I’m going to fix some narrow terms of debate and take issue with you over Bob Reich, while not disputing any of the facts. Back in the analog days, he had a brain and a spine. But measured strictly by his output here on Substack, he is just as much a carpetbagging regime stenographer as every other carpetbagging regime stenographer. And on here he can’t even bring himself criticise the party of slavery in order to try to save it. I still read his work up until a month or so post election in the hope of seeing the light flicker once party discipline was suspended. Nothing.
I have not yet tired of leaving comments in his stacks such as, "You've already traded in your Tesla for a Rivian. The only thing left you can do is to go outside and shake your tiny fists at the starlink satellites circling above." I got a like from him once. He either has a sense of humor, or it was an accident. Probably an accident.
Hilarious! Made me think of Paul Krugman, who’s become a kind of byword for consistent, platitudinous wrongness. I’m guessing he’s on here but I’m not actually going to look—after all, why?
My dear Librarian, I told you late last year that your brilliance would entrance me out of enough cash to pay for a subscription this year. And so it has. For March, anyway.
I am a man of my word.
But my good sir, I gird my sagging Boomer loins to request that you stop the casual slaps at my g - g - generation. If you'd like to take a cane and give us a whack across the bridge of the nose, that's a different matter.
But in all seriousness, it does upset me mildly to see a man of your excellence lapse into the generational imperative. It threatens to tarnish my opinion of you. And thirty - one days pass quickly.
We didn't all end up rich. For one thing, forty - five thousand of us died in Vietnam, a gouging of a generation which no American generation since has had to suffer. For another, we lived our childhoods with the daily nuke rattling of that f*cking fat beast, Khrushchev. The apex of this, The Cuban Missile Crisis, was so terrifying it put an end to it, but for close to a decade, we had to put up with it every day. Given what The ACE Study has shown about the ability of childhood trauma to screw a young life up for good, it's a wonder that more of us didn't end up as druggies.
When I looked through my high school's thirtieth year reunion album in 2000, I was surprised and pleased by how few divorces there seemed to have been. I shouldn't have been. As Ray Davies of The Kinks has said, The Sixties were a total fraud. Check the statistics: you'll discover that through the sixties and into the seventies, there was a gradual slackening in mores in the United States, with the black, oozing fruit of demoralization beginning to have its deep effects upon American popular culture in the late 1970s.
Hmmm. The late 1970s. Who was running things then? Why, I believe it was The Greatest Generation and The Silent Generation ( b. 1927 - 1945 ), the latter being a source of bafflement in history's apparent failure to notice them.
I don't deny that Boomers have been a disappointment. But I also do not see that Xers and Millennials even slowed the deterioration, let alone, tried to reverse it.
But the surviving Boomers all ended up rich and we seethe with a John Brown level of hatred toward them, don't we, Librarian? Yes, the Boomers all ended up rich, those who didn't get wiped out in the 2008 crash, and those who didn't spend their retirement money on raising the grandchildren because their Xer or Millennial children were too desiccated by dope to do it.
Come on, man, knock it off. Boomers don't think Xers and Millennials are all the same. That is probable evidence that we are smarter than successor generations, but oh, I'm just being nasty. Please cite a difference between generationalism and racism. G'wan!!! Why don'tcha??!!
I like to think all generations have their faults. Being a boomer that missed Gen x by 2 months, feels like I'm in the middle of those two gens. Had both one silent gen and one greatest gen parents. To my mind, the greatest fault of those two gens was believing any and everything that anyone in a position of authority would tell them. Always thought boomers biggest fault was being self-focused to the exclusion of other ideas at times. But all three gens to my mind have good points also. So looking forward, while it's always easy to find faults with others, I try to look for good things too. There are too many negative outlooks as it is. Overall, i see the up and coming gens adapting to tech very smoothly, which is a great life skill to have.
Well like you said, the nice thing about substack is that institutional pull hardly matters here, but i don't think he left because he failed here. French never struck me as a grifter, why do you think of him that way?
"She’s very much the PMC’s ideal of what a public intellectual should be, and to get an idea of what that is, imagine the Disney movie Fantasia, but with the role of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice played by a coven of faceless NGO apparatchiks and the broom being an animated NPR tote bag dumping plastic swag onto the internet. She’s the tote bag."
This list of roguish cats brings back memories, Beschloss, FrenchDavidians - the gold old days. I’d suggest Jim Sciutto for adopting the statesmen look of Reid Richard’s of the Fantastic Four, the Kirby era. Jake Tapper, Mitt Romney and Sciutto need the greying temples for gravitas. Sciutto got me suspended from Twitter because I asked him about Hillary and Bimbo control.
Is Cringestack an escape pod or a shriveled space seed?
Just remember, what Robert Reich lacks in intelligence he makes up with his height.
Cringestack is about treating this platform like a version of The Villages, that Florida community frozen in Boomer amber. It’s always 1998 here, Reagan Republicans versus Clinton Democrats, invade the world/ invite the world, neoliberalism forever. They hate nothing more than reminders that the world has moved on.
My millenium children use Heather Cox Richardson to back up every political point they make. I truly enjoy reading her sludge in the quiet, low key "NPR" voice so it sounds even more delightful and funny to me. Some day I will grow weary of this little obsession, but for now I get a huge kick out of her speical brand of sludge. That and the "Ahoy" comments that follow Kristol and the Bulwark crew around like gnats at a picnic. Another "well done" to you sir!
Maybe it's a good thing I'm distracted by university registration for my second undergrad degree, and my writing (and am shutting off twitter for the next few days), had no idea about cringestack. Seems to be quite the thing, I had no idea it was even a thing. Is that dumb of me? I guess I'm somewhat distracted these days.
I must say I was hoping for another Jan Sobieski essay, haha, mais ceci etait pas mal informative.
Half the fun of going down the rabbit hole is how far do I need to read before it becomes obvious what is being sold. Like going to an old fashioned magazine rack and sneaking a look inside before either getting reprimanded by the owner or deciding I will open my purse and hopefully discover that my instincts were correct. It becomes a study in rhetoric. One of the first things I do if any interest is sparked is go to the “ABOUT” section. In the case of previously known MSM writers and talkers, well they seldom reveal signs of personal growth. Did you ever let these grifters succeed in altering your perceptions on any other platform; any other medium of communication?
The only mainstream media figure I can think of with anything really original to say is Vernon Jones, who for all of his faults really is capable of introspection.
@librarian of Celaeno if you haven't already you should pick up and read The Captive Mind. Your article here is spot-on, and this book would further evidence what you're onto here. State-sanctioned journalists grow organically and without much oversight from the masters they serve whether they reside in a totalitarian state or a free and democratic society. Highly recommend this book, can't remember the author's name or pronounce it if I even could.
Even just reading the Wikipedia page on this book is pretty interesting but I recommend picking up the actual copy.
I had no idea Dan Rather was still alive and had a Substack. I’ll take your word for it that it’s terrible.
Although Ive freelanced for years, I’m still new to the Substack world and am trying to get the hang of this. It’s hard to be edgy and funny like you and some others I’ve stated following. I very much feel my norminess. Do most readers catch your references? I feel pretty happy if I can catch a solid majority of them.
That said, is the cringe phenomenon relegated to leftists and TDS conservatives, or are there more on the Right who qualify? And can we include the anti-woke leftists like Bari Weiss? I can’t stand her stuff.
What I think these people have in common is that they are fake. They don’t actually have anything to say, and either say what they are paid to say, or the best they can come up with on the basis that they might get paid to say it. Bari Weiss is deeply fake
I’m going to fix some narrow terms of debate and take issue with you over Bob Reich, while not disputing any of the facts. Back in the analog days, he had a brain and a spine. But measured strictly by his output here on Substack, he is just as much a carpetbagging regime stenographer as every other carpetbagging regime stenographer. And on here he can’t even bring himself criticise the party of slavery in order to try to save it. I still read his work up until a month or so post election in the hope of seeing the light flicker once party discipline was suspended. Nothing.
I have not yet tired of leaving comments in his stacks such as, "You've already traded in your Tesla for a Rivian. The only thing left you can do is to go outside and shake your tiny fists at the starlink satellites circling above." I got a like from him once. He either has a sense of humor, or it was an accident. Probably an accident.
I prefer to believe that at least one of these guys is self-aware. Why not him?
Why not? Because interns are inexpensive and prone to like things of their own volition, is why. just sayin'
😄
I haven’t checked his stack that carefully, but I remember him as a slight contrarian at times.
He isn't tall enough to have a brain AND a spine.
Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat: “Confederacy, Hitler, Literal Hitler”.
I’ve been seriously worried what Substack is going to do when all the USAID “paid subscribers” Cringestack money dries up. Hopefully they will cope.
It will be interesting. The mass protest budgets have clearly withered, and NAFO isn’t what it used to be.
Hilarious! Made me think of Paul Krugman, who’s become a kind of byword for consistent, platitudinous wrongness. I’m guessing he’s on here but I’m not actually going to look—after all, why?
Paul Krugman is the Bill Kristol of economics.
Now now…!
In more ways than one…
The Trump and Elon nicknames these people come up with are just atrocious.
It’s worse than “Lame-stream Media.” Boomers just don’t try anymore.
My dear Librarian, I told you late last year that your brilliance would entrance me out of enough cash to pay for a subscription this year. And so it has. For March, anyway.
I am a man of my word.
But my good sir, I gird my sagging Boomer loins to request that you stop the casual slaps at my g - g - generation. If you'd like to take a cane and give us a whack across the bridge of the nose, that's a different matter.
But in all seriousness, it does upset me mildly to see a man of your excellence lapse into the generational imperative. It threatens to tarnish my opinion of you. And thirty - one days pass quickly.
We didn't all end up rich. For one thing, forty - five thousand of us died in Vietnam, a gouging of a generation which no American generation since has had to suffer. For another, we lived our childhoods with the daily nuke rattling of that f*cking fat beast, Khrushchev. The apex of this, The Cuban Missile Crisis, was so terrifying it put an end to it, but for close to a decade, we had to put up with it every day. Given what The ACE Study has shown about the ability of childhood trauma to screw a young life up for good, it's a wonder that more of us didn't end up as druggies.
When I looked through my high school's thirtieth year reunion album in 2000, I was surprised and pleased by how few divorces there seemed to have been. I shouldn't have been. As Ray Davies of The Kinks has said, The Sixties were a total fraud. Check the statistics: you'll discover that through the sixties and into the seventies, there was a gradual slackening in mores in the United States, with the black, oozing fruit of demoralization beginning to have its deep effects upon American popular culture in the late 1970s.
Hmmm. The late 1970s. Who was running things then? Why, I believe it was The Greatest Generation and The Silent Generation ( b. 1927 - 1945 ), the latter being a source of bafflement in history's apparent failure to notice them.
I don't deny that Boomers have been a disappointment. But I also do not see that Xers and Millennials even slowed the deterioration, let alone, tried to reverse it.
But the surviving Boomers all ended up rich and we seethe with a John Brown level of hatred toward them, don't we, Librarian? Yes, the Boomers all ended up rich, those who didn't get wiped out in the 2008 crash, and those who didn't spend their retirement money on raising the grandchildren because their Xer or Millennial children were too desiccated by dope to do it.
Come on, man, knock it off. Boomers don't think Xers and Millennials are all the same. That is probable evidence that we are smarter than successor generations, but oh, I'm just being nasty. Please cite a difference between generationalism and racism. G'wan!!! Why don'tcha??!!
This response is so typically Boomer it needs to be framed as "Exhibit A."
I like to think all generations have their faults. Being a boomer that missed Gen x by 2 months, feels like I'm in the middle of those two gens. Had both one silent gen and one greatest gen parents. To my mind, the greatest fault of those two gens was believing any and everything that anyone in a position of authority would tell them. Always thought boomers biggest fault was being self-focused to the exclusion of other ideas at times. But all three gens to my mind have good points also. So looking forward, while it's always easy to find faults with others, I try to look for good things too. There are too many negative outlooks as it is. Overall, i see the up and coming gens adapting to tech very smoothly, which is a great life skill to have.
Somewhat lacking in intellectual content, but if you're unashamed to have it appear under your name, who am I to object?
I couldn't find intellectual content in your replies with a triple-distillation, man.
This is a great article, but that thumbnail will live in my nightmares.
If you’re having precognitive nightmares it may be because you’re part of a Bene Gesserit breeding program.
But does he get to be a immortal sandworm-human hybrid?
"French seems to have tried and failed on Substack" - if he failed, he failed upward (in his terms at least), writing for NYT now
That a man with that kind of institutional pull can’t grift here successfully says a lot.
Well like you said, the nice thing about substack is that institutional pull hardly matters here, but i don't think he left because he failed here. French never struck me as a grifter, why do you think of him that way?
Spectacular.
"She’s very much the PMC’s ideal of what a public intellectual should be, and to get an idea of what that is, imagine the Disney movie Fantasia, but with the role of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice played by a coven of faceless NGO apparatchiks and the broom being an animated NPR tote bag dumping plastic swag onto the internet. She’s the tote bag."
Thank you
The FrenchDavidians are a cult.
This list of roguish cats brings back memories, Beschloss, FrenchDavidians - the gold old days. I’d suggest Jim Sciutto for adopting the statesmen look of Reid Richard’s of the Fantastic Four, the Kirby era. Jake Tapper, Mitt Romney and Sciutto need the greying temples for gravitas. Sciutto got me suspended from Twitter because I asked him about Hillary and Bimbo control.
Is Cringestack an escape pod or a shriveled space seed?
Just remember, what Robert Reich lacks in intelligence he makes up with his height.
Cringestack is about treating this platform like a version of The Villages, that Florida community frozen in Boomer amber. It’s always 1998 here, Reagan Republicans versus Clinton Democrats, invade the world/ invite the world, neoliberalism forever. They hate nothing more than reminders that the world has moved on.
Boca … Del-Vista!
Love FrenchDavidians
My millenium children use Heather Cox Richardson to back up every political point they make. I truly enjoy reading her sludge in the quiet, low key "NPR" voice so it sounds even more delightful and funny to me. Some day I will grow weary of this little obsession, but for now I get a huge kick out of her speical brand of sludge. That and the "Ahoy" comments that follow Kristol and the Bulwark crew around like gnats at a picnic. Another "well done" to you sir!
Thank you
Maybe it's a good thing I'm distracted by university registration for my second undergrad degree, and my writing (and am shutting off twitter for the next few days), had no idea about cringestack. Seems to be quite the thing, I had no idea it was even a thing. Is that dumb of me? I guess I'm somewhat distracted these days.
I must say I was hoping for another Jan Sobieski essay, haha, mais ceci etait pas mal informative.
I’ll do another historical piece soon.
Yay! Can’t wait good sir! Your Sobieski piece still haunts me X)
Half the fun of going down the rabbit hole is how far do I need to read before it becomes obvious what is being sold. Like going to an old fashioned magazine rack and sneaking a look inside before either getting reprimanded by the owner or deciding I will open my purse and hopefully discover that my instincts were correct. It becomes a study in rhetoric. One of the first things I do if any interest is sparked is go to the “ABOUT” section. In the case of previously known MSM writers and talkers, well they seldom reveal signs of personal growth. Did you ever let these grifters succeed in altering your perceptions on any other platform; any other medium of communication?
The only mainstream media figure I can think of with anything really original to say is Vernon Jones, who for all of his faults really is capable of introspection.
Trump will become the God-emperor and lead mankind, the Imperium of Earth into a New Golden Age! Hail The Emperor! 🙋🏼♂️
This is a joke.
Well, with that attitude it is. He very may well be the kwisatz haderach.
I thought the Muad’Dib/kwisatz had wrack was his son Barron. Duke of New York!
I get Caesar and Augustus vibes here. Does that make Vance Mark Antony?
Oh no. Barron (Augustus) vs Vance (Antony) incoming.
I prefer the Zeitgeist in a Red Tie, but he’s a phenomenon anyway.
@librarian of Celaeno if you haven't already you should pick up and read The Captive Mind. Your article here is spot-on, and this book would further evidence what you're onto here. State-sanctioned journalists grow organically and without much oversight from the masters they serve whether they reside in a totalitarian state or a free and democratic society. Highly recommend this book, can't remember the author's name or pronounce it if I even could.
Even just reading the Wikipedia page on this book is pretty interesting but I recommend picking up the actual copy.
This is why I subscribe. Well written and I literally LOL'd several times.
Thank you very much.
I had no idea Dan Rather was still alive and had a Substack. I’ll take your word for it that it’s terrible.
Although Ive freelanced for years, I’m still new to the Substack world and am trying to get the hang of this. It’s hard to be edgy and funny like you and some others I’ve stated following. I very much feel my norminess. Do most readers catch your references? I feel pretty happy if I can catch a solid majority of them.
That said, is the cringe phenomenon relegated to leftists and TDS conservatives, or are there more on the Right who qualify? And can we include the anti-woke leftists like Bari Weiss? I can’t stand her stuff.
What I think these people have in common is that they are fake. They don’t actually have anything to say, and either say what they are paid to say, or the best they can come up with on the basis that they might get paid to say it. Bari Weiss is deeply fake