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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32763 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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So...guilty until proven innocent? This has never happened before.

Low-stakes crisis like this is the outcome of having a huge creative and intellectual-elite class, abundance, and economic prosperity and geopolitical stability. Twitter is the prefect medium for this. It will get much worse. Who's funding all of this. It's being funded by an endless supply of substack $, subscriber $. It's coming from somewhere. Like with Google we know they make money from advertisers buying ads, but who is is funding all this culture war?

I suspect that for the causes the right favors it's more grassroots (apparently a good chunk of the funding for the last North American right-wing protest came from the US even though it didn't occur there- admitting that doesn't help anyone involved, of course) and for the causes the left favors it's a lot more organized.

[Assume left and right are just sides of the aisle for the following].

The right-wing party doesn't listen to its voters as much as the left-wing party does partially because the people the State wants to target disproportionately exist on the right (and right-wing parties aren't immune to this when they form government), so they can't be as centralized for legibility reasons WRT the State. Substack's model of "Stripe doesn't serve Substack directly" helps them significantly in this regard- Patreon isn't as useful for the more interesting parts but not all parts need to be interesting.

For the causes the left favors? The grassroots movement for them haven't been nearly as strong- mainly because they have less middle (a double helping of "they're the State so they're necessarily against it" and "their civil religion currently happens to align with its elimination"), so it's organized backing by the strongest foreign corporation that owns the American means of production along with domestic corporations through both official State and deep State (in the "adopt the [anti-middle-class/right] religion, or we stop inviting you to the WEF dinner parties and start working against you" sense) pressure.

Twitter is the prefect medium for this. It will get much worse.

And now you know why left-wingers are apoplectic about the fact they no longer directly control Twitter; I think they believe (correctly?) that they've lost Twitter as command and control for their human botnet like they made heavy use of in 2020 WRT coordinating riots and general disease hysteria unless they manage to neutralize him and state power is all they have to do that (left-wing people aren't Starlink or Tesla customers). Remember, the only people who stopped using Twitter when he bought it were the religious, and religion alone is clearly not enough (which the relative failure of Gab and Truth Social should have made clear before the Left tried and failed with Mastodon).

And now you know why left-wingers are apoplectic about the fact they no longer directly control Twitter; I think they believe (correctly?) that they've lost Twitter as command and control for their human botnet like they did in 2020 WRT coordinating riots and general disease hysteria unless they manage to neutralize him and state power is all they have

This is why I'm still slumped that elites let Elon buy twitter. Top billionaire elites could have easily pooled their money together to buy it. Disney alone is worth $190 billion but just $40 billion for a major organ of propaganda is almost a good deal. Maybe they are hoping he runs it to the ground and then buy it back cheap, but why take that risk?

Top billionaire elites could have easily pooled their money together to buy it.

No. Only Musk could do it.

Most billionaires aren't actually that rich. They wouldn't be able to come up with enough money.

And of the ones that are, most of them aren't American (and the US would absolutely not let a foreign buyer get their hands on the Voice of America Twitter- Musk is US citizen enough for the government to offload its space program onto his company).

And of the ones that are, most of them work for technology companies that directly compete with Twitter (anti-trust law in the US is a dead letter these days, but if anything could get them to wake up it would be that- Musk isn't that kind of tech billionaire).

The thing that bothers me is that Musk is the only citizen in the US to whom its Constitution meaningfully applies, and has it in ways people meme about. There is a reason it was supposed to be for all citizens and this is it.

He purchased the First Amendment (he owns Twitter).

He purchased the Second Amendment (he owns a private fleet of ICBMs).

He purchased the Fourth Amendment (he owns a functionally-unjammable communications network).

If the country melts down sufficiently to allow a Caesar there's a very good argument to be made that these powers are sufficient to give him a crown.

If that happens, the furries (that also happen to be a good chunk of his staff, though not necessarily intentionally) will have been responsible for putting the Musk dynasty in charge of the entire world and the flag of the future will be a pawprint softly caressing a human face forever.

he owns a private fleet of ICBMs

Last I heard, it's a lot harder to get a working warhead on a rocket these days than it is to get the rocket.

Anything is a "warhead" at sufficient velocity.

Surely there's some non-nuclear explosives that are "good enough" to stick on a rocket...

Any larger corporation could have done a much richer stock for stock swap, it didn't have to be cash only.

Wait, furries? I'd ask where do they come in, but it sounds like the setup to a really gross punchline.

I'd ask where do they come in

The guy employs a lot of smart technical people.

That group just happens to disproportionately be furries.

That's it. History tends to have a sense of humor, so clearly this is the way it's going to go. Musky husky uwu

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