But I was too young for the online world to be an influence of my youth I was an adult, married and with a career, before I started spending a lot of time in virtual space, creating relationships there. I was too late for the years of common epistolary friendships, the time of “it is fun to be in the same decade as you” of Roosevelt and Churchill, the days of the long letters my father sent home from Korea or my mother from France. He didn’t care what you thought of him but he’d do anything for a friend.Īs a Gen-Xer, I grew up between eras. He was a flamboyant cynic who also cared deeply about important issues and how they hurt real people. He cared deeply about fairness and decency and the obligations of the powerful to the powerless. Popehat’s best satire was usually with his steady editing and ideas.įor all his humor, he was passionate about serious things. He had a keen understanding of the inanities of internet culture and a capacity to keep a straight face through satire that I’ve never matched. Lewis, or his unerring ear for authoritarian propaganda at - won many admirers. His talent for homage to other styles - like his exceptional riffs on the Screwtape Letters by C.S. ![]() His war stories from his legal career revealed an eye for observational humor and the oddities of the human condition. Throughout we reveled in a shared love of games, of wordplay and satire, of arguments and indignant tirades about liberty. He helped reason me through crisis in 2014 and I talked him through low points thereafter. Over the years we talked each other through great changes in our lives, triumphs, failures, the periodic visits of the Black Dog of depression we both knew too well. Kindred spirits - by which I mean lawyers, cynics, and aspiring writers - we became fast friends, and began writing together at Popehat 15 years ago. Patrick and I “met” - as we use the word now - on a gaming forum in about 2001. He leaves behind a newlywed wife, a father, brother, sister, niece, and many, many friends, some of which he even met. Patrick was about my age, but had been fighting grievous health issues for a few years. He shared our Twitter account for years, and went on to co-author the wickedly satirical account and his own Twitter account He died yesterday. Patrick, another irascible trial lawyer, wrote at Popehat for more than a decade. New doors open.People who came here from my old blog, will remember my long-time co-blogger and friend Patrick. On Post.News, Mastodon at by email at ken at popehat dot com.Įverything ends, and that’s okay. On SeriousTrouble.Show, the Substack for the podcast I co-host with Josh Barro I’m voting with my feet, exactly the way I’ve been telling people to do for years. But I’d never ask the government to stop it. I’m repulsed by the flood of triumphant bigotry and trolling, and by Musk’s sad-lonely-boy leaning into the arms of freaks who embrace him in his fruitless quest for love. That, not government regulation, is the way to do it. If one of us disagrees with the other’s exercise of rights, we can part company. Twitter - or whoever runs it - has rights. This is exactly how it’s supposed to work, as I’ve been arguing for years. I’ll probably delete the past tweets because I can’t stomach them being available to promote this enterprise. So I’m exercising my free speech and free association and leaving, and shuttering the account. The last straw was Elon Musk sending lunatics and bigots against former employees and leaning into conspiracy theories. That new branding is ugly and despicable and I don’t want to contribute content to it. Just as Twitter’s former leaders exercised their free speech and free association rights to brand Twitter one way, Twitter’s new boss is exercising his rights to brand it another way. I’m not just talking about the increasing tech glitches. The other reason is that I think it’s fundamentally changed, at least for now. I miss him, and his perspective and wit and humanity, keenly. Gradually I used it more and he used it less, until he split off to his own account. I only started using it around 2014 or so. My late friend and co-writer Patrick started Twitter account and built it. ![]() I still interact with many of the people I knew there, having connected with them at a series of successor locations, but many are lost to the decades - people I felt I knew, now only vaguely remembered. Usually whatever content I posted there - primitive lawsplainers, snark, banter, arguments - is gone as well. Many of those forums are gone now, like the proverbial tears in rain.
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