Weekend Blogging Roundup

I was blogging for the Monthly this weekend, and this time I'm actually going to do a compilation of all the posts I wrote, because I'm rather pleased with how they turned out. To wit:

1. There was a bit of a fracas around pictures showing a meltwater lake at the North Pole. Turns out that's something of an exaggeration.

2. What can we learn from PayPal accidentally giving some guy $92 quadrillion for a few minutes?

3. Why my fellow broke young men won't be slickered by conservative scumbags into bailing on Obamacare.

4. Social Security evades the effective demand problem with forced saving by transferring the money rather than storing it.

5. Walter Russell Mead is just completely full of shit about climate change.

6. Tom Coburn has this fascinating view that you should win elections if you want to implement your agenda.

7. An America where voting just broke down by race would suck balls.

8. Against the housing status quo. This one is almost entirely swiped from an email conversation with Steve Randy Waldman, who was incredibly gracious with his time in helping my dumb ass understand the housing market. I'm pretty proud of how the post came out, but mostly because I was able to (hopefully correctly) digest his explanation and rephrase in a way that made sense to me. And maybe add a couple nickels of value of my own. (Needless to say, any goofs are probably mine.)

And here's the anthem for the weekend:

Comments

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

Varanus albigularis albigularis

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The Conversational Downsides of Twitter's Structure

Over the past couple years, as I've had a steady writing job and ascended from "utter nobody" to "D-list pundit," I find it harder and harder to have discussions online. Twitter is the only social network I like and where I talk to people the most, but as your number of followers increases, the user experience becomes steadily more hostile to conversation. Here's my theory as to why this happens. First is Twitter's powerful tendency to create cliques and groupthink. Back in forum and blog comment section days, people would more often hang out in places where a certain interest or baseline understanding could be assumed. (Now, there were often epic fights, cliques, and gratuitous cruelty on forums too, particularly the joke or insult variety, but in my experience it was also much easier to just have a reasonable conversation.) On Twitter, people rather naturally form those same communities of like interest, but are trapped in the same space with differe

Ryan Cooper

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