“First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
The name of this Substack is “Third Thoughts”. It’s a place for me to write about whatever I need to write about. If you want to find hot takes about today’s news items, you’ve come to the wrong place.
Social media platforms live or die on an “engagement” model. They need their users to stay on the platform and engage with “content”, so that users will keep on clicking and seeing more ads. As such, they’ve evolved to be completely agnostic as to whether they are healthy places for you to spend your time, so long as you keep clicking.
Traditional media hasn’t really been able to do better. After the Capitol riots on January 6th, I decided I needed to stop ignoring the news, and bought a subscription to the Washington Post. Less than a month later, I canceled it - too few of the articles contained any more factual information than I could find more easily from other sources. It was a waste of my time.
I hope to avoid that here. My promise to my readers is that I won’t spread rumors or misinformation about breaking stories. I plan to accomplish that by not opining on them until the facts are reasonably well-understood. You have plenty of sources for that if you want it. I chose Substack as my platform specifically because they don’t need or want me to become what I hate.
You won’t find me on twitter. Please don’t try to follow me on Facebook. If you want to know my opinion about the latest outrageous thing some politician, cop, or activist said or did, you can send me an email - but don’t expect a response for at least two weeks.
What To Expect
In my next three posts, I will outline a few socio-political axioms that I think should guide an understanding of what was, what is, and what might be to come [edit: this may happen eventually, but it turns out I haven’t been arsed]. I can’t take credit for these - they were shared with me by an acquaintance over two decades ago, who will remain unnamed unless he requests otherwise.
Thanks for reading.