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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls. Might not make everything false, but you might as well read chicken entrails if you want something specific enough to actually say.

Austen Allred of Sigma Bloom formerly known as Lambda School lied about everything until his firm blew up and PG still defends him.

There's probably a steelman of that Allred piece -- heaven knows Lambda's collapse has a lot to be embarrassed about -- but it has such a scattered grab-bag of every disagreement possible that it's a little hard to take at face value. The clear illegality of operating as an unregistered school is damning, and then it's undercut by the 'oh and the legislature had to update the law later to make clear it was really-illegal not just I-want-it-to-be illegal'. Allred's homelessness was a lie, because he could have gone back to his parent's spare bedroom, as evidenced by this example of a guy who... was homeless until he made calls and went to a friend's spare bedroom. He did that incredibly dumb Sample Size of One Gimmick, but he also considers a court holding an arbitration clause intact as winning (spoiler: yes) and ran a pretty stupid 500 USD hustle to try to promote a YouTube channel (congrats, you've found an influencer). He's made three references to Elon Musk, which is tots a sign of delusion, and not just having different political aspirations, which is near-certainly what really set Sandusky off. There's some serious criticisms of Lamda excluding 'no-longer-searching' students that weren't searching because Lambda left them with no change or dropouts that Lamda went after for pennies, and also here's a claim of 27% job placement that's behind a paywall, which, once you roll the rock aside depends on interpretations of a leaked slide deck that, afaict, isn't anywhere online and allegedly is disputed by third-party auditors.

Which is probably is big difference. Graham's definitely got some serious faults here, and that he's not more critical where Lamda has fucked up says a lot about whether he's on the outside pissing in or the inside pissing out. But his sort of people have an answer about an indefensible fellow insider: they never mention them again. That's what you're seeing with Breslow -- Bolt faltered like most companies trying to upscale too fast in a highly competitive field (albeit with some hilarity when the pivot to profit collapsed, which isn't especially interesting, but that he dissed them and no one cares enough to accuse Breslow of eating faces means you couldn't get Graham et all to mention his name without a set of pliers.

Graham doesn't damnae memoria Allred not because of some complex conspiracy, but because he thinks there's some defensible variant of Lamda's goal that the school simply missed (and to be fair, I could be persuaded!), and at a more importantly, because so many criticisms of Allred were and are somewhere between exaggerated and junk.

My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls.

I think my grandparent's called that paranoid schizophrenia. Everything is connected, if you are mentally ill enough.

This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence :)