Welcome back to your favorite regular compilation of the subscriber-only content on Discourse Blog that you missed this week. You may have been wondering where this post was last week. The simple answer is that a certain old man caught a certain deadly infectious disease and kind of fucked up our whole schedule. News and all that. But we’re back this week!
Before we dive into our usual roundup, we want to remind you one more time: we are on the verge of some huge changes at Discourse Blog.
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OK, let’s get to what you missed this week!
On Wednesday, we hosted our second debate livestream on Twitch. Everyone got to watch the stream but our subscribers got to hang out with us in our exclusive Discord chat room. It was extremely fun! This is another thing that only subscribers have access to—even more reason to join.
In “What ‘The Social Dilemma’ Gets Wrong,” Samantha Grasso wrote about the buzzy new Netflix movie’s ham-fisted approach to politics:
In the narrative of the film, social media will continue to push people to political extremes, all but assuring mutual political destruction all because we’re not “talking” to each other. The documentary references Pizzagate and shows footage from Charlottesville, but otherwise conflates all political movements as equally toxic, the result of social media’s rampage on the weak, easily-manipulated minds of its consumers instead of a result of anything else that might inspire someone to fight for material change. There are both sides to the problem here, The Social Dilemma says. Right-wing white supremacist extremism predicated on active social media disinformation campaigns and left-wing Black Lives Matter protests for the liberation of people are both the result of the products we’ve created.
It’s simple and reductive, and insultingly wrong to insist that people are rioting because they don’t know the facts, and have been manipulated into thinking they do. The misinformation my uncle has absorbed to make him believe in anti-Semitic tropes and miracle cures is not the same thing as the objective fact that police kill with impunity, time and again, and to dismiss the validity of both in order to dismiss the validity of one is propaganda in itself.
In “Mike Pence Has No Base,” Paul Blest wrote about how the vice presidential debate showed that Mike Pence would actually be a terrible presidential candidate:
For someone who’s been Trump’s vice president for three years, Pence still has little understanding of Trump’s base beyond the traditional Republican parts. It’s all about owning the libs and spitting on diversity and Pence is basically a religious puritan with neocon tendencies, which is why the segment where he congratulated Kamala Harris on “the historic nature of your nomination” was so painfully awkward. And considering how closely he’s tied to Trump, it’s difficult to imagine him bringing many new people into the coalition.
If we’re lucky, Pence will go the way of Dan Quayle and be known forevermore as a replacement-level weird guy from Indiana. If Wednesday was Pence’s attempt at reassuring terrified Republicans, that looks increasingly likely to happen.
In our weekly Office Hours chat, we talked about the dizzying, head-spinning nature of the past week and wondered…what’s next?
The center is absolutely not holding these days. The elastic waistband of our national underpants is just too warped and stretched to ever snap back to normal now. The only way to go is forward. So I ask you simply: What’s next? What’s the next shoe to drop? What shocking revelation or horrifying development will blast away our last operational brain cells this week? October clearly isn’t done surprising us yet, so what’s it gonna be folks?
And in his regular “Man, What the Hell?” column, Rafi Schwartz said “man, what the hell” about, among other things, this:
Punks?? Not. (Dead)
I’m staring at these two tweets, both from the official Twitter account of legendary San Francisco punk rock outfit the Dead Kennedys, and I’m honestly not sure what’s worse: that an ostensibly hard-left progressive band literally named after multiple political assassinations is now gleefully shilling for a U.S. senator and former prosecutor OR that they’re doing it with the absolute lamest, most anodyne, boomer-focused memes imaginable?
Friends? The fly is done. It’s over. No more fly. It was fun while it lasted (about two minutes and change) and now we can move on to other, more important animals.
OK that’s it for this week! Remember: subscribe subscribe subscribe now if you want to reap the rewards very soon.
Have a great weekend!