In keeping with my pledge to send you three things a week (The Week That Perished on Sunday, my reg’lar column on Tuesday, and EXCLUSIVE CONTENT on Friday), here’s this Friday’s EXCLUSIVE CONTENT!
We had ten unsubs last week, and I’ve gotten in the habit of emailing them just because I have so little amusement in my life these days. Honest, with Ratibor dead or gone (and I know, I know, if he were dead I’d smell it, a hundred of you have smugly assured me of that. But I’m not sure you understand that the rules of physics and logic don’t operate at the Colehaus as they do in the normal world), things get dull ‘round here.
So one unsub I back-traced to an academic - a professor at a proper university. And the title of one of his published peer-reviewed papers amused me to such an extent that I had to email him:
I read your paper "A Computational Bayesian Approach to Machine Learning of an Acoustic Scatterer's State of Motion in a Refractive Propagation Environment Under a Small Aperture Constraint." Well, I tried to read it but the title gave me a stroke. I'm being fed through a tube now. Thanks a lot, egghead.
He replied with good humor. Seems like a nice guy; kinda sorry he unsubbed.
Then there was a guy who unsubbed, and I saw that he’s the originator of the “mud run.” Like, the guy who pioneered the very concept of the mud run. So I emailed him and said “I did a mud run once...but it was after a few too many bowls of bran.”
Again, he replied with good humor, but then it got serious, as he volunteered that the reason he unsubbed was “I originally signed up for the mailing list because I was looking to find some of your old Holocaust research, but currently I can’t find anything. Is there anywhere where I can see any of your old work?”
My reply?
Why would you want to see my “old research,” and not what I know now after 32 additional years of learning? I’m curious, would you ever say to a 55-year-old doctor, “I only want you to apply what you knew in med school, but nothing you learned after?”
I’m not comparing myself to a doctor or historiography to medicine, but that’s the point. In disciplines like medicine, it’s understood that it’s GOOD to learn new things, to be receptive to new knowledge.
But in Holocaust history, you guys want the world to have frozen in 1992. Nothing new after that!!! 1992 was the end of learning!
Why do you think that way? I’m asking sincerely.
And we had a pleasant back-and-forth. I sent him links and he promised to be receptive, and maybe I saved another soul from denial.
But it’s the damnedest thing, and a problem I face daily (especially when I was on Twitter). Historical revisionism was born of the notion that our learning always expands as we accumulate new knowledge, and we can’t treat historiography like religion and 32-year-old videos like eternal holy tablets, in which any attempt to amend the writ is blasphemy. But these days, that’s exactly how deniers see historiography. They’ve in fact become far more inflexible than the people they claim to oppose. You tell any denier that something new was learned after 1992, they react with the kind of furious intolerance you normally see in a Mansonian cultist.
I truly hope the mud run guy learns some new stuff; he seems a decent enough fella.
Finally, there was an unsub who was angry because in this week’s Taki column I mentioned that Steve Sailer gets paid to write for Unz. “Sailer would never take MONEY,” the disgruntled unsub bitterly wrote. “He writes for the GOOD OF MANKIND!”
It’s funny to me - perhaps more funny to me than to you - that so many people don’t get that writing is a profession. Me, Sailer, Coulter, it is our fucking job. We have bills to pay. Steve’s been on the scene 40+ years. If he were still writing on spec, he’d be quite the pathetic gent indeed.
And I think this childlike belief that your heroes don’t get paid is one of the major debilitations on the right. Mainstream conservatives who are into Shapiro and Boreing, MAGAs who worship Bannon and Beattie, and far-rightists who are into Fuentes, Peters, and Jones, really think those assholes go home, don a tricorn, grab a drum, and selflessly march around their living room all night going “badarump bump bump badarump bump bump, save America - vote for Trump!”
No. They eat a $1,000 steak dinner with the check you sent them to “save the republic.” Then they climb aboard their yacht or private jet, do coke off a Chinese hooker’s ass or Ali Alexander’s dick, and laugh at you for your gullibility.
Grow up.
Of course we get paid. If Taki didn’t pay me, you think I’d do this shit? I’d watch zombie films all day. That’s why I don’t eat $1,000 steak dinners. As I said in a previous rant, I bank every penny I make (buy me a beer!), because should I ever lose my job, you’ll never hear from me again. I’ll be living off my savings, re-watching Burial Ground for the 100th time, and pleased as punch to never again have to deal with Holocaust deniers.
I’ll take the Etruscan zombies of Burial Ground over Holocaust deniers any day.
But when I go, I will miss you guys. This Substack’s proving to be fun, all because of you and your vigorous engagement. I appreciate it, and I thank you.
Have a great weekend, and buy me a beer so that I can as well!
I'd never heard of you before I started reading Taki. Your sense of humor and willingness to point out the absurdity on your own team instantly made me want to continue to hear from you. The holocaust crap you occasionally discuss is interesting, and sometimes humorous, but not anything that would drive me toward or away. Coming up with descriptions like a Manatee falling from a skyscraper are keepers! You have a perspective I appreciate, and I assume many of the people who look forward to reading your articles feel the same.
Two points, Dave:
1) When anyone talks to me about "greed", in any context, I always say, "I am so glad to hear that you do your job pro bono. I have great respect for that!" They usually fall into the trap...
2) I am considering unsubbing *just* for a shot at an email exchange that I can brag about to friends!