Young men see feminism as having metastasized from a movement for equality for women into a movement against men, or at least against masculinity.What's that famous line? "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
There's been some dispute about whether the data actually holds up on this, at least for the US.
When I first saw the FT graphs I thought "Do you really think standard surveys can get statistically valid trends for just 18-29-year-old men?" And lo and behold, a couple of days later a number of serious critiques emerged.
Young men see feminism as having metastasized from a movement for equality for women into a movement against men, or at least against masculinity.
To the extent they are, it's a misperception at best, more likely an expression of resentment and little more. If a large proportion of young men share this misperception (arguendo), well, that may be a problem, but I'm not sure what feminists or other unblinkered people can practically do about it.
A comrade of mine who recently went back to finish his BA at UCSC: "I took radical feminist classes that were 99% women, trans or non binary at my very left wing college and I cannot recall a single instance where the professor or course material insulted men or collectively blamed men for any problems women faced. Not *one* time. ...Nearly all masculinity readings focused on how self destructive it was for men."
But I do agree that those charts (reposted in the links) are worrisome.
That's the fault of young women, who have it within their power to completely eliminate the disparity by becoming more contemptuous of women.
I mean Christ, what a load of crap. Reeves manages to approvingly cite this hilariously awful WaPo piece on how liberal women need to be more tolerant of assholes.
Also cited by Reeves: The American Enterprise Institute, that bastion of rigorous scholarship through which we learn:
In 2016, 61% of women said they were satisfied with the way women are treated in American society, according to a Gallup survey. Today, that has dropped to 44%.
Gee, can anyone think of any important change that happened in 2016 that might have led women toward a bit of cynicism about American society?
This is all just reactionary bullshit.
The interpretation by the FT writer is much more sensible:
The #MeToo movement was the key trigger, giving rise to fiercely feminist values among young women who felt empowered to speak out against long-running injustices. That spark found especially dry tinder in South Korea, where gender inequality remains stark, and outright misogyny is common.
I completely buy that the algorithms on TikTok and Youtube (and probably elsewhere) are really aggressive at pushing boys interest in video games into right-wing masculinity content, and that as a result there may be more radicalized gamergaters nowadays than there was before algorithmic content. But I agree with 2 and 3 that I'm not sure I buy that there's a divergence right now beyond the usual large gender gap. Of course, I haven't been single in a long time, but I buy the arguments that app-based dating is an unusually miserable experience for young men that's even worse than the already miserable experience of dating for men younger than 25 or so.
That said, there does seem to be evidence that the W-motivated super-democratic cohort of around 15-20 years is ending and the young generation is less Democratic than millennials. Probably just part of the big trend of conservative and moderate people of color becoming more Republican.
It's pretty odd to use South Korean data to kick off an article about changing attitudes in America. Korean culture is very distinct from USian, and what's happening there is different both in kind and in degree, from what's happening in the U.S.
Is app-based dating generally considered to be worse for young men than it is for young women? I don't know how young straight people do anything, but I had this idea the misery was thought to skew the other way, or was just universal.
11: In different ways. For the median straight man, it's a depressing slog through profiles that might seem promising or not but with interest-back rarely received. For women, a lot of horrid responses one has to filter out & get used to, & then bad experiences when it turns into dates.
It's pretty odd to use South Korean data to kick off an article about changing attitudes in America. Korean culture is very distinct from USian, and what's happening there is different both in kind and in degree, from what's happening in the U.S.
As a note on that, Alice Evans summary of a recent book about Korean feminism makes it sound like there are significant problems (that are very distinct from the US).
As long as men continue to dominate management and socialise with other men (on and offline), they are immersed in cultures of self-righteous sexism. 80% of men in their twenties believe there is serious gender discrimination. It's difficult to see what would unseat this antipathy.
I mean Christ, what a load of crap. Reeves manages to approvingly cite this hilariously awful WaPo piece on how liberal women need to be more tolerant of assholes.
I feel a little bit badly. He does come across better in some other cases -- his appearance on the Ezra Klein show (transcript) was interesting, but that particular piece is not very good.
I feel a little bit badly.
I did not mean to imply that there was anything wrong with you offering this post. It's instructive to read this sort of thing.
Besides, you're just a guy and your judgment is necessarily going to be impaired in this era of feminism. It's really heebie's fault.
Anyway, the answer to all this is obvious enough. When you take away structural impediments -- as they have largely done in schools but not in society at large -- women outperform men. The only possible conclusion is that women are genetically superior.
12: "& then bad experiences when it turns into dates"
... and the ever-present risk of rape.
I don't really buy the arguments that apps have made dating worse. It was really bad before and they ameliorate some but not all of the problems.
Yes, 19 is plausible too. But they provide a distinct flavor of disappointment vs. all the promise they implicitly offer (especially salient as photo after photo of presumably available person swooshes by).
Yeah, raising expectations that they're unable to fill could well be an issue.
As teo says, I've seen assertions that this Startling New Trend That Birthed a Thousand Reactionary Thinkpieces, like many of them, boils down to a change in the underlying data collection methodology. (To be fair, there's some pushback to the pushback in that thread.)
To build off of 9 the huge leftward ideological swing of people born between, say, 1980 and 1995 was pretty much an Anglosphere thing. It hasn't held for much of Europe, for instance.
political football-
The fact that women are genetically superior to men has been well known for decades. The Y chromosome has real problems.
According to what I read on the internet, women need to be constantly worried about finding unvaccinated sperm. That kind of stress, piled upon the usual demands of life, is probably pushing women to the left so they can get government help.
What I want to understand is: We know that changes in the educational system have benefited women. What evidence is there that changes have damaged men?
Maybe there's an answer to that, but whenever people get down to cases, they talk about stuff that has always been true in education. For example, the grading system favors people who turn in their homework.
Men are vaccinating their sperms? Where do you guys even find needles that small.
The trick is finding a pharmacist who doesn't call the cops.
I wonder if the shift in attitudes is because of the widening education gap between men and women. Conservatism is increasingly the politics of the ignorant, now that education is more or less freely available (ie it isn't just a marker for wealth).
Also not clear whether this is a general shift, or whether it's skewed by the growth of extreme right politics among a small minority, and the majority of men are much the same as previous generations.
Anecdotally, social media algorithms are also serving up notably left-wing content to young girls interested in Taylor Swift, Blackpink and makeup tutorials. The Swiftiedom + "you can listen to music on Spotify to fall asleep" led to podcast listening which led to Elke, age 10, asking lourdes and me if we'd heard of Lacanian analysis, which is a question no parenting guide has ever prepared even a tenured professor to field.
You think I'm kidding, but this *absolutely* happened and was the fault of Binchtopia, which we have decided is wholesome.
Look, if I'm of childbearing age, the fact that the SC just made it okay for Idaho to let me bleed out if treating me in emergency might possibly threaten a pregnancy means a "left" concern is in play for women. Men are holding more or less constant with a small rightward dip. Women are not, which kinda parallels recent legislation and trends in educational attainment.
Also: many of the men I know went through a hard core libertarian phase at 18-20. Most grew out of it when they got a girlfriend. Is "social contagion" an explanation we're allowed to use for boys who are online? Because it just seems like the same stuff amplified.
Could (part of) it be (to the extent anything real is being measured in the US) that the underlying politics haven't changed, but merely become more visible in surveys because Trump changed social desirability bias effects?
All I have is anecdata, but my sense is that there is some subset of young men whose entirely legitimate grievances about the way our culture sets up impossible expectations for them*...are gravitating** to GirlzBad! explanations rather than, y'know, structural critiques.
I could be talked into believing that this subset is anywhere from a very loud 0.5% to a much more worrying 5%. I really don't think it's more than that.
*It's notable that our culture has been setting up impossible expectations for women for generations, and yet somehow we as a class have NOT gravitated to BoyzBad! as an explanation.
**I also suspect that the "gravitating" is partially driven by the structural design of social media platforms and their various incentives for monetarization, extreme content, etc.
led to Elke, age 10, asking lourdes and me if we'd heard of Lacanian analysis, which is a question no parenting guide has ever prepared even a tenured professor to field.
I legit laughed out loud at this. Amazing. I should probably talk to my siblings, parents of my preteen/teen nieces.
I do think that for an awful lot of men between 15-25 who are struggling with dating the answer is just "wait until your late 20s and everything will be totally fine." But of course you can't sell any clicks with that message.
Relevant thread:
https://twitter.com/JSEllenberg/status/1628524590103158785
You need to wait until everything you have in yours and not stolen.
Obviously graduate school is the key to dating for the young, heterosexual male. My roommate in graduate school read a NYT article about guppies and how a male guppy would spend time next to a less attractive male guppy to make it easier to find a mate. He talked about finding a "guppy." This was exactly when I started dating the woman who would later be my wife.
OK, now I've read the linked piece. I've read Reeve before and found some to agree with, some to disagree. But this is just laughably wrong:
In the centrifugal dynamic of culture-war politics, the more the Right goes to one extreme, the more the Left must go to the other, and vice versa. The Left dismisses biology, the Right leans too heavily on it. The Left see a war on girls and women; the Right see a war on boys and men. The Left pathologizes masculinity; the Right pathologizes feminism.
Where on earth is he cherry-picking examples to say that the "Left" dismisses biology or pathologizes masculinity? I feel like he doesn't read or engage with any actual left leaning people, much less actual leftists. And as for a war...I dunno, but I do feel like the cascade of reproductive rights laws is pretty terrifying, and I'm at the tail end of my reproductive years.
The tendency on both sides of the political divide to frame gender issues in a zero-sum fashion is a big reason why young men and women are diverging so radically in their politics.
And this is equal baloney; bothsidesism at its worst. Where on earth is he getting the notion that there is a "tendency" of women or left-leaning people to frame gender issues in a zero-sum fashion?! Even in the mainstream, totally nonpolitical interactions I have, people are at pains to celebrate how wins for women are lifting all boats, not sinking men's boats. Good grief.
The whole essay is an exercise in strawmanning. Pun definitely intended.
"for an awful lot of men between 15-25 who are struggling with dating the answer is just "wait until your late 20s and everything will be totally fine.""
Well, yes, because that's the age at which women in the 18-25 bracket will start wanting to date you. What was a problem starts to become a solution.
38: if you don't know who the guppy is in the room, it's you?
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Not great.
https://www.deccanherald.com/india/manipur/radical-groups-challenge-peace-in-conflict-torn-manipur-kukis-are-confronting-too-2871837
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OT: Laura just posted that bj has died. She was only rarely here, but I think many of us remember her from 11d.
Where on earth is he cherry-picking examples to say that the "Left" dismisses biology or pathologizes masculinity?
To understand, you must enter the Reactionary Bullshit Cinematic Universe. The left dismisses biology by using phrases like "Assigned Female At Birth" to suggest -- contrary to biological science -- that it's possible to have a different identity than the one you are assigned at birth.
As for pathologizing masculinity, that's what the whole #metoo movement is about. It suggests that there is a huge problem with men preying on women, when we know that men are just misunderstood. It's the same way the George Floyd protests pathologized police work.
I assume the writer understands that the only way to gain the trust of a right-wing audience is to lie to them. The both-sides stuff is obligatory if you want to get read. Whether he himself believes the lies is another matter -- seems like he might?
Laura just posted that bj has died. She was only rarely here, but I think many of us remember her from 11d.
What's 11d?
Just finished Deadloch (from recs here), and I'll just say that this "issue" is quite relevant to its plot.
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"It is our old national custom, how can a soldier prove his heroism to his commander if he does not bring in noses? Of course we shall cut noses: we always have."|>
Anecdotally, as someone who has been in a lot of HSes and colleges over the last few years talking about voting and registering students, the gender gap is definitely noticeable--but not clear at all that it is accelerating*. We go out of our way to try to not expose anyone's ideology, but between questions from them re: registering D/R/Independent and exercises where we just ask what is your main concerns that might lead you to vote, the divide (at least among those who speak up is quite stark). This past year in particular, there was a ton of "Free Speech" as the most important issue--almost always from jockish-looking guys. Curious if there is a different code this year, but my sojourn here in New Mexico precludes my participation this spring.
Similarly in working the polls at primaries the R/D split among young people is quite evident.
*Per teo and snark there was some other dataset (not the removing 2022 one) that showed the divide being quite evident, but not appreciably increasing. Can't find it.
41: I mean, yeah? Cultural ideas are still that the guy ought to be older and financially set. A very good friend from college used to complain, when he was in law school, that the women his age were a problem, because they didn't want to date a student, but a lawyer. Of course, a few years later, he is the lawyer and he gets the girl, and they've been married eighteen years and have four kids and the whole thing.
So maybe the answer is "young man, be patient, and while you're being patient, don't turn into an asshole."
In Pennsylvania, apparently now we have to worry about young men beheading their fathers.
54: The news coverage has been very one-sided, exhibiting a clear anti-beheading bias while largely ignoring the father's traitorous provocations.
The left dismisses biology by using phrases like "Assigned Female At Birth"
Ohhhhhhhh. That actually makes much more sense. I was puzzling over what that could mean, given that in my opinion it's mostly conservatives who dismiss biology, what with their legislative proposals to make ectopic pregnancies be reimplanted in the uterus (if only!).
And also all the straightforward sexism and racism. If the left doesn't acknowledge that there are important biological differences that explain why women and POC tend not to have high paying jobs, that shows that the left denies biology.
Thanks. Sorry I missed that earlier.
I think the "dismisses biology" stuff is also shout-out to Andrew Sullivan devotees who are very aggrieved that we're not enthralled by IQ tests or, better still, measuring crania to determine inherent intelligence.
Or focusing on certain other physical measurements.
41: Yes, that's a big portion of it. But it's not the only thing. There are many things that change as you move into the second half of your 20s and all of them make dating easier for men. Women are more likely to want a partner rather than being happy being single. People are starting to couple up permanently, so many of the most desirable men who women did date when they were 18-25 are going off the market. In particular, I think a 27 year old man will both have an easier time dating 27 year old women than a 23yo will have with 23yos, in addition to the 27yo man also having better chances with 23yos.
53.last: Exactly. It's a simple and true message, and I think it really is true for the vast majority of men. Just be patient and magically women will start wanting to date you when you turn 25, nothing you do in the meantime is likely to help you that much anyway and becoming a rabid misogynist is the one thing that's going to make you still single after you hit your late 20s so don't do it! But I don't think tiktoks saying that will be very popular.
I haven't looked at statistics, but the 25 year old thing seems exaggerated: I know men tend to date younger women, but not as all that large a percentage of the dating pool. E.g., undergrads overwhelmingly date undergrads -- I don't believe it's the case that college boys are going unloved because all the college girls are dating employed college graduates.
I'm not sure what I'd look at to check this, though.
Further to 60, there is a truly lovely obituary for bj linked.
Someone really should do something about cancer.
Vonnegut on science:
God is unknowable, but nature is explaining herself all the time. What has she told us so far? That blacks are obviously inferior to whites, for one thing, and intended for menial work on white man's terms. This clear lesson from nature, we should remind ourselves from time to time, allowed Thomas Jefferson to own slaves. Imagine that.
Back in the day, yes. I don't know if anyone has met Laura in person, but when the 'blogosphere' was more of thing, it was a place that would link back and forth with us.
The eponymous apartment is actually in my neighborhood, although she's long since moved to Jersey for better educational support for her autistic son. We had a funny interaction once where the public school she'd moved away from was the one some friends of ours had faked their residential address to get into.
In New Jersey, everyone is working an angle.
I've not yet met Laura in person (though she should take her German-historian husband to Berlin some time!) but thanks to her good offices I plugged in to a network of nifty folks immediately upon moving to Tbilisi and became friends with her friends Julie and Jeremy when they were doing concurrent Fulbrights in Georgia. Good times!
74: Hi Laura!
Hi Laura!
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My 88 year old mother (her birthday today!) had a positive COVID test this morning and also slipped and fell and hurt her hand today. So not a great birthday.
She says I'm the first person she's told (at 6pm) about the test. She says she's NOT going to get Paxlovid for her "cold" and she says she's definitely NOT going to tell the neighbors who had her over for dinner and birthday cake yesterday about her positive test. I don't really know anything I can do from five states away to make her do anything sensible or ethical. This is completely typical for her.
|>
Hi Laura.
Hi chill. Hope your mother feels better soon and keeps breathing well. The neighbors probably had it coming.
I'm so sorry, chill. Feeling impotent in these situations is so frustrating. Best wishes to your mother.
77, 78: Thanks, she'll be fine, I'm sure.* She's compos mentis and not particularly frail, thoroughly vaccinated. Just stubborn. It's all in character.
*knock on wood, until some day she won't.
Hey, Laura! I was sorry to hear about bj -- we've had a few losses here over the years and it's always so sad.
Doug -- Jeremy and Julie were drinking beers in my kitchen last weekend. So glad that you guys were able to connect.
Parasocial relationships are real. You guys have an incredible little society here. Have you guys been chatting for 20 years now?
81.2: Who is still here that was here from the start? Ogged, of course, was was one of the founders and is here now, but was gone for years. LB and neb were commenting here from close to the start, I think. Anyone else?
I've gotten the sense that everyone that ever commented here regularly(and is still among the living and networked) continues to lurk .at least,occassionally.
82: Since I'm the only one here, apparently, I'll talk to myself.
I like to imagine Halford after a long day of deciding weighty matters, almost involuntarily finding himself typing in this url and seeing one of my comments and thinking, "Good ol' peep! How I hate him!"
Laura, I'm sorry for your loss.
82/83: Apo. And Teo was pretty early.
I think he was 9 years old when he started commenting here.
A wee caterpillar in a park ranger hat. And just look at him now!
Ha! I still feel like one of the late-comers actually. But I guess I did start commenting when the blog was only a year or two old.
I went on my quinquennial quest to find my first appearance on Unfogged. It was on March 31, 2006. Have I told you before that I cheated? Some of the newer folks may not know that.
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2006_03_26.html#004781
I was a couple of years after the founding -- enough that I felt like I was entering an already formed social group. But still very early: 2005 sometime.
I showed up 2005ish, to scold Neb about plagiarizing "at night, the ice weasels come." (That might not be my actual first comment, but I still think it's funny.)
I started commenting in 2004, part of I think a bunch of people who started commenting post-2004 election. I think the first thread to go over 100 was around then. I remember when comments didn't have timestamps.
Speaking of kinda early days, can anyone now tell me what the deleted, thousand-comment, sorta livecast SEK thread was all about? I just missed it because of time zones, and then a cone of silence descended.
81: Hi to Jeremy and Julie! I remember how he bonded with Kid One -- who is in college now -- over Star Wars fandom. Y'all *all* need to visit Berlin in some kind of fun and tax-deductible way.
I am the wrong person to ask, but I think nosflow could send you the whole thing -- it's still in the database somewhere but hidden. Actually, maybe I can? Let me look through old emails.
No guarantees that any of it actually happened, of course. SEK was a great guy in many ways, but did appear to live in a state of heightened reality.
Sorry, what I knew was that back in 2013, googling "phot/obucket Louis/iana" in the sidebar search box would get it, but it doesn't seem to work anymore.
I don't remember the details as a coherent narrative, but he discovered that the Louisiana-ruling-class husband of an old friend of his was engaged in trading porn of his wife with other scions of Louisiana 'royalty', and was agonizing over whether to tell her. Then he did, and I believe there was ultimately a car chase.
True or not, SEK could hold a comment thread spellbound.
Yeah, he was a bit of a fantasist but I sure miss that guy
I started reading within a year or two of the blog's founding, then it took me a few more years to stop lurking.
When I got sick and basically spent a year sitting on my couch, SEK became a frequent chat friend at the other place. I miss him quite a lot.
Iirc there was an elaborate point system where you could get points for engaging in sexual acts with people, but it had to be documented, so there were lots of photos of them cheating on their spouses.
I started reading within a year or two of the blog's founding
I read this blog for an extended period (maybe approaching a year) without opening the comments. I liked the front-page posters, and I knew from bitter experience that comment threads were always cesspools.
Then I lurked for awhile, resolving to not comment until I was satisfied that, by contributing, I could improve on the median-quality comment. And so I had to lurk awhile longer until I gave up on that and started saying whatever the fuck I wanted.
What I don't remember is how I ended up here in the first place. Do I remember correctly that in the Weird Old Days bloggers like Drum, Saiselgy and DeLong would link here and the front page was part of The Discourse? When did the site pivot from center-left warblog to social club for over-educated graphomaniacs?
I found this place either through Bitch or AWB (possibly both). I still can't believe it's been an entire decade since our DCDecadecon. We should try to arrange another one for our 25th.
Now that I think of it, I probably started reading in 2006.
2005, for sure. Or at least that's the earliest I can find comments made by me. I may well have lurked earlier. I found my way here via CT (or via people who commented at CT who also commented here, maybe).
I think I started reading around 2005, but didn't comment for a while. Via Bitch PhD seems the most likely route, but I'm really not sure.
Apo definitely has a copy of that insane SEK thread. That was the most riveting internet I've ever witnessed
I still can't believe it's been an entire decade since our DCDecadecon. We should try to arrange another one for our 25th.
I spent all of 2023 thinking, "I really should do a 20th anniversary post!" when I was not near a computer, and then forgetting when I was.
Do I remember correctly that in the Weird Old Days bloggers like Drum, Saiselgy and DeLong would link here and the front page was part of The Discourse?
It always seemed kind of weird and surprising to see Unfogged linked to in "respectable" places.
Yeah, we had a bizarre five-year or so run of credibility. Which was fun, but strange.
It always seemed kind of weird and surprising to see Unfogged linked to in "respectable" places.
I remember Neb's "welcome NYT readers" post . . .
I really don't know why we stopped getting taken seriously. Unrelatedly, be sure to read my latest post, where we're rhyming with the work "link".
This might be a good time to ask if there's any hope of making the archives searchable again. (The Google search has gotten unruly. I think today's Google is genuinely not backwards compatible with the way Unfogged has used human language.) It would be kind of amazing for someone to re-implement MT -- I guess it's still around?
There's no way that Louisiana story could have zero corroboration anywhere else in the world if it were true, is there? Especially if it's years in the past by now?
Just google Louisiana Candaulism car chase.
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"order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless, according to the measure of such hostility."|>
97 et seq.: Thanks, everyone! That sounds epic, completely believable for ruling-class Louisiana, and very good reason to take the thread down during SEK's lifetime. Some of them ol' boys don't play.
Yes on Google search being borked. I was trying to find the original thread on m-fun, from 2005, and not having any luck despite knowing some of the unusual words used in that thread. I'm not sure when I first wandered through the doors of Unfogged to find a company of delightful reprobates, but by 2005 I was feeling settled enough to be all snarky and weird.
Speaking of former relevance, at least one of us from A Fistful of Euros got some good gigs thanks to the blog. There was a time when AFOE was one of the top results if you just googled the word "euros" or "fistful," which was a funny feeling.
Whenever the next UnfoggeDCon is, I'll be sure to miss it, just to keep up the tradition. But! If any of y'all make it to Berlin, I'll stand you to a beer or whatever.
Thanks! Just got back from Berlin, but next time we're over...
119: It's totally possible. From this distance it may have seemed lurid and spectacular, but for south Louisiana it was probably just Tuesday. Remember when Edwin Edwards said the only way he was going to lose that election was if he got caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl? That was the Gospel truth.
I remember people in the late 1980s or early 1990s saying it was still too dangerous to write much about Leander Perez, the boss of Plaquemines Parish. So yeah, depending on who was involved, I can totally see this story not turning up anywhere else.
123: Sure! Also, I've long wondered whether your "triplanetary" address is for the book or the boardgame. Not that I've read or played either, mind. (Though I played a fair amount of Traveller, which kinda inherited Triplanetary's system for ship-to-ship space combat.)
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"The camps in the open pine-woods, the bonfires along the railways, the occasional sham-battles at night, with blazing pine-knots for weapons whirling in the darkness, all combined to leave upon the minds of officers and men the impression of a vast holiday frolic"|>
125: it's from the book, but I have also played the boardgame - it's elderly, and the Selkie tried it once and hated it, but the boy is unreasonably fond of it and loves calculating orbits and slingshot trajectories.
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The flames roared fearfully as they broke forth--like the fitful glare of lightning--from the impenetrable volume of smoke, which rose in awful grandeur toward the heavens. The vast mass of rosin, melted by the intense heat, had run down the hillside, on which the store-house stood, into a ravine through which a narrow swamp stretched away toward the east. Upon the surface of the water a crust, of emerald hue, had formed. The fire had not yet reached this point, and a handful of lighted grass was thrown upon the surface, igniting the combustible mass, and producing a flame that leaped to the highest tree-tops, melting the branches like threads of wax, and sending a column of smoke aloft that was awful to behold. Mingled with the roar and crackling of the flames was the hissing produced by the commingling of the burning mass with the water beneath.|>
I'm sure I came over here via the Crooked Timber blogroll. I lurked for years before finally commenting, maybe in 2008.
Do I remember correctly that in the Weird Old Days bloggers like Drum, Saiselgy and DeLong would link here and the front page was part of The Discourse?
Heh, as they say, yeah. Brad, Yggy, and E/zra K. commented here pretty consistently for a bit. Remember when I guest-blogged for Drum? Remember when E/zra complained that my write up of the DC meetup was shorter than the one of the NY meetup? It was a smaller world back then, and I worked in the early days to get us noticed. But at some point we made a deliberate decision to choose community over attention, and I think the changes we made to our search engine discoverability settings then were the original cause of the Googley Hoohole. Now we're basically the old guys chatting at the dilapidated VFW lodge, but that's ok too.
a deliberate decision to choose community over attention
Definitely my new euphemism for my lamest posts.
The country people complain of ravages committed by the abundance of wild rabbits since the war.
130 et al.: Gen-Sherman-SEC-Champion-1864-65.jpg
133: Folk blogging. (Or did we use that one already?)
Not naming any names, MOM (Mom is technically not a name). She saw her internist for x-rays, had broken a bone in her wrist, now set by the orthopedist, and claims that the day after her distinctly positive COVID test her next one was negative. Yeah, OK, not sure I believe that but no way for me to know really. Rough birthday but she's a tough old broad, and maybe her elite level powers of denial help her out, who knows. And at this point there's no point trying to fight denial's ugly sibling, gaslighting. It is what it is. She comes down to visit in April. We've already put a handrail by the inside (three) steps, but the outside is harder to do. I guess I'll look into that. Unlike her home state, there is no icy precipitation chez Chill, but still, it would be bad if she fell here (brick steps).
This is definitely community over any intrinsic value at all.
Best wishes to your mom, chill.
Whoever it was here that told me, a month or so ago, that the lizard in my house would eventually find its own way out, was wrong. We found him this morning, lying motionless on the living room floor. We thought he was dead and were pretty upset about it, but when we picked him up and put him in the garden he eventually revived. He's probably pretty weak from his ordeal, so I hope he makes it through the storms okay.
140 has been my experience with lizards also. Though mine didn't revive.
142: Or gin: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpse_reviver
But now i have stuck in my head:"Hallelujah, I'm a lizard / Hallelujah, lizard again / Hallelujah, give us a shot / To revive us again"
Big distillers want to make it complicated, but the old ways are the best. Blow tobacco smoke up the ass and follow with a nice glass of brandy (not up the ass).