them in the first place. That’s actually not an easy task.
Hans,
Your “original text” said that these people would view the sites in question as “inconsequential” even if they could find them. So then it’s not much of a mystery why they don’t find them more.
No one puts in much effort into looking for things they think are inconsequential. If you start by defining only the largest and most popular sources of information as consequential, and demean excellent but smaller outlets as “inconsequential mom-and-pop websites,” you will indeed be quickly stuck in a small and circular information loop.
“demean excellent but smaller outlets as ‘inconsequential mom-and-pop websites,’ you will indeed be quickly stuck in a small and circular information loop.”
1) it’s not demeaning, it’s just a fact. Enjoy the excellent content on these sites all you want, but you don’t get to pretend that they aren’t inconsequential in the grand scheme.
2) not sure how I get stuck in a small and circular information loop by stating what is obviously true, but oh well. I might get stuck in an information bubble, but not a loop.
>—“it’s not demeaning, it’s just a fact.”
Factual insults are much more effective in demeaning things than ones which are obviously untrue. Why would you think a demeaning comment couldn’t be factual?
Media outlets are increasing and decreasing in how consequential they are all the time.
>—“I might get stuck in an information bubble, but not a loop.”
Not sure why that makes a difference to you but, either way, the point is that both keep you stuck inside.
I would add the UK-based UnHerd to this list. These growing websites, along with numerous podcasters with a libertarian bent (Joe Rogan, Steven Crowder, Alex Epstein) are reactions to the censoring proclivities of the mass mainstream and social media (Need I mention bloggers such as AK, the Powerline boys, Francis Menton et al). Their rise is not unlike that of the think tanks that have flourished following the orthodoxy that overtook academia (Cato, AEI, Heritage, Hoover). Free markets are the salvation of those who would maintain free minds.
UnHerd reminds me a little of Slate when it was an interesting magazine its first ten years.
Would be interested to hear if you think Persuasion, Yascha Mounk’s new site, belongs in this list and why/why not.
To live unobserved
by your eyes, I now go
where never pain of mine
need flatter your disdain.
-Juana Ines de la Cruz
IMO, Solzhenitsyn missed the point. The Great American Liberal Experiment was brought by the film industry. It’s literally from “Birth of a Nation” to “Roots” in a couple of generations. The American conception *was* “BoaN” before Hollywood invented the alternate.
the Simcha Jacobovici, Stuart Samuels film “Hollywoodism” makes and I think, proves this case. “Progressivism” died with the adoption of the 19th Amendment and then with Prohibition. That *ended* it. But enough was transmitted through film to make a further dent. It’s now the Standard Model, the Hollywood conception is.
There are no actual Marxists left. There are a handful of pseudo-Marxians and a legion of half-Marxian theorists but not a materialist dialectician among them. People bleat “class” and “inequality” but none of them have even heard of a power law distribution. Power laws are *biology*. And Hitchens was the Last Trot.
The “woke” thing is an artifact of sheerest venal commercialism. It’s marketing in the age of the Black Mirror, the cell phone-computer. It’s principal use is intra-firm competition. It is to human resources what the Black-Scholes Theorem was to finance.
I was unfamiliar with New Discourses, so thanks for the pointer.
Arnold, I would appreciate it if you would periodically add/review other websites that you think are worthy of notice (or comment, anyway).
Several other blogs I follow use the sidebar “blogroll” to list sites which have met some degree of critical scrutiny. Saves the time of the reader (old library quote)…
Where’s the blogroll? That was one of the nice things in early blogging, and a few blogs still have it. Some even with askblog!
http://www.thenewneo.com/ << Neo is quite open minded and calling them as she sees them, including problems with Trump and lots of problems with the Left – which is most of her friends and family.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/ << Glenn at Instapundit has put together a fine gang of bloggers to read for Libber-conservatives.
https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2020/11/trumps-plan-to-defeat-cheats.html#more << a biased fan strongly in favor of Trump, but a good (ex-) reporter on lots of news factoids. This example explains a possible Trump legal strategy to still win.
I suspect Klainerman on Solzhenitsyn is ignoring the elephant in the room. Whenever he refers to “religious” (“humanism divorced from its religious roots”, “the absence of religion . . . problematic”), he really means “Christian”. Humanism’s roots are in a particular religion – Christianity. And Western society is not absent of other religions, certainly not more than in the past. I basically agree with Klainerman, and Solzenitsyn, but the discussion will be more constructive if it is more focused specifically on the loss of courage of Christianity in the West.