Jazzhands
7d ago
There's been a weird narrative push here lately to blame Christianity for the worst parts of leftism (see the similar "akshally Communism comes from Christianity" upthread).
You know the expression "Fascism is always descending upon America, but landing in Europe"? Same deal here. SJWs and Communists have been consistently and outspokenly opposed to Christianity. When you see a Christian organization turning to such left-wing activism, you can usually safely bet they are also on the off-ramp from being Christian.
Atheism is a critical ingredient.
Jazzhands
13d ago
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah%2027%3A6-8&version=NIV
Now I will give all your countries into the hands of my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; I will make even the wild animals subject to him. All nations will serve him and his son and his grandson until the time for his land comes; then many nations and great kings will subjugate him. If, however, any nation or kingdom will not serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon or bow its neck under his yoke, I will punish that nation with the sword, famine and plague, declares the Lord, until I destroy it by his hand.
I would simply remember Syria Libya. Why did the Democrats who had run against regime change in the Middle East decide to bomb them back to hell again? What was accomplished besides the reopening of slave markets? They didn't even bother selling it to the public, they just did it.
"We came, we saw, he died" was the main sober analysis offered by the administration at the time.
Jazzhands
19d ago
Ok, sure, if you redefine "social conservativism" to mean the opposite of how everybody uses it.
Jazzhands
27d ago
Are you under the impression that kids these days have grown up under a socially conservative system?
Jazzhands
2mo ago
Don Draper: Arranged marriages, but arranged by a computer instead of parents who love you.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
90% of the OP is about the current state of Republican epistemology, not the Left. And yet this subthread seems to be determined to prove the very intro it is complaining about.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
Depends how much you really believe in the wisdom of the crowd. If you can combine that with a general understanding that the epistemic status of any given tweet is very low, you might indeed be able to glean useful information, based on how wide a given piece of information has spread and for how long.
For example, the JFK files were just released. I ain't readin' any of that. But I am confident that if there's anything interesting in there, Twitter will surface it to me over the course of the next week. And if it's all a dud, it will surface that, too.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
Yeah, everything has trade-offs, and it's too early to say if this approach will actually be better than the previous one.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
It was a Left bubble, but now it's not. Left-wing Twitter needed to keep banning and suppressing stories they didn't like; right-wing twitter just out-tweets them.
So far right-wing twitter hasn't been used as much for cancellation (although arguably LibsOfTikTok does this); the targets are usually left-wing institutions.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
I've discoursed elsewhere on the Progressive Epistemic Crisis. Short version: they constructed such impervious bubbles that they become entirely disconnected from reality. Is the president senile? What is a woman? Is the economy good? The list of simple questions that a progressive cannot answer could go on and on.
This is problem for all of us, because they successfully marched through all the institutions that we all relied on to know what was true and what was important. The rot is evident everywhere, and has been discussed in these spaces many times before. Social sciences have a replication crisis. Alzheimer's research has been almost entirely fraud for 2 decades. University presidents dragged before Congress cannot articulate their views on calls for genocide, and cannot fall back on "free speech" defenses without everybody laughing in their faces. Nobody even knows who was running the presidency these past 4 years. And trust in the media, the institution tasked with helping to make sense of all of this, continues to crash.
The problem for the Left is how to extract themselves from these bubbles, or maybe even reform them. But the problem for the Right, which already believes them to be irredeemable, is what to replace them with. And it looks like the Right has coalesced around an answer.
Twitter. The answer is Twitter.
Legacy Ways of Knowing were highly authoritative and highly centralized; the new approach flips that entirely on its head.
The first thing you need to understand is that Twitter knowledge is delivered in a breaking-news, but very provisional, style. In Rationalist terms, every tweet is effectively tagged with "epistemic status: low certainty." Info comes in very fast, but the accuracy is also low; you have to wait and watch as the story develops and keep sampling the gestalt before you can have confidence in a given piece of info. When Elon talks about finding all these dead people in the Social Security and implies that this is a major source of fraud, he is pointing at an interesting thing he found and maybe it will grow into some more substantial as they dig into it. This is "move fast and break things" applied to epistemology. Even within the same story, you can contrast the two systems. On the left, an article was found to declare, authoritatively, that actually it's just COBOL. The pitfalls of both approaches show forth here, in that finding dead people will probably not catch much waste/fraud/abuse relatively speaking, but also in that the COBOL response was entirely incorrect.
Second, Twitter Knowing is highly decentralized. In the Legacy Knowing, you got with the party line quick if you knew what was good for you, or you were banned or cancelled. It didn't matter if they said masks were dumb last week, now they believe masks are good, and so now you will believe that too, with exactly the same certainty as the previous contradictory belief. Lefty pundits thought the Trump coalition was already cracking up when Musk tweeted in favor of more H1-Bs over Christmas, and got dogpiled for it; in their world such open dissent would have meant large numbers of purges all around. Instead, Musk retreated and the leadership received some valuable information about their coalition's views.
Of course, Musk did not quietly retreat. Instead, he changed the subject to Rotherham, and the Right united around remembering how terrible their enemies are. And this gets to the primary use of legacy media, which was not so much the transmission of information, but the directing of discussion. Leftwing institutions told them when to care about kids in cages (during Republican administrations) and when not to (during Democratic administrations)(1). Right-wingers have long struggled to match this narrative-pushing ability. But Twitter is now serving the same purpose of pushing forward stories to be talked about, and Musk is experimenting with just how far he can push that ability. Most of his current posts are mostly oriented around trying to nudge the narrative in certain directions. But note that he has this power because he is a highly followed account, not because he owns the site. Others with large follower counts can do the same thing, and increasingly will.
All of this could change very quickly, but that's where we stand at the moment. Legacy institutions already capitulated to this state of affairs when Biden resigned from the race via Twitter, with no further elaboration in any legacy media. Maybe they could have pushed back then, but not now.
tldr;
- Information is low confidence, but very fast. Confidence increases with time and retweets.
- The system is highly decentralized; there is no central arbiter of what is True.
- The system is now able to push stories.
(1) This should actually be seen as Kelsey attempting to wrest back some amount of agency.
There is one main reason it's not especially Joe Biden's fault: he's not in his right mind. One of the things about senility is that it can remove your ability recognize that you are senile.
The blame should be spread far wider. This is the fault of everybody else around him, who absolutely did know the condition he was in, and lied about it anyway. Most centrally, Kamala herself had a responsibility to say something, but she covered it up on the calculation that it was better for her personally. But she's hardly alone. Obama must have known. Pelosi must have known. Surely every senior Democrats in DC who interacted with the president knew, along with staff.
They all covered it up. The only party leaders who can claim they were not involved are governors and minor House members.
Jazzhands
1yr ago
Obama played games with the definition of "treaty" to try to get around the 2/3 Senate requirement to pass them, claiming it was merely a "non-binding political commitment." Republicans had stated their displeasure, too; the House voted down a resolution of approval (269 to 162), and Senate Democrats only managed to kill the resolution of disapproval by filibustering it (54 Reps opposed, along with 4 Dems). (And yes, that is down-voted resolution of approval, and a filibustered resolution of disapproval, which is what happens when you start the process with procedural gamesmanship.) Having avoided the work of getting buy-in from Republicans, and declaring it "non-binding," you don't get to complain when Republicans feel not-bound by it.
Clinton's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreed_Framework was not the Joint Declaration you linked to, but a response to that falling apart. It was also not approved by the Senate as a treaty, again because he knew the Republican Senate did not approve of it. This was all 5 years before Bush was elected and had a chance to pounce.
So, let's adjust this statement to be accurate:
In both cases, we have democratic presidents agreeing to nuclear treaties that would at least in theory prevent proliferation (and in my opinion would have). Then republican presidents dismantling those treaties.
In both cases we have democratic presidents pretending to have treaties, but not actually passing a treaty like the constitution requires. Shockingly, Republican presidents did not feel bound by these non-treaties that their parties had always opposed.
The entirely of the Testimonium Flavium, as we have it today:
That's not "diverged greatly," that's just short.
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