Blame Caitlin Johnstone for this one...
I can't even think of what to put in this field. Will I really be any good at this?
I’m was already writing a lot (well, tweeting, and a lot more than is probably good for my mental health) when I saw this post by Caitlin. In addition to being right, which I believe she usually is, she had this to say near the end:
If you've got any urge to write articles or make videos or a podcast, just do it. You're infinitely more qualified to be the media than people who are paid by billionaires to lie, and they're not asking anyone for permission to speak. If Chris fucking Cuomo gets a voice, then so do you.
You don't have to be perfect or professional quality or whatever; hell, give yourself permission to outright suck at first if that's how it plays out. Give yourself permission to not be perfect and just learn as you go and correct your mistakes as you make them. That's allowed. Again, no matter how bad you are you're still infinitely more qualified to report the news and tell the truth than any of the shitstains who are being platformed by multibillion-dollar media outlets right now, and whatever you make will be better than what they make. Just do it.
Don't stop if you don't get a big audience right away, or if you never do. It's not about that. If you can open even one person's eyes to one aspect of reality, you are helping humanity to become a more conscious species by that much. That's what it's about. That's what matters. And even if you don't do that, fleshing out your ideas in some public medium is a great way to help yourself become aware of more things and deepen your own understanding, so you're still improving humanity by that much. So no matter what happens you can't lose.
If we're ever to turn things around it will be the result of a very large number of us grabbing a rope and tugging. You don't have to be a megastar, you just have to do your bit. Start from there and see what happens.
Well, all right. As she said, I’m at least better than Chris fucking Cuomo, a.k.a. Fredo.
Right? Wait, CAN I do this? I can write coherent sentences, sure, but exactly how good is this newsletter going to end up being with someone like me doing it?
It’s sprung to what passes for my mind (I’ll self-deprecate often before somebody else can deprecate me) that I may not really be qualified for this after all. And for a first post, why not talk about my doubts? It should at least be interesting. It should at least give people a little idea of what they’re signing up for. (In this case literally; you are actually signing in and subscribing to my newsletter, hopefully.)
All right, let’s talk about anger to kick things off. I don’t expect to be linking as much as other writers I respect, but there’s a link coming up now. The reason I call the Cuomo brother who’s still employed “Fredo” is because he hates it. He hates it a LOT.
Am I better at controlling my temper than Chris Cuomo? Um…I think so, because I haven’t threatened to throw anybody down a flight of stairs lately, or ever in fact. But that’s not to say I’ve never said anything I regretted (or should regret) in a fit of rage, not even that I’ve never made threats to people when I was extremely angry.
That’s not ideal, for sure, but it isn’t going to have any impact on how well or poorly I write, is it?
Well, that depends on what I want to write about. I usually don’t have the patience to have civil exchanges with people I think are wrong; I can’t last very long in an exchange with somebody who still believes the Russiagate allegations, for example, or with somebody who believes that the internet being censored more and more is actually a good thing, or with somebody who says that Israel is just defending itself whenever it bombs a densely populated residential area as it claims it’s doing its best not to hit civilians.
(If Hamas said that they, too, were doing their best not to hit civilians—and maybe they have, this is one of many things I don’t know—I very much doubt that Israel’s response would be “Oh, well, that’s all right then.” It doesn’t count for much if the result is a high civilian death toll.)
So I won’t always be a good interviewer, if I interview anybody.
Not only am I unsure about my ability to interview people, I may not even be somebody who’ll do as much research as he ought to.
For example, I’ll talk a lot on Twitter about how much MSNBC sucks or how much The Young Turks suck after seeing short clips from shows on those outlets, and reading tweets from people there.
Can I make myself watch shows I hate from start to finish, or even just the important parts that are around 15-20 minutes, when hearing Cenk Uygur or Rachel Maddow talk too long without their statements being challenged makes me wish a buffalo would take a diarrhea dump in my ear to keep me from hearing any more of it? (H/t to Kyle Justin for writing those lyrics.)
YouTubers who cover either cable news or other YouTube shows, subjecting themselves to every painful microsecond so that they can comment on the whole thing? I don’t know how they do it.
And finally for now, exactly what level of quality are these opinions I spout? There are lots of worse ones, sure, but there are some which the majority of people even on the left will not only not agree with but will probably be angry about.
Should I really make this a regular thing?
I guess I’ll give it a shot and see how it goes.
To start out I’ll keep it completely free, but in the future I might charge a $1/month subscription fee to see everything. That’s 1/5 of Matt Taibbi’s price, and if people pay it then I might start thinking I’m 1/5 as good as Matt is, and then my head will swell up and start knocking walls and furniture over. So if you ever wanted to pay me to destroy my humble abode, you might just get that chance!