“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
~ Yoda
After 18 years, more than 900 episodes and countless dissections of topical cultural miscellany — be it a Taylor Swift album or “Middlemarch” — Slate’s “Culture Gabfest” will gab no more.
The pioneering weekly chat podcast, which premiered in February 2008 and helped define one of the then-nascent medium’s most durable formats, released its last episode on Wednesday. Stephen Metcalf, Julia Turner and Dana Stevens, the hosts for the entire run, had announced in June that they would end the show to focus on other projects.
Slate’s ‘Culture Gabfest’ Signs Off After 18 Years
What Online Platforms Can and Must Do to Help Mitigate Escalating Political Violence
Tech Policy: “Political violence is on the rise in the United States.
According to a summary of key trends from the Princeton University Bridging Divides Initiative, this rise is reflected across a range of different statistics, from an increase in targeted violence and assassination attempts to an increase in the overall volume of threats and harassment against political figures at the local and national level. Unprecedented levels of threats against public officials, including federal judges, both on- and offline have coincided with a bout of assassination attempts and acts of targeted violence in the United States.
A growing number of violent acts over the past decade have demonstrated a clear nexus to the perpetrators’ social media use, including the September assassination attempt against President Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk’s murder, and the arson attack against Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. We are now entering the midterm election cycle with more serious threats emanating from the online systems than ever before, and with fewer protections than we’ve had in a decade..”
How Local News Reduces Loneliness
Washington Monthly – “One more reason rebuilding local news is vital. Academic research suggests that whether it’s an obituary, a puff piece, or news of a sale on tuna at the grocery, local news makes us feel less alone. “When thinking about the harms caused by the collapse of local news, our minds might first turn to the practical: Less local news means more corruption, more government waste, and meager knowledge of candidates for local office. More recent research has also found that the local news crisis exacerbates polarization and misinformation. When community news contracts, the vacuum is filled by national media (more partisan) and social media (optimized for anger, misinformation-friendly). That got Danny Hayes, a professor of political science at The George Washington University, wondering: If local news influences communal feelings, could it also influence personal feelings?
His recent study is stunning. He and researcher Anusha Trivedi compared levels of individual loneliness in comparable communities, some with robust local news and others without. They found that those with less community news had higher levels of loneliness, especially in rural areas. In a state that is half rural, a 10-point increase in the share of the state’s low-news counties leads to a 1.4-point increase in loneliness…”
I TOLD YOU SO, YOU F***KING FOOLS: ‘In the End I Was Right:’ How a Harvard Historian Helped Reagan Topple Soviet Communism.
Fortunately for America and for those under the jackboot of Soviet Communism, there were some who saw past the propaganda to the cruel truth. Among them was [Richard] Pipes, a historian of Russia who also served the U.S. government during the Ford and Reagan administrations.
After Pipes first visited the Soviet Union, in 1957, he wrote a colleague: “All the buildings on the streets were in a state of disrepair, the gateways crumbling, the façades patched up, the courtyards invisible for the mud which covered them. … Everything made the impression of being decayed or dead, even the people walking on the streets, somberly and paying no attention to each other. … I found it difficult to suppress the tears as I viewed about me the effects of 40 years of Soviet rule which had exacted such suffering from the population.”
Pipes later recalled it: “in Leningrad everyone looked gloomy and did not look at each other but seemed deep in their own thoughts. Because one could be executed under Stalin merely for an association with someone deemed guilty of counterrevolution, the only reasonable defense was to have nothing to do with other people.”
Daly quotes Pipes in 1996 summing up his own contribution: “Whereas the profession as a whole regarded the Soviet Union as an essentially popular and stable regime, I saw it as an unpopular and weak regime, which we ought to press very hard. That was very much a minority view, but I think that in the end I was right. Sound, stable popular regimes don’t collapse suddenly, as the Soviet Union did.”
The preference cascaded rather spectacularly back then, much to the chagrin of the DNC-MSM.
(Classical reference in headline.)
