The thing he wrote about Israel-Gaza that devolved into a tirade against American liberals seemed kind of tone-deaf against a backdrop of 30,000 civilian deaths. But also:
> it makes me wonder why they want to invest so much of their time and effort in publishing things that are unkind, superficial, and not contributing anything meaningful.
Nearly all of the time, money. The outrage machine pays. Looks like OP's associated with Singal, who's the king of stoking various social panics to get eyeballs on his work. Same as the Miles-Cheong playbook. It's the intellectual equivalent of churning out "<X> reacts to <Y>!" videos on YouTube for ad revenue.
Thanks for pointing this out. I was assuming the author is publishing this stuff because he just likes sharing his opinions with the world. If there are more concrete incentives that's even worse.
Oh yeah, at one point Glenn Greenwald was making an estimated ~100k per month on Substack.[1] Pretty sure Graham Linehan has raked in some serious cash doing the same.
And then of course it's concerning that so many people are willing to throw that much money at wannabe pudits whose insights often boil down to "trans people are scary and bad." (That's still the focus of Linehan's newsletter, apparently! In all these years he's never come up with anything else to say!)
> it makes me wonder why they want to invest so much of their time and effort in publishing things that are unkind, superficial, and not contributing anything meaningful.
Nearly all of the time, money. The outrage machine pays. Looks like OP's associated with Singal, who's the king of stoking various social panics to get eyeballs on his work. Same as the Miles-Cheong playbook. It's the intellectual equivalent of churning out "<X> reacts to <Y>!" videos on YouTube for ad revenue.