The Current Plan

To start, I’ll be compiling Twitter threads here for any and all readers. The tweets are public and their presentation here will be free. Time allowing, I’ll develop the threads in essays as posts for paid subscribers only. I’d charge a more nominal fee, but Substack sets a minimum subscription price. The free posts / Twitter reproductions are presented with the spirit of a gift, as “civic duty”, civic friendship, social responsibility, political charity, in a would-be virtuous and principled but maybe irritatingly saccharine public spirit. I’m gagging on my own innocence here! I’ll think about occasional “shit talk Fridays”, a little salt and acid with swill tequila. I can talk shit too.

The free posts are a Noble Civic Contribution, but any subscription in the spirit of gift I won’t turn down. I’m not trying to make six figures here, or warp my mind into a profitable shtick. The way this goes, the way my Twitter’s gone, I’d be surprised and glad to have eight or nine free subscribers within three months.

The essays would flesh out ideas and arguments, with the hope of melding accessible and more expert style: GIFs and everyday analogies and anecdotes for people without expertise, references, citations, and more technical argument for the educated and over-educated.

I have limited material access right now to academic databases and no spare change for independent subscription to JSTOR. Limited funds to buy books. So much out of print even then. I have some academic training and credentials but not overwhelming ones, on my pet topics more generalist than specialist, part critic-“scholar”, part autodidact, part passionate amateur. No claim to especial expertise, no method but what I develop and do as I go. The “themes” will be political, psychoanalytic, literary, pop cultural, whatever. I don’t know my politics, I feel lately like I’m off the right-continuum, or occupying some five-dimensional position. Left libertarian cultural pluralist with democratic socialist leanings, hoping for a “smart socialism” tempered but not mugged by reality.

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psychoanalysis, politics, culture

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Psychoanalytic social psychology of politics and culture , or, a soothsayer interprets the news