Curtis White on the Middle Mind. It's (Terry Gross's FreshAir) like Dr. Laura for people with bachelor degrees. Car Talk has more intellectual content. From the perspective of a person really interested in art and culture, one can only say, "Well, I think she's on my side, but, God, she's so stupidly on my side that I hardly recognize my side as my side." Thus the Middle Mind... My contention is simply that a mediocre book--facilitated by a culture of mediocrity that forbids real intelligence--hurts us all... One of the most common gambits of the Middle Mind is to claim to provide high culture while really providing something a good deal less. Thus, one of the operating assumptions of Fresh Air is "some of our best writers work for TV." Joe Queenan (in Balsamic Dreams) and Dinty Moore (in Accidental Buddhist) provide a sociology and theology perfectly appropriate to the expectations and conceptual capacities of the readers of Time magazine. The Middle Mind's motto could be "Promise him Culture but give him TV." Oh, boy, do I feel this way about NPR...

Carl Chenet: The Importance of Choosing the Correct Mastodon Instance (more)

Sonya Mann: A Handful of Tech Companies Decide Who Has Free Speech Online. That's Not Good. (more)

Stowe Boyd wants a master ToDoList creator. (more)

A BullShit artist closes 8-figure deals. (more)

Fear of Missing Out

Millennials - group after Generation X, before Generation Z (more)

whoops Millennial

aka Generation Y

Radio serial turned into series of books. Douglas Adams (more)

Matt Taibbi: Blame the Big Media for Creating a World Dumb Enough for Trump (more)

Ethan Zuckerman: Mastodon is big in Japan. The reason why is… uncomfortable (more)

Revolutionary political philosophy in the Takeshi Kovacs series of books (more)

Liberal?

Rory Sutherland: How internet Paywalls are making us all dumber (more)

Sarah Jeong says Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It? (more)

National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus), more commonly known as Nazism (/ˈnɑːtsɪzəm, ˈnæ-/[1]), is the ideology and set of practices associated with the 20th-century German Nazi Party, Nazi Germany, and other far-right groups. Usually characterized as a form of Fascism that incorporates scientific Racism and antisemitism, Nazism's development was influenced by German nationalism (especially Pan-Germanism), the Völkisch movement and the anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary groups that emerged during the Weimar Republic after Germany's defeat in First World War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism (more)

believer in Nazism

A reactionary is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society, which they believe possessed characteristics (discipline, respect for authority, etc.) that are negatively absent from the contemporary status quo of a society. As an adjective, the word reactionary describes points of view and policies meant to restore the status quo ante. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary (more)

Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes retaining traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization. By some definitions, conservatives have variously sought to preserve institutions including religion, monarchy, parliamentary government, property rights and the social hierarchy, emphasizing stability and continuity, while the more extreme elements called reactionaries (Reactionary) oppose modernism and seek a return to "the way things were." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism (more)