r/SneerClub archives
newest
bestest
longest
To the surprise of no one, that article Quillette ran about the anti-DSA Marxist-Leninist-Alinskyisk was a hoax (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/archie-carter-quillette-dsa)
78

I love how my first reaction to the piece was “this looks like a troll, some twitter leftist probably showed Quillette a fake union card” and somehow that was dramatically overestimating the race science website’s commitment to fact-checking:

On Tuesday — two full days before running the piece — an editor asked if Carter could provide proof of ID. He never did, and Quillette inexplicably ran the piece anyway.

Boy, I bet those Quillette fact-checkers feel like small-skulls now.

> Quillette fact-checkers [lol good one](https://www.cjr.org/analysis/quillette-antifa-journalist-smear-campaign.php)
real smooth brains, i'm sure
I think this article, and similar instances of this happening to other outlets, is an example of what many people call “[Too Good To Check](https://www.oxfordreference.com/viewbydoi/10.1093/acref/9780199646241.013.1385)”. This is the biggest threat to journalism especially politics or ideologically oriented writing — you find an example that is so perfect and lined up so smoothly with what you already believe that you can’t bring yourself to do even basic due diligence.

The Alinsky stuff is the biggest tell for anyone who knows anything about the left.

yeah i definitely had to include that bit in my title lol

For example, it was Quillette, not Carter, that included the line, “My union friends were horrified. While these people spend hours reproaching themselves and each other, real people in America are suffering.”

Quillette also suggested that DSA meetings “would drag on forever in order to accommodate the neuroses of the participants and to ensure that the proceedings observed the norms of ‘inclusivity.’”

So, not only was it a hoax, it was a hoax that a staff writer at Quillette added shit to.

lol @themotte ‘the hoaxer should be punished!’ (yes, I know it was said as a joke).

Upstream to that comment is more ‘nah, nothing going on here’ denialism stuff.

E: lol greyenlightenment believes the story was only big because quilette retracted it, else it woulnd’t have gotten attention. Do none of these folks pay any attention to the left?

>Upstream to that comment is more 'nah, nothing going on here' denialism stuff. Yep, and people acting like this is the first time Quillette has published obviously-fake articles attacking the left (**Epistaxis** points out another recent one above) so they should be given a Mulligan on it. And eventually somebody manages to change the topic to the "Sokal squared" hoax and they all fall over themselves talking about how that *totally* proved that the SJWs were exactly as bad as they'd always thought.
Reading ~~ssc~~themotte is the best way to ensure you have the least amount of bias. ;)

This is hilarious.

Lol

I always wonder why they like so much this hoax. I mean, there's no *"winning",* because they've two different narratives to choose from: (i) The academia full of SJW marxists post-modernists hate science and scientific method and (ii) The academia full of SJW marxists post-modernists are censuring my "well-researched" phrenology paper.

omg. i thought the original piece was just made up by a right-wing writer. this is delightful

Amazin’

check out this guy in the notes of a post about this on rattumb who apparently misread the post so hard he thinks the DSA is censoring quillette and he’s pontificating about the morality of murdering all dsa members: [link]

[deleted]

not saying it's not a hoax, but i don't think it's that unbelievable that some warehouse worker somewhere has decent writing skills. I've been a warehouse worker in a couple different warehouses (though i'm currently in retail), and I'd like to think a professional editor could coax me into hammering out an at least somewhat legible essay
Thanks! I realized I was being classist and I deleted the comment. Have you read the article? There was something odd about it.
hey good on ya! I have read it, it's been a while, but it definitely seemed pretty boilerplate "corporate PR article" to me, like it could almost have been transposed straight from a fawning article about Musk's warehouses, like the author's identification as a (former? I can't remember) Amazon worker was pretty tangential to the actual substance. Like they were just laying claim to that **identity** to validate their **politics** 🤔 Also wasn't the author employed in a completely different kind of warehouse than the ones they were defending? anyway definitely agree it seemed pretty weird when i read it
I have heard that the Amazon warehouse piece was a somehow-sponsored promotional article, but haven't seen this nailed down.
Taking well over 4000 words to say what you could in 800 is not my definition of "decent writing skills." Not saying that your main point is wrong but good writing should matter and lets not devalue the concept by applying it to any piece which runs in Quillette. Anywhere that publishes [this](https://quillette.com/2019/06/24/headline-rhymes-36/) or [this](https://quillette.com/2019/04/21/headline-rhymes-32/) should be nuked from orbit by lovers of the English language.
There's a blogger I like who used to write for a newspaper, and is a good writer. Then, as we descended a few layers deeper into the pits of hell, writing at a medium sized newspaper just stopped being a job that really existed, and he got laid off. Now he stocks shelves at a big box store, because what else do you do with a journalism degree in The Year of Our Lord 2019? Shit happens
and everyone knows that stupid meme about the PhD in [humanities field] working at Starbucks, i'm sure your example isn't too uncommon
[deleted]
Sorry. Deleted.
Yeah what you're saying makes sense but is wrong, there are actually quite a few people with mental illnesses or terrible life circumstances who can fall through the cracks and end up working awful manual labor jobs but can still write rather well.
There is for example an indie game dev who works part time as a pizza delivery person to pay rent and expenses while coding for himself. So you don't even need terrible life circumstances or mental illness, the system just sucks and sometimes you need to make shitty choices for your dreams.
Yes, sometimes the worthy ones are unlucky or unfortunate and have to settle for lower caste jobs.
It wasn’t obvious because the writing was good, it was obvious because it perfectly characterized a common complaint of the right for DSA. It was essentially too on the nose.
the deleted comment was talking about the Amazon warehouse article