Our Weekly Discontents: August 3, 2020
It's Monday baby. You know what that means (it's the day we publish this newsletter).
Hey everyone, welcome to week two. I’m Jack Crosbie, one of the co-owners and writers at Discourse Blog, the resurrected newsroom of former Splinter staffers trying to make it as a collective running a newsletter.
That makes us part of a sort of Russian nesting doll scheme here at Discontents, which is also a collective of writers trying to make it as a newsletter. Right now, Substack appears to be one of the most viable ways for a single writer or podcaster to make this dream a reality. On that note, many of us are also participating in Opt Out, which is building an app-based news service that aggregates newsletters and publications on the left as well. There are other ways to make the industry work for us too — Defector’s launch of a fully worker-owned publication last week is a hugely promising one — but if you’ve got a smaller platform and staff the Substack model looks promising, even though I’m very aware that we’re all kind of hitching our carts to another tech company that says it’s nice and good but could very well turn out to be fucked like the rest of them.
Like Derek said last week, the only way this works is if we lift each other up, share each other’s work, and use every platform we have to help each other grow. And if needed, use those networks to protect what we’ve built so far if the same forces that screwed us over the first and second time try to do it again. Let’s get into what we did this week.
Foreign Exchanges
Derek Davison
I don’t really have anything to share, since Foreign Exchanges and I took the week mostly off. Though if you’re a fan of Remembering Things, you might appreciate the “Today in History” pieces I do when I’m away, where we commemorate the anniversaries of things like the Korean Armistice Agreement or the founding of the city of Baghdad. Mostly though, I just wanted to thank you all for sticking with us for a second week and say I hope you’ll keep sticking with us in the weeks to come!
A Lonely Impulse of Delight
Connor Southard
Last week, I wrote about Pacific Rim and how it excels at not cynically pretending to care about Important Themes it has no real interest in. This week’s newsletter will either be about Train to Busan and what it means to have something to say about class in a piece of narrative art, or it’ll be about Claire Keegan’s Foster and what we really mean by “beautiful prose.” Now is a good time to sign up because I’m going to start asking subscribers to help me figure out what my premium content should be.
Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future
Patrick Wyman
This was a light week for Perspectives because I spent most of it moving to the middle of the desert in the middle of a pandemic. With that said, I did write a post about the world during the heart of the last Ice Age, and how Paleolithic people survived tens of thousands of years on the icy grasslands of the mammoth steppe while creating some of the coolest art in human history. If you’d rather think about the present day, you might check out this essay on how imperial wars always come home sooner or later. This coming week, I’ll have a new post on the first people to come past the ice sheets to the Americas more than twenty thousand years ago, and how genetics and new archaeological discoveries are changing our understanding of these folks.
Welcome to Hell World
Luke O’Neil
I chatted with a bunch of the writers involved in Defector — the new home of the erstwhile Deadspin crew — about what to expect from the site and how it feels to be striking out on their own. “This is how it's gonna have to be for indie journalism as a whole moving forward,” Drew Magary said. “Just you and the readers. No one else getting in the way.”
I also published an essay about the history of the humble lemonade stand and its role as an early introduction to the lessons of capitalism for children.
“While the stories of the iconic lemonade stand, one of the most enduring symbols of wholesome Americana we have, are supposed to be about self reliance, and initiative, and all of the other phony parables about bootstrapping we teach children under the mythology of capitalism, much like everything else in American history, the real lesson is a lot more brutal than that. It’s about beating the competition. It’s about struggling to survive. It’s about winners and losers.”
Air Gordon pt. 2
Jeremy Gordon
Apart from being fun and occasionally life-affirming, sports are very goofy and absurd; one of the reasons why Deadspin, now Defector, was such an excellent site is because it was the one of the only mainstream sports publications capable of honestly writing about their goofiness and absurdity. Now sports are back, and deeply alien in a way the powers that be are nonetheless trying to pass off as completely normal and even a little exciting. That’s not dissimilar from the way a great many things work now, which I tried to write about.
Wars Of Future Past
Kelsey Atherton
For the latest “Wars of Future Past,” I (Kelsey Atherton) use the roll out of new AI principles for US Intelligence agencies to talk about the weird and semi-visible fight over creating principles of AI ethics for the Pentagon. Designing constraints for the computer brains that may someday hold guns is a tricky matter, and the direction of principles drafted suggests imposing even voluntary constraints is going to be a constant battle.
There’s also a reference to Leeroy Jenkins in a story about EMP fears, and a look at some of what I think is essential on-the-ground reporting from state-directed violence within the United States.
BORDER/LINES
Gaby Del Valle and Felipe De La Hoz
Last week, we wrote about what’s happening with DACA, which the Trump administration tried to end and is now trying to gut by refusing to process new applications. Our working title was “DACA fuckery,” because that’s basically what’s going on, but we ended up going with a more jargony one. We also looked at what’s happening on the border, which has been effectively closed to asylum seekers since the pandemic began. “Kids in cages” has become a popular liberal refrain, but instead of incarcerating children and families, immigration agencies are now detaining them in hotels before “expelling” them back to Mexico.
Next week, we’ll be publishing a premium post explaining the legal justifications the administration used to send Border Patrol officers to crack down on protesters in Portland. You may not be surprised to hear it all originated with the War on Terror.
Cruel and Usual
Shane Ferro
I wrote nothing last week, so I’ll just leave you with this quote to chew on:
“It only gets worse from here,” warned Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“As the shootings continue, so will retaliation. It’s a vicious cycle that the NYPD worked hard to mitigate, but that they are no longer able and in some cases willing to do.”
Were I not willing to do my job I would get fired, but I suppose my boss has more of a spine than Bill de Blasio.
The Insurgents
Jordan Uhl and Rob Rousseau
On this week’s episode we talked to John Iadarola of TYT’s The Damage Report about whether there’s going to be an election in November, the Joe Kennedy/Ed Markey race, how woke language is being weaponized by both liberals and conservatives, Joe Biden’s increasingly terrible platform, America’s looming cataclysmic eviction crisis, and some stuff about board games for some reason.
Also, Rob bids a tearful goodbye to his dream of viral Tik Tok superstardom, and Jordan recounts his interesting week, after his mild troll of an Army recruiter on Twitch turned into a national news story and ended up being debated on the floor of the House.
Be The Spark
Kim Kelly
Last week, I once again got very mad about the many ways in which the leaders of certain big, influential unions continue to fail us. This time, it was the matter of how the presidents of SEIU, AFT, IBEW, and NEA all voted against a measure to add Medicare For All to the DNC’s 2020 platform (and also helped shoot down efforts to add weed legalization and Medicare expansion). I generally steer as far clear of electoral bullshit as possible, but this latest abdication of labor leadership’s duty to the working class got under my skin given the circumstances (you know, global pandemic, massive unemployment, eviction apocalypse looming).
If I was in charge, not a single penny of union money would go to any political party or politician, but since, sadly, I am not, I ended up writing an essay about how certain elected union officials seem more concerned with greasing the wheels of the Democratic Party machine than listening to what their rank-and-file membership actually wants on pressing issues like Medicare For All and expelling police from the labor movement. Knock that shit off.
no love in fear
André Carlisle
Over the weekend Tobe Nwigwe released The Pandemic Project, a six track masterpiece that I cannot stop listening to. The project has depth, sorrow, hurt, anger and a tenderness that is sorely needed during this time in particular, when everything is so scary. I dropped some notes about each track in hopes that you will find the project as precious as I have.
Time to Say Goodbye
Jay Caspian Kang, Tammy Kim, Andy Liu
This week on the podcast, Jay scuba dived the depths of Asian American TikTok to engage Andy and Tammy in a critique of gendered home-cooking videos. How far have we really come? We then get a bit more serious, with a discussion of the continuing Black Lives Matter protests in downtown Portland and lessons in coalition-building from the 1970s Combahee River Collective.
Discourse Blog
Like most weeks, Discourse Blog published stuff all over the place. Paul Blest celebrated the launch of sports blog Defector by writing about how we need to immediately cancel all sports. Caitlin Schneider, meanwhile, put out a call for the weirdest unsolved mysteries from your hometown, including a truly strange story about a giant pile of banana peels. Our biggest effort this week is a reporting project started by Sam Grasso, which is attempting to compile people’s stories of experiencing police violence during the protests these past few months. You can email us those at discoursetheblog@gmail.com.
That’s where we’re at this week. We’ll be back next Monday (probably earlier in the day, that’s my bad) with another roundup of everything going on in the extended leftist Substack universe.