This is perhaps the most charitable possible reading.
I don't see what it has over the theory that two narcissistic Machiavellians who both believe they run shit clashed and the one with the guns won.
I don't believe that Musk is 100% truthful and transparent, he's uninhibited (but not so much that he doesn't know what he's doing. As someone said below, he manages to ride the line in terms of how he signals dissident right stuff which implies he knows how controversial it could be).
Even if we write off his optimistic estimates about his various products, there's still things like him calling the cave diver a pedo without much the evidence. That fits more with him just being an asshole. Assholes are always telling it like it is, in my experience.
Things he could not possibly believe
I'm not sure about this. Sam Harris' account of his bet with Elon indicated that he's way higher on his own supply than I thought.
He included a link to a page on the CDC website, indicating that Covid was not even among the top 100 causes of death in the United States. This was a patently silly point to make in the first days of a pandemic. ...Elon and I didn’t converge on a common view of epidemiology over the course of those two hours, but we hit upon a fun compromise: A wager. Elon bet me $1 million dollars (to be given to charity) against a bottle of fancy tequila ($1000) that we wouldn’t see as many as 35,000 cases of Covid in the United States (cases, not deaths).
And it also showed how that happens:
5.A few weeks later, when the CDC website finally reported 35,000 deaths from Covid in the U.S. and 600,000 cases, I sent Elon the following text:
Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) > 35,000 cases?
6.This text appears to have ended our friendship. Elon never responded, and it was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses. For my part, I eventually started complaining about the startling erosion of his integrity on my podcast, without providing any detail about what had transpired between us.
Thing is, this seems to have happened in private (at first). So it wasn't purely a matter of grandstanding for his proles.
Whatever his problems, Harris will at least tell you what he thinks. You start behaving like this with Twitter "friends" and you end up surrounded by Ian Miles Cheong types sucking your nuts and then all of the epistemic brakes are gone.
Tanista
28d ago
Elon isn't an idiot.
He does however have a history of aiming high and then working it out if he doesn't meet his deadlines.
He gets somewhat of a pass from people (going by Tesla's share price) because it's assumed he'll eventually get to whatever he shot for but this obviously doesn't work in a time-limited, government position like DOGE.
Who are they even pillaging it for? Dems are more PMC now so they are hardly all low income
Which explains Biden's abortive attempt at college debt forgiveness.
Tanista
29d ago
His schtick mostly seems to be begging the Democrats not to be crazy (and failing) for 1.5 years, and then spending the other 0.5 years during peak election season (midterm and presidential) sheep herding all the audience he grown being "contrarian" into voting Blue No Matter Who anyways because "The Republicans are still worse."
You missed Step 0, where he's in denial about how crazy Democrats are. See the "menstruating men" discussion with Dennis Prager.
You can't have a left-wing Joe Rogan because the next time he strays from the line on COVID or anything else, they'll get what Rogan got. Friedland has already had one brush with cancel culture for utterly inane reasons. He got past it because he was too small to be the priority target. Whoever sits in that spot will go down for something.
This whole discussion is a bunch of evangelicals sitting around trying to figure out why they can't make movies that appeal to outsiders while refusing to mention the mile-long faith statement and guidelines they need everyone working on the film to sign on to and the essential points of doctrine that must be squeezed in. There haven't been many good movies about Mohammed for a reason.
You can have a left-wing person who's at Joe's level. You can't have a left-wing Joe Rogan because Joe Rogan isn't a partisan warrior. That's how he got so big!
Even desiring a left-wing Rogan is telling on themselves. Not everyone sees their media consumption as a way to bring about the Kingdom. It's just more of the same: people need to be educated -> people resist and flee our spaces -> well, we should just colonize that outlet too so they have no escape. Doesn't work as well with new media.
Tanista
30d ago
I reject this premise. What we can do is work with them, educate them on how to live a better life, and love them.
As with HBD the question is what happens if you can't do that (at least at scale) and it's easier to do other things?
In this case "destigmatize" whatever their condition is, which seems to have somehow flowed directly into "publicize" and even "encourage".
You can see why. It's simply much more convenient, and less mean, if society has the problem and it can be made to disappear in a puff by encouraging the "marginalized".
If you take punitive/mean options off the table it's an excruciating problem to find some way of containing bad memes without containing carriers. And, frankly, it cedes power to a certain sort of person I'm not sure it's wise to trust.
The suicidewatch subreddit has always struck me as weird, in that it expects incredibly specific behaviors from posters that are in line with the way suicide hotline call center workers are trained, but from anonymous redditors.
I honestly don't think it's weird at all. Except maybe in a sort of Tumblr-ish "weirdos online intuit where the culture will go" way.
A lot of the stuff around microaggressions, trigger warnings and pronouns essentially insist on turning first any employee in proximity and then the average person into a caregiver for those who are or claim to be fragile.
A sad story. But I wonder if the object lesson is not so much about intolerance of dissent as it is about the characteristic Christian calling of humility: humility before morality, before duty, before other people, and ultimately before God.
Atheists of a certain sort simply do not see humility in religion but the opposite so this point never lands with them. But it should raise an interesting question: Christians are tyrannical, know-it-all busybodies, how bad do the consequences of a lack of humility have to be that even their book warns against it?
I get the sense that Democrats really, really, really wish they could just run against 2006 era George W Bush again, or Mitt Romney.
I mean, people just explicitly say this. Even with a sense of humor
They frame it as Trump being particularly awful but W was called a war criminal who killed hundreds of thousands for years, hard to say that 2016 - especially early - Trump was worse by any utilitarian calculus. It isn't just that Trump is loathsome, it's that it doesn't seem to stick. People giggle along way too much.
My roommates got a mining rig in college and, in hindsight, it's great for my FOMO because it made it clear I obviously would have done what they did and sold BTC off long before the peaks.
Assuming of course, that social transition itself is not a negative. Either to the person transitioning or society itself.
Tanista
1mo ago
It's not "loser-coded" if you're just a loser. Nobody would even blink an eye at a poor person being for socialism, it's not even a great condemnation to note it. It's sort of a trivial statement that losers look like losers.
"Loser-coded" implies that the act itself carries the stench of failure and ressentiment no matter who does it.
There were 76 million people in the US circa 1900 and they were 88% white. The American Empire followed, and it wasn't Chinese students building it. We did have a glut of Jewish talent but if anything the peak of our Empire was smaller than it would have been as their contribution was hastening the inevitable that was American victory.
The gulf between the West and the Rest was greater then.
Some nations may not have come as far as they think but China definitely isn't one of them. Even if we do the whole DR special pleading thing and assume that Asiatic bugmen are worth less than one intrepid Western autistic genius no matter what the overall IQ score says , no one can deny that China has the numbers, at least close human capital, and doesn't seem to be doing badly enough that Western quality is guaranteed a win.
The other side remembered the proscriptions and chaos caused by people pushing their reforms and will too far. People lost friends and colleagues and people like Pompey and Crassus were prime beneficiaries.
They weren't scared of just losing a political battle. They were scared of getting liquidated this time around if they let anyone claim enough political clout by getting certain wins.
Very different from the initial backlash to Trump. The moment of realization that history hadn't ended and there wasn't going to be a coronation by the emerging democratic majority may have felt existential but hard to argue it's the same.
It was not really a dispute about whether corruption was acceptable or unacceptable. I would argue that the Optimates' desire to sweep it all under the rug was actually a step in the wrong direction. Caesar talked about corruption openly, and having a problem out in the open is the first step to solving it.
Because it wasn't about corruption as such. They just didn't want Caesar (or, early on in his career, his allies Pompey and Crassus) to win
You can't really map it unto America by making it all about corruption in the shady business deal sense. You can't really explain anyone's behavior here (though arguably some Optimates seem crazy or reckless either way) without the civil war that preceded Caesar and what it did to the Roman psyche.
America isn't really there.
Now that Donald Trump is openly messing with US tax policy for personal gain with his combination of tariffs and insider trading, maybe that will be the catalyst to finally pass laws against using secret government intelligence to make money trading stocks.
I mean, if we're going to compare to the Roman Republic, it should be noted that many attempts were made to pass laws to fix the problems caused by corrupt people. Including, sometimes, by those very people!
It didn't work, and the after-effects of their corruption and norm-breaking outweighed their good intentions.
The Republic, once it became so "corrupt" that it lost the ability to promise its citizens safety in the pursuit of politics, could no more legislate that back into existence than it could control the weather or enforce a positive economic sentiment.
You can't always get it back. You can't always write something that outweighs your lack of virtue. Sometimes you just break things.
Sure. But that could be because it leads to a total loss on the political front in both the West and with its neighbors which might vastly outweigh any benefit to being more effective at killing Hamas.
I took the claim to be that it'd be militarily less effective than people tend to imagine.
Tanista
1mo ago
Why do you think it would go worse than expected for a casualty-insensitive modern military facing an enemy it totally outclasses and a hostage population?
Cause, in the recent cases of Western militaries tangling with such groups that come to mind, those foes have things (friendly geography, the ability to cross into a nuclear-armed Pakistan of dubious reliability) that Gazans simply don't.
That whole worldview (America as moral crusader) is dying anyway.
You'd think so. But, on the one hand, Trump criticizes regime change and social engineering and moralism in foreign policy and then litigates DR fascinations like South Africa and white genocide.
Perhaps we're just in the age where Americans don't even pretend that moral crusades are anything but domestic culture wars by proxy.
Tanista
1mo ago
Yes. Inasmuch as anyone at Columbia actually believes that this is tyranny, they should be willing to let the institution's current incarnation collapse before they give in.
Or you recognize that Trumpism may be temporary and letting him destroy Columbia before that would be useless or counterproductive since institutions like that will be needed come the counter-counter-revolution.
I grant it's totally hypocritical if you think there's an active genocide though.
Tanista
1mo ago
The entire history of the debate around wokeness: "Everyone is folding to wokeness, all the time. That's weird"
But also "so-and-so folded because he, specifically, is a pussy".
It's funny that even reversing the dynamic in favor of antiwokes doesn't change the assumption.
Tanista
1mo ago
I can get why Coogler didn't want the bad guy to be lying about the Klan, thematically.
I thought the mid-credits scene was a bit indulgent though and raised needless questions about the established vamp lore.
Currently reading SM Stirling's To Turn the Tide. Which is exactly the sort of ISOT story I signed up for. Not the deepest characters but still enjoyable enough. Except...
I just wish Stirling didn't crib from his own - much better - genre namer. You read enough of a small circle of althist writers like him and Eric Flint and you start to see the same tropes.
They said rap should be subversive, well what did they think subversive meant? Vibes? Essays?
Most people are able to roll with realizing rap not a subversive genre anymore, even if they feel embarrassed enough to cope a bit when their favorite rapper is at the Super Bowl. At worst, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, people disappear for a bit to deal with the revelation "the system" actually loves or is totally fine with their content.
The best proof of Kanye's mental illness is that his reaction to this is actually trying to be subversive. Sane people worry about their bills.
Tanista
1mo ago
The question is actually whether the wedge itself helped the giant grow.
American socialists continually lament the lack of class consciousness even on the left. The identity politics-obsessed left that has power has based their entire movement on America's second founding. Maybe the next weapon is just significantly worse.
Their power comes from the fact that there is - was - a bipartisan consensus on some things. Many things that expanded their power were justified explicitly by special pleading on race and either allowed or ignored by mainstream Republicans for fear of being on the wrong side again. Would they be equally sanguine for other things?
It took till Trump to even fight on the AA issue. Things like the trans activist craze are building off laws and ideas that started with race. In a different time it would be inconceivable how fast it's spread and even been mandated. But you can't actually deny the left the tools that do this, because they can always point out where they come from.
The same way it was managed before the revolution: you tell people the truth that men and women differ , and then you impose social costs on the males who can't behave appropriately . No focus on sympathetically explaining this, no "uplifting as Simone Biles demands even as she calls for transmen to be exiled to their own league. That implies ambivalence and people can sniff it out.
Start with unbelieving denial - of course you're not a woman, don't be ridiculous. Then mockery, contempt, maybe informal punishment from their fellow men when they step out of line by doing things like demanding to enter female washrooms (when administrations turn a blind eye men can rectify even the most stubborn)
I'm not convinced that most people are legitimately as clueless as they claim, I think many are just entitled and coddled (hand-wringing about how to get them to see this is,imo, part of the same coddling instinct). Jessica Yaniv knows what he's doing, he's outright malicious imo. Artemis at the very least knows that he makes women feel uncomfortable. He just knows he can get away with it.
But the lawyers are in charge of things now and you live in an age of "zero tolerance" for bullying. These sorts of men are harder to convince because they know they have the option of filing a lawsuit or complaining to some administrator or finding some advocacy group. That's most of it. It's not a matter of rational debate or education if one side can win by tattling to the teacher. It's just about power.
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