Wesley Osam

An unconscious assumption behind a lot of online discourse is that we’re political spectators, not citizens with collective agency/responsibility; like The Democrats are a sports team and our role is merely to yell at the TV when they play badly.

Basically I think one skill everybody on the left ought to learn is rhetoric.

Also, if you have more than a few dozen followers on social media you’re not just chatting with your friends, you’re a small-scale influencer. What effect do you want that influence to have?

Not that we have the media's ears, but we can talk to people in our communities. If it helps to call Republicans weird, you can call them weird whenever the subject comes up.

A lot of discourse lately about how Democrats fail at messaging. They do often struggle, though a lot of the problem is a hostile media. But it isn’t entirely on elected Dems—we need to admit this is an area where we, ordinary citizens, collectively have a role to play.

The Great Asymmetry is that the media constantly lets Republicans get away with shamelessly lying about verifiable facts, while constantly implying that Democrats are lying when they're actually telling the truth.

That's really all there is to it.

and because i can imagine the bad faith reading of this, what i am *not* saying is that everything about the extant democratic party is hunky dory other than its total absence of a communications/propaganda infrastructure. what i *am* saying is that this absence puts a hard limit on reaching voters

Cartoon of a man sitting on a chair staring into space. Thought bubble reads 'I wonder what I'm thinking about'

My creative process

www.worldofmoose.com/collections/...

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more genre fiction should embrace the fact that History is Unknowable even for very well recorded periods of time

tremendously admire his work and the way he talks abt an exploratory creative process BUT it is very sad to me how little that sort of thinking & working is possible. like u need to have an enormously successful career in a medium that isn't yet perfectly industrialized in order to get to this point

sometimes i think we lost something with the disappearance of not just cheap but cheap *looking* mass market paperback versions of "prestige" books

if you approach even pretty difficult or experimental writers with the presumption that they’re simply trying to while away and afternoon or figure something out, same as every other writer on earth, you may or may not finish the book, but there probably won’t be bad feelings either way

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I think movies have done a lot to convince people that art or writing or any creative endeavor is when you come up with an "idea" because your dumb friend said a phrase, and all the rest of making it is busy work, a montage, and wouldn't you like to skip the montage? well good news, AI can do it

a still from TRON (1982)

a still from TRON (1982)

a still from TRON (1982)

Still from TRON (1982

I think what's impressive about TRON is that, visually, it's still so much more interesting than any of it's sequels. It's crazy that they tried update this digital world by making it as 'realistically rendered' as possible. It's a complete misunderstanding of the original's charm.

And maybe just, y'know... actually trying to learn about the subjects we want to talk about, instead of just blurting whatever off-the-cuff feelings pop into our heads about the latest discourse?

Which means being careful not to repost AI slop, but also means not falling for it when Politico or Axios or even the New York Times posts some clickbait article designed solely to make us angry or scared.

I'm kind of coming round to the idea that all of us on social media—even those of us whose followings aren't huge—are basically small-scale influencers, and should think of ourselves as having certain responsibilities on that basis.

Maybe we should all just not repost videos for a while.

I’ve been thinking for a bit that we’ve moved not only into a post-material perspective of the world, but also a post-informational one that privileges collective make-believe and imagining over any other mode of reality

Like, a lot of online discourse feels like fan fiction about real people, both public figures and not. Posters exchanging head canons about their goals, motivations, and inner lives.

I'm not planning on watching this show, but found this thread interesting. I've been thinking for a while our culture encourages everyone to think about and relate to real people in pretty much the same ways we think about and relate to fictional people.

Social media is very effective at creating sin-eaters. A sin-eater is different from an ephemeral main-character. It's a recurring "well would you look at that guy" person you see screenshotted on your feed constantly, who is meant to stand in for the evils of some larger group you dislike

few better movie experiences than watching something where you’re like “there’s no way they can stick this landing” and then it goes full Kerri Strug. that’s this movie.

This kind of pacing has bothered me for ages; I just checked and it looks like I first complained about it on my blog nearly a decade ago: www.superdoomedplanet.com/blog/2016/04...

I've been seeing a lot of this even in books that seem like they should be more driven, pulpier, more plot & action-focused. What frustrates me about it—to be clear, I adore a contemplative lost-in-the-landscape literary meander—is when it seems to stem from a televisual concept of *time*.

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