Fine one-liner from Kirn. Congress is showing its idiocy in hearings about the Taibbi Twitter expose.

Zing!

The non-techy congresspuppet should have prepared better. Congresspuppets have large staffs of younger people whose entire job is preparing and scripting the puppet. The staff didn’t do their job.

BUT: The question isn’t easy. In non-techy terms, what is Substack kinda like? It’s not a newspaper. It’s not a blog. It’s not an email-ish platform like Twitter or Facebook. It’s not a mostly-free platform like Youtube.

The closest 1950 equivalent is a newspaper syndicate open to the public. Writers and artists contribute to the syndicate. Readers pay a subscription fee for each column or cartoon they want to receive regularly. The syndicate distributes and takes a percentage of the subscriptions.

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Later after watching a few minutes of the original exchange… Taibbi is playing an unsatisfying game. He’s clinging to the “journalist” rule of not revealing sources, which is identical to the CIA rule of not revealing sources. The rule does not create trust. There are two ways to trustify a text.

One way is complete and open documentation of all the experiences and experiments and interviews that were edited and distilled to create the text. This is the ideal in science and law, and both fields achieve the ideal fairly often when not corrupted by Deepstate power and secrecy.

The other way to trustify a text is to check against your OWN experience and sources. At the points where this “news” intersects with my own experience, does it match what I know? Taibbi could have invited the puppet (really her staff) to compare the Substack pieces with what she (her staff) knows through government channels. They have MUCH BETTER access to the relevant info, because they are GENERATING the relevant info. Taibbi is only READING a small part of the info, selected by Elon’s staff.

THEY KNOW IT’S A HOAX BECAUSE THEY MADE THE HOAX.

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The part about staff preparing the elderly puppet reminded me…
Father Zuhlsdorf has been writing a series of “journal entries” by a Progressive Bishop. I’m undoubtedly missing most of the inside references, but the satire is delicious anyway. Similar to Lewis’s Screwtape Letters.