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The Triple-Digit IQ Club is for people tired of bad arguments delivered with maximum confidence.
I am Steven. Steven of the Club. Steven of this club. And I make decent arguments, delivered with the minimum amount of uncertainty I can justify.
I write forensic, funny, occasionally hostile essays about sloppy reasoning, abused language, fake profundity, political nonsense, category errors, and the tiny conceptual trapdoors people keep falling through.
If you like watching bad ideas get opened up on the table and examined with a flashlight, this is probably for you.
I’m not here to ‘find my voice’; I’ve been a writer for a long time. I’m here because I miss the age of reason. I’ve decided to fight back against this post-truth Hades-scape, where speaking to people online feels like interacting with a pre-programmed video game character—spitting pre-digested talking points and intellectually scampering at the slightest confrontation instead of standing by their word.
the Argument Field Manual
Alongside the main articles, Field Notes, and the other assorted content I publish here, one of the major projects of the Triple-Digit IQ Club is the Argument Field Manual.
TDiqC = the club/publication/world.
tAFM = the big reference-work project being constructed inside it.
I am building tAFM to be a structured, navigable catalogue of the recurring moves people make when arguments go wrong: distortions, evasions, attacks, retreats, rhetorical tricks, conceptual errors, and the other familiar machinery of bad reasoning. The larger categories map families of related moves; the individual entries take one of them apart in detail—what it is, how it works, what it looks like in the wild, and what to do when somebody uses it.
The aim is to make bad argumentation easier to see. Once a move has a name, a shape, and a place in the larger map, it becomes much harder for it to slip past unnoticed. Over time, I’m trying to turn tAFM into something between a reference work, a forensic toolkit, and a field guide for people who would rather understand an argument than merely survive one.
(Clicking the orange ‘Subscribe Now’ buttons and subscribing is the fastest way to get rid of them)
the Argument Field Manual
the Argument Field Manual is a field guide to recurring moves, distortions, slogans, bad frames, and reasoning machinery in public argument.
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What Subscribing Gets You
When you subscribe to TDiqC, you’ll initially be subscribed to all three publishing streams: main essays, Field Notes, and the Argument Field Manual. They’re separate Substack sections, though, so you can manage them individually at any time and turn off whichever ones you don’t want. If you’re only here for tAFM, only want the shorter Field Notes, or just prefer the major articles, you don’t have to take the rest.
TDiqC is still taking shape, so this structure may evolve — but you’ll always be able to manage which sections you receive.
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Meet Steven of the Club
If you’re curious about my flavour of argumentation, my intellectual inspirations, heroes, guides and mentors include: George Carlin, George Orwell, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, Friedrich Nietzsche, Weird Al Yankovic, Captain Paul Watson, Richard Dawkins, Ken Wilber, Siddhartha Gautama, Charlie Chaplin, Amy Goodman, Maynard James Keenan, Martin Luther King Jr, Martin Luther, Terry Pratchett, S. N. Goenka, Farley Mowat, Daron Malakian & Serj Tankian, Noam Chomsky, Peewee Herman, Alan Watts, Richard Feynman, Alison Armstrong, my mom, Bill Hicks, Diogenes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Anton Wilson, Marcus Aurelius, Stewart Lee, Bjork, Matt Dillahunty, Anohni Hegarty, Scroobius Pip, Maria Bamford, Carl Jung, and Jello Biafra.⠀
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Why subscribe?
Join the sane majority. It’s going to be crazy!
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⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ > ⌒ヽ
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⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ノ ) Lﾉ
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⠀🍰 🎀 𝐿𝒾𝒻𝑒 𝓂❀𝓉𝓉🏵: 𝒮𝒾𝓁𝓁𝒾𝓃𝑒𝓈𝓈 𝒽𝑒𝓁𝓅𝓈 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓈𝒸𝒾𝑒𝓃𝒸𝑒 𝑔🌸 𝒹☯𝓌𝓃 🎀 🍰⠀
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