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Has anyone been checking out the reddit and hacker news reaction to TW's FAA scandal follow-up?
He's downvoted to -44 on /r/atc, which applauded his essay last year. Highlights from the comments:
The top-voted comment on hackernews is accusing it of being a rehashed non-scandal laundered by authoritarian fascists. But the actual comments are mostly in favor, or pointing out that there's suddenly a lot of brand new accounts defending the FAA & claiming "this wasn't real DEI."
Grendel-khan describes the reaction:
Taking it for granted for a moment that a lot of this stuff is totally astroturfed by blueanon orgs with AI-assisted spamming, it looks like doubling-down and tripling-down on full spectrum information manipulation is still the only strategy on the menu, even as it's increasingly failing and backfiring outside of totally controlled environments like reddit and bluesky.
So, what are the next four years going to look like? Is there going to be any evolution in strategy? Are they correct that just repeating a party line hard enough will bring people back into the fold?
I think that right now it's easy to point at this sort of frantic concern-trolling and laugh, but in a few years the average voter won't remember anything about some FAA hiring scandal except that "Trump used a tragedy for a culture war attack on minorities." Because while they'll only read a hackernews thread about TW's article once, they'll have heard the counter-narrative a million times, and will be sick of mustering the mental resources to reply critically with half-remembered anecdotes in the face of emotional blackmail. Eventually they'll forget they ever questioned the need for DEI programs, because only maga Nazis think that. The majority of people will never even see it once because reddit moderators deleted every mention of the article from the default subs, and banned the people who linked it.
So don't count on the familiar manipulation tactics failing forever just because it doesn't seem to be working right now. There is still an enormous propaganda engine manufacturing public opinion, and if I was in charge I'd make fighting it a high priority. But the current counter-elite supporting Trump dismiss that arm of the cathedral as opportunistic mercenaries, and fail to recognize the threat.
Moldbug and especially Thiel may absolutely despise the press, but they see the manipulation of public opinion as a quirk of "demotic" regimes, and have no time for it themselves. Moldbug in particular dismisses color revolutions with the over-simplistic "why does the dictator not simply shoot the revolutionaries with crypto-controlled weapons?" Thiel is quieter but clearly sees controlling the murder drones and spying rings as more important than propaganda. Musk is the only one of Trump's big backers who thinks control of social media is important, and I'm convinced that's because of his showman's instincts and desire for attention rather than some strategic policy.
People here have been talking as if the left will shift to violence and hard power in response to their usual methods failing last year (more assassinations of Musk & Trump, etc.). I'm a lot more worried about them doing the same thing they always do and getting away with it, because people don't have lasting immunity to propaganda.
I'm not sure I have a whole lot to say here beyond, "TracingWoodgrains is just right."
He's just right! There's no way to justify a norm like "never criticise bad things if my side is responsible". That's unironically the sort of logic that gets you the Great Leap Forward, where lower-ranking officials are afraid to report anything that goes against the narrative preferred by the higher-ups, and the result is always disastrous.
Set aside what you think about him as a person. On the specific issue here, he is just unambiguously correct.
The fact that people whose brains have been eaten by partisanship and culture war are unable to see that, whether that be lefties who have to deny and distract and minimise the scandal because it's going to be a win for the right, or whether it be righties who cannot possibly grant that a hated outsider did a better job of identifying and advocating for an issue that should have been an easy win for them, is really their own problem.
TracingWoodgrains is right.
Everything else is distraction.
I don't know who had their brain eaten by culture war if you think that people who don't want to sing praises of your friend must be distracting from the issue.
How did he do a better job identifying and advocating for the issue? He did a better job reporting on that particular story, but when it comes to the issue itself, how has he done a better job identifying it than anyone from James Lindsay through Lomez to the seven zillion witches posting here? How has he done a better job advocating for it, than Chris Rufo? Last I checked he was advocating that people vote for the candidate that would ensure more of this would keep happening.
As I said, it doesn't matter whether you like him or not. Nor do I care whether or not you praise him. The merits of TW as an individual are beside the point. The point is the issue itself.
I submit that TW is right about the issue, and that he has done a better job of bringing this particular issue to the public attention than anybody on the Motte, much less James Lindsay or Chris Rufo. Rufo has probably been more effective as an anti-woke activist in general, but on the FAA hirings scandal specifically - movement there is because of TW. He notes this himself.
And yes, he voted for Harris. He voted for Harris while publicly and passionately expressing his dissatisfaction with her, and after the election, he went on to continue to explain his problems with her, and what he thinks the Democrats ought to do, which means that I think this portrayal of him as some kind of bootlicking Democrat partisan is absurd. He made a judgement that, as much as he disliked Harris, he found her on balance the less-bad candidate that Donald Trump. If you want to blame him for literally everying that Harris or her political faction ever advocated for, then by the same logic we must blame every Trump voter for literally everything that Trump or his political faction ever advocated for. That is a lunatic standard to hold any voter to.
And even so, it is irrelevant, because whatever you think of TW's choice in the 2024 election, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the FAA hiring scandal or his activism thereabouts.
On the issue - he is right. You don't have to praise him. You don't have to like him. But he is right about the FAA.
This is like the argument that Microsoft is good because it brought computers to the people. Microsoft was the one who did that because Microsoft's own actions made there be no room for anyone else to do so.
It's very difficult for anyone not on the left to bring an issue to public attention, because of the actions of the left. So yes, it's true that he did, but this doesn't mean much.
Except he isn't "the left", he's one guy, and he's not responsible for it being "very difficult for anyone not on the left to bring an issue to public attention".
It's still his allies. And even if that doesn't count for anything, it's still that he did it because of external forces that made it easier for people like him.
I last heard this argument deployed to explain why white men didn't earn their accomplishments. I really didn't expect to see it deployed to explain why it doesn't count that TW spoke out against a bad thing.
If only Hlynka were here to see this.
It depends on how directly the second group is affected by the first group's actions, and how directly the members of the first group who accomplished things are associated with the members who did the oppression. If a group of whites suddenly oppressed all the nonwhites and their white friends all made great accomplishments within the next five year period, then yes, that may be a good point. But the lasting effect of oppression that happened a long time ago doesn't count.
I'd also question whether it's true anyway. The US and Europe are predominantly white, especially in historic time periods, so even if there was no oppression at all, most accomplishments would be by whites just by size of population. And when those countries oppressed outsiders, the outsiders generally were in primitive cultures that couldn't accomplish much regardless of whether they were oppressed.
Also, since Jews were oppressed for much of history, you can't use this to say that Jews didn't earn their accomplishments. Even over time periods where Jews weren't oppressed, you'd have to find out how many extra accomplishments the Jews had compared to non-Jews per capita, and exempt those too, since any such excess was unrelated to oppression.
This also raises the question of exactly what you mean by "doesn't count". It counts as TW doing a good thing. But it doesn't count if what you're praising him for explicitly depends on the size of his audience, such as "successfully promoted it when the right-wingers who first noticed it couldn't". (Which is another difference between this and the white people case.)
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