1:7:22

RIP Joan Didion.

Emma Murphree, "Joan Didion’s Scientific Method," Jan 6, 2022:

"In a world where everything seems subsumed by polemic, Joan Didion’s writing, in its refusal to tell people what to think, but rather tell them how to think, feels like a relic of more halcyon days.

Perhaps ironically, given the leagues of modern journalists who cite her as an influence, Didion’s scientific approach to cultural commentary is fundamentally incompatible with the think-piece era. The occasional branding of Didion as a conservative is itself a product of the party line vice grip she sought to critique. If anything, she is, in form, a skeptic, perpetually wise to the relay of artifices that form a patina obscuring our myriad crises, stagnations and deceptions.

To no one’s surprise, today’s center is no more structurally sound than in the post-Manson murders, Haight-Ashbury counterculture milieu in which Didion began writing. In her conception, the “center” is not a singular Jenga block that when pulled, precipitates the crumbling of the entire structure; it’s a center that has deliberately and systemically been hollowed out, weathered by both top-down forces and, as she inconveniently asserts, the supplemental corroding forces of self-delusion.

As Zadie Smith notes in a recent New Yorker article about Didion’s legacy, it is unfortunate that so much of what Didion viewed as a dialectical failure (the “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” ethos) has been interpreted as earnest affirmation, even by some of her most ardent fans (the brigade of Lithub tote-wearing millennials with liberal arts degrees).

Yet, it remains difficult to fault Didion’s misinterpreters too much; after all, we are a culture disinclined to think critically — a failing at both the individual and institutional level. Apropos of our shared disordered thought process, Didion’s most important legacy will not be her cigarettes-and-Coca-Cola chic or her California-gothic grit, but her staunch realism and conviction in excavating it.

For Didion, “Style is character”: i.e., language betrays character. As such, the act of writing, distilling complexities into language, also merits a prioritization of verisimilitude and accuracy, because it is so easy to go the opposite way: easy to “reduce human suffering to what atomized individuals endure,” easy to forgo nuance for convenience, easy to distort truth into falsehood. Didion taught us that thinking is an act that should require effort — more effort than we often are wont to exercise."


Tyler Durden on the new wave of media, QTR's Fringe Finance Substack, Jan 3, 2022:

"A thought dawned on me: this interview with Dr Robert Malone is now officially out there and, no matter how much anyone tries to censor it, it can’t be taken back.

Putting aside the obvious irony of Twitter attempting to ban somebody and the person in question going viral as a result, I also thought about how, despite the fact that Malone’s opinions put him at odds with the mainstream media (who would never dare to have him on), Joe Rogan launched him past the usual media suspects and into the real “mainstream”.

I then thought to myself that in 2022, the mainstream media as we know it today (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, etc.) is going to be forced to change its narrative on Covid.

I think the result of the seismic shift is going to be several-fold, but the most important revelation I’ve come to is that the mainstream media is losing the fight of its life over the Covid narrative.If there’s one thing we can agree one, it’s that Covid is a tie that binds all 7 billion people on Planet Earth right now: everybody knows about it, everybody is concerned about it and everybody, to some degree, wants to stay informed about it.

In fact, health officials and the media have made it this way.

What they may not have known they were inadvertently doing, however, was opening up communication veins for people with integrity and honesty like Joe Rogan to dose them with a them with a look at reason and honest inquiry. This, in turn, created a benchmark for the world to compare the mainstream media to, revealing them to be the hysterical, sensational maniacs that they’ve become.

For 2022, I’m gonna make a bold prediction. The media, and maybe even politicians, are going to start to realize that the narratives that they have been pushing with regard to Covid, lockdowns, vaccinations and our economy are no longer being accepted at face value by their viewers.

The same capitalistic engine keeping Joe Rogan on the air is going to force the change in legacy media."


Glenn Greenwald on the shameless histrionics of Jan 6, 2022:

"Far too many centers of political and economic power benefit from an exaggerated and even false narrative about January 6 to expect it ever to end".

We have created a world of cowards, liars, hypochondriacs (remember when that was a bad thing?), and hysterics. The way everyone behaves now about everything is just plain embarrassing and shameful. In a culture that has programmed its population to celebrate their emotional and psychological fragility and invalidism is really paying off now. In this new era of psychosis, we can all be "sick" and afraid of being sick forever. The government can come to our rescue. The one good thing about the COVID regime is that it has revealed people for exactly who they really are. No hiding it now.