magic9mushroom's profile

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 7mo ago · Edited 7mo ago

Disclaimer: I don't actually work in the industry.

The problem AFAICS is that there are so many layers of selection against anti-SJ and no real layers of selection against SJ apart from the end-users, because arts are heavy on SJers and SJ will retaliate against people for helping an anti-SJ game.

Let's assume you're a game dev and you want to make an anti-SJ game. You need: funding, other devs, marketers, friendly-ish journalists, platforms to sell it on, and of course end users.

If you're rich, you can bankroll your own game, but if you're looking for investors you might have some trouble because of the latter stages, and because SJ has a reasonable degree of penetration into the financial system (i.e. people who can invest in you with other people's money, not just their own).

Lots of other devs are SJWs, so they're not going to work with you. The ones that aren't SJWs still are afraid to work with you, because if they do then their career is basically limited to "make more explicitly-anti-SJ games"; SJ will cancel them for the sin of working with you and they probably won't be able to be coworkers with SJWs ever again.

Lots of marketers are SJWs, so they're not going to work with you. The ones that aren't SJWs still are afraid to work with you, because if they do then their career is going to take a rather serious hit; lots of marketing agencies won't hire someone with that kind of black mark.

Lots of journalists are SJWs, so they're not going to promote your game. There is an alt-media ecosystem these days who've already paid the costs of cancellation and will not be deterred by it, but it tends to be focused on politics rather than entertainment; still, this one's noticeably less of an issue.

Lots of platform bureaucrats are SJWs, so you're going to have a hard time getting your game on those platforms. This one's especially hard because of the oligopoly.

End users, as you say, no real issue.

And a lot of these reinforce each other, too, because if the game is going to fail anyway then what the hell is the point?

Even trying to make a non-SJ game has some of these problems, because you still can't hire essentially any SJW devs (or to some degree marketers) without them at some point wanting to insert SJ and then you have the choice of either defying them and being considered anti-SJ by SJWs, or acceding in which case it's now an SJ game. And yeah, as others have said there are also rumours of ESG shenanigans on the "investor" rung.

Now, there are exceptions. Eastern media comes pre-made from a place where these incentives don't apply (although translators may still have a go at "fixing" it, that's actual extra work and thus less profit). Indie games don't have the incentives interlock quite as strongly because you need less people, although outside of single-person passion projects they're still there. But for the main industry? This $20 note is sitting on the ground... in the free-fire zone of the Berlin Wall. It's not impossible to pick it up, but it's also not surprising that it sits there a while.

41

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 11mo ago

It is exactly what you'd expect from the culture war, and the percentage of books written in the last 10 years (much less the last 20) is absurdly high.

No, it's not. It's "books of the 21st century" i.e. written in or since 2000, and 42/100 are 2014 or later. It's been about 24.5 years since Jan 1 2000, so you'd expect 42.8% to be in or since 2014.

34

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 16d ago · Edited 16d ago

To which I say, you aren't offering any evidence that these compromises are offered in bad faith, you're pretending to read the minds of your outgroup and ascribe the worst possible impulses to them.

I feel there's kind of a false dichotomy/definition debate going on here.

Let's talk about Newcomb's Paradox. There is and stubbornly remains some class of people who think the solution to the problem is to intend to one-box, but then to become a two-boxer after Omega has made its prediction. This solution is fatally flawed because, to misquote Minority Report, "Omega doesn't care what you intend to do. Only what you will do". If one will "become" a two-boxer before the decision is made, then one already is a two-boxer, because the definition of a two-boxer is "one who will pick both boxes", not "one who currently thinks he will pick both boxes". If I am programming Omega, and I want to make Omega as reliable as possible, I should count such people as two-boxers because they will two-box; their false consciousness of being a one-boxer, no matter how sincerely believed, is not actually relevant.

(I went looking for the exchange I had with one of these people, but I couldn't find it.)

The shape of the excluded third option should now be pretty clear. There exists a class of people who'll sincerely make a compromise, and then change their minds later. When talking about your ingroup, the natural tendency is to count these people as "good faith", because they believe what they say and you sympathise with them. When talking about your outgroup, the natural tendency is to count these people as "bad faith" because the natural context of analysing your outgroup is wanting to know whether deals will be kept or not.

Hence, under their definitions, "deals have not been kept in the past" is evidence of bad faith, because "your outgroup doesn't care what you intend to do. Only what your movement will do". It's not totally-irrefutable evidence - movements change, and not all deals are created equal - but it's relevant. Moreover, I think modelling social justice as unable to keep its bargains is actually fairly justified, because of two reasons:

Social justice is leaderless. Committees are bad at keeping their bargains absent specific effort, because committees tend to include people who wanted to reject the bargain, and turnover might lead to those people gaining control of the committee at some point (and "you should respect a bargain you never agreed to, because others in your movement did over your objection" is a much-tougher sell than "you should respect a bargain you agreed to"*).
Social justice is not very interested in keeping historical norms. "Dead old white men", and so forth. So that tough sell is even tougher.

I get that it's really awkward to respond to the claim "you can't make a believable compromise, because you will change your mind and/or others in your movement will overrule you". I sympathise. Unfortunately, that doesn't always mean it's false.

*I'm reminded of the exchange at the end of the TNG episode "The Pegasus":

PICARD: In the Treaty of Algeron the Federation specifically agreed not to develop cloaking technology.

PRESSMAN: And that treaty is the biggest mistake we ever made! It's kept us from exploiting a vital area of defence.

PICARD: That treaty has kept us in peace for sixty years, and as a Starfleet officer, you're supposed to uphold it.

It's very, very easy to be a Pressman. There are probably still circumstances where I'd be a Pressman, despite having assimilated Ratsphere cautions against it.

31

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 8mo ago · Edited 8mo ago

There's a speech from Order of the Stick which I'm just going to quote in its entirety because it's easier than re-inventing it from scratch.

Shojo: I mean The Game, the big one. The one that each of us plays every day when we get out of bed, put on our face, and go out into the world. Some of us play to get ahead, some of us just want to get through the day without breaking character. It's called "Civilization" No, wait, there's already a game called that... OK, it's called "Society." Your problem is that you don't want to play the game at all, you want to sit on the couch and eat Cheetos while everyone else is playing.

Belkar: Well, why shouldn't I? What's the point of their Society, anyway? It never did anything for me.

Shojo: The point is that if you laugh and spit in their faces enough times, they'll kick you out of the house—which in this extended metaphor means killing you.

Belkar: So, what, you're saying that the only alternative is to show up and play by everyone else's stupid rules??

Shojo: Of course not, my woolly friend. You can cheat. Twelve Gods know that I always did. Nudge die rolls, palm cards, "forget" penalties... but you have to sit down to play first. As long as the people at the table see a fellow player across from them, they'll tolerate you. A crooked player is a pain in the ass, but someone who refuses to play at all makes them start questioning their own lives—and people hate to think. They'd rather lose to a cheater, than dwell too long on why they're playing in the first place.

The expectation up until Trump was that everyone serious in US politics would at least pretend to stay within the bounds of Polite Society as defined by the Cathedral or whatever else you want to call it. Trump didn't. He didn't cheat; he refused to play the game at all, and spat in the faces of those that demanded he do so. That was a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of Polite Society/the Cathedral/etc., the same way that the Comics Code Authority was fundamentally undermined when Marvel ran a story in defiance of the Code and got away with it - if people can openly defy you without getting immediately punished and forced to repent, you aren't a consensus authority anymore, just another guy on one side of a controversy.

Now, one can certainly say that somebody like Trump was overdetermined to appear once SJ started drastically curtailing what counted as "acceptable for Polite Society". But that's not quite obvious even to me, much less to someone who thinks SJ is "just common fucking decency", and so he gets blamed for putting a bunch of propositions that had previously seemed like bedrock up for debate.

31

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 11mo ago

Do I agree with you on the object-level issue? Yes.

I think there's one clear nonsense point there, which is the connection drawn between "Trump found guilty" and "Trump is bad". Under the circumstances, Trump being found guilty should be a null update about his character. There are many excellent reasons to hate the guy, but this one - i.e. "if you can find a kangaroo court to convict someone of a crime, that makes him evil" - is obviously bananas; even divine command theory has question marks on it, and this moral precept amounts in practice to "tyrant command theory".

30

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 10mo ago

This is a bit of a tangent, but why do women tend to lean left?

My basic understanding:

The median woman is a lot less liberal (in the proper sense - "supportive of liberty") than the median man. Freedom of speech, in particular, is supported far more strongly by men than by women (e.g. Cato Institute poll - women tend to be far more easily offended and more willing to censor than men, mostly regardless of political valence of the speech). Free speech is now* mostly a right-wing issue, and is pulling men with it (like me!) but not women.
As a strongly-related but mildly-distinct point, women tend to be more conformist, and the education system has made SJ the "default" among the younger generations*; more men defect from that default than women.
A reasonable amount of SJ-influenced social policies are just explicitly stacked in favour of women (e.g. investigating male-dominated industries for sexism, but not female-dominated ones; here in Oz removing maths as a required year 12 subject but still requiring English); one should not be surprised that these tend to piss off men more than women, although this is AIUI less important than it sounds like it should be, because neither men nor women are Homo economicus and they don't vote purely their personal interest.

*Note the time-dependence here; IIRC in the 60s women tended to be further right than men.

27

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 10mo ago

The meme is "Can we stop restricting supply? Best I can do is subsidize demand".

The pic and snowclone are apparently based off a reality TV show about a pawn shop, with one of the proprietors having a catchphrase of "best I can do is [$X]".

27

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 11mo ago

It sounds like you think “they” can simply control what the jury believes.

The thing is, Trump's so polarising that you'd expect most people to vote on the jury based on their opinion of Trump, rather than the facts of the case. And, well, Manhattan voted 90% Democrat in 2020, and ten peremptory strikes for each side easily suffice for an all-Democrat jury (even strikes for each side advantage whoever has a majority, because striking a minority juror will usually succeed at replacing the juror with one of the majority while striking a majority juror will usually just replace the juror with another one of the majority - this is the same way the South could ensure all-white juries until Batson declared race-based peremptory strikes to be unconstitutional).

27

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 8mo ago · Edited 8mo ago

The only way, the only way to convince the Democrats that wokeness is Not Okay is to rub their noses in it like a dog. Smack them on the snout with a rolled up newspaper and proclaim "BAD!" in a thunderous shout. In a perfect world this would never have been required. In a better world they would have learned the lesson in 2016. We do not live in those worlds, we live in this one, and in this one they are still on the woke train. So I will vote for the man whose re-election constitutes the philosophical equivalent of smacking the Democratic Party on the nose with a rolled up newspaper before grinding it into the stain on the carpet.

They did learn a lesson from 2016; Biden the 2020 candidate was considerably more moderate. The problem is that Biden the 2021-2024 President, or rather his administration, wasn't moderate at all, because apparently the lesson they learned was "fake being moderate on the campaign trail and then exploit it once in power".

I think your only hope on this path is that the Democratic machine politicians are pragmatic enough to be willing to appeal to the centre and far-sighted enough to realise that tricking them is not a long-term solution and powerful enough to force the SJer groundswell into line; I'm not rating that very highly.

I think the ultimate way to deal with this has to include shattering all of SJ's walled gardens, so that they get to start seeing rightists first-hand as people, and so that their Authority foundation stops locking onto HR ladies and similar types. This, admittedly, does require power, and lots of it.

26

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 9mo ago

To your basic question of "why specifically this year", the answer is probably "Elon Musk bought Twitter and this is one of the fruits". Prior to that, this was a banned opinion in mainstream venues, so of course the mainstream didn't hear it much.

26

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 7mo ago · Edited 7mo ago

I agree with @Dean about "Democratic over-reliance on media shaping", but want to take it in a different direction. I don't have the numbers to hand (EDIT: I do now), but I saw an exit poll showing a staggeringly-huge swing among the under-30s - Gen Z, who are extremely online. And what happened online in the past four years? Elon Musk bought Twitter, which shattered SJ's consensus-astroturfing operation; up until then, they'd been seeing a false SJ consensus created by banning everyone who spoke out, but now they see something closer to reality. And I think that gave... call it "social permission" to not vote Democrat; SJ can no longer gaslight them into thinking that voting Republican is lonely dissent.

24

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 8mo ago

Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?

Zvi calls this the Incorrect Anti-Narrative Contrarian Cluster, and he's had a post about it in IOU status for nearly three years.

Part of the answer has got to be "the right is highly suspicious of running sanity gatekeeping, because all the institutions which were supposed to do that went rogue and abused their power to shut the right out of the conversation".

(Also, you mean "kooky".)

24

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 6mo ago

The drones spotted over NJ in December were Chinese kit equipped with gravitic propulsion systems.

No. Pulse detonation I'd believe. Nuclear I'd believe. Antimatter I'd be dubious about, but the stuff you'd need to fuel it isn't impossible to hide. Gravitic, no. Not even if you count "total conversion via black hole" as "gravitic"; an accelerator big enough to make one of those is too big to hide, and if they'd been in use for decades one of them would have gone boom (with a force greater than every nuclear weapon on Earth put together).

Tech like this would be extremely dangerous for obvious reasons. Reasons that would explain the secrecy.

I'm sorry, if you're talking about straight-up antigravity, they're not obvious to me.

If gravity has been cracked, it potentially means that other wild stuff like zero point energy is also on the table.

I'm sorry, but somebody's been filling your head with nonsense.

Zero-point energy is not a type of energy. It's just any energy that can't be extracted, and thus is part of the effective "zero point" of your scale. "Extracting zero-point energy" literally means "extracting energy that can't be extracted", which is by definition impossible - either you can extract it or you can't.

Any time somebody talks about "zero-point energy" as a power source, that's an immediate "this guy has been suckered by pseudoscience".

23

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 4mo ago

How the fuck does he have so much ammo?

General rule of politics is that systems will be about as corrupt as they can get away with. One would presume that DOGE was not baked into the calculations of how much they could get away with.

22

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 7mo ago · Edited 7mo ago

It fully corrupts the parent/child relationship; every member of our society learns when they grow up that their mother once had the fully legitimized option to have them slaughtered, and depending on her social environment and character she may well have seriously considered it. It's a horror lurking in our collective unconscious which we willfully repress, in much the same way that we repress our own mortality by avoiding the thought of hospitals and old folks' homes, keeping them sterile, out of the way, antimemetic.

I'm not actually against abortion, but I have to say you're not wrong about this. I do remember being a kid (7-10 age range IIRC) and telling Mum "thanks for not aborting me", and her not being super-reassuring about it (I don't think she seriously considered it, but I'm damned sure that during my adolescence she often wished she had). It's a bit creepy.

21

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 8mo ago · Edited 8mo ago

The literal Fair Game notice was/is a Scientology term; L. Ron Hubbard would declare someone "fair game", and this meant "use any and all means to ruin this person" (frivolous lawsuits, slander, illegal spying and leaking to tabloids, framing for crimes...).

There seems to be something akin to a Fair Game notice (though presumably not with that exact name) in place against Elon Musk following his purchase of Twitter (and gutting of its censorship bureau); loads of different federal agencies have done things to screw over unrelated Musk businesses (the one I recall off the top of my head is the FCC retracting the rural-Internet grant to Starlink, on the basis that it hadn't met the target yet, despite the target not being due for another couple of years; there's a dissent from that order which lists a bunch of others, though I don't know all the details, as well as noting that Biden was fairly open about this). My understanding is that this is half of the reason Musk's star has been waning recently (the other half being that Twitter isn't his sort of business and it's distracting him).

As noted, due to Twitter being among other things a news service, this is in direct opposition to freedom of the press (as well as impartial justice). You can plausibly argue that this is significantly worse than Watergate due to the sheer scale of the corrupt operation (the Sedition Act was still worse, but that was 225 years ago). But, uh, this seems to have not been a huge scandal, which has disturbing implications about the USA.

21

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 8mo ago

Would you mind giving me confidence levels on your predictions of:

Trump won't be declared the winner;
If Trump is declared the winner, he'll not take office;
If Harris takes office, Elon Musk will be arrested in the next year?

19

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 11mo ago

I can't remember which centre-left memelord said "Who was President in summer 2020 is a key election issue." but the point isn't that people have forgotten who was President, it's that Trump has successfully convinced people that he wasn't making the decisions and the Deep State is to blame for the screw-up.

Wasn't it proven that the vaccine was intentionally delayed to come out after the election in order to spike Trump's chances? Like, Zvi mentioned this, and if anything he's got TDS; he's no Trump shill.

19

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 3mo ago

But within reason, I generally lean on the side of privileging the freedom of the (public) artist, regardless of the aesthetic preferences of the public who will be exposed to their work. If it's that important to you, then you should consider becoming an artist too. And if it's not sufficiently important to you, then you are at the mercy of the people to whom it was sufficiently important.

I'm not sure that this is coherent. If the artist has the freedom to put a sculpture of a gory corpse outside my house against my will, because that fits his conception of beauty, then do I not have the freedom to melt down his sculpture with a blowtorch against his will, because that fits my conception of beauty? Am I not also an artist, for making the world around me more beautiful as I see it?

You might say "well, he got approval from the government and you didn't", but since we're presupposing that the public agrees with me, and since this is presumably a democratic government that is supposed to follow the public will, for the government to give him and not me approval is an obvious bug, not intended behaviour.

18

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 4mo ago

There are several interlocking factors that make any September 11 lookalike impossible, at least in a way that TSA checks can help to prevent.

Passenger agency. September 11 got 3/4 successes because every previous plane hijack had been to hold the passengers hostage, not to use the plane as a battering ram. This meant that in 3/4 cases the passengers didn't zerg-rush the terrorists. That's over now. Flight 93 will happen every single time. Indeed, this response is so ingrained that it goes off accidentally some amount of the time when somebody is misidentified as being a terrorist.
Plain-clothes police on board planes. Usually these guys mostly wind up having to prevent a would-be terrorist from being lynched, due to #1, but they do provide an added layer of protection.
Cockpit security doors. These do trade off "passenger is a terrorist" against "pilot is himself a terrorist", but "pilot is a terrorist" is specifically something that can't be stopped by the TSA checks; he doesn't need any unauthorised items to fly a plane into a building. This is basically a matter for background checks on pilots, and TTBOMK they do a decent job at weeding out terrorists (though a worse job at weeding out random suicides).

18

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 7mo ago

The Chinese don’t desire control of the world. They never have, it’s not in their genes.

You know that for like two millennia China had a policy of "no equals, only tributaries and rebels", right? That's a large part of why the Opium Wars happened; Qing China insisted that it wouldn't treat the Western powers as sovereign nations - there were to be no negotiations, only tribute, acknowledging the Emperor as their feudal overlord, and begging him for magnanimity - and while the Dutch played along with the farce, the Empire on which the Sun Never Sets said "fuck that" and kicked over the anthill.

And the core tenet of the CPC's legitimacy is that that pratfall was a terrible injustice and that it will bring China back to the glory that preceded it.

18

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 7mo ago

The PRC wants the South China Sea, Taiwan, Senkaku, Ryukyu (they've openly put out feelers, even if they haven't officially demanded it yet), and a few territories along the Indian border, plus maybe Korea, plus some degree of control over the policy of ~everywhere (see e.g. the Fourteen Demands).

Japan and South Korea will nuclearise if Taiwan falls unfought. Pure if-then. In a world where the USA is not willing to defend East Asia and the PLAN has Pacific Ocean access unobstructed by the First Island Chain, Beijing would otherwise be able to dictate terms to them due to the threat of blockade (neither country is remotely close to food security).

Unless we feel like performing the kowtow, we're probably going to have to fight the PRC, and if so we should fight it while our allies are all intact and the geography works against it.

18

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 9mo ago · Edited 9mo ago

I notice that 100% of what you've said both in your blurb here and in your blurb on YouTube avoids the appearance of partisanship, but the actual video is very clearly intended to get people to vote for Harris. This is disingenuous.
You have zero mention of the issue that, hey, this situation sucks and that preferential voting would help avoid these kinds of dilemmas.
You paper over the issue that while politicians do often keep their promises, a lot of things simply aren't on the ballot. You don't even acknowledge the possibility that for some people, not voting for either major party is in fact the correct choice because there's no difference on the relevant issues. (To give an example, I tried to single-issue vote on civil defence last election year here in Australia, but I couldn't, because all parties' civil defence policies were the empty string; I eventually gave up on that and voted on other, less-important issues, but like 80% of what I wanted simply wasn't available to vote for.)
Your description of the case for not voting for the lesser evil as an excuse for "it feels bad" is to a fair extent a strawman (also your naïve first-order consequentialist point is greatly exploitable), and reeks of using Dark Arts to shame people into doing what you want i.e. voting for Harris.

Overall, this is get-out-the-vote propaganda masquerading as a fair look at the options, I'm disgusted, and my opinion of you is drastically lowered. This is the case even though I would mildly prefer that Harris won.

18

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 10mo ago

No, we get that by rewarding incompetence (there's that sign tap again...). We don't need to overcorrect to fix that, we just need to actually punish those people instead of promoting them or whatever.

@RandomRanger's point is that if you are rewarded for recklessness (or punished for prudence) a lot of the time and only punished for recklessness when something goes wrong, the punishment when something goes wrong needs to be large to outweigh the benefit and thus provide a net disincentive.

This isn't critical infrastructure, come on. It's freaking antivirus. It's not the only one, nor is it ubiquitous. It's just another software product.

I hear that it's basically required in a bunch of fields for regulatory compliance purposes; is that not so? Also, uh, I can't get any hard numbers but I'm guessing a bunch of people died due to hospitals getting hit. When you're playing the government-contracts game, there are responsibilities attached to that.

I'm willing to bet you that the technical people did want to test updates. Maybe their direct managers did too, although that I'm less certain about. But at the end of the day, when your boss says "do this or else", very few people are willing to take the "or else" option. That's not unreasonable of them.

Usually when "do this" has massive negative externalities, you want a) to have the boss get in trouble for saying that, b) to have the civil/criminal penalty for "do this" be larger than the corporate penalty for "or else". Basic game theory; you want "do this" to never be picked, so you need to make sure those picking never have an incentive to pick it regardless of what other shenanigans are going on.

18

Context

magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 3mo ago

Trump isn't flying blind because the sensemaking institutions he inherited are so corrupted as to be worthless. He is flying blind because he is an unrigorous vibes-based thinker.

Scott, "Planet-Sized Nutshell":

There is an extraordinarily useful pattern of refactored agency in which you view humans as basically actors playing roles determined by their incentives. Anyone who strays even slightly from their role is outcompeted and replaced by an understudy who will do better.

In a sense it's both. The reason Trump is that way is because he's Trump. Why is Trump POTUS, though, rather than losing the Republican nomination back in 2016? Well, because all the sensemaking institutions said "Don't nominate Trump" and the Republican base treated that as an endorsement. "Be a huckster" was no longer a losing strategy to get the Republican nomination, because the Republican base no longer trusted the institutions that normally filtered out hucksters, because those institutions by then also filtered out anyone loyal to the Red Tribe; indeed, the base went so far as to anti-trust the institutions and deliberately do the opposite of what they said.

17

Context

What is this place?

Why are you called The Motte?

New post guidelines

Rules

Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats

magic9mushroom

magic9mushroom