Mitch's Blog

I’ve heard from two people in the past 24 hours who have dropped Mastodon, citing negativity. One said it’s “pretty fucking toxic.”

Meanwhile, I’m focusing more of my blogging and social media on Mastodon (and Tumblr too, but I’m talking about Mastodon today).

I’m taking a break from posting to Bluesky because I don’t get enough activity there to be worth posting to.

And I am taking a break from posting to Facebook — hopefully permanently — because I don’t like Meta and I don’t like the way Facebook operates.

Different people have different experiences, and my social media profile is so low nowadays that if Masto is toxic, I may simply be too small to target.

One of the reasons I chose Masto over Bluesky is that I was able to migrate my account to a server, hachyderm.io that permits posts of up to 2,263 characters. I hate short character limits — 140 characters, 280, 300, 500. I have more than that to say.

Here’s my link page, where you can find my links to Mastodon, Tumblr, etc.

I use Grammarly to check grammar and usage in my writing. I find it valuable, but also excessively intrusive. The recent update is more aggressive and annoying about making arbitrary and unnecessary changes.

I decided to read through the documentation and lo! there is a preference page.. I’ve switched off some types of suggestions — for example: “Sound more personable,” “Use word variety,” “Use descriptive, vivid words,” “Rewrite text for improved effect,” etc. This makes Grammarly far less pushy and annoying and more useful,

I am an extremely good writer, but a mediocre proofreader at best. Also, Grammarly is great at cutting out extraneous words. I want Grammarly to focus on those things, not look over my shoulder and make obnoxious suggestions.

This post is based on conversations I had on Tumblr and Mastodon yesterday.

Kyla Scanlon is an insightful writer about societal issues from a fresh perspective — Generation Z. She recently appeared on the Ezra Klein Show podcast, in an episode titled, “How the Attention Economy Is Devouring Gen Z — and the Rest of Us. She expands on that theme in her newsletter, in a post entitled: From Dollar Dominance to the Slop Machine

One of the themes Scanlon raises stays with me. It appeals to me a great deal as a Grand Unified Theory of a lot of what’s wrong with the U.S. economy, and perhaps the whole West.

The U.S. is focused on extracting wealth – tearing down – and China is focused on building.

The U.S.’s focus on wealth extraction rather than value creation means all activity is measured as a revenue opportunity. We can’t build affordable housing because families' wealth is tied up in their homes. Initiatives in healthcare, education and the food chain are all measured against their ability to generate revenue. Artificial intelligence extracts the works of millions of creative people and sends the revenue to a few Silicon Valley billionaires. Short-term financial thinking locks us into fossil fuels – though wind and solar are generating wealth and jobs, much of that financial value doesn’t exist yet. And that’s not the point of wind and solar anyway – the point is to avoid burning down the planet.

People are desperate to keep from falling behind economically, and therefore don’t think about long-term threats like Long Covid and climate change.

As a friend pointed out a few years ago: If James Bond went up against a supervillain in real life, the local community would rally around the supervillian. He’s a job creator! Look at how many henchman and crony positions he’s created!

We can’t even enjoy our hobbies anymore without pressure to make money off of them. Why have a hobby when you can have a side-hustle!

Meanwhile, China is building cities, electric cars, solar power and educating engineers and scientists.

This ties in with writing by two bloggers I follow closely, particularly Ian Welsh and also Chris Arnade.

China’s leadership has done terrible things. But they’re pulling ahead of the U.S. because they are investing in the future. They serve the future of China and all its people for the long term. Meanwhile, our leaders are dismantling American greatness and selling it, like the gangsters in “Goodfellas” or “The Sopranos” busting out a business.

The U.S. is becoming a nation of TikTok celebrities, grifters and crypto scammers. Our leaders serve the superrich and have no plans for the future.

But the U.S. slide is not inevitable. We have plenty of smart people here who are working and building, and plenty more eager to join them.

We need elected officials who think about the long term for their communities, the state, U.S. and world. Who think beyond the nexxt election and who work for all the people, not just the super-rich and white people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War.

We’ve probably lost a generation of time. But (paraphrasing a popular saying): When you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, the thing to do is stop digging and start climbing.

Links and ephemera (memes, vintage photos, illustrations and ads) go on Mastodon, Tumblr and (sigh) Facebook. I’m saving this blog for meatier updates.

It just seems more appropriate and easier to post the links and ephemera in those other places. Unfortunately, that means my newsletter subscribers won’t see those things, at least for now.

Also: I’m taking a break from Bluesky. I feel like I don’t get enough activity there to be worth the expenditure of attention and time.

This is all likely to change again. I am constantly fiddling with my blogging and social setup. In late May, I paused Mastodon entirely and just used this blog, which is hosted on Micro.blog, as my outpost on the Fediverse. This current change reverses that one. I think Mastodon is better for linkblogging and ephemera than Micro.blog is, though Micro.blog is a great blogging platform.

More ideas I’m noodling:

• Possibly switching from mastodon.social to hachyderm, because hachyderm permits longer posts.
• Can I figure out a way to keep the links and ephemera in my newsletter without doing significantly more work? Because this isn’t supposed to be work for me — it’s a hobby!

I read this story when I was a little kid — it blew my mind.

My cousin Barry let me borrow a whole stack of Analog magazines from 1968-72, which included this issue, and I devoured them voraciously. That stack of magazines is a big part of my origin story as a science fiction fan.

That stack of magazines is a big part of my origin story as a science fiction fan.

And Barry never expressed much interest in having the magazines back, so I hung on to them. They may be somewhere in my house right now, 50+ years and 2,500 miles from where they started.

Those magazines were how I was introduced to Joe Haldeman — they included several of his early stories, including “Hero,” which became the opening of “The Forever War.” In much later life, Joe and his delightful wife Gay became friends.

Great cover, isn’t it?

I loved this Ezra Klein interview with Kyla Scanlon, a newsletter writer who focuses on the attention economy. The discussion complements one of my greatest fears about the U.S. (and maybe the whole West) — that the economy, politics and society are now built on attention and virality, rather than things that matter — manufacturing, science, infrastructure, etc. It’s all about the retweets.

We’re doing ok now, coasting on past accomplishments, like wealthy spendthrifts living off the wealth of past generations. But it’s coming apart fast.

Donald Trump is, of course, the ringmaster of this circus.

Crypto is the apotheosis of the U.S. economy built on social media virality. Gilded Age robber barons were monsters, but they built railroads, coal and steel mines and factories. They built urban infrastructure. The U.S economy and society today are built on conspiracy theories and digital beanie babies.

This sounds dire — but we can stop this. People and societies have free will. It’ll take a while to dig out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves into. I probably won’t live to see the end of this process. But we need to get started.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

“Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence – that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time,” Vance said.

He explained that such a definition “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree” with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, dubbing it “the logic of America as a purely Creole nation.”

By the opposite token, Vance said, conceiving of American citizenship “purely as an idea” would “reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War,” he said, referencing the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that was founded to combat antisemitism and that, among other activities, tracks far-right groups.

“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he concluded.

My ancestors did not serve in the Civil War. My grandparents immigrated around 1905. I suspect that by Vance’s bullshit standards I don’t qualify as a real American, even though I and both my parents were born here.

It’s a strawman argument to suggest that anybody believes that simply agreeing with the ideals of the Declaration makes a person American. There’s more to it than that. But Vance’s blood-and-soil patriotism is both wrong and traitorous, and it’s particularly shameful that he gave his talk on Independence Day weekend.

Shockingly, Mamdani, who was born in Uganada to parents of Indian descent, checked both the “Asian” and “Black or African-American” boxes on his Columbia University application in 2009. Supposedly, this was wrong of him to do, even though he is, in fact, both Asian and African-American.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

Where’s the lie? Did Uganda move? Is it not in Africa anymore? Are we really going to pretend that America’s racial categories, designed primarily for descendants of American slavery, map perfectly onto the global complexity of human identity?

Also:

But here’s what kills me: they could have written a fascinating story about how a network of racist activists was trying to weaponize hacked university data that revealed nothing particularly interesting to attack a Muslim mayoral candidate. They could have exposed the whole operation. Instead, they decided to become part of it. It’s like if Woodward and Bernstein, upon discovering Watergate, had decided to focus their expose on how the security at the Watergate Hotel was top notch, with an anonymous quote from G. Gordon Liddy.

The Double Standard is Glaring

The Times' decision becomes even more indefensible when you consider their recent editorial choices. They refused to publish hacked materials about JD Vance during the 2024 election and declined to explain why. But when a racist hands them a hacked college application from 2009 that reveals nothing of public interest, suddenly those ethical concerns disappear.

The paper also famously decided not to endorse candidates in local elections–except when it came to Mamdani, whom they specifically urged voters not to rank at all on their ballots. Interestingly, they didn’t issue similar “please don’t vote for this person” guidance about Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor who resigned over sexual harassment allegations and has been plagued with scandals from his mismanagement during the pandemic. Apparently checking the objectively accurate box on a college application is more disqualifying than a pattern of sexual misconduct and mismanagement.

Manufacturing Controversy To Justify Bad Journalism

Perhaps most galling is the Times' response to criticism. When readers and media critics pointed out how absurd this story was, an anonymous Times source told Semafor that the controversy proved they were right to publish this:

“The fact that this story engendered all the conversation and debate that it has feels like all the evidence you need that this was a legit line of reporting,” one senior reporter told Semafor.

But that’s not how any of this works. At all. Sometimes the “conversation and debate” is about how you should have known better.

The Times mostly does solid journalism. I subscribe and read it most days. But it also regularly kowtows to racist Republican interests.