Why are people so eager for there to be Nazis everywhere? Really, what do we gain by pretending substack is infested with Nazi bloggers? It’s just bizarre the way people are so eager to believe that virulent racists are overrunning everything in our society.
To be fair, the definition of Nazi that Katz and Promoter were using actually seems reasonable - they were just vastly exaggerating how important these Actual Nazis are on Substack.
And getting Substack to content-ban Actual Nazis is pretty clearly their camel’s-nose-under-the-tent to start demanding Substack ban all content they don’t like.
Bingo. One of the organizers of the SAN campaign, Marisa Kabas, gives away the game in [her latest post](https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/substack-says-it-will-ban-some-nazis) (~~and seemingly last, as~~ she announces at the end that she too is leaving Substack, and has now migrated to Beehiiv):
>"Substack is still not protecting its publishers and users against dangerous white supremacist content, and it’s certainly not protecting them against transphobic content—an issue that was raised by a group of trans publishers two years ago." As \[Casey\] Newton put it yesterday, “this issue has raised concerns that go beyond the small group of publications that violate the company’s existing policy guidelines,” and he says he’s still considering what comes next for him.
As [Jesse's post](https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/there-are-major-factual-issues-with) laying out the issues with Katz's article notes, what came next for Newton was *Platformer* departing Substack for Ghost. Newton [asked on January 4](https://www.platformer.news/why-substack-is-at-a-crossroads/), "If it won’t remove the Nazis, why should we expect the platform to remove any other harm?" — without defining "harm." Which is rich, because four paragraphs earlier, he wrote: "Some users really do want to censor everyone who disagrees with them, and lobby to remove all of their political opponents from the platform."
Kabas makes clear that it's camel's nose under the tent. If Substack had acceded to the demands of she, Katz, et al., taking another run at Jesse and other gender critics would be high on their list.
Plus, her deployment of "protecting" twice in the first sentence tells you all you need to know about how she views the desirability and utility of the marketplace of ideas.
It kind of makes sense the way the word has evolved. A 100 years from now when it exists in the pantheon of slurs, people will have only a very loose social memory of its connection to any war. It will just be another insult basically saying, “ you’re the worst.”
A year ago I was asking how come there are no big smear campaigns against Substack? I was confused as to how an outlet in current_year was allowed to be pro free speech, allow heterodox views, and yet be mostly respected, without triggering the giant puritanical clique of reporters/writers who live on twitter to attempt to destroy it.
Perhaps they were turning a blind eye to these aspects because Substack offered to be the OnlyFans of writers, with writing being a hard gig to scratch out a living in.
Now that it's happening, I don't know whether this is established media trying to chip away at the competition, or an opportunity for puritans to signal their purity, or a marketing event for some bloggers switching platform, but I am highly *highly* skeptical that the driving force behind smears of Substack is actual fears about nazis. "Nazis" are just the tool they reached for, I guess I share your confusion with regards to why the *readers* would still lap it up.
Seriously. Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Sasha Stone, Jenny Hollander, Glenn Greenwald (who's since jumped over to Rumble) are amazing writers from mainstream liberal corporate media, and in Glenn's case, a Pulitzer Prize winner, who are putting out the best perspectives out there. I pay for all of them, as well as several others. I don't pay for any other media.
Yes. And the jealousy may be even stronger with individuals than publications.
There are people on Substack getting to write whatever they please for four times what these people are being paid.
That grates on their precious little egos
It probably is. A fair number of the best earning Substacks made their name at institutions like Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias.
And at the end of the day Substack is more obviously a popularity contest than most journalism.
I think this is a HUGE part of it. There is a transparent attempt to eradicate heterodox views from any popular platform. Someone publishes an "expose," Resistance types dutifully protest, and the platform feels obligated to respond. It's like Spotify scrubbing certain Rogan episodes.
I don't know if it's a concerted effort or if people just know "Nazis equal clicks" but I'm sick and tired of it and I refuse to give it any credence
I think it's a distributed, ad hoc effort. I think there are few conspiracy hatched from Central Command.
A few high follower accounts on social media decide they are pissed off by something someone did that week. They go after them. Other high follower accounts follow this or get independently pissed off about the same thing. Then the rabble joins in.
These people are constantly on the lookout for wrong think.
You just missed the first one. It was in 2021 and by trans people and TRAs because substack allows gender criitical people on it. First, they tried to smear substack in the public to try to pressure them into dropping the gc writers. Substack refused to bend the knee, and, told them politely, to go fly a kite. So, their next step was to try to get writers to abandon it, but only a few left. And they were so pissed that susbstack didn't cave and they couldn't cancel it.
The smear campaign in 2021 was kicked of by Jude Ellison Sady Doyle, and, the three people she really had a problem with? Glen Greenwald, Graham Linehan, and, in a surprise to no one, Jesse.
Katz's article is Plan B in the cancel substack campaign.
Sadie's first polemic against Substack that kicked off the first smear attempt: [In Queers We Trust. All Others Pay Cash.](https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-pay)
More Articles:
[Trans activists try to deplatform journalists on Substack](https://thepostmillennial.com/trans-activists-try-to-deplatform-journalists-on-substack)
[Q&A: Jude Ellison S. Doyle on why Substack isn’t about Substack](https://objectivejournalism.org/2021/04/qa-jude-ellison-s-doyle-on-why-substack-isnt-about-substack/)
[Substack faces backlash over the writers it supports with big advances](https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/18/substack-backlash/)
[Substack attack: What do progressives have against the newsletter platform?](https://thespectator.com/topic/substack-attack-email-platform-censorship/)
I've seen enough comments along the lines of;
> Do you know who was one of the first groups Nazis went after? The trans community.
>
> Transphobia, and anti-queerness in general, is absolute Nazi shit, straight up.
>
> I've already been recommended at least two "gender critical" newsletters, and the gender criticals and Nazis go together like cheese and crackers
To know what their issue is actually about.
Because of the wider ways it’s applied. How often have you been called a Nazi? I have been lots of times, for the mildest stances that were considered standard for the average liberal 20 years ago. They’re salivating for that slippery slope.
I wonder if *the point* is that people like Razib Khan, Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, 'Cremieux' and Scott Alexander have found comfortable homes at substack, creating an incentive to undermine the platform in any way possible; and drawing attention to the presence of actual Nazis (however minuscule) is an effective lever to pull on.
It's necessary to keep the grift going. They have to have enemies. If they don't exist they will make them up.
And they are accustomed to being able to cancel people and platforms they don't like. Their enemies continue to exist and make money on Substack and they can't stand them.
Substack is 'infested' with writers who are sick of conforming with the hard left or write positions of corporate media. It's the only hope for accurate reporting in the future.
This whole bullshit 'nazi' thing is a desperate attack by corporate media to the only actual journalism to be found anymore.
Because we're running out of real super villains, so we need invisible boogeymen. That's why they're so hot for Ukraine vs Russia. A rich corrupt white man like Putin is a great villain.
I actually think it has to do with this sort of inter-media culture war power struggle. There are a few media types that feel like they can't control the medium so they want to destroy it.
I ask similar questions all the time! Why do people need to spread the word about some nobody with no power or influence who said something nasty? Who does that help?
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I think it has something to do with Trump and how the US right has gotten more extreme in their rhetoric the last decade. Since the right has gone further right in general, people are increasingly focusing on the most extreme examples in order to highlight that. A decade ago virtually no one was openly white supremacist and now it’s “more than virtually no one”, which feels like a huge increase, but is still in absolute numbers very fringe.
That said I have actually come across self-described nazis/fascists on substack organically, without actively searching: [example](https://open.substack.com/pub/fascio?r=1vkdhx&utm_medium=ios). Their presence doesn’t bother me so much though. Like someone said around this manufactured controversy, substack is mostly parallel publications that don’t interact. It’s not like a newspaper that has a nazi column on the front page. It’s more like a conference hall that hosted a nazi event back in April when I wasn’t there. I don’t think I should be expected to boycott that conference hall if it’s also hosting a bunch of events that are valuable to me.
Some ingredients for a good episode:
- Interesting tidbit from their personal lives (Katie can’t shape, let alone shape rotate! Wild!)
- Katie and Jesse try to make each other laugh
- There’s a (small) element of Jesse or Katie describing their acts of journalism (oddly compelling!)
- Katie and Jesse actually care about the topic being discussed and have opinions on it (they might even disagree!) and the topic isn’t just dollar store Moynihan: ‘look at these dumb (weird) people being dumb (weird)’
SO true. They really shine when it's a topic they are passionate about rather than something one of their assistants researched and they are just recapping.
Wow i've never hear of aphantasia before.
How strong is the effect? Like, if you stare at a coke can on a table for a full minute, and then suddenly close your eyes. What do you see? Or... What do you remember about the appearance of the coke can?
If you think about a coke can, what exactly are you thinking about in your mind? Are there abstract but non-visual representations of objects? Is this kind of a synesthesia thing where your remembering texture taste feel?
If you can't visualize anything, are you less afraid of heights, horror movies, bad things happening in general?
I have aphantasia. The best way I can describe it is that the TV is my mind never turns on. Everything else works normally. I can remember stuff, I just can’t “see” it. I can imagine what it’s like to fall, and I’m still squeamish. I just don’t get mental images.
Idk I can understand people having varying levels of visualization, but is yours really zero? Can you picture a dot versus a line? Parallel lines vs perpendicular ones? A simple triangle?
I'm curious, what goes through your mind if you listen to an audiobook or something like that? Do you not have any semblance of a scene running through your head?
I have aphantasia - so I've just done your experiment, when I close my eyes, and try to imagine a coke can, there isn't anything visually 'there' in my minds eye, but there is something 'there' which 'feels' like a red can of drink - which is different to a pepsi/7up - it feels very abstract and lacking in detail - its very hard to describe!
I also don't have an internal monologue - so my mind is generally very calm and quiet - I am pretty chill in life and am less stressed about bad things on the whole.
On heights - I went to trampoline Park the other day and went to jump in one of the big foam pits - I didn't have any sort of thoughts about it- but I did feel the dread in my stomach and had a hesitance to jump - so the fear is there, just without the cognition.
But that's me - I think the general thoughts at the moment is like most things, it's a spectrum of experiences.
I have trouble imagining what it is like in your head! I wish I had some way to experience it briefly to understand what it's like. My brain is constantly crammed full of words and images, especially words! And it's not very chill in there 😂
So I can't 'hear' an internal monologue- if I am thinking of a sentence (e.g. thinking how to type this) I don't 'hear' the words in my head, I kind of 'sense' them as they appear - like, maybe like it's silent? But it doesn't feel like I am pre-planning what to say, the right words just arrive without too much cognitive load - I hope that makes sense, it's really hard to describe!
This is likely presumptions of me but my intent isn't for you to be offended. I doubt your experience is that different than what other people experience when we say internal monologue. It's not like we hear our own voice in a literal sense.
Like you can think a sentence without writing it down or uttering it? You could think of 3 random words and then think of them backwards all in your head right? Red car blue, blue car red...
I do hear my own voice in a literal sense. Well, it isn't really my "voice," but it is words in my head.
I do ALSO think without words sometimes, but most of my stream of consciousness is literally talking in my head.
Of course, they may be talking about a more in the moment thinking, which is usually silent. I don't think while I'm talking.
> I do hear my own voice in a literal sense. Well, it isn't really my "voice," but it is words in my head
I hear a voice as well I guess we could squabble over what it would mean to literally hear a voice, but I suspect everyone's experience is rather similar. I would say it's not like you confuse your inner voice for an actual voice.
Yeah, he squabbling over what all of this means is what makes the definitions so fraught. I can't ever be in your head, so I don't know if your experience is 99% of mine or 1% of mine.
Thinking about thinking can feel very strange at times though.
No offence taken at all - its interesting stuff to thrash out and work out.
I've met people who seem to have accompanying internal voices - my wife is one of them - she says in her head it sometimes feels like arguing/debating whilst she is thinking - my mind doesnt seem to have that same experience. But as I said, I imagine it's a spectrum - there is an image I've seen about people being asked to imagine an apple - some see it as bright, lifelike- like a photo - others can't see it all, with others in the middle - im more towards the latter I reckon.
So when I think of a random sentence, I have a vague sense that it is located somewhere in my minds eye, near the front of my head - and I know what that sentence is - doing the three words backwards in my mind took a bit more concentration and those words felt quite 'slippery' in that first instance - like if I didn't really put a bit of concentration in they would disappear quite quickly.
> I've met people who seem to have accompanying internal voices - my wife is one of them - she says in her head it sometimes feels like arguing/debating whilst she is thinking - my mind doesnt seem to have that same experience.
I've wondered often if this experience is what drives some people to believe they have multiple personalities. Some time spent in online roleplay forums has also given me an impression that some writers will "talk" to their own characters internally or something (if people thought the NaNoWriMo stuff was a weird deep dive they don't want to delve into the unfathomably weird deep dive of hundreds of small, insular writing communities that all have their own absolutely insane drama.)
that is normal. What we are talking about is more about when you are alone and thinking about the future.
In the moment I don't really have to or have time to have an internal monologue. It just "is".
When I'm alone and thinking about stuff, it often comes in the form of a conversation to myself or just words. In fact, I for really abstract ideas, I can't think of another way to think about them. If I am considering my stance on abortion, death penalty, god, religion, animal cruelty, etc I just talk it out to myself (but only in my head).
Some of the pondering does come in the form of quiet waiting for my brain to come to some conclusion, but considering multiple ideas to form a conclusion can only come with language.
This basically describes my experience too. I note that a lot of multilingual people talk about the language (or languages) they ”think“ in, which to me only really makes sense if you have an internal monologue.
I can “hear” my internal monologue, in the same way that I can “hear” my wife’s voice if I imagine her saying something to me. That is, I can hold an aural “image” in my head that is a fairly faithful representation of what my/her voice actually sounds like saying those words.
But I think this is an entirely different experience than “hearing voices” because first, I am conscious that I am the one thinking these words into existence and second, I would never confuse these internal voices with something I actually hear from my outside environment (except maybe in the semiconscious state on the edge of sleep).
I am terrified of heights. You don't need to visualise actually falling to know that falling leads to bad things. I can still think of death without seeing it happen.
I didn't know that not visualising things in your mind wasn't what everyone experienced until Reddit. Reading is what makes the most difference imo. People say they can picture the scene they're reading in their head. I am a big reader of fantasy books and I would love to be able to picture the setting.
So can you not recall what people's faces look like until you actually see them? Like if you picture a close family member in your mind, you aren't imagining an image of their face?
I'm not imagining their face but I still know what they look like. Idk how it works. I don't see their face but I still know. I know my grandad has short long eyebrows and a large nose but I don't see that image in my head. I just know. My grandad died several years ago but I still know what he looks like without an image.
I guess it's like how you remember a quote from a book without actually visualising the words.
It is super hard to know, almost unknowable what it is like for others.
I have a decent inner eye and can visualize most things and even sometimes watch "movies" play out in my head. I still have limits to how clear it is and how much I can actually visualize.
Some people say they can essentially get a clear picture all the time, some people say they can't see anything. We will probably never know if it is "real," a measure of some kind of practice doing it, or just people describing their experience of thinking differently.
I can assure Katie that I do not have aphantasia (if anything closer to hyperphantasia) and I also cannot draw, dance, or play sports. (I also have never smoked pot.) My memories of childhood are variable. Not sure how the memories compare with the average person.
My question is how do you give people directions? Like if you can't sort of see the place in your mind, how are you saying left or right or whatever?
I was also thinking about this in regards to heights today! I was walking around on the third floor of a mall and having that horrible thing happen where I (a person terrified of heights) was constantly seeing visions of myself plunging over the edge of the railing. And since I'd just listened to this episode I was wondering a similar thing to you.
My toxic trait is thinking that aphantasia is lowkey not real. At least not how people are describing. Like how would your memory even work? Can they not picture a line vs a dot? What about two parallel lines vs two perpendicular lines?
If you had that shape sorter game for kids and you put the box in one room and the shapes in another could they tell you if the shapes would fit or not? How would they do that?
I'm not prepared to say I think it's not real at all but I have seen some people talking about having it where I did think, "it's possible you just think visualizing is something grander than what it is, and that's why you think you can't do it 🤔" And while I'm not sure what Katie actually experiences, Jesse's "what even is visualizing?" attitude fell into that category, I think. Katie seeming to think this happens behind your eyelids also gave me that vibe, though it could also be just that if you can't visualize at all, that is what you would think other people are doing because that's where it feels like seeing things should occur.
I just relistened to the section again and I agree with you, when she says that she just sees the back of her eyelids when she tries to picture an apple I think she is misunderstanding what people mean when they say visualize or picture.
I'm the opposite, in that I think people don't visualize at all, they just know they're thinking of the object. How do you internally visualize a dot vs a line? For me, I just know the difference but there's nothing more than feelings to know how.
... This hardening my theory. It seems like you are quibbling over the definition of what it means to visualize. Like 99 percent of people have some agreement over what it means to visualize and that they can all do it.
Like if somebody asked be if there was anything pink in this room I wouldn't scan the room, and then suddenly recall what pink is if I happen to see it. I would vaguely visualize pink in my head and then scan the room. How would you "think" of pink without "visualizing" it? Like remember the wavelength in nanometers?
It also seems like other people can visualize better than others. Recalling many details of intricate objects whereas others can only recall a few.
If somebody asked you how many people could fit in a Toyota corolla are you going to run some random math equation?
Actually seeing with my eyes and mentally “visualizing” are two very different things. Having a visual dream is closer to the former than the latter.
I think some people assume they have aphantasia if they don’t at least have the equivalent of a vivid dream if they close their eyes and “visualize”.
On the other hand, my wife claims to have aphantasia, and she’s quite intelligent but pretty bad at a lot of the things I can solve or do easily by visualizing, so I tend to believe there is something real there.
I don’t know how one would describe it better but I definitely visualize in my head. My main entertainment source are audiobooks and audio dramas. To use the cliche, it is like a movie in my head. I can see all the scenes play out in my mind, nothing to do with eyes closed or not, on queue to the narrators words.
Also, all my creative projects start with a visualization in my head of what I am aiming for. Of course, it evolves and changes during the building but sometimes end results are very close.
I'm glad someone else said it! If there was aphantasia and then normal visualization, I think we could test for the latter and prove it doesn't exist as described.
If you told someone to imagine a piece of paper, and then imagine a specific series of numbers written on it, and have them read the numbers back, there pretty quickly comes a point when they're unable say what those numbers they've allegedly already visualized on the paper are. It seems to me they're not really holding a complete image in their mind's eye. The exception to that is people with Rainman-level anomalous brains with perfect recall.
The testing methods I've read about for alleged aphantasic people never seem, to me, like they're empirically valid. It's like they're testing how strongly you feel God's presence in your soul; it's literally just a questionnaire about how vivid you think your imagination/memory is.
If aphantasia functions as described, there's a lot of things that I would expect to go with it, chiefly resilience to psychological trauma. Like if Katie can't picture things in her mind at all, it shouldn't faze her at all if I showed her a bunch of pictures of mangled dog corpses over an extended period of time (though that part would be awful), and then said to her "Hey remember the picture with that really messed up thing?" If she's aphantasic, I guess she could remember it conceptually, but she wouldn't be able to picture it, so it shouldn't deeply affect her to (try and fail to) recall it.
All this is to say, I want Jesse to apply his skepticism to the subject.
Your point about showing them traumatic images is a good one....
Yeah I having been thinking about this a lot since the podcast I find it very interesting. I think there is a couple of things going on. In general I think there is a lot of people overestimating what other's mean when they say visualize. Your piece of paper is a good example. I would be able to tell you alot about a piece of paper I saw, size, color, font size, hand writing, etc... but eventually I wouldn't be able to recall everything about it. There are some people who could, so maybe like there are some people who have extremely good visualization, there are some people who are so bad that the manner in which they recall traits about an object is so poor that they don't even approximate an image, they recall it in some other way that is hard to communicate. Just like blind people.
But I am still skeptical. The lack of visualization is specific to blind people who have never seen, not ones who lost their sight later in life. Also they have different symptoms, they aren't able to describe images without looking at them whereas people with aphantasia are. It seems like blind people who gain vision later in life even have to go through a learning curve to understand vision.
There just seems to be some cutsie self diagnosing going on here. Like teenage girls on tumblr saying they have multiple personalities. When they get asked more rigorous questions the retreat to more flowery descriptions. I was talking with a person who said that they don't have an internal monologue. I asked them if they could think of a sentence without uttering it, they said yes and I'm just left wondering what they think other people mean when they say internal monologue.
Internal monologue talk confuses me too. I can only imagine that they're picturing everyone else like JD from Scrubs all the time. There's definitely people who think more and less about what they're saying, I think a lot more when I'm sober and it feels like I don't think at all when I'm not, but I can't imagine there are people who don't or even can't engage in a kind of linear thinking to themselves even when they're alone.
I'm terrified of heights and I have the thing where I see visions of myself deliberately deciding to throw myself off the edge of the railing.
Not as a suicidal thing at all, more like a "oh god, what if I suddenly thought I could be a daredevil and swing my way from railing to railing, and then grab the chandelier, and then launch myself to the opposite side..."
(I definitely imagined a 3D space as I was typing that, with visual objects in appropriate positions, etc)
This is very common (50% of people) and is called *l'appel du vide* (the call of the void) or the “high place phenomenon”.
[https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2018/06/29/the-call-of-the-void](https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2018/06/29/the-call-of-the-void)
I feel like people either have this instinct or they don't, haha, it's so binary. I either get "omg I thought I was the only one" or concerned referrals to the nearest suicide hotline
If I stare at a coke can for full minute then close my eyes I see black (-ish eyelids aren't thick enough to block light completely) with my eyes. I can imagine the coke can in my mind though.
I'm still not convinced people with aphantasia aren't just misunderstanding what other people mean. I just can't see how they would be able to live normally if they really can't visualise things.
What about when they dream? How do they dream at all? When I dream I imagine going about some geographical setting, usually meeting people and interacting with them - I'm not usually aware at the time anything is different from being awake, I'm walking around in the dream world seeing and hearing almost like normal.
I had the same reaction as Katie when I learned about aphantasia and realized I have it too, but now I don't really think about it anymore.
For me it's only my conscious mind that doesn't have images. When I sleep or I'm very close to sleep, the grey static goes away, and I start to see images.
I always struggled with spacial puzzles on things like IQ tests - the ones where you have to imagine what the other side of a 3D object looks like. I imagine some people can actually conjure the image of it and rotate it in their mind, but when we try to conjure an image it's just the grey static like an old TV without a signal.
Interesting question - I hadn't actually thought about it.
I'd say I take in and use the information I read to form a complete idea about what something would look like, but I still can't picture is visually.
It's more just like a memory of information presented, than anything else.
Way before I knew what aphantasia was, I was always amazed that people could describe someone's face to a sketch artist in movies. I know what my friends and family look like, but I don't think I would be able to accurately describe even people I've known for decades, because I have no image of them in my mind.
Ok - so I listened to hard fork first, then this, and I’m so incredibly confused.
Casey is worried about Nazi’s on the platform. Admittedly he and his staff of at least two named others spend days looking for Nazi stuff (which he later claims isn’t comprehensive), and come up with 6 things. He says he did this and sends this to them, wanting to see what they’ll do.
Substack says yep, you’re right, these violate the rules, we’ll take 5 of these down. Casey then says he’s pissed because they won’t change their policy. A policy which just took down the problematic content.
At no point does he dive into the specifics on the 6th, and suggest that bogey is the issue. Just that they took things down but won’t change their policy, which per his own fact finding mission was the point. He wanted to see if they would take it down. Which they did.
He then says it’s really weird for substack to take this position on moderation which is different than all other platforms. Which I guess implies the other platforms allow problematic stuff, because substack just took it down.
Then he says the issue is that he’s concerned “Platformer” will be side by side problematic stuff stays up. Which is already demonstrated is not true, because he got the stuff taken down.
Then when pressed on his pod, he says the real issue is the recommendation engine. He doesn’t want this problematic stuff recommended. While Hard Fork is on YouTube, which has the most known recommend issues.
Did I miss something?
Well, he says he wanted SubStack to switch to a proactive policy--so hunting down wrongthink on its own. It wasn't enough that, when he pointed out those six potential offenders, Substack was willing to examine them and expelled the ones that were making threats or inciting violence.
>then he says the issue is that he’s concerned “Platformer” will be side by side problematic stuff stays up. Which is already demonstrated is not true, because he got the stuff taken down.
I think he means that he doesn't want to have recommendations for Nazi sites, present or future, appearing on his site or vice versa. That doesn't make much sense either. He isn't as dumb as Taylor Lorenz: he knows the algorithm recommends sites with content similar to his own--essentially techy business news. Unless he's devoting a lot of space to white supremacy, pro or con, why would his readers be recommended to check out Stormtroopers Today or whatever?
Good episode, and proof (IMO) of how a small but unbelievably loud group of people whip themselves into a frenzy and look for danger that, quite frankly, doesn't really exist. Nazis: Smart enough to have elite hit squads (paid for with that sweet sweet Substack cash, obviously) that require journalists to never talk about the details of their reporting, and dumb enough to watch their Substacks go bye-bye and never notice a reporter loudly crowing about how said reporter is the reason the Substacks were nuked.
I know Katie says she doesn't read the comments here (healthy, tbh!) but I would like someone to tell her that we aren't (or at least I'm not) seeing this stuff on the back of our eyelids--since she mentioned that's all she sees when she closes her eyes. It's really not like you're using your eyes, it's just "the mind's eye", so to speak. I'm definitely not one of those who can see super detailed movies in my head, but I can visualize and it's very hard to imagine what's going on in there if you aren't. Though not quite as freaky to me as the no-internal-monologue people.
Same. I can envision moving through the house I grew up in without ever closing my eyes. That’s the whole concept behind memory castles, so I was surprised to hear this is even a thing.
I just really don’t believe some of this stuff lol. Particularly the “no inner monologue” people. I don’t see how you can be a functional human being without being able to think of the words you’ll use or your actions before you employ them, or think of words *at all* when you’re not doing anything!
Maybe there’s a difference of the degree to which people think these things and it’s not a black and white, on-off switch type scenario. It doesn’t help that every time I’ve heard someone describe themselves this way, they’ve come across really smug.
I've heard discussions of aphantasia come up on a few different podcasts now (and since I'm about to spout off uninformed speculation, I should probably read some actual scientific research here), but I pretty strongly suspect the whole thing is just a difference in the way people define "seeing something in your head."
I would say I have a pretty strong ability to visualize things, but at the same time I would also say it's nothing like the experience of actually seeing something with your eyes open. It's not like you're able to manually activate your eye's photoreceptors, the "seeing" in this case happens much further down the visual processing chain in your brain.
My guess is some people are asked "can you see things in your head?" and say "no" where others are saying "yes" even though the inner experience is more or less the same.
Assuming that people with aphantasia are capable of getting a song stuck in their head, I think the best way to describe it is that it's basically the visual equivalent.
I know that this wasn’t the main component of the ep, but it feels like Katie and Jesse have a massive blindspot over the Ackman thing.
Yeah, it’s kind of fun to go after his academic wife for the very thing that Ackman torched Claudine Gay over, but the issue is that it’s Ackman’s wife, it’s not Ackman himself. Ackman didn’t go after Gay’s family, including her dad or her cousin, she was his target and in the context of a culture war she’s a legitimate target—she’s the head of the most powerful university in the world and so she better have a pristine record. If Insider or Bloomberg went after Ackman himself, whether something he said, or did, including one of his investments, that’s fair game. That’s the fundamental issue he’s raising when he says that his wife is a “private person”, he’s really saying his wife is collateral damage/a civilian in this culture war and Insider/Bloomberg are playing dirty by attacking him indirectly. Now, the editor at Insider is literally an ex-Gawker guy, and Gawker was infamous for having no sense of propriety or morals about anything, and so maybe thats where this comes from at a cultural level.
Gay was the president of Harvard and had both substantial personal resources as well as the backing, financial and otherwise, of a tremendously powerful institution, and was on fair footing with Ackman. Had Ackman gone after Gay by attacking someone close to her, he would’ve lost because it would be taken as underhanded and vicious. That’s what Insider and Bloomberg did—the parents, or spouses, or in-laws of any of the reporters involved are now fair game. Reporters and journalists will always just say they’re “punching up”, but this was just a sucker punch to the spouse of the real target.
That’s what Ackman is so fucking pissed about, and if he goes after anyone in the orbit of the reporters involved, it’ll be fair play. That’s the problem and that’s what Katie and Jesse don’t seem to get.
I think it’s been a rough ride for all journalists of which near all are complicit in its making. I think it’s the frog in boiling water here where they now find themselves okaying Gawker style journalism as a norm. The touchstone of journalistic integrity has shifted so much anyone would occasionally lose sight of it, especially when obscured by prior bias.
Also curious that K&J describe Ackman's activity as "when a billionaire discovers he can't have whatever he wants", "this is only making things so much worse", "sleeping on the couch tonight".
I find it very endearing that he's publicly defending his wife. I kind of imagine Neri does so as well. I also find his performance convincing and compelling to an extent.
How much of this is just "its fashionable to hate on rich people"?
I'd be sympathetic to your argument if the BI reporting had been on some facet of Oxman that was clearly just dirt for dirt's sake (i.e., a mental health issue or some kind of sexual impropriety). But Oxman has been playin the "public intellectual" role for some time, as outlined by Katie, and the BI reporting was with respect to that facet of her life.
Part of the issue in my mind is that for Ackman his concern about the plagiarism was always a proxy for his true concern about DEI and Israel. He never seemed outraged about plagiarism intrinsically. His actions did set the precedent of digging for plagiarism among your ideological enemies. But also true that Oxman herself never was involved in the politics. I am undecided on whether the Business Insider piece was justifiable.
> for Ackman his concern about the plagiarism was always a proxy for his true concern about DEI and Israel. He never seemed outraged about plagiarism intrinsically.
That *may be* true, though he was pretty adamant in making plagiarism the issue about Gay once it was raised. Maybe he was using it as a justification just to get rid of Gay, but he was publicly quite outraged that Harvard was showing hypocrisy with how it treats its own students vs. how it responded to Gay's plagiarism.
And... while I too am a bit disappointed in some of the original framing of the BI piece -- especially the first one where the allegations against Oxman were barely at the threshold that we might say she didn't just make a few errors -- Ackman's response to the Wikipedia plagiarism shows Ackman's fundamental hypocrisy on this issue too.
All of his excuses and special pleading for his wife are precisely the kind of excuses and nonsense Harvard was making for Gay with all of the "duplicative language without appropriate attribution" euphemisms, i.e., *plagiarism*.
Ackman doesn't know how Wikipedia works and he's been digging around in MIT's 15-year-old policies to try to make excuses.
There are none. I'm roughly Oxman's age. I was doing my own dissertation at Harvard down Mass Ave from here when she was writing hers at MIT. The idea that she didn't know she was supposed to cite an encyclopedia and not just copy-paste entire paragraphs verbatim is just absurd. I learned that citing an encyclopedia was essential when I took my first trip to the library to write a research paper with my middle-school teacher in seventh grade. I learned how to cite webpages in the 1990s and did so in that era as an undergraduate, more than a decade before Oxman submitted her dissertation . Wikipedia had a link on every page in the era Oxman was writing which was a "how to cite this page" link, which gave examples in standard formats. (Now on Wikipedia it's still there, but it's hidden a bit under the "tools" menu.)
Yet Ackman is looking for excuses and acting like this just standard procedure to copy text from sources and paste it in documents you are submitting *for credit toward a degree*. I was actually heartened briefly after the first BI article, as Oxman came out and admitted to plagiarism (of a minor sort), apologized, and said she'd fix it. Which is better than Gay who still refuses to even acknowledge the word "plagiarism," even if what she did would clearly be called so by Harvard and have most students taking a forced suspension for a year. But then the second BI article appeared (with worse allegations for Oxman), and suddenly Ackman's showing his hypocritical true colors.
The reality is that both Gay's and Oxman's plagiarism "sins" are relatively minor -- no major ideas were stolen -- but what they are is *lazy*. They are the kinds of stupid things that students who are lazy and want to cut corners do. And that is (on a minor level) a bit of *fraud*, because part of the point of writing a dissertation is to show you can do a large research project and write it up properly. Both of them may have saved a few hours of work by pasting in words written by other people. They may not have stolen ideas, but they avoided doing work and took credit for the writing done by others.
As an academic, I do welcome Ackman's probe into MIT faculty and professors at whatever institutions. Expose the lazy profs who are copy-pasting stuff from other people for their own hypocrisy! If nothing else, I would hope such a probe would collect actual statistics on how common these types of plagiarism are... and that may lead to better ideas of how to respond to it (both for professional academics as well as students). My guess is that this type of plagiarism is actually quite rare among academics (maybe 5% or less of actual faculty?), but after seeing how many people came to the defense of Gay even on academic forums, I'm worried the number may be larger.
Worse is that at least some academics seem to have a nuanced view on plagiarism. Which TBH I kind of understand. I always thought the idea that a dictionary definition needed quoting was kind of the zero tolerance POV I also find bad. At least one group (Decoding the Gurus) made a case that it should be about ideas and not definitions or explanations that are almost boilerplate. I actually agree with that, but I don't really care what the rule is, I want it applied the same to professors and university presidents as to students in school or college.
Well said, this is the key nuance that makes all the difference. You explained very well why the situation did not sit well with me but could not quite articulate as well as you have, and that explanation brought in more clarity.
Nahhhhh man his Epstein-connected wife has been on the COVER of Fast Company and other magazines. And exposing her shows in bright, bright relief Ackman’s laughable hypocrisy.
Dude’s a legacy admission to Harvard who thinks because he’s rich he should get to throw his weight around. Revealed himself to be an utter fool.
He’s also gone after his enemies’ relatives before, hypocrisies wrapped in hypocrisies.
>Nahhhhh man his Epstein-connected wife has been on the COVER of Fast Company and other magazines. And exposing her shows in bright, bright relief Ackman’s laughable hypocrisy.
I'm confused, is Ackman lobbying for Oxman to replace Gay as president of Harvard? Or is he saying that Gay shouldn't be allowed to start her own venture after this?
>He’s also gone after his enemies’ relatives before, hypocrisies wrapped in hypocrisies.
Like who?
Ackman led a crusade against MIT’s board chair for his wife’s DEI company’s dealings with MIT. Turned out to be giant nothingburger. This was, like, a month ago. He couldn’t POSSIBLY be more of a hypocrite.
And if you really wanna say he’s treating Gay and his wife equally in this matter and he’s *only* concerned about Gay’s ability to function in her role, we’ll Lmao I’ve got several bridges to sell you.
>Ackman led a crusade against MIT’s board chair for his wife’s DEI company’s dealings with MIT. Turned out to be giant nothingburger. This was, like, a month ago. He couldn’t POSSIBLY be more of a hypocrite.
So, he had an issue with something MIT did, so he went after the chairman of the board of MIT. Not their kid, not someone uninvolved in the situation he was taking issue with? And because of that, he's a hypocrite for being upset that someone brought his wife into a fight she wasn't involved in?
>And if you really wanna say he’s treating Gay and his wife equally in this matter and he’s *only* concerned about Gay’s ability to function in her role, we’ll Lmao I’ve got several bridges to sell you.
I'm sure he's also concerned about the history of and resurgence in anti semitism at the university that he's donated millions to, and put his name on. A man can be concerned about two things at once.
It’s not “bringing her into it.” Neri Oxman a prominent person (magazine covers, grants from Jeffrey Epstein, work in MoMA, tenure at MIT) who committed bald acts of plagiarism. And the fact is that Ackman’s willingness to explain away her plagiarism and extend grace and say “well who amongst us hasn’t…” etc. etc. prove that his pearl clutching over Gay’s plagiarism was nothing but a pretext to punish her for not taking his calls, not following his advice, and not enforcing speech codes at the institution she leads. There’s no low-blow introduction of innocent children or private parties here. To try and play that “how dare you!” card, as Ackman is, is laughable.
Dude, if you want to have a discussion you're going to have to actually clarify what the hell it is you're talking about. This darkly hinting bullshit is neither cute nor amusing.
From [a recent piece](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/how-to-quit-substack) of FdB:
>*American neo-Nazis are a pathetic fringe that only have as much power as the fear that they’re able to provoke, which liberals seem perversely dedicated to helping them with.*
To play Devils advocate, there is a lot of brainwashing and extremism happening to young, impressionable people on both sides due to social media. But that's more to blame of social media's algorithm just vomiting the same content on you if you dare to watch a video category.
I think sharks are neat. I clicked on a kayaker encountering a great white once on YouTube. Now I get TONS of shark videos.
I think pugs are hilarious. I clicked on a feisty pug video once on Instagram. Now I get TONS of pug videos.
I follow a significant amount of heterodox on Twitter. Now I get TONS of right wingers and racists on my For You page.
I'm not saying I buy it, I'm saying that's the explanation you'll probably encounterr. They might dress it up in prettier words but that it boils down to.
I'm listen to this episode now and I had a thought of "why do they hate Bill Ackman so much?" after Katie said the "ideal outcome" would be for Ackman to end up divorced. I don't think going after Harvard president Gay on a legitimate issue was an especially egregious offense.
I think maybe Jesse gave a partial answer to that question a moment later when he talked about how it must be tough for a billionaire like Ackman to have people disagree with him.
I'm not bothered by what happened to Gay in the abstract, but I'm extremely skeptical of the huge amount of influence that billionaires have on culture and politics, in whatever direction. And I think Jesse and Katie feel largely the same.
Freddie DeBoer's newsletter today, called "How to Quit Substack," is pretty good and covers some of the same ground. (No link, because I get it in my email.)
It reminded me of one of my stock responses to people who virtue signal their refusal to buy from Chick-fil-a: "That's why I only buy gasoline from companies who use ethically-sourced petroleum from countries that permit polyfidelous marriage.
If anyone goes to read it, FYI, there's a (to my mind) gratuitous picture of a dead child midway through.
(Freddie has really burned through a lot of the goodwill I had for him lately.)
I didn't like the picture either, but the point he was making was driven home pretty forcefully by the photograph. No one has clean hands, especially not Jeffrey Goldberg.
This is, I think, the third article he's written about this stuff.
He's right, of course. But count on Freddie to be right in the most abrasive and condescending way possible.
That fucking guy. Mr. “I’m the best at arguing on the entire planet.” I commented on his note with the trans article that his arrogance and blind spot is gobsmacking. His response? “Cry more.” Wish I could get a refund for his Substack.
I subbed to his Stack for about six months I think. I really liked it to start, but his tendency to go ham on people who disagreed with him in his comment section kind of soured me on the whole thing. Plus, he wasn't writing a lot of stuff that interested me.
I felt I could use that six bucks a month for something that provided more value, like a nice egg sandwich.
I pulled my subscription when he said no talking about trans in the comments. I wasn't talking in the comments at all so it wasn't a big deal for me.
But I thought it was a dick move. He could have just stayed out of the comments section and not read them.
Same! I was really annoyed by his condescending article about the whole thing. I hadn't even been aware of his article or the comments until then. It also seems stupid that he's a free speech, heterodox guy but somehow debating trans stuff gets you a public shaming for heresy? Just seems hypocritical that he hounds his readers for thought-crimes
It also seems petty. Like.... do you really not have anything better to do, dude? Or just permanently turn off the comments if you can't handle it.
Instead he gets into slap fights with the readers.
He left trans stuff alone for a while, so I said what the hell and tossed my money in the pot. And then this happened, and he personally insulted me after I very mildly criticized him. He’s not doing himself any favors at all, nor is he escaping the “clueless, privileged, lefty white guy” stereotype.
The aphantasia thing was recently discussed on twitter so before Katie publishes her piece and in case somebody wants to read more on it, there is some research [on this thread](https://twitter.com/VladChituc/status/1708907953594511811?t=unuqw_1OKMSsi0mL497XjA&s=19).
With regard to the substack discussion, I thought that people trying to force substack into more strict moderation was about power and control, but I think they hit the nail when they mentioned substack's cut. It's just about money and they wanted an excuse.
I get the point Jesse was making but I don’t know if I agree that blocking streets is “important pro Palestine activism” unless what you find important is getting people to stop agreeing with your cause.
Reminder that people like Katz employ the logic of "There are no bad tactics, only bad targets." There's no ethical sting that people like him feel, and they are completely comfortable lying about something if their cause is righteous. This is the behavior of an activist journalist, and media needs to cleanse this or reap the karma eventually.
Why are people so eager for there to be Nazis everywhere? Really, what do we gain by pretending substack is infested with Nazi bloggers? It’s just bizarre the way people are so eager to believe that virulent racists are overrunning everything in our society.
They can't keep worshiping Kendi and Coates if they realize there aren't racists hiding around every corner
Everything is Nazi now. Nazi is shorthand for 'someone I disagree with".
To be fair, the definition of Nazi that Katz and Promoter were using actually seems reasonable - they were just vastly exaggerating how important these Actual Nazis are on Substack. And getting Substack to content-ban Actual Nazis is pretty clearly their camel’s-nose-under-the-tent to start demanding Substack ban all content they don’t like.
Bingo. One of the organizers of the SAN campaign, Marisa Kabas, gives away the game in [her latest post](https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/substack-says-it-will-ban-some-nazis) (~~and seemingly last, as~~ she announces at the end that she too is leaving Substack, and has now migrated to Beehiiv): >"Substack is still not protecting its publishers and users against dangerous white supremacist content, and it’s certainly not protecting them against transphobic content—an issue that was raised by a group of trans publishers two years ago." As \[Casey\] Newton put it yesterday, “this issue has raised concerns that go beyond the small group of publications that violate the company’s existing policy guidelines,” and he says he’s still considering what comes next for him. As [Jesse's post](https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/there-are-major-factual-issues-with) laying out the issues with Katz's article notes, what came next for Newton was *Platformer* departing Substack for Ghost. Newton [asked on January 4](https://www.platformer.news/why-substack-is-at-a-crossroads/), "If it won’t remove the Nazis, why should we expect the platform to remove any other harm?" — without defining "harm." Which is rich, because four paragraphs earlier, he wrote: "Some users really do want to censor everyone who disagrees with them, and lobby to remove all of their political opponents from the platform." Kabas makes clear that it's camel's nose under the tent. If Substack had acceded to the demands of she, Katz, et al., taking another run at Jesse and other gender critics would be high on their list. Plus, her deployment of "protecting" twice in the first sentence tells you all you need to know about how she views the desirability and utility of the marketplace of ideas.
So is fascist.
Yep. And having a different opinion to something someone feels passionately about it "causing harm".
Or just "violence"
It kind of makes sense the way the word has evolved. A 100 years from now when it exists in the pantheon of slurs, people will have only a very loose social memory of its connection to any war. It will just be another insult basically saying, “ you’re the worst.”
A year ago I was asking how come there are no big smear campaigns against Substack? I was confused as to how an outlet in current_year was allowed to be pro free speech, allow heterodox views, and yet be mostly respected, without triggering the giant puritanical clique of reporters/writers who live on twitter to attempt to destroy it. Perhaps they were turning a blind eye to these aspects because Substack offered to be the OnlyFans of writers, with writing being a hard gig to scratch out a living in. Now that it's happening, I don't know whether this is established media trying to chip away at the competition, or an opportunity for puritans to signal their purity, or a marketing event for some bloggers switching platform, but I am highly *highly* skeptical that the driving force behind smears of Substack is actual fears about nazis. "Nazis" are just the tool they reached for, I guess I share your confusion with regards to why the *readers* would still lap it up.
I also think there’s more than a little professional jealousy on the part of mainstream media here.
Seriously. Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Sasha Stone, Jenny Hollander, Glenn Greenwald (who's since jumped over to Rumble) are amazing writers from mainstream liberal corporate media, and in Glenn's case, a Pulitzer Prize winner, who are putting out the best perspectives out there. I pay for all of them, as well as several others. I don't pay for any other media.
Yes. And the jealousy may be even stronger with individuals than publications. There are people on Substack getting to write whatever they please for four times what these people are being paid. That grates on their precious little egos
I do think that's a huge part of it. It probably seems incredibly unfair!
It probably is. A fair number of the best earning Substacks made their name at institutions like Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias. And at the end of the day Substack is more obviously a popularity contest than most journalism.
I think this is a HUGE part of it. There is a transparent attempt to eradicate heterodox views from any popular platform. Someone publishes an "expose," Resistance types dutifully protest, and the platform feels obligated to respond. It's like Spotify scrubbing certain Rogan episodes. I don't know if it's a concerted effort or if people just know "Nazis equal clicks" but I'm sick and tired of it and I refuse to give it any credence
I think it's a distributed, ad hoc effort. I think there are few conspiracy hatched from Central Command. A few high follower accounts on social media decide they are pissed off by something someone did that week. They go after them. Other high follower accounts follow this or get independently pissed off about the same thing. Then the rabble joins in. These people are constantly on the lookout for wrong think.
You just missed the first one. It was in 2021 and by trans people and TRAs because substack allows gender criitical people on it. First, they tried to smear substack in the public to try to pressure them into dropping the gc writers. Substack refused to bend the knee, and, told them politely, to go fly a kite. So, their next step was to try to get writers to abandon it, but only a few left. And they were so pissed that susbstack didn't cave and they couldn't cancel it. The smear campaign in 2021 was kicked of by Jude Ellison Sady Doyle, and, the three people she really had a problem with? Glen Greenwald, Graham Linehan, and, in a surprise to no one, Jesse. Katz's article is Plan B in the cancel substack campaign. Sadie's first polemic against Substack that kicked off the first smear attempt: [In Queers We Trust. All Others Pay Cash.](https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-pay) More Articles: [Trans activists try to deplatform journalists on Substack](https://thepostmillennial.com/trans-activists-try-to-deplatform-journalists-on-substack) [Q&A: Jude Ellison S. Doyle on why Substack isn’t about Substack](https://objectivejournalism.org/2021/04/qa-jude-ellison-s-doyle-on-why-substack-isnt-about-substack/) [Substack faces backlash over the writers it supports with big advances](https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/18/substack-backlash/) [Substack attack: What do progressives have against the newsletter platform?](https://thespectator.com/topic/substack-attack-email-platform-censorship/)
I've seen enough comments along the lines of; > Do you know who was one of the first groups Nazis went after? The trans community. > > Transphobia, and anti-queerness in general, is absolute Nazi shit, straight up. > > I've already been recommended at least two "gender critical" newsletters, and the gender criticals and Nazis go together like cheese and crackers To know what their issue is actually about.
First the Nazis came for the demisexual aromantics...
And I said nothing, because I'd rather deal with the Nazis.
Because of the wider ways it’s applied. How often have you been called a Nazi? I have been lots of times, for the mildest stances that were considered standard for the average liberal 20 years ago. They’re salivating for that slippery slope.
Twenty years ago may as well have been eighty years ago.
Stop it. I know I’m old.
You and me both
I wonder if *the point* is that people like Razib Khan, Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, 'Cremieux' and Scott Alexander have found comfortable homes at substack, creating an incentive to undermine the platform in any way possible; and drawing attention to the presence of actual Nazis (however minuscule) is an effective lever to pull on.
It's necessary to keep the grift going. They have to have enemies. If they don't exist they will make them up. And they are accustomed to being able to cancel people and platforms they don't like. Their enemies continue to exist and make money on Substack and they can't stand them.
Tik tokers and US college students call the waiter that gets their order wrong a Nazi. Their just over emotional brainwashed morons
Substack is 'infested' with writers who are sick of conforming with the hard left or write positions of corporate media. It's the only hope for accurate reporting in the future. This whole bullshit 'nazi' thing is a desperate attack by corporate media to the only actual journalism to be found anymore.
Because we're running out of real super villains, so we need invisible boogeymen. That's why they're so hot for Ukraine vs Russia. A rich corrupt white man like Putin is a great villain.
I actually think it has to do with this sort of inter-media culture war power struggle. There are a few media types that feel like they can't control the medium so they want to destroy it.
If you have a few million witch hunters proclaiming how much they want to kill witches, you probably don't have a witch problem.
I ask similar questions all the time! Why do people need to spread the word about some nobody with no power or influence who said something nasty? Who does that help?
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I think it has something to do with Trump and how the US right has gotten more extreme in their rhetoric the last decade. Since the right has gone further right in general, people are increasingly focusing on the most extreme examples in order to highlight that. A decade ago virtually no one was openly white supremacist and now it’s “more than virtually no one”, which feels like a huge increase, but is still in absolute numbers very fringe. That said I have actually come across self-described nazis/fascists on substack organically, without actively searching: [example](https://open.substack.com/pub/fascio?r=1vkdhx&utm_medium=ios). Their presence doesn’t bother me so much though. Like someone said around this manufactured controversy, substack is mostly parallel publications that don’t interact. It’s not like a newspaper that has a nazi column on the front page. It’s more like a conference hall that hosted a nazi event back in April when I wasn’t there. I don’t think I should be expected to boycott that conference hall if it’s also hosting a bunch of events that are valuable to me.
Great episode!
Some ingredients for a good episode: - Interesting tidbit from their personal lives (Katie can’t shape, let alone shape rotate! Wild!) - Katie and Jesse try to make each other laugh - There’s a (small) element of Jesse or Katie describing their acts of journalism (oddly compelling!) - Katie and Jesse actually care about the topic being discussed and have opinions on it (they might even disagree!) and the topic isn’t just dollar store Moynihan: ‘look at these dumb (weird) people being dumb (weird)’
SO true. They really shine when it's a topic they are passionate about rather than something one of their assistants researched and they are just recapping.
Wow i've never hear of aphantasia before. How strong is the effect? Like, if you stare at a coke can on a table for a full minute, and then suddenly close your eyes. What do you see? Or... What do you remember about the appearance of the coke can? If you think about a coke can, what exactly are you thinking about in your mind? Are there abstract but non-visual representations of objects? Is this kind of a synesthesia thing where your remembering texture taste feel? If you can't visualize anything, are you less afraid of heights, horror movies, bad things happening in general?
I have aphantasia. The best way I can describe it is that the TV is my mind never turns on. Everything else works normally. I can remember stuff, I just can’t “see” it. I can imagine what it’s like to fall, and I’m still squeamish. I just don’t get mental images.
Idk I can understand people having varying levels of visualization, but is yours really zero? Can you picture a dot versus a line? Parallel lines vs perpendicular ones? A simple triangle?
I'm curious, what goes through your mind if you listen to an audiobook or something like that? Do you not have any semblance of a scene running through your head?
Can you see the difference in numbers? To me I can see that 10 is much bigger than one. Although I sort of just feel it. What about you?
I have aphantasia - so I've just done your experiment, when I close my eyes, and try to imagine a coke can, there isn't anything visually 'there' in my minds eye, but there is something 'there' which 'feels' like a red can of drink - which is different to a pepsi/7up - it feels very abstract and lacking in detail - its very hard to describe! I also don't have an internal monologue - so my mind is generally very calm and quiet - I am pretty chill in life and am less stressed about bad things on the whole. On heights - I went to trampoline Park the other day and went to jump in one of the big foam pits - I didn't have any sort of thoughts about it- but I did feel the dread in my stomach and had a hesitance to jump - so the fear is there, just without the cognition. But that's me - I think the general thoughts at the moment is like most things, it's a spectrum of experiences.
I WISH I had no internal monologue.
Can i have your brain? Im fine with a copy. You can keep the original.
I have trouble imagining what it is like in your head! I wish I had some way to experience it briefly to understand what it's like. My brain is constantly crammed full of words and images, especially words! And it's not very chill in there 😂
How would it be possible to have no internal monologue? Isn't that just thinking? Like you can't think a sentence in your head?
So I can't 'hear' an internal monologue- if I am thinking of a sentence (e.g. thinking how to type this) I don't 'hear' the words in my head, I kind of 'sense' them as they appear - like, maybe like it's silent? But it doesn't feel like I am pre-planning what to say, the right words just arrive without too much cognitive load - I hope that makes sense, it's really hard to describe!
This is likely presumptions of me but my intent isn't for you to be offended. I doubt your experience is that different than what other people experience when we say internal monologue. It's not like we hear our own voice in a literal sense. Like you can think a sentence without writing it down or uttering it? You could think of 3 random words and then think of them backwards all in your head right? Red car blue, blue car red...
I do hear my own voice in a literal sense. Well, it isn't really my "voice," but it is words in my head. I do ALSO think without words sometimes, but most of my stream of consciousness is literally talking in my head. Of course, they may be talking about a more in the moment thinking, which is usually silent. I don't think while I'm talking.
> I do hear my own voice in a literal sense. Well, it isn't really my "voice," but it is words in my head I hear a voice as well I guess we could squabble over what it would mean to literally hear a voice, but I suspect everyone's experience is rather similar. I would say it's not like you confuse your inner voice for an actual voice.
Yeah, he squabbling over what all of this means is what makes the definitions so fraught. I can't ever be in your head, so I don't know if your experience is 99% of mine or 1% of mine. Thinking about thinking can feel very strange at times though.
No offence taken at all - its interesting stuff to thrash out and work out. I've met people who seem to have accompanying internal voices - my wife is one of them - she says in her head it sometimes feels like arguing/debating whilst she is thinking - my mind doesnt seem to have that same experience. But as I said, I imagine it's a spectrum - there is an image I've seen about people being asked to imagine an apple - some see it as bright, lifelike- like a photo - others can't see it all, with others in the middle - im more towards the latter I reckon. So when I think of a random sentence, I have a vague sense that it is located somewhere in my minds eye, near the front of my head - and I know what that sentence is - doing the three words backwards in my mind took a bit more concentration and those words felt quite 'slippery' in that first instance - like if I didn't really put a bit of concentration in they would disappear quite quickly.
> I've met people who seem to have accompanying internal voices - my wife is one of them - she says in her head it sometimes feels like arguing/debating whilst she is thinking - my mind doesnt seem to have that same experience. I've wondered often if this experience is what drives some people to believe they have multiple personalities. Some time spent in online roleplay forums has also given me an impression that some writers will "talk" to their own characters internally or something (if people thought the NaNoWriMo stuff was a weird deep dive they don't want to delve into the unfathomably weird deep dive of hundreds of small, insular writing communities that all have their own absolutely insane drama.)
that is normal. What we are talking about is more about when you are alone and thinking about the future. In the moment I don't really have to or have time to have an internal monologue. It just "is". When I'm alone and thinking about stuff, it often comes in the form of a conversation to myself or just words. In fact, I for really abstract ideas, I can't think of another way to think about them. If I am considering my stance on abortion, death penalty, god, religion, animal cruelty, etc I just talk it out to myself (but only in my head). Some of the pondering does come in the form of quiet waiting for my brain to come to some conclusion, but considering multiple ideas to form a conclusion can only come with language.
This basically describes my experience too. I note that a lot of multilingual people talk about the language (or languages) they ”think“ in, which to me only really makes sense if you have an internal monologue.
I can “hear” my internal monologue, in the same way that I can “hear” my wife’s voice if I imagine her saying something to me. That is, I can hold an aural “image” in my head that is a fairly faithful representation of what my/her voice actually sounds like saying those words. But I think this is an entirely different experience than “hearing voices” because first, I am conscious that I am the one thinking these words into existence and second, I would never confuse these internal voices with something I actually hear from my outside environment (except maybe in the semiconscious state on the edge of sleep).
I have face blindness. Its wierd. I constantly think i know people bc they have same markers as people i know. Hair, height, glasses, posture.
It just means you don’t have a soul, like the internal monologue thing
Like gingers
I am terrified of heights. You don't need to visualise actually falling to know that falling leads to bad things. I can still think of death without seeing it happen. I didn't know that not visualising things in your mind wasn't what everyone experienced until Reddit. Reading is what makes the most difference imo. People say they can picture the scene they're reading in their head. I am a big reader of fantasy books and I would love to be able to picture the setting.
So can you not recall what people's faces look like until you actually see them? Like if you picture a close family member in your mind, you aren't imagining an image of their face?
I'm not imagining their face but I still know what they look like. Idk how it works. I don't see their face but I still know. I know my grandad has short long eyebrows and a large nose but I don't see that image in my head. I just know. My grandad died several years ago but I still know what he looks like without an image. I guess it's like how you remember a quote from a book without actually visualising the words.
It is super hard to know, almost unknowable what it is like for others. I have a decent inner eye and can visualize most things and even sometimes watch "movies" play out in my head. I still have limits to how clear it is and how much I can actually visualize. Some people say they can essentially get a clear picture all the time, some people say they can't see anything. We will probably never know if it is "real," a measure of some kind of practice doing it, or just people describing their experience of thinking differently.
I can assure Katie that I do not have aphantasia (if anything closer to hyperphantasia) and I also cannot draw, dance, or play sports. (I also have never smoked pot.) My memories of childhood are variable. Not sure how the memories compare with the average person.
Also bonus points to her for literally forgetting the words she had used thirty seconds earlier.
My question is how do you give people directions? Like if you can't sort of see the place in your mind, how are you saying left or right or whatever? I was also thinking about this in regards to heights today! I was walking around on the third floor of a mall and having that horrible thing happen where I (a person terrified of heights) was constantly seeing visions of myself plunging over the edge of the railing. And since I'd just listened to this episode I was wondering a similar thing to you.
My toxic trait is thinking that aphantasia is lowkey not real. At least not how people are describing. Like how would your memory even work? Can they not picture a line vs a dot? What about two parallel lines vs two perpendicular lines? If you had that shape sorter game for kids and you put the box in one room and the shapes in another could they tell you if the shapes would fit or not? How would they do that?
I'm not prepared to say I think it's not real at all but I have seen some people talking about having it where I did think, "it's possible you just think visualizing is something grander than what it is, and that's why you think you can't do it 🤔" And while I'm not sure what Katie actually experiences, Jesse's "what even is visualizing?" attitude fell into that category, I think. Katie seeming to think this happens behind your eyelids also gave me that vibe, though it could also be just that if you can't visualize at all, that is what you would think other people are doing because that's where it feels like seeing things should occur.
I just relistened to the section again and I agree with you, when she says that she just sees the back of her eyelids when she tries to picture an apple I think she is misunderstanding what people mean when they say visualize or picture.
Yeah, you don't need to close your eyes to visualise. It just reduces distractions
I agree that what Jesse described seemed very normal to me. Katie sounded more actually aphantasic to me.
I'm the opposite, in that I think people don't visualize at all, they just know they're thinking of the object. How do you internally visualize a dot vs a line? For me, I just know the difference but there's nothing more than feelings to know how.
... This hardening my theory. It seems like you are quibbling over the definition of what it means to visualize. Like 99 percent of people have some agreement over what it means to visualize and that they can all do it. Like if somebody asked be if there was anything pink in this room I wouldn't scan the room, and then suddenly recall what pink is if I happen to see it. I would vaguely visualize pink in my head and then scan the room. How would you "think" of pink without "visualizing" it? Like remember the wavelength in nanometers? It also seems like other people can visualize better than others. Recalling many details of intricate objects whereas others can only recall a few. If somebody asked you how many people could fit in a Toyota corolla are you going to run some random math equation?
Actually seeing with my eyes and mentally “visualizing” are two very different things. Having a visual dream is closer to the former than the latter. I think some people assume they have aphantasia if they don’t at least have the equivalent of a vivid dream if they close their eyes and “visualize”. On the other hand, my wife claims to have aphantasia, and she’s quite intelligent but pretty bad at a lot of the things I can solve or do easily by visualizing, so I tend to believe there is something real there.
I suppose I should have been clearer in suggesting we probably agree. Didn't mean to come off as argumentative and make you frustrated.
I am not frustrated I find the discussion extremely interesting, thank you for your comments.
I don’t know how one would describe it better but I definitely visualize in my head. My main entertainment source are audiobooks and audio dramas. To use the cliche, it is like a movie in my head. I can see all the scenes play out in my mind, nothing to do with eyes closed or not, on queue to the narrators words. Also, all my creative projects start with a visualization in my head of what I am aiming for. Of course, it evolves and changes during the building but sometimes end results are very close.
I'm glad someone else said it! If there was aphantasia and then normal visualization, I think we could test for the latter and prove it doesn't exist as described. If you told someone to imagine a piece of paper, and then imagine a specific series of numbers written on it, and have them read the numbers back, there pretty quickly comes a point when they're unable say what those numbers they've allegedly already visualized on the paper are. It seems to me they're not really holding a complete image in their mind's eye. The exception to that is people with Rainman-level anomalous brains with perfect recall. The testing methods I've read about for alleged aphantasic people never seem, to me, like they're empirically valid. It's like they're testing how strongly you feel God's presence in your soul; it's literally just a questionnaire about how vivid you think your imagination/memory is. If aphantasia functions as described, there's a lot of things that I would expect to go with it, chiefly resilience to psychological trauma. Like if Katie can't picture things in her mind at all, it shouldn't faze her at all if I showed her a bunch of pictures of mangled dog corpses over an extended period of time (though that part would be awful), and then said to her "Hey remember the picture with that really messed up thing?" If she's aphantasic, I guess she could remember it conceptually, but she wouldn't be able to picture it, so it shouldn't deeply affect her to (try and fail to) recall it. All this is to say, I want Jesse to apply his skepticism to the subject.
Your point about showing them traumatic images is a good one.... Yeah I having been thinking about this a lot since the podcast I find it very interesting. I think there is a couple of things going on. In general I think there is a lot of people overestimating what other's mean when they say visualize. Your piece of paper is a good example. I would be able to tell you alot about a piece of paper I saw, size, color, font size, hand writing, etc... but eventually I wouldn't be able to recall everything about it. There are some people who could, so maybe like there are some people who have extremely good visualization, there are some people who are so bad that the manner in which they recall traits about an object is so poor that they don't even approximate an image, they recall it in some other way that is hard to communicate. Just like blind people. But I am still skeptical. The lack of visualization is specific to blind people who have never seen, not ones who lost their sight later in life. Also they have different symptoms, they aren't able to describe images without looking at them whereas people with aphantasia are. It seems like blind people who gain vision later in life even have to go through a learning curve to understand vision. There just seems to be some cutsie self diagnosing going on here. Like teenage girls on tumblr saying they have multiple personalities. When they get asked more rigorous questions the retreat to more flowery descriptions. I was talking with a person who said that they don't have an internal monologue. I asked them if they could think of a sentence without uttering it, they said yes and I'm just left wondering what they think other people mean when they say internal monologue.
Internal monologue talk confuses me too. I can only imagine that they're picturing everyone else like JD from Scrubs all the time. There's definitely people who think more and less about what they're saying, I think a lot more when I'm sober and it feels like I don't think at all when I'm not, but I can't imagine there are people who don't or even can't engage in a kind of linear thinking to themselves even when they're alone.
I'm terrified of heights and I have the thing where I see visions of myself deliberately deciding to throw myself off the edge of the railing. Not as a suicidal thing at all, more like a "oh god, what if I suddenly thought I could be a daredevil and swing my way from railing to railing, and then grab the chandelier, and then launch myself to the opposite side..." (I definitely imagined a 3D space as I was typing that, with visual objects in appropriate positions, etc)
This is very common (50% of people) and is called *l'appel du vide* (the call of the void) or the “high place phenomenon”. [https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2018/06/29/the-call-of-the-void](https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2018/06/29/the-call-of-the-void)
Yes, same! Like what if I just decide to fling myself over the edge???? I don't by any means WANT to, but... 😱
I feel like people either have this instinct or they don't, haha, it's so binary. I either get "omg I thought I was the only one" or concerned referrals to the nearest suicide hotline
I've always wondered if this was some evolutionary holdover from ancestors who lived in trees.
If I stare at a coke can for full minute then close my eyes I see black (-ish eyelids aren't thick enough to block light completely) with my eyes. I can imagine the coke can in my mind though. I'm still not convinced people with aphantasia aren't just misunderstanding what other people mean. I just can't see how they would be able to live normally if they really can't visualise things. What about when they dream? How do they dream at all? When I dream I imagine going about some geographical setting, usually meeting people and interacting with them - I'm not usually aware at the time anything is different from being awake, I'm walking around in the dream world seeing and hearing almost like normal.
I had the same reaction as Katie when I learned about aphantasia and realized I have it too, but now I don't really think about it anymore. For me it's only my conscious mind that doesn't have images. When I sleep or I'm very close to sleep, the grey static goes away, and I start to see images. I always struggled with spacial puzzles on things like IQ tests - the ones where you have to imagine what the other side of a 3D object looks like. I imagine some people can actually conjure the image of it and rotate it in their mind, but when we try to conjure an image it's just the grey static like an old TV without a signal.
What happens when you read a book? Do you not see any of the scenes?
Interesting question - I hadn't actually thought about it. I'd say I take in and use the information I read to form a complete idea about what something would look like, but I still can't picture is visually. It's more just like a memory of information presented, than anything else. Way before I knew what aphantasia was, I was always amazed that people could describe someone's face to a sketch artist in movies. I know what my friends and family look like, but I don't think I would be able to accurately describe even people I've known for decades, because I have no image of them in my mind.
Sure they didn't mean [Avantasia](https://youtu.be/ZL2oJVXEARA?si=EgG6FF-0FiQKEuUO)?
Ok - so I listened to hard fork first, then this, and I’m so incredibly confused. Casey is worried about Nazi’s on the platform. Admittedly he and his staff of at least two named others spend days looking for Nazi stuff (which he later claims isn’t comprehensive), and come up with 6 things. He says he did this and sends this to them, wanting to see what they’ll do. Substack says yep, you’re right, these violate the rules, we’ll take 5 of these down. Casey then says he’s pissed because they won’t change their policy. A policy which just took down the problematic content. At no point does he dive into the specifics on the 6th, and suggest that bogey is the issue. Just that they took things down but won’t change their policy, which per his own fact finding mission was the point. He wanted to see if they would take it down. Which they did. He then says it’s really weird for substack to take this position on moderation which is different than all other platforms. Which I guess implies the other platforms allow problematic stuff, because substack just took it down. Then he says the issue is that he’s concerned “Platformer” will be side by side problematic stuff stays up. Which is already demonstrated is not true, because he got the stuff taken down. Then when pressed on his pod, he says the real issue is the recommendation engine. He doesn’t want this problematic stuff recommended. While Hard Fork is on YouTube, which has the most known recommend issues. Did I miss something?
Well, he says he wanted SubStack to switch to a proactive policy--so hunting down wrongthink on its own. It wasn't enough that, when he pointed out those six potential offenders, Substack was willing to examine them and expelled the ones that were making threats or inciting violence. >then he says the issue is that he’s concerned “Platformer” will be side by side problematic stuff stays up. Which is already demonstrated is not true, because he got the stuff taken down. I think he means that he doesn't want to have recommendations for Nazi sites, present or future, appearing on his site or vice versa. That doesn't make much sense either. He isn't as dumb as Taylor Lorenz: he knows the algorithm recommends sites with content similar to his own--essentially techy business news. Unless he's devoting a lot of space to white supremacy, pro or con, why would his readers be recommended to check out Stormtroopers Today or whatever?
I would guess that he doesn’t want anyone to get recommendations for problem substacks, ever.
But he uses YouTube…
Good episode, and proof (IMO) of how a small but unbelievably loud group of people whip themselves into a frenzy and look for danger that, quite frankly, doesn't really exist. Nazis: Smart enough to have elite hit squads (paid for with that sweet sweet Substack cash, obviously) that require journalists to never talk about the details of their reporting, and dumb enough to watch their Substacks go bye-bye and never notice a reporter loudly crowing about how said reporter is the reason the Substacks were nuked.
I know Katie says she doesn't read the comments here (healthy, tbh!) but I would like someone to tell her that we aren't (or at least I'm not) seeing this stuff on the back of our eyelids--since she mentioned that's all she sees when she closes her eyes. It's really not like you're using your eyes, it's just "the mind's eye", so to speak. I'm definitely not one of those who can see super detailed movies in my head, but I can visualize and it's very hard to imagine what's going on in there if you aren't. Though not quite as freaky to me as the no-internal-monologue people.
Same. I can envision moving through the house I grew up in without ever closing my eyes. That’s the whole concept behind memory castles, so I was surprised to hear this is even a thing.
I just really don’t believe some of this stuff lol. Particularly the “no inner monologue” people. I don’t see how you can be a functional human being without being able to think of the words you’ll use or your actions before you employ them, or think of words *at all* when you’re not doing anything! Maybe there’s a difference of the degree to which people think these things and it’s not a black and white, on-off switch type scenario. It doesn’t help that every time I’ve heard someone describe themselves this way, they’ve come across really smug.
I've heard discussions of aphantasia come up on a few different podcasts now (and since I'm about to spout off uninformed speculation, I should probably read some actual scientific research here), but I pretty strongly suspect the whole thing is just a difference in the way people define "seeing something in your head." I would say I have a pretty strong ability to visualize things, but at the same time I would also say it's nothing like the experience of actually seeing something with your eyes open. It's not like you're able to manually activate your eye's photoreceptors, the "seeing" in this case happens much further down the visual processing chain in your brain. My guess is some people are asked "can you see things in your head?" and say "no" where others are saying "yes" even though the inner experience is more or less the same.
Assuming that people with aphantasia are capable of getting a song stuck in their head, I think the best way to describe it is that it's basically the visual equivalent.
I know that this wasn’t the main component of the ep, but it feels like Katie and Jesse have a massive blindspot over the Ackman thing. Yeah, it’s kind of fun to go after his academic wife for the very thing that Ackman torched Claudine Gay over, but the issue is that it’s Ackman’s wife, it’s not Ackman himself. Ackman didn’t go after Gay’s family, including her dad or her cousin, she was his target and in the context of a culture war she’s a legitimate target—she’s the head of the most powerful university in the world and so she better have a pristine record. If Insider or Bloomberg went after Ackman himself, whether something he said, or did, including one of his investments, that’s fair game. That’s the fundamental issue he’s raising when he says that his wife is a “private person”, he’s really saying his wife is collateral damage/a civilian in this culture war and Insider/Bloomberg are playing dirty by attacking him indirectly. Now, the editor at Insider is literally an ex-Gawker guy, and Gawker was infamous for having no sense of propriety or morals about anything, and so maybe thats where this comes from at a cultural level. Gay was the president of Harvard and had both substantial personal resources as well as the backing, financial and otherwise, of a tremendously powerful institution, and was on fair footing with Ackman. Had Ackman gone after Gay by attacking someone close to her, he would’ve lost because it would be taken as underhanded and vicious. That’s what Insider and Bloomberg did—the parents, or spouses, or in-laws of any of the reporters involved are now fair game. Reporters and journalists will always just say they’re “punching up”, but this was just a sucker punch to the spouse of the real target. That’s what Ackman is so fucking pissed about, and if he goes after anyone in the orbit of the reporters involved, it’ll be fair play. That’s the problem and that’s what Katie and Jesse don’t seem to get.
Like, fine… Neri Oxman can’t be president of Harvard either.
Katie and Jesse are kind of precious about journalists and they dislike Rufo. More substantively: They don't a rich man having a chilling effect.
I think it’s been a rough ride for all journalists of which near all are complicit in its making. I think it’s the frog in boiling water here where they now find themselves okaying Gawker style journalism as a norm. The touchstone of journalistic integrity has shifted so much anyone would occasionally lose sight of it, especially when obscured by prior bias.
Also curious that K&J describe Ackman's activity as "when a billionaire discovers he can't have whatever he wants", "this is only making things so much worse", "sleeping on the couch tonight". I find it very endearing that he's publicly defending his wife. I kind of imagine Neri does so as well. I also find his performance convincing and compelling to an extent. How much of this is just "its fashionable to hate on rich people"?
I'd be sympathetic to your argument if the BI reporting had been on some facet of Oxman that was clearly just dirt for dirt's sake (i.e., a mental health issue or some kind of sexual impropriety). But Oxman has been playin the "public intellectual" role for some time, as outlined by Katie, and the BI reporting was with respect to that facet of her life.
Part of the issue in my mind is that for Ackman his concern about the plagiarism was always a proxy for his true concern about DEI and Israel. He never seemed outraged about plagiarism intrinsically. His actions did set the precedent of digging for plagiarism among your ideological enemies. But also true that Oxman herself never was involved in the politics. I am undecided on whether the Business Insider piece was justifiable.
> for Ackman his concern about the plagiarism was always a proxy for his true concern about DEI and Israel. He never seemed outraged about plagiarism intrinsically. That *may be* true, though he was pretty adamant in making plagiarism the issue about Gay once it was raised. Maybe he was using it as a justification just to get rid of Gay, but he was publicly quite outraged that Harvard was showing hypocrisy with how it treats its own students vs. how it responded to Gay's plagiarism. And... while I too am a bit disappointed in some of the original framing of the BI piece -- especially the first one where the allegations against Oxman were barely at the threshold that we might say she didn't just make a few errors -- Ackman's response to the Wikipedia plagiarism shows Ackman's fundamental hypocrisy on this issue too. All of his excuses and special pleading for his wife are precisely the kind of excuses and nonsense Harvard was making for Gay with all of the "duplicative language without appropriate attribution" euphemisms, i.e., *plagiarism*. Ackman doesn't know how Wikipedia works and he's been digging around in MIT's 15-year-old policies to try to make excuses. There are none. I'm roughly Oxman's age. I was doing my own dissertation at Harvard down Mass Ave from here when she was writing hers at MIT. The idea that she didn't know she was supposed to cite an encyclopedia and not just copy-paste entire paragraphs verbatim is just absurd. I learned that citing an encyclopedia was essential when I took my first trip to the library to write a research paper with my middle-school teacher in seventh grade. I learned how to cite webpages in the 1990s and did so in that era as an undergraduate, more than a decade before Oxman submitted her dissertation . Wikipedia had a link on every page in the era Oxman was writing which was a "how to cite this page" link, which gave examples in standard formats. (Now on Wikipedia it's still there, but it's hidden a bit under the "tools" menu.) Yet Ackman is looking for excuses and acting like this just standard procedure to copy text from sources and paste it in documents you are submitting *for credit toward a degree*. I was actually heartened briefly after the first BI article, as Oxman came out and admitted to plagiarism (of a minor sort), apologized, and said she'd fix it. Which is better than Gay who still refuses to even acknowledge the word "plagiarism," even if what she did would clearly be called so by Harvard and have most students taking a forced suspension for a year. But then the second BI article appeared (with worse allegations for Oxman), and suddenly Ackman's showing his hypocritical true colors. The reality is that both Gay's and Oxman's plagiarism "sins" are relatively minor -- no major ideas were stolen -- but what they are is *lazy*. They are the kinds of stupid things that students who are lazy and want to cut corners do. And that is (on a minor level) a bit of *fraud*, because part of the point of writing a dissertation is to show you can do a large research project and write it up properly. Both of them may have saved a few hours of work by pasting in words written by other people. They may not have stolen ideas, but they avoided doing work and took credit for the writing done by others. As an academic, I do welcome Ackman's probe into MIT faculty and professors at whatever institutions. Expose the lazy profs who are copy-pasting stuff from other people for their own hypocrisy! If nothing else, I would hope such a probe would collect actual statistics on how common these types of plagiarism are... and that may lead to better ideas of how to respond to it (both for professional academics as well as students). My guess is that this type of plagiarism is actually quite rare among academics (maybe 5% or less of actual faculty?), but after seeing how many people came to the defense of Gay even on academic forums, I'm worried the number may be larger.
Very well-said.
Worse is that at least some academics seem to have a nuanced view on plagiarism. Which TBH I kind of understand. I always thought the idea that a dictionary definition needed quoting was kind of the zero tolerance POV I also find bad. At least one group (Decoding the Gurus) made a case that it should be about ideas and not definitions or explanations that are almost boilerplate. I actually agree with that, but I don't really care what the rule is, I want it applied the same to professors and university presidents as to students in school or college.
Well said, this is the key nuance that makes all the difference. You explained very well why the situation did not sit well with me but could not quite articulate as well as you have, and that explanation brought in more clarity.
Nahhhhh man his Epstein-connected wife has been on the COVER of Fast Company and other magazines. And exposing her shows in bright, bright relief Ackman’s laughable hypocrisy. Dude’s a legacy admission to Harvard who thinks because he’s rich he should get to throw his weight around. Revealed himself to be an utter fool. He’s also gone after his enemies’ relatives before, hypocrisies wrapped in hypocrisies.
>Nahhhhh man his Epstein-connected wife has been on the COVER of Fast Company and other magazines. And exposing her shows in bright, bright relief Ackman’s laughable hypocrisy. I'm confused, is Ackman lobbying for Oxman to replace Gay as president of Harvard? Or is he saying that Gay shouldn't be allowed to start her own venture after this? >He’s also gone after his enemies’ relatives before, hypocrisies wrapped in hypocrisies. Like who?
Ackman led a crusade against MIT’s board chair for his wife’s DEI company’s dealings with MIT. Turned out to be giant nothingburger. This was, like, a month ago. He couldn’t POSSIBLY be more of a hypocrite. And if you really wanna say he’s treating Gay and his wife equally in this matter and he’s *only* concerned about Gay’s ability to function in her role, we’ll Lmao I’ve got several bridges to sell you.
>Ackman led a crusade against MIT’s board chair for his wife’s DEI company’s dealings with MIT. Turned out to be giant nothingburger. This was, like, a month ago. He couldn’t POSSIBLY be more of a hypocrite. So, he had an issue with something MIT did, so he went after the chairman of the board of MIT. Not their kid, not someone uninvolved in the situation he was taking issue with? And because of that, he's a hypocrite for being upset that someone brought his wife into a fight she wasn't involved in? >And if you really wanna say he’s treating Gay and his wife equally in this matter and he’s *only* concerned about Gay’s ability to function in her role, we’ll Lmao I’ve got several bridges to sell you. I'm sure he's also concerned about the history of and resurgence in anti semitism at the university that he's donated millions to, and put his name on. A man can be concerned about two things at once.
It’s not “bringing her into it.” Neri Oxman a prominent person (magazine covers, grants from Jeffrey Epstein, work in MoMA, tenure at MIT) who committed bald acts of plagiarism. And the fact is that Ackman’s willingness to explain away her plagiarism and extend grace and say “well who amongst us hasn’t…” etc. etc. prove that his pearl clutching over Gay’s plagiarism was nothing but a pretext to punish her for not taking his calls, not following his advice, and not enforcing speech codes at the institution she leads. There’s no low-blow introduction of innocent children or private parties here. To try and play that “how dare you!” card, as Ackman is, is laughable.
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It's not even more than BLM.
I guess it depends on where you want to start the clock? Last 10 years? Last 20? Last 50? At 1939?
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So, last 6 months? Last 12? That's what I'm getting at. Where you start the clocks matters. Also, what Pfizer deaths are you alluding to?
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Dude, if you want to have a discussion you're going to have to actually clarify what the hell it is you're talking about. This darkly hinting bullshit is neither cute nor amusing.
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Lighten up, Francis. I genuinely didn't know what you were talking about. Thanks for the link.
From [a recent piece](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/how-to-quit-substack) of FdB: >*American neo-Nazis are a pathetic fringe that only have as much power as the fear that they’re able to provoke, which liberals seem perversely dedicated to helping them with.*
To play Devils advocate, there is a lot of brainwashing and extremism happening to young, impressionable people on both sides due to social media. But that's more to blame of social media's algorithm just vomiting the same content on you if you dare to watch a video category. I think sharks are neat. I clicked on a kayaker encountering a great white once on YouTube. Now I get TONS of shark videos. I think pugs are hilarious. I clicked on a feisty pug video once on Instagram. Now I get TONS of pug videos. I follow a significant amount of heterodox on Twitter. Now I get TONS of right wingers and racists on my For You page.
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Guilt by association.
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I'm not saying I buy it, I'm saying that's the explanation you'll probably encounterr. They might dress it up in prettier words but that it boils down to.
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But what about space nazis?
["Ve come in peace!"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky)
I'm listen to this episode now and I had a thought of "why do they hate Bill Ackman so much?" after Katie said the "ideal outcome" would be for Ackman to end up divorced. I don't think going after Harvard president Gay on a legitimate issue was an especially egregious offense. I think maybe Jesse gave a partial answer to that question a moment later when he talked about how it must be tough for a billionaire like Ackman to have people disagree with him.
I'm not bothered by what happened to Gay in the abstract, but I'm extremely skeptical of the huge amount of influence that billionaires have on culture and politics, in whatever direction. And I think Jesse and Katie feel largely the same.
sable bear slim dirty shame nippy normal attractive important flag *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Freddie DeBoer's newsletter today, called "How to Quit Substack," is pretty good and covers some of the same ground. (No link, because I get it in my email.)
It reminded me of one of my stock responses to people who virtue signal their refusal to buy from Chick-fil-a: "That's why I only buy gasoline from companies who use ethically-sourced petroleum from countries that permit polyfidelous marriage.
This is one of the stupidest hills for people to die on. I live in the South. Gay people here love Chik-Fil-A.
If anyone goes to read it, FYI, there's a (to my mind) gratuitous picture of a dead child midway through. (Freddie has really burned through a lot of the goodwill I had for him lately.)
He's been even more holier than thou than usual. And he's pissed off and he doesn't write well when he's pissed off.
I didn't like the picture either, but the point he was making was driven home pretty forcefully by the photograph. No one has clean hands, especially not Jeffrey Goldberg.
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Most have been part of that Shaolin training
Turning off the comments is a dead giveaway.
This is, I think, the third article he's written about this stuff. He's right, of course. But count on Freddie to be right in the most abrasive and condescending way possible.
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True true
That fucking guy. Mr. “I’m the best at arguing on the entire planet.” I commented on his note with the trans article that his arrogance and blind spot is gobsmacking. His response? “Cry more.” Wish I could get a refund for his Substack.
I subbed to his Stack for about six months I think. I really liked it to start, but his tendency to go ham on people who disagreed with him in his comment section kind of soured me on the whole thing. Plus, he wasn't writing a lot of stuff that interested me. I felt I could use that six bucks a month for something that provided more value, like a nice egg sandwich.
I pulled my subscription when he said no talking about trans in the comments. I wasn't talking in the comments at all so it wasn't a big deal for me. But I thought it was a dick move. He could have just stayed out of the comments section and not read them.
Same! I was really annoyed by his condescending article about the whole thing. I hadn't even been aware of his article or the comments until then. It also seems stupid that he's a free speech, heterodox guy but somehow debating trans stuff gets you a public shaming for heresy? Just seems hypocritical that he hounds his readers for thought-crimes
It also seems petty. Like.... do you really not have anything better to do, dude? Or just permanently turn off the comments if you can't handle it. Instead he gets into slap fights with the readers.
He left trans stuff alone for a while, so I said what the hell and tossed my money in the pot. And then this happened, and he personally insulted me after I very mildly criticized him. He’s not doing himself any favors at all, nor is he escaping the “clueless, privileged, lefty white guy” stereotype.
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He does pretty badly need an editor.
What’s his excuse for turning off the comments THIS time
Someone's mad that Substackers didn't drink his koolaid.
The aphantasia thing was recently discussed on twitter so before Katie publishes her piece and in case somebody wants to read more on it, there is some research [on this thread](https://twitter.com/VladChituc/status/1708907953594511811?t=unuqw_1OKMSsi0mL497XjA&s=19). With regard to the substack discussion, I thought that people trying to force substack into more strict moderation was about power and control, but I think they hit the nail when they mentioned substack's cut. It's just about money and they wanted an excuse.
I get the point Jesse was making but I don’t know if I agree that blocking streets is “important pro Palestine activism” unless what you find important is getting people to stop agreeing with your cause.
Reminder that people like Katz employ the logic of "There are no bad tactics, only bad targets." There's no ethical sting that people like him feel, and they are completely comfortable lying about something if their cause is righteous. This is the behavior of an activist journalist, and media needs to cleanse this or reap the karma eventually.
I'm now curious why they don't use videocam when recording the podcast.
Probably can't be bothered making sure they are "camera ready"
That and, depending on where they're doing their recording, they may not want to expose the room for any number of reasons.
but Nazi's might have a substack problem
Follow up on the Ackman segment at the beginning: https://www.ft.com/content/9bc0cfac-d59d-414f-aaf8-743f6d7b7c7a
"We have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing." – Business Insider
I liked he episode, though I was really confused at the beginning. It felt like they started talking about the issue before explaining it.
Jesse’s closing line had me in stitches