I want to bite that hand so badly

Before he was Cancelled by the Woke Mob(tm) Louis CK had a bit where he talked about how he would feel good about having engaged in noble behavior that he had in fact only thought about undertaking. For example he would be sitting in the first class section of an airliner while a member of the military walked or perhaps limped by, on the way back to the coach section. In this situation, Louis would imagine spontaneously giving his seat up to the possibly wounded warrior, in a heartwarmingly generous gesture, the contemplation of which invariably filled him good feelings about himself.

He enjoyed this sensation so much that he indulged in a reverie about it pretty much whenever a passenger in military uniform boarded a flight on which Louis was already seated. But he never actually offered to give up his seat, because imagining being the kind of person who gives up his first class seat to someone in those circumstances doesn’t actually require giving up your seat, which after all would be slightly inconvenient.

A lot of regular readers of LGM are imagining making a contribution to the blog right now. Feels good, doesn’t it?

My co-bloggers have already made lots of excellent points about why you should do more than imagine — it’s easy if you try — so I’ll just add a couple of personal notes.

I’m well aware that it’s a terrific privilege to write for this blog, and in particular to have the kind of job that allows for doing those sort of work — and as Erik mentioned, it’s a lot of work. For example the college costs post I published yesterday was an end product of (conservatively) hundreds of hours of research over the last several years. I could publish a version of that in an academic venue, which nobody would read, or another version in a highbrow legacy journalism outlet, which is getting increasingly hard to do. Instead I publish that sort of thing here, at one of the last surviving outposts of the Golden Age of Blogging, because I know it will reach a critical but appreciative audience, both here and elsewhere on the Internet.

By the way I get essentially no professional credit for this kind of work. This is admittedly a big improvement from a decade ago, when my then-dean tried to fire me for blogging about how law schools were ripping people off left and right with phony employment numbers and lots of feel-good nonsense about how you can do anything with a law degree. But I keep writing the kinds of things I write, that often annoy powerful and important people. Long ago I grasped the profound wisdom of Swifty Lazar’s dictum that in this life one must have either fuck you money or fuck you attitude.

We here at LGM have been getting along, and very well too, with plenty of the latter. It’s not as if our fundraising efforts are going to result in bestowing anything like the former on us, but nevertheless we really do both appreciate and need whatever you can spare, so we can continue to do this kind of work.

In the meantime, we’ll keep them hopping until our ammunition’s gone. (Metaphorically speaking. We’re not murderers, despite what this NRA flak says).

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