AMApril

Welcome, first of all, to the somewhat unbelievable number of new subscribers I’ve received over the last 48 hours. I am delighted you’re here and look forward to alienating you with my bullshit over the coming weeks or months.

(Seriously though. Really happy you’re here)

In case you missed it, here’s a brief recap: yesterday, Elon Musk declared war on Substack for announcing a competing service, Substack Notes. Rather than, like, making his product better, he decided to prevent people from liking, replying to, or sharing tweets with Substack links in them. Then, because his team couldn’t figure out how to retroactively apply the gag order to posts made before Elon lost his mind and also because people were able to get around his temper tantrum through link shorteners, he flagged all traffic flowing from Twitter to Substack as malicious and potentially unsafe. Behold:

I’ve quit Twitter before. But I quit primarily for health reasons—I wanted to touch more grass—and because I was annoyed by Elon Musk being on my timeline all the time. I started going back “just to promote my work” which was a bit like an addict doing “just a little bit of cocaine”; soon I was posting full-time again. That buzzy feeling of strangers paying attention to you, those little bon mottes that deliver zaps of dopamine straight to the brain. And it really was driving traffic to the Substack. Helping me network. All the stuff it’s always done for me.

Flagging links as malicious when they’re fine is more than annoying, though. It’s dangerous.

Imagine if someone started placing fake stop signs all over the road. At first, it’s just obnoxious—people are stopping when they shouldn’t be, traffic’s getting snarled. The danger comes later: when people get used to the idea that not all stop signs are real. Suddenly, people are less likely to stop at real stop signs. You’d have to take a second to think, every time: is this a real stop sign, or a fake one? And then you guess wrong and get T-boned by a semi.

The beautiful nerds who created the Internet envisioned a utopian collective of academics and computer geeks. When the web got bigger and that turned out to emphatically not to be the case, the nerds developed norms and customs for dealing with it. One of the most important of those customs is the flagging of malicious links. Blocking access is one thing—it’s disgusting, it’s against the ethos of the Internet, and it alienated me from Twitter entirely—but flagging safe links as malicious makes all of us less safe. Much as I love my online drug of choice, I love Online more. I live on the Internet and I won’t be part of breaking it like this.

Besides: what’s in it for me at this point? Why should I produce content for the most contemptible person on earth, for free, when I can’t promote my own work? It really is just cocaine at this point. Online onanism.

In conclusion, fuck Elon Musk forever. I’m off Twitter and I’m not going back. Substack will theoretically be rolling Notes out in the next few days, and I’ll be an early adopter. Like all my content, it will be free unless you feel like paying for it. Hopefully it turns out to be a good platform. If not, I’ll hang out here anyway and wait for a good one to emerge.

Enough. Let us leave this dumpster fire and move to better things

A couple of weeks ago, I solicited questions for an AMA (Ask Me Anything for the never-been-on-Redditors amongst us). Now I have a bunch of questions. What better way to overcome the absolute terror I have of disappointing all of you than with a copout article? Let’s rip the band-aid right off with some horrible hot takes and narcissism:

I’m not going to reprint all the nice things people said about me in these questions because it feels like excessive narcissism even considering the exercise, but please know that if you sent me a nice thing I read it, really appreciate it, and that it made me feel super good about myself. Thank you a lot!

I’m incredibly socially anxious. I am anxious all the time. I think one of the reasons that going to weird events works for me is that the nervousness makes sense in that context—I know why I’m worried so I’m less worried. Same with public speaking, probably.

Very glad you like it!! Everyone else: if you hate this kind of content, it’s this person’s fault

I hadn’t seen it, but I just watched it and really liked it. I guess it makes sense that people understood fascism a lot better 18 years after the death of Hitler than they do now.

For those who haven’t seen the episode (spoiler alert for a 60-year-old show): the episode is about an aspiring fascist leader named Pete Vollmer and the various steps he takes to gain power. I really admire the way this episode humanizes Pete—he is a sad and tormented man with a traumatic past and a terror of weakness—without ever letting him off the hook for the ideas he pedals or their results. There’s a bit where he has one of his inner circle killed in order to create a martyr that we might all do well to think about. It is why, pragmatically speaking, it is a dangerous thing to punch a member of the far right.

The episode also involves an attempted intervention by Pete’s surrogate father, a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust. Ultimately, Pete kills him. He makes no real move to defend himself. It’s a powerful scene with great dialogue but it’s also an example of a different kind of martyr cult: the Hollywood Self-Sacrificing Hero.

I think it is very important to remember that you can fully empathize with someone—love them, even—while also understanding the need to protect you and yours by deadly force if necessary. It feels like a contradiction, but it isn’t. It’s much harder than the dehumanization route, but ultimately less hazardous for the soul. There’s a whole ideology that centers around viewing political enemies as subhuman vermin in need of extinction—we have a name for it and everything—and it’s better to stay as far away from it as possible.

“Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley when I made that April Fool’s video. Plot twist: I love that song.

There is a certain look that I associate with an asshole strain of conservatism that involves a beard, but it usually involves a lot more than a beard and I’ve been wrong before. Also though: beards can be very attractive. All in all, I’d say it balances out.

Same.

People who know me in real life are having a bit of a giggle right now because I love dogs to an unreasonable extent. Dogs are my favorite. They are very very good creatures that we bred to love us, which is kind of a fucked up thing to do, but they’re here now and very good and deserve to be happy all the time.

You’re not the first person to suggest I write about my military experiences, and maybe I will someday. It’s strange: it all feels like it happened to a very different person and my memories are not as sharp as one might like. I have vignettes. Maybe that’s enough.

I did a Twitter thread that kind of encapsulates my memories being a woman in the military, but we are Not Doing Twitter Anymore so I’ve thrown it up as a backdated Substack and you can read it here if you would like to.

Oh jeez, I’m so bad at actors. Someone I was very into once told me that Tilda Swinton would make a good me and at the time it was slightly devastating but, you know, whatever. Let’s go with that. She’ll need to gain a few pounds but I believe in her.

Really, really dark humor or deeply stupid Internet humor. Or a little bit of both. Here’s the last thing that made me laugh uncontrollably for like five minutes straight:

Don’t you dare judge me.

Oh god this is the question, isn’t it? This is a terrible answer and no one likes it and I certainly don’t always abide by it, but I think anger and venemous contempt aren’t always particularly useful either unless they’re spurring you to an action that doesn’t require a lot of finesse. Like, if you’re about to be in a physical fight, anger is great. If you need to DESTROY someone with FACTS and LOGIC: also a great tool.

My personal day-to-day strategy, though, is to try to find a way to laugh at whatever it is that’s making me freak out (hence the dark humor thing). My favorite book, Deep Survival, describes laughter as “the body telling itself that it’s all right.” A lot of people mistake dark humor for indifference, and maybe sometimes that’s true, but in my experience it is usually the exact opposite of that. It’s a way to stay cool when things are extremly not cool, man, not cool at all.

And once you feel slightly cool, you can move forward with doing whatever thing you can do to push back against this nonsense. Even if it is very small. If everyone does very small things to push back, our odds of being OK go way up.

It is the only way I eat croutons, to the point where I just don’t have them in the house because what’s the point.

A couple weeks, probably? Camping and/or army.

Like you would hardly believe.

Features writer at New York Magazine (or similar) who also gets to write op/eds whenever she wants and gets paid enough to have her very own bathroom. Or charismatic political cult leader. Whichever.

Honestly it’s been pretty good so far, I’m procrastinating super hard on work I absolutely must do in order to graduate this spring (getting a masters in journalism from NYU) but I’m really enjoying procrastinating so there’s that. Also I just watched this really cool Twilight Zone episode so you could say things are going all right.

This is a really perceptive comment. I said I wasn’t going to print the praise but I’m making an exception here because, like, thank you for recognizing that there’s another private me that isn’t this me. She says thank you.

In the middle of Trump’s speech at CPAC Texas 2022 last August I became absolutely convinced that I would need to leave this country someday, possibly very soon, before things deteriorate to the point that the far right starts stringing up loudmouth asshole journalists for real. I was looking at Portugal, which seems like a great place for expats (at the expense of the people already living there, I know, but I’m not exactly rolling in dough so my options are limited).

But then the midterms happened and also I thought about things more and now I’m not so sure. I get so goddamn angry at America, but you can’t get this angry at something you don’t deeply love. This is my country and I love it a great deal. If I ever leave, it will be because there’s no other way to stay alive.

With the caveat that I haven’t sat down and followed MMA seriously for a few years: Raging Al Iaquinta. He’s not very good. He’s mostly a real estate agent because the UFC doesn’t pay regular fighters enough. He bitches about this all the time and was involved in efforts to form a fighter’s union. He’s also an absolute demon in the ring: he does not give a fuck what you do to him, he will keep trying to knock you out until you put him down or run out of time. The heart on that guy. God bless.

As I type this someone is blasting mariachi music outside of my window. This happens day and night with a wide variety of genres. People get into shouting matches on the street regularly, in the summer people stay out and drink on stoops all night. In summary: yeah, basically. It’s pretty rad.

As stated above dogs are my absolute favorite but cats are also amazing. I love an opinionated asshole cat, and I love a snuggle-in-your-lap cat. Very cool dudes.

Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I lose my absolute shit. When I was working on the last substack, the one about protest violence, and I realized that Billboard Chris started that altercation—grabbed the woman by the collar and then cried about her self-defense on Twitter and TV for days? And that the right had been told and did not care at all? I lost my mind for a couple hours. Could not handle it.

To whatever extent I manage to not be like that, I think it’s because I remember very clearly holding views I don’t anymore, and I remember that I held them for good reasons. I was sure that unregulated capitalism was the best way for everyone to have the best possible life, including poor people. I was sure that the War on Terror was going to bring freedom and democracy to people who wanted it and that it would keep us safe. If I believed that there was a satanic cult full of pedophiles that get off on mutilating children, I’d fight to the death to stop them too.

(nb: I still do not see any contradiction between “if I believed what you do I’d do the same thing” and “if you come for me and mine I will end you”)

It also helps that I go to these events and, like…meet people. It makes it very hard to forget that people mean well when you talk to them all the time.

But it sucks, and it’s very hard, and I think it’s fine and even healthy to rage out once in a while. I hope so, anyway

I think it’s got some unique problems.

The thing about Portland is…well. It’s white. It’s the whitest city in the country for ugly historical reasons. So immediately you have that very specific Northern kind of racism that is Definitely Not Racist just Really Awkward Around Black People Because You’ve Only Met Like Three Of Them In Your Entire Life.

Also, because there are very few Black people in Portland, and because the city is deeply progressive, it puts any left-of-center movement in a position where a couple of Black people can come in and be dicks and not get called on it. Every human being on the planet has the ability to be a dick—it transcends race—and when you treat one race like they’re never dicks, a) positive stereotypes are still stereotypes and b) it means that things like Teressa Raiford can happen (a no-shot write-in candidate for mayor in 2020 who cost the progressive candidate the election while also voting for candidates endorsed by the police union, it’s a whole Thing, I’m going to die mad about it)

ALSO: Portland did not actually burn down in 2020, but a lot of people were brutalized in 2020. People who didn’t even go to protests regularly experienced tear gas in their houses. People who did go to protests were beaten, saw people get beaten, were arrested for bullshit, and spent over a hundred days terrified out of their minds. The entire leftist scene has a massive case of undiagnosed PTSD. It’s had an impact on activism.

Also? I can’t prove it, but I will go to my grave believing that Portland is crawling with feds who deliberately sabotage left-wing organization. We know they spied on us in 2020. We know they were on the ground at the 2021 election day protests. We know they paid someone to sow discord in the Denver protest scene and we know they spent the entire 60s doing the same thing to leftists and Black liberation groups. So I think the city’s dysfunciton likely has some outside help.

You’re hired.

Substack has a lot going for it. The monetization model is really simple, the writing platform itself has everything I need and nothing I don’t, and it’s starting to get some name recognition. Paid subscriptions have worked out really well so far. This content is and will remain free, but about ten percent of readers have opted to pay, and to them I am eternally grateful. The paywalls seem really flexible for people who want to go that route, which is also great.

One thing I do not like is that you really, really need some kind of external promotion mechanism to make Substack work. The internal ecosystem isn’t quite there yet. I’m hoping Notes helps with this since I no longer have an engine to drive traffic to the site.

Yes, absolutely

Honestly probably not—I see the rationale, but it seems like a lot of red tape, and honestly, someone who wants a handgun for self-defense—maybe someone with a stalker, or a vengeful ex—doesn’t really need to get good at a single-shot rifle. I fully support mandatory education for specific kinds of weapons—not a day-long classroom session but multiple days that include range time. People can’t drive cars without licenses; why the hell can you own and fire a gun without one?

I’m not super familiar with this act so please take this with a grain of salt, but I’m all fo the registry part of the equation. If you have to register a car, it seems to me like you should have to register a gun, especially given that sometimes guns are used in, like. Crime. Also sometimes guns are stolen. Registration helps a lot in these cases.

I’m not in favor of a burdensome cost for the registration, though, because that’s an extremely regressive tax and I generally don’t like those. I don’t want guns to be a rich people thing, I want it to be a thing that people have enough education to use properly

This is such a cool question, and I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. My final answer: Christian Smalls. He’s smart, he’s tough, and he held his own against Tucker Carlson on his own show. That’s a man who uses masculine power to uplift and help people.

If readers have other ideas they should sound off in the comments, not just to boost engagement but because seriously this is such a good question and I really like it.

I just went looking for it—this is his weekly email thing, right? I’m not subscribed and, in true Walsh fashion, he has made it impossible to find any kind of archived materials on his jumbled mess of a website. If you send it to me a link, I’ll check it out (email or https://ngl.link/laurajedeed)

Damn, this question made me realize how jumbled my moral system really is. It’s more various tenets than anything. At its root is the idea that every person has a soul created in the image of God. Whether that God is a real entity or a metaphor doesn’t matter: the idea is that every human life has intrinsic worth. Most of the rest proceeds logically from there. Which is probably closest to Christianity. I don’t think most Christians would consider me particularly Christian in my spiritual practice (pagan-adjacent) or view of God (he’s an asshole, but he has a plan), but there it is.

I also think we’re social creatures who evolved to work together in a community for survival, and that a good community gives everyone a chance to succeed and contribute. Because of the whole intrinsic value of the human soul thing. Which is why I consider myself a leftist.

<3

They’re…good? Important to have materials to fight a war. Can’t really fight a war without them, and a lot of wars have been infamously lost when supply chains got cut or messed up

That being said, I have yet to meet a single supply sergeant who wasn’t a raging prick.

I was told by someone I trust late last year to watch Andor, and I’ve watched a few episodes, and it appears I will have to watch more. This is great

And there it is, folks—way too long, and now you have a pretty good idea of whether you’ll enjoy things around here. Thanks again to all the new people, I hope you stick around and can’t wait to put all my posting energy towards writing stuff on here.