Jesus said when we are weighed down like this to pray for our enemies, turn the other cheek, and to seek first His kingdom which is not of this world. I have never - in 7 years of reading Rod - seen these ethics in his writings or conduct. It’s just extremely thin Heidegger kulturkampf gruel in a never ending cycle.
Don’t let the sun go down on your anger lest you give the devil a foothold; perfect love casts out fear. There’s no coincidence to me that anger and fear are singled out as spiritually devastating in the Bible. Rod - and his fans -would do well to realize everything he writes is tinged or soaked with anger or fear. I write this not to bury him, but in genuine hope he can get help for what seems to me to be severe depression and to let his anger and fear go.
If Abraham, who was of Ur, could plead with God to spare the foreign pagans of Sodom and Gomorrah, surely Rod could spare a little Christian charity for the pagans of his own homeland?
Much of what I see from American Christian conservative writers is heavily steeped in anger, fear, and resentment, which makes me wonder what they think is the real essence of Christianity. I see a lot of vindictiveness and cruelty coming from people who claim the mantle of "devout Christian" and the hypocrisy drives me around the bend.
I started to read him -- RD-- a few years ago but everything is so tinged with apocalyptic hysteria .... and now he’s so head over heels in love with Orban -- he just seems to have lost any sense of judgment and perspective.
You're not the only one wondering what happened to Rod. There's a whole Reddit subthread devoted to former readers speculating about what caused him to go off the rails. I started reading Rod soon after he moved to Louisiana. While I didn't agree with many of his views, at least that Rod was intellectually curious and willing to engage with readers who challenged his viewpoints. I found his writings on Dante moving and got a lot from them.
Somewhere around the time of the Benedict Option, Rod's views started hardening and the "mean girl" aspects of his personality metastasized. His obsession with homosexuality, transexuality, and wokeness took center stage, and his blog posts became predictable. His substack, where he writes about more personal matters and about his project on enchantment, shows aspects of the old Rod, but it's become impossible for me to reconcile that guy with the nasty, misogynistic guy on AmCon and Twitter, who embraces authoritarian leaders and an ends-justifies-the-means mentality. He's become a shill for Orban and Putin and what he sees as their manly virtues.
Rod's writings on Substack make clear he believes that, having been exiled (and yes, that's the term he uses) from Baton Rogue, he's now on a mission from G-d to help save Christianity from the libs. I'm sure he'd embrace being labeled as a prophet. Sadly, I think it's more likely he's on the verge of some kind of mental breakdown.
Would you be willing to link to the Reddit? I'm one of his former readers, and he and I enjoyed a good online correspondence for several years. I became increasingly concerned about his mental and spiritual health a couple of years ago and wrote to him about his increasingly dark and authoritarian essays. I never heard back, and he blocked me on Twitter.
Be warned--there's lots of snark and lots of people who are genuinely trying to understand Rod's metamorphasis into rightwing troll. Lesson learned: when you set yourself up as moral arbiter of good and evil and your personal life explodes in a rather spectacular fashion, be prepared for major blowback. Rod was not. He presents himself as a victim of family history and dark forces in his Substack. His failure to take any kind of responsibility for what happened to his marriage speaks to the growing divide between what he professes to believe and his actions and has made many of his former readers wonder whether there was ever anything real to him in the first place.
I don't go anywhere near Twitter (I think it's a cesspool) but you're in good company with other people he's banned for expressing similar concerns to your own.
Thanks! I found it earlier by searching Reddit and....wow.
I tend to agree with those who speculate he may be suffering from bipolar disorder. A friend of mine was married to a man with undiagnosed bipolar disorder and stuck it out, being a Good Catholic, until his erratic behavior and delusions of grandeur ended up bankrupting the family. She only told us what it was like after they separated. He'd oscillate between insanely brilliant and productive tears at work (software developer) with being bedridden and suicidal.
These folks always want a benefit of the doubt they don’t give others. He was victimized by history and dark forces, but his foes are just willful sinners. Past conservatives who did bad things were men of their times, but contemporary progressives he disagrees with are historically evil.
Hah, Michelle, I remember you (and your excellent avatar) from those days and the comments section (I was not a prolific commenter there, unlike you). I stopped reading around 2017/early 2018 (soon after the BenOp book came out), not that I had or have anything against BenOppers as such, but the blog was getting pretty repetitive and it was becoming too much effort to maintain my equanimity searching for the genuinely there at times gold in the comments - too much cyanide and plutonium dust to make the gold mining worthwhile for me.
I have a hypothesis, which functionally unfalsifiable given public data, that the _initial_ cancer might have been the vitriol in the unpublished comments he had to wade through, starting maybe late 2015? Let us not forget that one of Trump's superpowers is his ability to bring out the pre-existing worst in both his supporters and (many/most?) of his opponents. I remember accidentally finding some very under the radar blogs maybe mid to late 2016 that were, err, crucifying him for not getting on the Trump train as it was then constituted. His skin might not have been as thick as he thought.
I remember you as well. I used to enjoy Rod's comments section because of the diversity of views and because it was, for the most part, well moderated. Lots of insightful stuff. Between life getting a lot busier and my growing lack of interest in Rod's subject matter, I stopped engaging nearly as much. When AmCon moved to Discus, some of his more interesting commenters seemed to disappear.
Assuming you're asking about the practice in general, it's a Jewish custom to use "Gd" or "G-d" to avoid writing "God" (there's many internet explainers).
In short, some Jewish groups interpret Deuteronomy 12:3-4 to mean you shouldn't destroy/disrespect the name of God, and if (for example), you printed "God" in a newspaper, and the newspaper is discarded in the garbage, you've broken the rule.
Anyway, why this applies to on-line wording I have no clue. Do bytes scream when they're deleted? Maybe because there's the chance someone might print out these comments one day.
Thanks for the comic. I not only did not remember the comic, I had largely forgotten the whole flag desecration tempest of those days. Appreciate the reminder.
To be slightly more serious about your final paragraph, interesting question (assuming the answer of goes beyond force of habit/inertia). Such online material I have seen from really, really serious OG Orthodox* in the US (responsa from those who find Chabad heterodox* at best) follow the convention but I have never seen online applicability questioned or explained.
*A far more semantically correct, if obscure, adjective/substantive in English for Judaic groups we call Orthodox would be Orthopractic: the intense emphasis on belief over practice that gave rise (in Greek, mostly, rather than Latin) to the, err, apotheosis :) of Orthodoxy not only derives from Christianity, but is not AFAICT even particularly meaningful in any strain of Judaism that a non-specialist would recognize.
For the readers who know more than I do on the topic (probably/hopefully at least a minyan), would for example a median Karaite characterize their disagreement with rabbinic Judaism regarding the authority of the Oral Torah as a difference in *belief*? I don't think so.
This isn't a new question, the examples are chalkboards and overhead projectors. Can you erase the chalkboard, or turn off the projector once "God" is written? The answer seems to focus on the intent of writing the name (sanctified or not), and the technology used to display the name and its permanence.
The decisions on sanctity are mixed, and I didn't see a hard call being made on either side (or simply didn't understand well enough to see the call being made, there's a lot of insider baseball going on here).
The reviewer concluded:
"Orthodox rabbis have held that writing on a computer is not a permanent form, thus it is not a violation to type God's Name into a computer and then backspace over it or cut and paste it, or copy and delete files with God's Name in them. However, once you print the document out, it becomes a permanent form. That is why observant Jews avoid writing a Name of God online: because there is a risk that someone else will print it out and deface it."
Hadn't thought about backspacing, that is a conundrum.
It's hard to resist this paragraph trying to tease apart permanence of projection vs. computer screens: "However, we can differentiate between the wall and the pixels. The reflecting wall is really physically unchanged. The pixels are. The glowing phosphor reacts with the energy beamed to it by sending out energy in a new form of light. The crystal-liquid display is being re-arranged -creating a physical representation of character-writing."
On first blush, I think that's wrong, we have to consider the photons. The screen/projector has arranged photons in a specific physical way which includes roughly infinite copies of the name of God in photonic form. That form can be disrupted or absorbed, if I scatter the photons coming off the wall (I mean, some of the photons went through the wall, but whatever, imagine a laser in the room), which would erase the name.
Or worse, when my eye sees the photon, the energy of the photon is transferred to the molecules in my eye, literally erasing the physical representation of the name of God. Also, gravitational lensing bends photons, which means that NATURE ITSELF is constantly erasing the name of God, and the act of seeing the name of God erases it forever.
Other readers offered a good explanation of the practice. For me, it's a way of respecting the sanctity and mystery of G-d's name, which, in Hebrew, is transliterated into the unpronounceable YHWH. I was unaware of the debate over online wording. I'm from the Reconstructionist/Reform wing of Judaism, not the Orthodox.
Rod wrote in March of 2020 that Covid would cause a Great Depression, readers thanked him as they pulled their savings out of the market, as it turned out, it was the greatest buying opportunity in our generation
It sounds similar to the essays he wrote about wokeness and gender a few years ago, where he'd quote long screeds from anonymous professors and doctors who wrote to him of the coming Bad Times. Some of the things he brought forward (gender theory in medical school overriding a patient's anatomy) have been covered by other journalists like Jesse Singal, who I think does a good job objectively covering the gender beat, so not crazy, but others---hoo boy. The whole "I can't tell you who told me this, because he fears for his job/life, but...." and then proceeds with a long tale in which the narrator is persecuted by the Wokesters or Teh gayz or the "transgenders."
I stopped reading a couple of years ago because the formula kept setting off my BS detector. I couldn't tell if he was making stuff up, or if he'd become a magnet for every middle aged malcontent who felt picked on at work. His complete willingness to spread pretty sensational accusations without any shred of evidence that these stories were true both concerned and offended me. His writing at points bordered on hysteria. As a Christian, I worry that he's given into the sin of despair, which as a former Catholic Damon you'd recognize is a pretty big deal in terms of sin. I'm definitely on the progressive Christian side, but despair seems to fit his state of mind better than anything else I can think of, and I genuinely worry about Rod's mind and soul. The recent announcement about the end of his marriage seems to have made things worse--sometimes I wonder if he's fallen into the embrace of the authoritarian Orbanista community to make up for losing his family? He's estranged from his family of origin and it seems weird that he's in Europe and his kids are here (as far as I know). Hard to be a present dad when you live on a different continent.
Anyway--thank you for writing this. Rod--if you are reading the comments I pray for you and hope you get some support and help. You seem to be in a lot of spiritual pain.
Damon, don’t ever think there’s such a thing as giving too much attention to the ongoing radicalization of so many of our fellow citizens! I’m absolutely fascinated by it, when I’m not terrified and hiding under the bed. In my case, this study of humans I used to know and respect is the replacement for the conversation, interaction, enjoyment and gatherings with humans I used to know and respect. But 2015-16 poisoned all of that and then the pandemic sealed the deal. My trust is broken. Yet I have little energy left for anger or combat. I simply want to see and try to understand, maybe find ways to help in small ways. I find your observations and thought patterns unbelievably helpful and profitable in increasing my understanding and calming frequent bouts of hysteria caused by the marinade of lunacy in which we are swimming these days. Engaging one’s mind in analysis is, for me, a good way to disrupt unhealthy, self destructive emotions that help no one and only lead to despair.
As for Rod. Yeah, I used to relate to him and enjoy him years ago. But it’s clear he has made a choice now to throw himself in with this new crowd of recycled, same-old deceivers and powermongers - where his every impulse will be cheered and lifted to new heights. Heh. Out of one side of his mouth he talks isolation, a monk’s life and prayerful contemplation. But he is no more immune than any other mere mortal to escaping The Law - which dominates his theological understanding. Adulation, the warm embrace of a mob, traveling to exotic locales to mix with masters of the universe, telling fantastical stories over drinks & candlelight (especially during a mid-life crisis!)… all this must come as quite a temptation for a weary, failed monk.
You’ve extended your hand and words of caution like a true friend. That is a kindness and an example to follow.
Looks like a lot of people are familiar with Rod, I only have a distant acquaintanceship with his work and tweets. I bow to y’all’s knowledge.
At the risk of sounding like who I actually am, a conservative Christian, I get part of what Damon says he’s saying. And quite frankly, my flavor of Christians have been saying the same thing since I’ve been a teen. The wild-eyed wing has always been about what is now called prepping. The televangelist Jim Bakker even sells prep stuff or so I’ve been told. There’s enough of it on Xn TV that every once in a while my MIL wants to stock up on goods. (Don’t get me started on the fear-mongering done to old ladies by Xn TV. I can’t wait for the perpetrators to try to explain that to God.)
RW Christians desire the apocalypse because that means Jesus will be coming back soon. I think they take this from the book of Revelations 22:20 (NLT) where Jesus says “Yes, I am coming soon.” And John, the writer of Revelations seems pretty pleased.”Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!” (Confession: yes, I’d like Jesus to come soon, too, but the Apocalypse, not so much.)
Here’s where I lose the plot. In my understanding there is a real distinction between the enemy (Satan, Lucifer Morningstar, the Devil -- whatever one’s faith tradition calls it) and our fellow human beings and there seems to be more and more confusion about that. Sean Feucht quoted Ron DeSantis as substituting the word enemy (as identified above) with liberals in a key Bible passage. This confounds me as in the Bible there is a real distinction on how to pro-actively love our fellow beings versus resisting the strategies of the devil. The full armor of God is to resist a spiritual enemy not a fellow traveler.
Hmmm, maybe it’s not me who has lost the plot. And maybe the strategies of the devil have been more successful with the rad-trads then they realize.
Thank you, Mel, for this. I'm grateful to hear from a conservative Christian who is also calm. This heterodox liberal atheist definitely values hearing from you, particularly but not only in areas where we disagree.
Routine political chatter from the extreme right. Of course, politics, most of the time, is 80% or so chatter. And right-wing Christian chatter is consumed, to a large extent, with excited predictions of the apocalypse, because – guess what? – you-know-who is coming back with his Kingdom.
The interesting thing is that, to judge from the New Testament and other writings of the time, most early Christians started out with this apocalyptic excitement. But it cooled down before long because as the years passed, you-know-who obviously wasn’t showing up. So the Apocalypse-Now stuff became limited to the most hot-headed faithful, like RD, who are still pushing it out.
Also, modern hot-heads are really looking forward to martyrdom, strangely enough, for the same reason: the more martyrdom they suffer, the closer it’s getting to Messiah time!
To be honest, I haven't read much Dreher recently. I do know that he seemed extremely concerned about people being led into sin by mistaking simple, sexual, pleasure for a moral good; I wish he had paid attention to the danger of making a similar error with respect to the very real pleasure of being angrily self-righteous. Elsewhere in these precincts I will make reference to the Book of Jonah….
I created, so far as I know, the term 'Lying Fact' to describe what at least some Young Earth Creationists think of the fossil record, those who consider it as having been 'planted' by Satan (to lead us astray) or the LORD (to proof our faith).
The continued failure of the U.S., and especially of Socialist!Atheist! (except, now, for Hungary and Poland) Europe to suddenly turn to terrible hellscapes that would punish the libs and, less importantly, show us all the errors of our ways and the way toward righteousness is to some another Lying Fact. This system which they believe has utterly rejected Truth, that is their opinions and views, _can_not_ work at all, any evidence to the contrary is mere fact contradicting Truth, and such Gates of Hell can not endure.
Mr Dreher might pay some attention to Jonah as presented in his Book. Even when he finally obeys his marching-orders and preaches to Nineveh, Jonah has no desire that he be listened-to and believed and the foreign pagans (as 'Donny from Queens' put it elsewhere here for the people of the Cities of the Plain) of Nineveh saved, and his boss takes issue with that.
…which makes me wonder: perhaps Mr Dreher's intemperance is born of not only expecting that he will not really affect things, but of by now actually not wanting to be heard and to be believed. He _wants_ Nineveh destroyed, so why bother crafting a message that might be more effective and distinguishing between preaching and venting?
(Elsewhere, here, I speculate that he may have been misled by the sheer pleasure of self-righteous anger.)
I agree with this and would also add that if he truly believes the Christian teachings on eternity, then “to live is Christ and to die is gain.” And if Hell is real, all the more reason to have mercy and compassion for the pagans. He, however, seems to think that “persecution” that comes far, far short of death or even serious discomfort is intolerable suffering.
I'm not Christian, so I oughtn't say I know how Christians ought to behave, but their behaviour toward those they think are Hell-bound seems to bifurcate between kindness toward the doomed and 'Why bother caring for the chaff about to be burned?' (or, alternately, and ignoring what I gather are key points of Christian doctrine, 'Why treat these people any better than the LORD is going to do?').
I do not know Mr. Dreher, but perhaps he is spending too much time in Europe. My friends and family over there are very freaked out.
We Americans cannot understand the visceral existential fear that Putin’s aggression has unleashed among Europeans who lived through ww2 (&their descendants) or who lived under the Soviets’ boot. Yes, we Americans fought in ww2, but our grandmas were not being raped in their kitchens in Ohio by Russian troops. Nor our neighbors thrown into concentration camps in Boston. We really do not understand that level of gut-wrenching fear.
Things look scarier than they have in a long time — from climate change to Putin and Xi.
And in scary times, we human monkeys turn to “God”, and we speak in “the end of the world” terms. And we try to keep our families fed, and turn to neighbors for unified protection. Since time immemorial, this is always the case — Nothing new here.
Mr. Dreher is perhaps simply a spokesman for our transcendent, archetypal fears. Carl Jung would have understood him, as would George Lucas and Joseph Campbell.
I just read his article in “American Conservative” and it is harmless. Other than the advice to store cash (worthless during real crisis — try gems, gold and canned/dry foods) he sounds like many people I know, both here and in Europe.
No need to 911 him. And if you do, you’ll have do the same for half of Europeans and a good chunk of Americans.
We’ll be even more afraid if German grandmas freeze in their homes this winter. Or if a nuclear cloud drifts over Prague.
Strap in, the ride is only just beginning. Prophets and Messiahs will be coming out of the woodwork. And so will Demagogues.
See what's happening in the Netherlands, France, and the coming Italian elections and you will see it's not a "visceral fear of Putin". No one seriously thinks Putin is going to invade anywhere outside the former Soviet republics. The anger is the COVID19 restrictions and inflation. Plus the feeling people have lost their individual and national freedoms to the unelected bureaucrats of the EU. When people freeze in the dark this winter it won't be Russia's fault. It will be the fault of the misguided policies of the US, UK & EU.
Sep 17, 2022·edited Sep 17, 2022Liked by Damon Linker
Firstly, thank you, Mr. Linker, for the most unpunditesque humility you display (I hope you don't get thrown out of the union), especially but by no means only in this post. Specifically re economics - that you know you don't enough about economics to know whom you should trust about the topic.
Not only am I among those who learned a lot from reading Rod Dreher in the Olden Daze, I first became aware of you via him (it would have been perhaps 2006 or so? pretty sure you were at Beliefnet at the time).
In honor of your previous status as a Christian (or your heritage as a descendant of Judaism), the chain of, err, prophecy went
Sullivan => Douthat => Daniel Larison =>Dreher => you.
Dear Everyone: I'm very busy with many things and so usually avoid jumping into the discussions in the comments on my posts. But I want you all to know that I'm thrilled you've taken to having conversations and respectful debates about the issues I write about. You're making this a real community. I also wanted you to know that I follow along with and read everything.
Attitude reflects the leadership, Captain. You maintain a spirit of civility and a genuine desire for discourse even amidst serious disagreement that has attracted likeminded folks!
Since thou* art reading along, and also busy, may I use thy meta-comment to spark a respectful discussion among the commentariat, that might be useful to thee, regarding the pros and cons of thy hypothetical jumping into the discussion (assuming thou hadst the bandwidth to spare)?
** My use of archaic pronouns is mostly just play, plus disambiguation, since Late Modern English foolishly dropped the distinction between second person singular and plural. If it seems disrespectful to anyone, please speak up and I will not do it any more.
For those who don't know, at least back when I read Rod's TAC comment section, he very much jumped in.
Thy *not* jumping in keeps this very much a peer discussion, whereas the reality of all of our primate brains would mean any further intervention in the comments by thee would make thee, err, the proverbial 800 pound gorilla, I fear.
I hope that any particular comment thread or subthread that sparks interesting thoughts in thee will result in a subsequent post.
Since we seem to have a bunch of ex-Dreher readers here, I'd like to ask both Our Host and open the floor for nominations for the closest current equivalent to the Dreher of his early TAC days (say up to 2014?) - not so much politically or theologically, but tone and engagement. David French is the closest example I can currently think of, but maybe someone whose political profile is lower than his so that the blog is not quite so taken over by anti-Trump and anti-anti-Trump arguments - a bit more applied theology and less short term politics? That might be unrealistic to ask. (n.b. I think the world of David French, but the comments section there is inevitably higher temperature).
I can't really think of anyone offhand. I think that may be why there's so much disappointment among his former readers. He filled a unique niche and was able to act as a bridge between people with very different politics who shared a feeling that our current American, capitalistic culture was both shallow and unfulfilling. Now he's just another angry, rightwing troll of which there seems to be an endless supply.
I get the point of this blog, but weeks after Sam Harris said he has no problem cheating elections with Big Tech censorship to defeat the other side, and Biden declared any opposition to his policies is illegitimate extremism, picking on Rod Dreher for his own hopes of a "Great Reset" in the anti-WEF direction sounds petty.
You don't have to read far right sources to see the trucker's protest in Canada (brutally crushed by the way), protests in the Netherlands and next week's elections in Italy to see that people are rising up against the Establishment. And you don't have to be an economist to see the Fed's coming additional interest rate hike (reportedly 75 to 100 basis points) in the face of rapidly rising inflation to be alarmed at what the future holds.
Having concerns about troubles is one thing. Constantly catastrophizing is another.
The Canadian trucker thing is a bad example. More than 90% of Canadian truckers were vaxxed so the protest was not at all some massive groundswell of the oppressed little guy rising up against the establishment. It was a few malcontents bolstered by toxic US politics. I don’t blame the Canadians for squelching the attempt of US bad actors to spread the cancer of our politics to them.
And if you think it was “brutally suppressed” when it went through several court arguments and orders prior to any law enforcement action, you and I are probably not going to agree on what the rule of law means.
Sam Harris comments: "Nothing I said on that podcast was meant to suggest that the Democrats would have been right to commit election fraud or take other illegal measures to deny Trump the presidency (nor do I think they did that)."
"Any opposition"? Biden said no such thing.
Truckers brutally crushed? Wikipedia says: "In spite of an injunction by a judge and the invocation of three levels of states of emergency, municipal, provincial, and federal, protesters temporarily refused to end blockades and the occupation of the red zone." and "Over the weekend of February 17 to 20, a large joint-operation police presence in Ottawa arrested about 200 organizers and protesters, laid 389 charges, issued fines, removed the heavy trucks and trailers with 79 vehicles towed away, seized 36 license plates, and dismantled encampments across the city." After a MONTH of shutting down parts of Ottawa, repeated legal judgements against the protestors, and the Canadian professional trucker groups and unions disavowing any association, the protestors refused to vacate and, uh, checks notes, "were fined". True, the brutality never ends in Canada. Probably lost their saved Tim Horton's points, too.
Being "alarmed at what the future holds" isn't unreasonable. Predicting the end of Western Civilization based on roughly zero evidence isn't the same thing.
"I get the point of this blog" - I see no evidence of that in your comments in this thread anyway (if you have commented on other threads I have missed/don't remember it - if you wish to point me to any please do). I am indeed alarmed at what the future holds, because I do fear a serious global recession.
I at least would love to see at least a couple of non-trollish national populists here (no, I don't think that's an oxymoron, and I'm not sure they are even necessarily rare compared to e.g. Chapo-style trolls; I just have not figured out where the non-trollish NPs congregate in sufficient numbers relative to trollish ones) - a Julius Krein type for example to put it in recent American context, or if Krein is too obscure maybe a Mickey Kaus type - someone who was a committed NP of some sort pre escalator ride. Daniel Larison? These days he's focused laser like on non-interventionism; pre-TAC he was a wide ranging NP (and a joy to read).
Mr. Linker, it's your blog, obviously, but if you are looking to hand out free subscriptions I would be strongly in favor of your doing so in the interest of ideological and/or geographic diversity (I generally have no acts of coitus to give regarding identitarian diversity as such, but one of the good things about Rod's comment section Back When It Was Good is that it had a surprising fraction of non-Americans; the only comment section from a US-based, ethnically 'Murrican blogger I can think of with as high a non-US fraction of regular commenters would be Scott Alexander).
Jesus said when we are weighed down like this to pray for our enemies, turn the other cheek, and to seek first His kingdom which is not of this world. I have never - in 7 years of reading Rod - seen these ethics in his writings or conduct. It’s just extremely thin Heidegger kulturkampf gruel in a never ending cycle.
Don’t let the sun go down on your anger lest you give the devil a foothold; perfect love casts out fear. There’s no coincidence to me that anger and fear are singled out as spiritually devastating in the Bible. Rod - and his fans -would do well to realize everything he writes is tinged or soaked with anger or fear. I write this not to bury him, but in genuine hope he can get help for what seems to me to be severe depression and to let his anger and fear go.
If Abraham, who was of Ur, could plead with God to spare the foreign pagans of Sodom and Gomorrah, surely Rod could spare a little Christian charity for the pagans of his own homeland?
Much of what I see from American Christian conservative writers is heavily steeped in anger, fear, and resentment, which makes me wonder what they think is the real essence of Christianity. I see a lot of vindictiveness and cruelty coming from people who claim the mantle of "devout Christian" and the hypocrisy drives me around the bend.
I started to read him -- RD-- a few years ago but everything is so tinged with apocalyptic hysteria .... and now he’s so head over heels in love with Orban -- he just seems to have lost any sense of judgment and perspective.
You're not the only one wondering what happened to Rod. There's a whole Reddit subthread devoted to former readers speculating about what caused him to go off the rails. I started reading Rod soon after he moved to Louisiana. While I didn't agree with many of his views, at least that Rod was intellectually curious and willing to engage with readers who challenged his viewpoints. I found his writings on Dante moving and got a lot from them.
Somewhere around the time of the Benedict Option, Rod's views started hardening and the "mean girl" aspects of his personality metastasized. His obsession with homosexuality, transexuality, and wokeness took center stage, and his blog posts became predictable. His substack, where he writes about more personal matters and about his project on enchantment, shows aspects of the old Rod, but it's become impossible for me to reconcile that guy with the nasty, misogynistic guy on AmCon and Twitter, who embraces authoritarian leaders and an ends-justifies-the-means mentality. He's become a shill for Orban and Putin and what he sees as their manly virtues.
Rod's writings on Substack make clear he believes that, having been exiled (and yes, that's the term he uses) from Baton Rogue, he's now on a mission from G-d to help save Christianity from the libs. I'm sure he'd embrace being labeled as a prophet. Sadly, I think it's more likely he's on the verge of some kind of mental breakdown.
Would you be willing to link to the Reddit? I'm one of his former readers, and he and I enjoyed a good online correspondence for several years. I became increasingly concerned about his mental and spiritual health a couple of years ago and wrote to him about his increasingly dark and authoritarian essays. I never heard back, and he blocked me on Twitter.
Here's the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/x6h66i/rod_dreher_megathread_3/
Be warned--there's lots of snark and lots of people who are genuinely trying to understand Rod's metamorphasis into rightwing troll. Lesson learned: when you set yourself up as moral arbiter of good and evil and your personal life explodes in a rather spectacular fashion, be prepared for major blowback. Rod was not. He presents himself as a victim of family history and dark forces in his Substack. His failure to take any kind of responsibility for what happened to his marriage speaks to the growing divide between what he professes to believe and his actions and has made many of his former readers wonder whether there was ever anything real to him in the first place.
I don't go anywhere near Twitter (I think it's a cesspool) but you're in good company with other people he's banned for expressing similar concerns to your own.
Thanks! I found it earlier by searching Reddit and....wow.
I tend to agree with those who speculate he may be suffering from bipolar disorder. A friend of mine was married to a man with undiagnosed bipolar disorder and stuck it out, being a Good Catholic, until his erratic behavior and delusions of grandeur ended up bankrupting the family. She only told us what it was like after they separated. He'd oscillate between insanely brilliant and productive tears at work (software developer) with being bedridden and suicidal.
These folks always want a benefit of the doubt they don’t give others. He was victimized by history and dark forces, but his foes are just willful sinners. Past conservatives who did bad things were men of their times, but contemporary progressives he disagrees with are historically evil.
His anger and bitterness have cost his family already. Is there no Orthodox Christian in his life to speak to him in love?
Hah, Michelle, I remember you (and your excellent avatar) from those days and the comments section (I was not a prolific commenter there, unlike you). I stopped reading around 2017/early 2018 (soon after the BenOp book came out), not that I had or have anything against BenOppers as such, but the blog was getting pretty repetitive and it was becoming too much effort to maintain my equanimity searching for the genuinely there at times gold in the comments - too much cyanide and plutonium dust to make the gold mining worthwhile for me.
I have a hypothesis, which functionally unfalsifiable given public data, that the _initial_ cancer might have been the vitriol in the unpublished comments he had to wade through, starting maybe late 2015? Let us not forget that one of Trump's superpowers is his ability to bring out the pre-existing worst in both his supporters and (many/most?) of his opponents. I remember accidentally finding some very under the radar blogs maybe mid to late 2016 that were, err, crucifying him for not getting on the Trump train as it was then constituted. His skin might not have been as thick as he thought.
I remember you as well. I used to enjoy Rod's comments section because of the diversity of views and because it was, for the most part, well moderated. Lots of insightful stuff. Between life getting a lot busier and my growing lack of interest in Rod's subject matter, I stopped engaging nearly as much. When AmCon moved to Discus, some of his more interesting commenters seemed to disappear.
Is there a reason you wrote "G-d" instead of "God?" This is a sincere question, I'm not trying to be snarky.
Assuming you're asking about the practice in general, it's a Jewish custom to use "Gd" or "G-d" to avoid writing "God" (there's many internet explainers).
In short, some Jewish groups interpret Deuteronomy 12:3-4 to mean you shouldn't destroy/disrespect the name of God, and if (for example), you printed "God" in a newspaper, and the newspaper is discarded in the garbage, you've broken the rule.
For amusement, Doonesbury made the same point about George Bush's flag desecration wording: https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1989/11/05.
Anyway, why this applies to on-line wording I have no clue. Do bytes scream when they're deleted? Maybe because there's the chance someone might print out these comments one day.
Interesting. Thanks for the info.
Thanks for the comic. I not only did not remember the comic, I had largely forgotten the whole flag desecration tempest of those days. Appreciate the reminder.
To be slightly more serious about your final paragraph, interesting question (assuming the answer of goes beyond force of habit/inertia). Such online material I have seen from really, really serious OG Orthodox* in the US (responsa from those who find Chabad heterodox* at best) follow the convention but I have never seen online applicability questioned or explained.
*A far more semantically correct, if obscure, adjective/substantive in English for Judaic groups we call Orthodox would be Orthopractic: the intense emphasis on belief over practice that gave rise (in Greek, mostly, rather than Latin) to the, err, apotheosis :) of Orthodoxy not only derives from Christianity, but is not AFAICT even particularly meaningful in any strain of Judaism that a non-specialist would recognize.
For the readers who know more than I do on the topic (probably/hopefully at least a minyan), would for example a median Karaite characterize their disagreement with rabbinic Judaism regarding the authority of the Oral Torah as a difference in *belief*? I don't think so.
OK, there goes a chunk of my life I won't get back:
https://www.jewfaq.org/name_of_g-d leads to https://studylib.net/doc/7385559/the-sanctity-of-god-s-name--part-1 both of which are great reads.
This isn't a new question, the examples are chalkboards and overhead projectors. Can you erase the chalkboard, or turn off the projector once "God" is written? The answer seems to focus on the intent of writing the name (sanctified or not), and the technology used to display the name and its permanence.
The decisions on sanctity are mixed, and I didn't see a hard call being made on either side (or simply didn't understand well enough to see the call being made, there's a lot of insider baseball going on here).
The reviewer concluded:
"Orthodox rabbis have held that writing on a computer is not a permanent form, thus it is not a violation to type God's Name into a computer and then backspace over it or cut and paste it, or copy and delete files with God's Name in them. However, once you print the document out, it becomes a permanent form. That is why observant Jews avoid writing a Name of God online: because there is a risk that someone else will print it out and deface it."
Hadn't thought about backspacing, that is a conundrum.
It's hard to resist this paragraph trying to tease apart permanence of projection vs. computer screens: "However, we can differentiate between the wall and the pixels. The reflecting wall is really physically unchanged. The pixels are. The glowing phosphor reacts with the energy beamed to it by sending out energy in a new form of light. The crystal-liquid display is being re-arranged -creating a physical representation of character-writing."
On first blush, I think that's wrong, we have to consider the photons. The screen/projector has arranged photons in a specific physical way which includes roughly infinite copies of the name of God in photonic form. That form can be disrupted or absorbed, if I scatter the photons coming off the wall (I mean, some of the photons went through the wall, but whatever, imagine a laser in the room), which would erase the name.
Or worse, when my eye sees the photon, the energy of the photon is transferred to the molecules in my eye, literally erasing the physical representation of the name of God. Also, gravitational lensing bends photons, which means that NATURE ITSELF is constantly erasing the name of God, and the act of seeing the name of God erases it forever.
Make of that what you will.
Other readers offered a good explanation of the practice. For me, it's a way of respecting the sanctity and mystery of G-d's name, which, in Hebrew, is transliterated into the unpronounceable YHWH. I was unaware of the debate over online wording. I'm from the Reconstructionist/Reform wing of Judaism, not the Orthodox.
Rod wrote in March of 2020 that Covid would cause a Great Depression, readers thanked him as they pulled their savings out of the market, as it turned out, it was the greatest buying opportunity in our generation
It sounds similar to the essays he wrote about wokeness and gender a few years ago, where he'd quote long screeds from anonymous professors and doctors who wrote to him of the coming Bad Times. Some of the things he brought forward (gender theory in medical school overriding a patient's anatomy) have been covered by other journalists like Jesse Singal, who I think does a good job objectively covering the gender beat, so not crazy, but others---hoo boy. The whole "I can't tell you who told me this, because he fears for his job/life, but...." and then proceeds with a long tale in which the narrator is persecuted by the Wokesters or Teh gayz or the "transgenders."
I stopped reading a couple of years ago because the formula kept setting off my BS detector. I couldn't tell if he was making stuff up, or if he'd become a magnet for every middle aged malcontent who felt picked on at work. His complete willingness to spread pretty sensational accusations without any shred of evidence that these stories were true both concerned and offended me. His writing at points bordered on hysteria. As a Christian, I worry that he's given into the sin of despair, which as a former Catholic Damon you'd recognize is a pretty big deal in terms of sin. I'm definitely on the progressive Christian side, but despair seems to fit his state of mind better than anything else I can think of, and I genuinely worry about Rod's mind and soul. The recent announcement about the end of his marriage seems to have made things worse--sometimes I wonder if he's fallen into the embrace of the authoritarian Orbanista community to make up for losing his family? He's estranged from his family of origin and it seems weird that he's in Europe and his kids are here (as far as I know). Hard to be a present dad when you live on a different continent.
Anyway--thank you for writing this. Rod--if you are reading the comments I pray for you and hope you get some support and help. You seem to be in a lot of spiritual pain.
Damon, don’t ever think there’s such a thing as giving too much attention to the ongoing radicalization of so many of our fellow citizens! I’m absolutely fascinated by it, when I’m not terrified and hiding under the bed. In my case, this study of humans I used to know and respect is the replacement for the conversation, interaction, enjoyment and gatherings with humans I used to know and respect. But 2015-16 poisoned all of that and then the pandemic sealed the deal. My trust is broken. Yet I have little energy left for anger or combat. I simply want to see and try to understand, maybe find ways to help in small ways. I find your observations and thought patterns unbelievably helpful and profitable in increasing my understanding and calming frequent bouts of hysteria caused by the marinade of lunacy in which we are swimming these days. Engaging one’s mind in analysis is, for me, a good way to disrupt unhealthy, self destructive emotions that help no one and only lead to despair.
As for Rod. Yeah, I used to relate to him and enjoy him years ago. But it’s clear he has made a choice now to throw himself in with this new crowd of recycled, same-old deceivers and powermongers - where his every impulse will be cheered and lifted to new heights. Heh. Out of one side of his mouth he talks isolation, a monk’s life and prayerful contemplation. But he is no more immune than any other mere mortal to escaping The Law - which dominates his theological understanding. Adulation, the warm embrace of a mob, traveling to exotic locales to mix with masters of the universe, telling fantastical stories over drinks & candlelight (especially during a mid-life crisis!)… all this must come as quite a temptation for a weary, failed monk.
You’ve extended your hand and words of caution like a true friend. That is a kindness and an example to follow.
Looks like a lot of people are familiar with Rod, I only have a distant acquaintanceship with his work and tweets. I bow to y’all’s knowledge.
At the risk of sounding like who I actually am, a conservative Christian, I get part of what Damon says he’s saying. And quite frankly, my flavor of Christians have been saying the same thing since I’ve been a teen. The wild-eyed wing has always been about what is now called prepping. The televangelist Jim Bakker even sells prep stuff or so I’ve been told. There’s enough of it on Xn TV that every once in a while my MIL wants to stock up on goods. (Don’t get me started on the fear-mongering done to old ladies by Xn TV. I can’t wait for the perpetrators to try to explain that to God.)
RW Christians desire the apocalypse because that means Jesus will be coming back soon. I think they take this from the book of Revelations 22:20 (NLT) where Jesus says “Yes, I am coming soon.” And John, the writer of Revelations seems pretty pleased.”Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!” (Confession: yes, I’d like Jesus to come soon, too, but the Apocalypse, not so much.)
Here’s where I lose the plot. In my understanding there is a real distinction between the enemy (Satan, Lucifer Morningstar, the Devil -- whatever one’s faith tradition calls it) and our fellow human beings and there seems to be more and more confusion about that. Sean Feucht quoted Ron DeSantis as substituting the word enemy (as identified above) with liberals in a key Bible passage. This confounds me as in the Bible there is a real distinction on how to pro-actively love our fellow beings versus resisting the strategies of the devil. The full armor of God is to resist a spiritual enemy not a fellow traveler.
Hmmm, maybe it’s not me who has lost the plot. And maybe the strategies of the devil have been more successful with the rad-trads then they realize.
Thank you, Mel, for this. I'm grateful to hear from a conservative Christian who is also calm. This heterodox liberal atheist definitely values hearing from you, particularly but not only in areas where we disagree.
Routine political chatter from the extreme right. Of course, politics, most of the time, is 80% or so chatter. And right-wing Christian chatter is consumed, to a large extent, with excited predictions of the apocalypse, because – guess what? – you-know-who is coming back with his Kingdom.
The interesting thing is that, to judge from the New Testament and other writings of the time, most early Christians started out with this apocalyptic excitement. But it cooled down before long because as the years passed, you-know-who obviously wasn’t showing up. So the Apocalypse-Now stuff became limited to the most hot-headed faithful, like RD, who are still pushing it out.
Also, modern hot-heads are really looking forward to martyrdom, strangely enough, for the same reason: the more martyrdom they suffer, the closer it’s getting to Messiah time!
To be honest, I haven't read much Dreher recently. I do know that he seemed extremely concerned about people being led into sin by mistaking simple, sexual, pleasure for a moral good; I wish he had paid attention to the danger of making a similar error with respect to the very real pleasure of being angrily self-righteous. Elsewhere in these precincts I will make reference to the Book of Jonah….
I created, so far as I know, the term 'Lying Fact' to describe what at least some Young Earth Creationists think of the fossil record, those who consider it as having been 'planted' by Satan (to lead us astray) or the LORD (to proof our faith).
The continued failure of the U.S., and especially of Socialist!Atheist! (except, now, for Hungary and Poland) Europe to suddenly turn to terrible hellscapes that would punish the libs and, less importantly, show us all the errors of our ways and the way toward righteousness is to some another Lying Fact. This system which they believe has utterly rejected Truth, that is their opinions and views, _can_not_ work at all, any evidence to the contrary is mere fact contradicting Truth, and such Gates of Hell can not endure.
Mr Dreher might pay some attention to Jonah as presented in his Book. Even when he finally obeys his marching-orders and preaches to Nineveh, Jonah has no desire that he be listened-to and believed and the foreign pagans (as 'Donny from Queens' put it elsewhere here for the people of the Cities of the Plain) of Nineveh saved, and his boss takes issue with that.
…which makes me wonder: perhaps Mr Dreher's intemperance is born of not only expecting that he will not really affect things, but of by now actually not wanting to be heard and to be believed. He _wants_ Nineveh destroyed, so why bother crafting a message that might be more effective and distinguishing between preaching and venting?
(Elsewhere, here, I speculate that he may have been misled by the sheer pleasure of self-righteous anger.)
I agree with this and would also add that if he truly believes the Christian teachings on eternity, then “to live is Christ and to die is gain.” And if Hell is real, all the more reason to have mercy and compassion for the pagans. He, however, seems to think that “persecution” that comes far, far short of death or even serious discomfort is intolerable suffering.
I'm not Christian, so I oughtn't say I know how Christians ought to behave, but their behaviour toward those they think are Hell-bound seems to bifurcate between kindness toward the doomed and 'Why bother caring for the chaff about to be burned?' (or, alternately, and ignoring what I gather are key points of Christian doctrine, 'Why treat these people any better than the LORD is going to do?').
I do not know Mr. Dreher, but perhaps he is spending too much time in Europe. My friends and family over there are very freaked out.
We Americans cannot understand the visceral existential fear that Putin’s aggression has unleashed among Europeans who lived through ww2 (&their descendants) or who lived under the Soviets’ boot. Yes, we Americans fought in ww2, but our grandmas were not being raped in their kitchens in Ohio by Russian troops. Nor our neighbors thrown into concentration camps in Boston. We really do not understand that level of gut-wrenching fear.
Things look scarier than they have in a long time — from climate change to Putin and Xi.
And in scary times, we human monkeys turn to “God”, and we speak in “the end of the world” terms. And we try to keep our families fed, and turn to neighbors for unified protection. Since time immemorial, this is always the case — Nothing new here.
Mr. Dreher is perhaps simply a spokesman for our transcendent, archetypal fears. Carl Jung would have understood him, as would George Lucas and Joseph Campbell.
I just read his article in “American Conservative” and it is harmless. Other than the advice to store cash (worthless during real crisis — try gems, gold and canned/dry foods) he sounds like many people I know, both here and in Europe.
No need to 911 him. And if you do, you’ll have do the same for half of Europeans and a good chunk of Americans.
We’ll be even more afraid if German grandmas freeze in their homes this winter. Or if a nuclear cloud drifts over Prague.
Strap in, the ride is only just beginning. Prophets and Messiahs will be coming out of the woodwork. And so will Demagogues.
See what's happening in the Netherlands, France, and the coming Italian elections and you will see it's not a "visceral fear of Putin". No one seriously thinks Putin is going to invade anywhere outside the former Soviet republics. The anger is the COVID19 restrictions and inflation. Plus the feeling people have lost their individual and national freedoms to the unelected bureaucrats of the EU. When people freeze in the dark this winter it won't be Russia's fault. It will be the fault of the misguided policies of the US, UK & EU.
Firstly, thank you, Mr. Linker, for the most unpunditesque humility you display (I hope you don't get thrown out of the union), especially but by no means only in this post. Specifically re economics - that you know you don't enough about economics to know whom you should trust about the topic.
Not only am I among those who learned a lot from reading Rod Dreher in the Olden Daze, I first became aware of you via him (it would have been perhaps 2006 or so? pretty sure you were at Beliefnet at the time).
In honor of your previous status as a Christian (or your heritage as a descendant of Judaism), the chain of, err, prophecy went
Sullivan => Douthat => Daniel Larison =>Dreher => you.
Dear Everyone: I'm very busy with many things and so usually avoid jumping into the discussions in the comments on my posts. But I want you all to know that I'm thrilled you've taken to having conversations and respectful debates about the issues I write about. You're making this a real community. I also wanted you to know that I follow along with and read everything.
Attitude reflects the leadership, Captain. You maintain a spirit of civility and a genuine desire for discourse even amidst serious disagreement that has attracted likeminded folks!
Since thou* art reading along, and also busy, may I use thy meta-comment to spark a respectful discussion among the commentariat, that might be useful to thee, regarding the pros and cons of thy hypothetical jumping into the discussion (assuming thou hadst the bandwidth to spare)?
** My use of archaic pronouns is mostly just play, plus disambiguation, since Late Modern English foolishly dropped the distinction between second person singular and plural. If it seems disrespectful to anyone, please speak up and I will not do it any more.
For those who don't know, at least back when I read Rod's TAC comment section, he very much jumped in.
Thy *not* jumping in keeps this very much a peer discussion, whereas the reality of all of our primate brains would mean any further intervention in the comments by thee would make thee, err, the proverbial 800 pound gorilla, I fear.
I hope that any particular comment thread or subthread that sparks interesting thoughts in thee will result in a subsequent post.
Since we seem to have a bunch of ex-Dreher readers here, I'd like to ask both Our Host and open the floor for nominations for the closest current equivalent to the Dreher of his early TAC days (say up to 2014?) - not so much politically or theologically, but tone and engagement. David French is the closest example I can currently think of, but maybe someone whose political profile is lower than his so that the blog is not quite so taken over by anti-Trump and anti-anti-Trump arguments - a bit more applied theology and less short term politics? That might be unrealistic to ask. (n.b. I think the world of David French, but the comments section there is inevitably higher temperature).
I can't really think of anyone offhand. I think that may be why there's so much disappointment among his former readers. He filled a unique niche and was able to act as a bridge between people with very different politics who shared a feeling that our current American, capitalistic culture was both shallow and unfulfilling. Now he's just another angry, rightwing troll of which there seems to be an endless supply.
there’s a wish for cataclysm. read strauss’s lecture on german nihilism.
To save others searching for the lecture, I found it with open access at the link below.
https://ia801005.us.archive.org/29/items/LeoStraussGermanNihilismIntegral1941/Leo%20Strauss%20-%20%27%27German%20Nihilism%27%27%20%5BIntegral%2C%201941%5D.pdf
I get the point of this blog, but weeks after Sam Harris said he has no problem cheating elections with Big Tech censorship to defeat the other side, and Biden declared any opposition to his policies is illegitimate extremism, picking on Rod Dreher for his own hopes of a "Great Reset" in the anti-WEF direction sounds petty.
You don't have to read far right sources to see the trucker's protest in Canada (brutally crushed by the way), protests in the Netherlands and next week's elections in Italy to see that people are rising up against the Establishment. And you don't have to be an economist to see the Fed's coming additional interest rate hike (reportedly 75 to 100 basis points) in the face of rapidly rising inflation to be alarmed at what the future holds.
Having concerns about troubles is one thing. Constantly catastrophizing is another.
The Canadian trucker thing is a bad example. More than 90% of Canadian truckers were vaxxed so the protest was not at all some massive groundswell of the oppressed little guy rising up against the establishment. It was a few malcontents bolstered by toxic US politics. I don’t blame the Canadians for squelching the attempt of US bad actors to spread the cancer of our politics to them.
And if you think it was “brutally suppressed” when it went through several court arguments and orders prior to any law enforcement action, you and I are probably not going to agree on what the rule of law means.
Oh, come on.
Sam Harris comments: "Nothing I said on that podcast was meant to suggest that the Democrats would have been right to commit election fraud or take other illegal measures to deny Trump the presidency (nor do I think they did that)."
"Any opposition"? Biden said no such thing.
Truckers brutally crushed? Wikipedia says: "In spite of an injunction by a judge and the invocation of three levels of states of emergency, municipal, provincial, and federal, protesters temporarily refused to end blockades and the occupation of the red zone." and "Over the weekend of February 17 to 20, a large joint-operation police presence in Ottawa arrested about 200 organizers and protesters, laid 389 charges, issued fines, removed the heavy trucks and trailers with 79 vehicles towed away, seized 36 license plates, and dismantled encampments across the city." After a MONTH of shutting down parts of Ottawa, repeated legal judgements against the protestors, and the Canadian professional trucker groups and unions disavowing any association, the protestors refused to vacate and, uh, checks notes, "were fined". True, the brutality never ends in Canada. Probably lost their saved Tim Horton's points, too.
Being "alarmed at what the future holds" isn't unreasonable. Predicting the end of Western Civilization based on roughly zero evidence isn't the same thing.
I award you a comments Pulitzer.
"I get the point of this blog" - I see no evidence of that in your comments in this thread anyway (if you have commented on other threads I have missed/don't remember it - if you wish to point me to any please do). I am indeed alarmed at what the future holds, because I do fear a serious global recession.
I at least would love to see at least a couple of non-trollish national populists here (no, I don't think that's an oxymoron, and I'm not sure they are even necessarily rare compared to e.g. Chapo-style trolls; I just have not figured out where the non-trollish NPs congregate in sufficient numbers relative to trollish ones) - a Julius Krein type for example to put it in recent American context, or if Krein is too obscure maybe a Mickey Kaus type - someone who was a committed NP of some sort pre escalator ride. Daniel Larison? These days he's focused laser like on non-interventionism; pre-TAC he was a wide ranging NP (and a joy to read).
Mr. Linker, it's your blog, obviously, but if you are looking to hand out free subscriptions I would be strongly in favor of your doing so in the interest of ideological and/or geographic diversity (I generally have no acts of coitus to give regarding identitarian diversity as such, but one of the good things about Rod's comment section Back When It Was Good is that it had a surprising fraction of non-Americans; the only comment section from a US-based, ethnically 'Murrican blogger I can think of with as high a non-US fraction of regular commenters would be Scott Alexander).