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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   34923 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Noah Smith thinks DOGE's purpose is to drive liberals out of the civil service, to make room for conservative hires. Three paragraphs from below the paywall of today's post:

It seems clear that defeating the “woke mind virus” is high on DOGE’s list of priorities — my guess is that it’s actually the #1 priority. Trump’s first action with regards to the civil service was to fire all the DEI staff. But woke attitudes are far more widespread than just the few people who are officially hired to work on DEI, and Trump and Musk are probably united on the need to root out as many as possible.

This is probably why Elon loudly made a big deal out of rehiring a DOGE staffer who was fired for racist tweets, despite having himself gone to war on X against people making similar tweets. Federal civil service workers are a lot harder to fire than workers at Twitter; many are on contract, and there’s a limit to how long they can be placed on administrative leave. Musk tried the gambit of offering a buyout to all federal employees, but very few took it. One relatively easy way of getting the government’s wokest staffers to quit is to make it clear that the culture of their workplace has changed, and an easy way to do that is to have guys who write stuff like “Normalize Indian hate”.

This also explains many of the programs that Elon is going after. Actual examples of fraud are few and far between, but a decent number of federal grants and other programs have either been outsourced to progressive NGOs, repurposed for “justice”-related goals, or had DEI programs attached to them. When the DOGE people talk about “waste” and “fraud”, it’s usually just progressive stuff like this (which, to be fair, they do consider wasteful).

This seems to fit the available evidence, but what would prove or disprove it? I'd be more convinced if there had been a clear effort to recruit conservatives, prior to this - driving out progressives by purposely making civil service jobs generally less appealing doesn't make me want a civil service job.

I'd be more convinced if there had been a clear effort to recruit conservatives, prior to this - driving out progressives by purposely making civil service jobs generally less appealing doesn't make me want a civil service job.

In his companies, Musk has recruited peerless employees despite being awful to them, sometimes even awful in an unfair way.

There's a paradox here, which I think is best illustrated by this comparison. Which advertisement will result in the most effective military?

  1. Come join the military. It's not that hard and we'll give you lots of free stuff!

  2. The military will be the hardest experience of your life. You might even die. Only the toughest will make it.

Recruiting people who are doing it for the money or for cushy work conditions gets you exactly the civil service we have now.

Any good info on post-Musk twitter recruiting?

Not sure. Tech is kinda easy right now because of all the layoffs in 2022/23. Twitter is doing really well with the employees they do have. The site functions better than it did before.

On a business level, Twitter is crushing it. It's profitable and, with the advertiser boycott broken, it's about to start absolutely gushing cash.

In 2021, Twitter's revenue was $5.1 billion, with expenses of $5.3 billion. Let's assume that expenses are closer to $1-2 billion now, and that revenue is starting to crawl back up towards 2021 levels. This thing is going to throw off billions in profit per year.

It's profitable and, with the advertiser boycott broken,

Was it?

This is a sincere question- I wasn't tracking any particular industry movement, and last I'd heard was of a lawsuit against boycotters, rather than a breakdown and return of advertisers.

All of the ads I ever see are tiny companies I’ve never heard of. Actually, “companies” might be a bit generous. Most of them seem like outright scams.

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