5 ms·
These recent substack articles which have been posted to HN are interesting. Not because the people who write the articles are intelligent and serious thinkers,
by MisterBastahrd 5y ago
These recent substack articles which have been posted to HN are interesting. Not because the people who write the articles are intelligent and serious thinkers, because if they are, they definitely aren't showing it via their prose.
They're interesting because they show exactly the sort of vacuous garbage one can expect when an amateur is is trying to make a name for themselves as a writer and has no editor to slap their hand or even ask for some sort of coherence.
- bobmaxup 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Kirn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Kirn
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoEssayist is a more concise way to describe someone who engages in long-form verbal diarrhea. It takes neither moral courage nor intellectual valor to declare oneself above the fray without describing your method for being so.
- pessimizer 5y ago> He has also reviewed books for New York Magazine and has written for The New York Times Book Review and New York Times Sunday Magazine, and is a contributing editor of Time, where he has received popularity for his entertaining and sometimes humorous first-person essays among other articles of interest. He also served as an American cultural correspondent for the BBC. > In addition to teaching nonfiction writing at the University of Montana, Kirn was the 2008–09 Vare Nonfiction Writer in Residence at the University of Chicago. He graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University in 1983 after completing a 22-page-long senior thesis entitled "Entangling Breaths (Poems)." Following that, he obtained a second undergraduate degree in English Literature at Oxford University, where he was a Keasbey Scholar. You don't think this guy can get a job as an editor?
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoI think that guy seriously NEEDS an editor. All writers do.
- peytn 5y agoWow, this guy must have something to say with haters like these.
- LQexplanation 5y agoA guy standing in the middle of busy road and screaming that pigeons are spying him, has probably a lot of haters and not much to say. Let's judge people by their creations, not by the hate.
- cpu_qwerty 5y agoHow about judging the essence of an argument instead of just talking about prose and going on an irrelevant tangent about "recent articles on HN"?
- rootusrootus 5y agoIt's probably just because he spends most of his essay complaining only about left-wing media sins. Nobody said he had to be neutral, of course, but if you want to know who the haters are...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jollybean 5y agoLack of editing doesn't make the output garbage, just a little more difficult to read, and sometimes with a little too much personal 'English' on the ball. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi, Andrew Sullivan, The Dispatch are all fine Substack publications. Their audiences are really small however, it's the total opposite of populist, I'm not sure how much influence they could possibly have.
- mns 5y agoI think it's more interesting how he's been already labeled as an amateur who's trying to make a name for himself, alt-right nut-job, covid conspiracy theorist, racist and so on, all in various comments on this page. Having grown up in a communist country, it's so disturbing, especially now, to see how whenever someone has a diverging opinion (someone could agree with you on 99 issues and have a different thought on the last one) he's done and needs to be labeled and treated like a pariah.
- denton-scratch 5y agoSo you think that in a non-"communist" country, it's unreasonable for people to express divergent opinions about stuff that's been published? Where you have what passes for freedom of speech, the corrollary is that everyone has the freedom to oppose your views.