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Update on My Situation

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81–90 of 142 posts

Re: Update on My Situation

#81

I would like someone with the funds to do so to simply become his patron, and give him a salary to do what the hell he likes, ala medieval Europe. He’s got to have enough very wealthy fans that this is realistic?

I think the more modern version of this arrangement would be for Alexander to work at/start a think tank, which has the advantage of being tax-exempt for the patron. Or for a less formal, more distributed solution, there is of course Patreon.

That’s interesting, although my understanding of Think Tanks is that they’re meant to be following an editorial line

Re: Update on My Situation

#82

Sad that Alexander has had to leave his job because some petulant reporter thought he was a sufficiently public figure for a takedown, but good for him and Substack for making sure he landed on his feet. A personal hit job by one of the most powerful institutions on the planet (or rather, their mouthpiece) is no small life event.

I would like to see a link to this hit job, please.

Re: Update on My Situation

#84
post #59

[flagged]

I did not downvote, but this is a low quality comment. There is a distinction in journalism between protecting a source and revealing the object of a story. I still disapprove of NYT doxing him.

The people who have consistently destroyed lives and wealth around the world for decades are far more appropriate "objects" for journalism than some random psychiatrist with opinions.

Since you are a human, I believe that you didn't downvote.

Re: Update on My Situation

#85
post #6

> And now that I’ve publicly admitted privacy is important to me – something I tried to avoid coming on too strong about before, for exactly this reason – some people have taken it upon themselves to post my real name all over Twitter in order to harass and threaten me. Has anybody applied the Dark Forest metaphor to internet publicity? It's fascinating (horrifying) how simply catching the attention of too big a piec…

> You don't even have to have done anything controversial. Attention itself appears to be caustic, at the extreme. I haven't read it but I assumed the blog was controversial based on all the concern about anonymity. Is that not the case?

It was "controversial" because it was a safe space for discussion about any topic - as long as participants adhered to some rules, that Scott enforced, and of course exemplified them as best as he could.

So it's not hard to find something that "looks bad", even if it's really not.

Re: Update on My Situation

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One strategy might be to not hit the self destruct button prematurely. Far more people have read and shared his blog post about being doxxed than have read the NYT article.

The optimal strategy would probably have been radio silence, and then the blog disappearing without an explanation after a few weeks.

Optimal for what? Sure that might thwart this problematic piece but would it guarantee anything for the future?

At least this way Scott was able to size up his readership and work on solving this problem for good (for himself), plus the cat is out of the bag regarding how fickle the NYT is.

Re: Update on My Situation

#87
post #61

Interesting to speculate on the “extremely generous” offer from Substack. They’re obviously willing to devote a decent amount of dev time to making Scott comfortable, and I’m sure they have a good idea of how having SSC on board would promote their platform on its take-over-the-blog-market mission, so it could be generous indeed.

All we know is that Substack is willing to make a lot of promises to Scott. Scott probably lacks (as I do) the expertise to negotiate a contract that would actually hold Substack to those promises. But maybe I am being too cynical.

It's not the promises that are problematic. The long term plans and interests of Substack are not so well aligned with Scott's.

Every future development has to either treat him as a special snowflake (so they have to implement a VIP tier) or eventually bulldoze every perk of his blog back into uniformity.

I don't understand why doesn't he goes full patreon.

Re: Update on My Situation

#88
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the common trope of a person with wealth and/or power reclining while a servant or slave feeds them grapes or fans them with palm fronds [1]? Is Djambi actually higher status than Hedonism bot [2]? [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GrapesOfLuxury [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFYMzQ3Vfq0

Haha IMO we are all equally capable of thinking for ourselves, and therefore it is not necessary to have the patient recline in order to subjugate them and/or induce openness.

Isn't that done also to break eye contact? In (some) analytical therapy face-to-face discussion is discouraged as far as I know.

Re: Update on My Situation

#89
post #66

Interestingly this time around, Bing and Wikipedia seem to be on the side of censorship, and google now as back then still blasts the name open. Rare teams!

What do Wikipedia, Bing, and Google have to do with this?
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