u/Ok_Artichoke_2928

I’ve really enjoyed listening to the podcast lately and especially the last three or four. I think (and have thought historically) that Tucker often puts his finger on important data points for normal Americans that political elites on both sides miss or dismiss.

But the more I listen to Tucker and others swirl this vast web of conspiracy to explain how Trump 2.0 devolved so quickly to disaster, the more I think that all of it is just cope to avoid having to admit the uncomfortable truth that the very elites Tucker hates the most were correct about Trump from the start.

Trump is corrupt, motivated entirely by (usually short term) self interest, and inept (at least for the level of power he’s come to attain.) More than anything, this explains the many conspiracies and scandals of the Trump era.

Russiagate wasn’t the national security/intelligence blob trying to destroy him because he rejects the orthodoxies of their worldview. Trump just lacked the ability to restrain his transactional interest (business and political) with Russia, or his desire to obstruct investigations that may have yielded embarrassing disclosures about his businesses or campaign.

Hell, Obama was more dovish on Russia than Trump. Trump was perfectly willing to arm Ukraine, he just wanted personal favors in exchange.

I think Israel is the same. Netanyahu helped Trump get elected. Trump saw the potential for gain in the relationship, he’s just too self interested and not wise enough to not let it lead to a disastrous foreign entanglement. That’s it, not Israeli kompromat via Epstein.

And of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t truths contained in the web of conspiracy, I just think the whole of them is concocted to avoid something simpler but harder to swallow: it was dumb to get behind Trump.

I don’t always agree with Pitchfork reviews, but I’ve long appreciated them as a kind of shared cultural anchor for discussing new albums, especially in indie/alternative adjacent genres. Even when people hated a review, they still talked about it. The reviews became part of the discourse around a release.

I also understand the broader context here. Online ad revenue isn’t what it used to be, journalism is struggling, and writers deserve to be paid.

But personally, I’m just not motivated enough to pay for a subscription simply to read album reviews. And I suspect a lot of people feel similarly.

My view is that Pitchfork paywalled the wrong layer of the product.

The reviews themselves function as public cultural infrastructure. Their value partly comes from being discoverable, shareable, arguable, and broadly accessible. Putting them behind a paywall risks shrinking Pitchfork’s cultural relevance over time, because fewer people will encounter, reference, and debate the reviews in the first place.

Instead, I think they should have kept reviews public while paywalling community features:

• commenting

• crowd scores

• user critic profiles (basically allow users to become their own established critics)

• follower systems

• reputation/status systems for insightful commenters

• maybe even featured community takes beneath reviews

They could still bait non-subscribers by showing one or two provocative or insightful comments beneath each review. That would:

• preserve the public reach of the reviews themselves

• create curiosity/social FOMO around the subscriber community

• incentivize subscribers to create thoughtful or funny comments in hopes of being featured

Basically: monetize participation and identity formation rather than access to the reviews themselves.

My kid is 6 and playing any sort of baseball for the first time. The couple taking on coaching are really nice and having coached my other kid in soccer I appreciate what a thankless and tough job it is. I also help at practice and base coach etc doing the games.

My question, being new to this is that I observe the other teams move kids through positions in the field, where our team has kept the same kids in the same positions all season. The ball rarely goes in the outfield and the kids out there just seem to be getting less and less invested in fielding. (Of course my kid is in the outfield.) Before I make a suggestion, is it normal to be rotating the kids at this age?