If you’re trying to sell me on your newsletter, podcast or book, you’re gonna use your best voice, right? And maybe you got friends happy to swear to your bona fides and if we trust those friends, why wouldn’t we be willing to put our trust in you?
That’s partly how I collected my little garden of Substack reads and Twitter follows, and much as everyone likes to pretend Twitter’s just the worst place ever, it’s in fact a very handy screener for middle-school temperaments.
If it’s really easy for you to lose control in public, with your professional reputation at stake, I want to know it, so I can sprinkle the necessary amount of salt on anything you serve up to me all nicely plated.
Michael Senger’s recent snarling about ivermectin almost made me drop my mug of tea when I read it; you’d think he’d taken up a bet to play Alex Berenson for the day. Meanwhile Alex mocking Pierre Kory was just Alex being his usual, and Jordan Schachtel tweeting nastily about Alex and deleting immediately afterwards was a little Groundhog Day interlude in my feed-scrolling.
To be sure, savage put-downs are a great enjoyment if aimed at deserving targets and hitting ’em right between the eyes. But that’s grownup sport. Little boys ain’t up to it.
I want my purveyors of essential information or useful analyses to have the kishkes to hold firm under pressure; to pick their battles wisely; to not need to prove themselves smarter than that guy over there who fell for the whatever.
Still trying to trip someone up with a cafeteria chair, even with all those eyes watching—you know, I needed to see that.
yes, Twitter is a carnival. It has always been so. I have an account but honestly it is not a great place to spend time