eXile

Taken from https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/

"There are whole websites for this: How To Convince Your Shrink You Have ADHD [0], How To Get Your Doctor To Prescribe You Adderall In Five Easy Steps [1], et cetera. But I can’t imagine most people need them. Just talk about all the times in your life that you had attention and concentration problems, and if your doctor asks you a more specific question (“Do you often lose things?”) you give the obvious right answer (“Wow, it’s like you’ve known me my whole life!”).

Aren’t psychiatrists creepy wizards who can see through your deceptions? There are people like that. They’re called forensicists, they have special training in dealing with patients who might be lying to them, and they tend to get brought in for things like evaluating a murderer pleading the insanity defense. They have a toolbox of fascinating and frequently hilarious techniques to ascertain the truth, and they’re really good at their jobs.

But me? At best, I can have a vague suspicion you’re not telling the truth. And how many patients genuinely in need of treatment do I want to risk accidentally rejecting just so I can be sure of thwarting you? A lot of 100% honest psychiatric patients’ stories are pretty unbelievable, really, and I don’t want to have to treat every patient like a convicted murderer. Unless you give me some specific reason to doubt you, I start with the assumption that you’re telling the…

I was unaware of Levine before posting the link, which I think is a fair enough story, rather than a "hatchet job", btw.

Having looked now, though, I'd say "interesting" rather than "ridiculous." See, for example "Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?" [1] - which gloriously headlined article seems to have broken the story of the Koch brothers' involvement in the Tea Party and other astroturf campaigns, back in 2009.

Also worth a look is the claimed list of other post-eXile scoops at exiledonline [2]

Same for The Exile itself - "tabloid" seems a little mild.

- Vanity Fair on The Exile [3]:

> In its time The Exile was arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia, and Ames and his staff had paid for that fact, or at least for the fact that they were arrogant reprobates, many times before. Columnist Edward Limonov, the 66-year-old political provocateur in whom the Federal Service officials were particularly interested, filed his copy from prison for two years after being convicted of possessing arms, which he admits he intended to smuggle into Kazakhstan in an effort to incite a coup there. Writer Kevin McElwee, an American expatriate, had both legs broken when he was torn from the side of a building he was scaling to escape an angry mob of Muscovites, an incident that had nothing to do with anything he’d written—McElwee, The Exile’s film reviewer, was just a rambunctious drunk. On another…

Has been the case for decades:

http://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/

>The left won’t accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix “if only the people knew the Truth.”

>But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance–and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left’s wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America’s rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it’s not so much Goering’s famous “bigger lie” that works here, but the dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it repeated.

I've never heard of this until now. Reading the article people have mentioned below:

http://exiledonline.com/malcolm-gladwell-unmasked-a-look-into-the-life-work-of-america%E2%80%99s-most-successful-propagandist/

Well, it's a really badly written article, full of "association" but I can't really find anything damning, just a bunch of innuendo, which could be invented about most any sufficiently prolific journalist.

I've read a lot of Gladwell's writing -- the only main theme I can find is that he just tends to write articles that fly in the face of received wisdom. That's his whole shtick. He plays devil's advocate.

So obviously, if he defends unpopular positions, you can read into that all you want, but I don't see any real evidence that it's ideological or driven by corporate support. It's just his writing style, and you can probably find just as many counter-examples.

No, we're not, at last not in the original meaning. Nerd used to mean someone obsessed and therefore knowledgeable about something (book nerd, comic nerd, or... The War Nerd[1]). Later geek took over that meaning and nerd moved towards someone socially awkward but smart.

Owning a smartwatch, reading a best seller novel, or watching a blockbuster doesn't make anyone a nerd. Not any more than wearing aviator sunglasses makes me a pilot. Which is actually what nerd tends to mean now, a style, a fashion fad inspired by the original.

Ironically, yet also completely predictably when you think of it, the original demographic is starting to look down on the nerd interests of yesteryear. You can read very dismissive (and downright insulting but that's a given) comments about anime and computer gaming on 4chan of all places.

[1] http://exiledonline.com/cat/war-nerd/

Ayn Rand, it seems, didn't like that libertarians were concerned in any way with how to provide collective resources. She idealized a lack of concern with others and one role model of hers was a man named William Edward Hickman who killed and dismembered a 12 year old girl.

>“Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote, gushing that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”

http://exiledonline.com/atlas-shrieked-why-ayn-rands-right-wing-followers-are-scarier-than-the-manson-family-and-the-gruesome-story-of-the-serial-killer-who-stole-ayn-rands-heart/

Ayn Rand was an eloquent proponent of sociopathy.