Wallowing: Your Input is Requested
I need your opinion, because it’ll shape what I do on Substack in the near future. (Psst, down here! Let’s talk!)
The day after I finished writing a post pointing out that a newspaper columnist complaining about how dishonest and fascist it is to run political ads on TV that discuss high rates of violent crime was doing that complaining in a newspaper full of reports about high rates of violent crime, I read a piece of reporting from a journalist who discovered that Republicans are fascists who want to seize control of media corporations, and viciously use their fascist repressive power to….make social media giants stop banning people and let everyone speak freely in a wide-open public sphere. jUsT LiKE aDOlF hItLEr!!!!!
And I sighed heavily, as I tend to do twenty to fifty times a day — a family member recently informed me that “mildly irritated” is my “default condition” — and thought about mentioning the latest free speech is literally fascism article here.
But then, dear reader, I stopped. With, you know, trembling hand. And stuff. Because I know that the drumbeat of “here’s a new discussion about another idiotic piece of lazy bullshit from some sleazy legacy media halfwit” becomes less thrilling over time, and because a good number of commenters here say that it’s just time to ignore the tedious mendacity of this highly predictable social type. I get that argument, but I also think it’s usually worth noticing the willful distortion of the information environment by hacks, ‘cause truth is better than lies.
So. Because the likes of MSNBC anchors and newspaper op-ed columnists tend to irritate me enough to complain about them, and because not everyone wants to read about that, I had the thought that I might split what I write, continuing this page but also starting a new page that I might call something like “Hack Watch,” with a daily round-up of the least honest and most stupid news and opinion — sort of like offering a daily tour of a sewer, and how much fun would that be?
But I leave it to you: What should I do?
Comments open below, to parse the fine shades of nuance in your answer.
I think you could take a hybrid approach--maybe designate every Friday to be a roundup of the week's stupidity. Or maybe a Monday, "Just another Hack-filled Monday".
Insightful and entertaining writing that doesn't sound like everything else--that is your niche. So hack watching is fine, but as your intuition tells you...don't let it dominate you. You are better than that.
This is your blog space and you write what you feel you should write about. We like to read your thoughts - whatever they are are. If we don’t want to we can skip that time. This woukd be the same if there were two or one. It’s easier to keep up with one.