How to properly navigate a bullshit-laden, truth-concealing Internet

Also, how should we handle errors we make in our own published material—especially when our errors are purposeful?

Much of the information I offer here is difficult to verify unless I provide direct links to my sources. This is especially true regarding the many issues the corporate media and the White House are not merely lying about but ignoring outright.

Because I’ve been a reader of Matt Taibbi’s TK News (now Racket News) since its inception, I've had a pipeline connecting me to either geopolitical reality or its most dogged pursuers for around five years. Taibbi’s comments sections are bursting with other Substackers of a similar bent. I have also never been a steady watcher of cable news.

I therefore haven't had to attain or display any special powers of independent prognostication in continually blowing apart Wokish or otherwise sham narratives. Instead, I’ve simply limited my exposure to persuasive propaganda and, perhaps more importantly, never believed in the concept of the “noble lie.”

Because the running industry is swamped in Democratic Party politics and that party is now powered fully by lies both superficially noble and patently immoral, my unwillingness to not only not support but remain silent about obvious horseshit has rendered me an ignoble figure among my peers and former colleagues in this industry and elsewhere. But it has also further solidified my staunch, probably ineluctable skepticism, because I have consistently chosen what I know or believe to be true over what is popular, in-universe, to express.

This doesn't make me unique, either. Sane people across the political spectrum can see how broken “running culture”—whatever that term means from the standpoint of the few dedicated running-first corporate publications still in existence—is, and how absurd the figures being touted as visionaries and righteous revolutionaries accordingly are. But I seem to possess one rare trait, which is a willingness to confront demoralized people, companies, and organizations using my own name and with obvious disregard for the easily discerned personal consequences. I don’t want to live in a world controlled by raving fucking lunatics, period, so there is really no firm cost to widely immolating whatever is left of my own reputation. When I get discouraged, it’s because I know the world is going to complete shit anyway, not because I doubt myself.

One day I will take stock of where I have overreached in this unofficial project and shat on people who were more hapless cog than consciously malign actor. There is no way I have perfectly calibrated the aim or intensity of my venom-stream; no critic does, especially an angry one. But if any of us are even alive in a few years, I will cross all of those burned bridges when I get to them.

A reader pointed out a screw-up I made in a June 17 post about Athing Mu’s extended absence from competition. It was, in my view, both a serious and relatively inconsequential mistake. I wrote that Mu had run a slow 800 meters in April at the Michael Johnson Invitational in Waco, Texas, and has therefore competed only once since July 22, 2022. As it happens, that race was in April 2022. That’s a grave reporting error, but because correct reporting would only have underscored my thesis, it didn’t seem to stand out.

This kind of thing—and I’ve corrected the post—annoys me and would even if I didn’t spend so much time belittling the imperfections of others. But it’s not the mistakes I see that bother me, it’s a clearly institutionalized unwillingness to correct or even acknowledge them with a level of staunchness that rivals that of my skeptical streak. It’s people being shitty pussies because they all have lots of company. I may be rude, but it really doesn’t get more cynical than this.

The Instagram account of Outside Magazine just announced a collaboration with New Balance to publicize the feats of a dozen runners with “creative approaches.” Below is the result of my attempt to learn about these creative folx, coupled to my suggested answer to the survey I was offered after returning to the Instagram page.

The Instagram post seems to have been deleted.

Trail Runner Editor-of-Sorts Zoe Rom wrote a profile of ultrarunner Ryan Montgomery that was published on Thursday with a really, really, really outstanding fuckup in the subhead.

Montgomery and his partner Pattie Gonia (Wyn Wiley) are LGBTQ-grifters. Because they are gay, and because Montgomery has genuine running chops and Gonia was in the public eye even before Wokism formally exploded into prominence in the spring of 2020, they are absolutely perfect ESG/DEI fodder, especially given that one of them is wondrously photogenic. (Gonia/Wiley has a marvelous double-grift going, as he probably makes ten times as much money from his climate-change cavorting-in-drag as he ever will from the running industry alone.)

I can’t fault either of them for happening into a money-stream based on sheer luck. What bothers me about Montgomery is the pressure he continually puts on companies to acknowledge and celebrate bullshit, mostly the contrived “nonbinary” identity. Companies are already under considerable pressure to cave to this kind of nonsense, so when individual figures already being dubiously rewarded start amplifying the charade with threats, they identify as demoralized.

Some may have noticed that I consistently link to pages within domains such as archive.ph and archive.is. I use archiving sites for two reasons: To track headline and other scurrilous changes to articles published on high-traffic sites like newyorktimes.com, and to evade paywalls and “you have x stories remaining this month” notices. I do this with The New York Times, the Boulder Daily Camera, every publication within the Outside, Inc. domain, Runner’s World, and many others. With NYT and Washington Post stories, someone has almost always gotten there before I have even if the original story is only an hour old. With those in the running media, I am proud to say I am responsible for being the first to archive a given item dozens of times and thus allowing everyone who reads this newsletter access to dozens of articles, and counting, that do not count toward whatever number of free articles per month the site intends to provide or generate any ad revenue or site impressions for the parent operation.

Because the people doing the Web programming for every running publication known are morons, lazy, or all two, this trick even works with “member exclusives” that are supposed to be paywalled for anyone who lacks a subscription. This even works with The Wall Street Journal. I could explain in ten minutes to anyone interested how to fix this issue, but apathy and neglect run through these businesses as cleanly as does their penchant for distributing morose, rank bullshit.

In a bygone era, I would have felt guilty about in effect causing writers to be paid less for their work, either directly or by applying upstream forces. When Run Strong was published in 2005, it wasn’t long before bootleg PDF copies of this indispensable tome appeared online. This both honored and annoyed me: Someone actually cared enough about the book to upload the whole thing to the Internet, but that kind of thing eats into royalty payments. I kind of hope some free copies are still available, since I lost my only hard copy years ago and shun the use of Amazon. Maybe I’ll check someday.

I feel no guilt whatsoever about steering people away from ads associated with stories written by shitty “creators” who have already been paid for them. These are propaganda outlets and everyone in the chain deserves to be punished in ways large and small for playing roles in keeping the intentional misinformation and disinformation stream high-flux.

I have a couple of helpful tricks for searching the Web. One is to use Duck Duck Go instead of Google Search; you’ll be amazed at how much uncomfortable-to-the-state information is easier to unearth when the CIA isn’t directly involved in the provision of Google Search results. Another, which is only useful when looking for material about Gen X and grayer types, is to constrain the date range of the search to older time periods. For example, when looking for old stories about Bob “Bobby” Kersee, I asked Google to look for stories published between 1/1/1980 (in other words, pre-Internet, for you young bucks) and 1/1/1995. Then I expanded the range by changing the later date to 1/1/2000, then 1/1/2005, and so on.

The nice thing about these chronologically filtered results is the high signal-to-noise ratio; about the only publications that were publishing online in the mid-1990s, or that have bothered uploading older articles, are formerly reliable giants like The NYT and The WaPo. You don’t see the glut of results linking to more recently instituted sites of pure shitspew like Vox and The Daily Beast. Bill Gates did not control the media or hunt for his online critics back in the day, even if he has been able to disappear a lot of unflattering information about himself in the meantime.

I am also continuing to track down the story behind the unannounced changing of an article I wrote for the Runner’s World Web site in September 2020. I started this process by haranguing the five people involved with the assignment and publication of my piece and tagging the RW “Runner-in-Chief” on Twitter, to no concreate avail. I could have just gone right to the source—the writer of the new, bullshit story—given that she is also an editor at RW. But because I never get replies to my inquiries, I intended from the beginning to pepper as many potential culprits as I can, with the hope that they recognize that cover-ups (i.e., silence) are far worse than any of their crimes. I intend to do this in a wealth of related areas.

Below is an image of part of the RW page for Jennifer Acker, the creator of “Why You Might Want to Consider Breathing Only Through Your Nose on the Run,” published on May 29, 2022 to replace “Can Nasal Breathing Improve Your Running Performance?” (There’s also a Runner’s World page for Kevin Beck. What the fuck are they even waiting for?) Below that is a snippet of her LinkedIn profile.

Acker also has a personal Web site with a “Contact” page, which I used earlier today to send her the message below.

Hi Jennifer,

I wrote a piece for Runner's World about nasal breathing that was published on the website in September 2020. This piece is archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20200916014601/https://www.runnersworld.com/training/a33993505/nasal-breathing/.

At some point, my article was silently replaced at the same URL with a completely contradictory article you wrote about the same topic. And by "silently," I mean "sleazily," as no one at Runner's World bothered to inform me of the change. Imagine my surprise when a link I gave a friend to one of "my" RW pieces instead took him to an article written by someone else that was antithetical to what I'd written, even though I'd given him the correct URL.

Care to explain this? Because not only is the new article as stupid as everything else RW cranks out now, but that's also a really uncool, cowardly editorial move, and you're apparently the editor responsible.

Kevin

If Acker had a defensible reason for changing my article and uploading her nonsense to the same URL, then she or someone should be able to supply it. For example, if it contained factual errors, the publication should have notified me when Acker made her revision if no one caught them when it was published.

Somehow, I doubt that was it.

It’s likely at this point that everyone I write to is aware that their responses will be published here by a notably truculent person. This is simply an encouragement to do the right thing or else be the subject of ongoing, well-deserved-but-over-the-top vitriol. I accept that none of these people have brains in their heads and are hopelessly lazy and self-righteous on top of that, but there are ways of getting to such people without sliding into the same moral sewers in which they live, feed, shit, and “create,” processes that have become indistinguishable in 2023.