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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2872 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 2, 2025

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Who is the best, most sane, and intelligent, centrist or left-leaning commentator/podcaster you can recommend for me to listen to? I'm a bit worried that as the Motte trends further rightward that I'm in too much of a filter bubble, and most of the stuff I naturally listen to is right-leaning, because the stuff that's explicitly leftist is braindead and infuriating. I don't want someone ranting about how Trump is Hitler, I want people good, calm, and reasoned defenses for their positions that I don't already agree with so I can understand their position and maybe find some insights that I previously dismissed as braindead because I only heard the stupid version of it before. I used to like Sargon of Akkad for this, because he was in a nice centrist zone: left on some issues but right on others, but every year he drifts further right and I don't think he serves this purpose anymore.

I like to listen to people talk about stuff while I'm playing casual games that don't take up too much brain power or require audio themselves, so multi-hour broadcasts with a lot of backlog are ideal. I do read things sometimes, obviously since I'm here, but I'm mostly looking for audio right now.

most sane (...) centrist or left-leaning

Underdefined. These days even the boring centrists seem certifiably insane, and who even counts as "left"? I like Angela Nagle and Aimee Terese, the Red Scare girls are ok as well, but this is because our worldviews aren't in that much of an opposition, so... are they "left"? Am I?

Hasn't Angela Nagle already had her 15 minutes of fame due to her book after which she was ostracized by her tribe for appearing on Tucker's TV show? This was many years ago.

Yes, but I think she was at her most interesting after that. For a while she was going various dissident podcasts, then she started a substack that was also quite interesting, but fell off in terms of frequency of activity. I recently saw her starting a podcast there with some dude I never heard of, the podcast is again quite good, but the last episode was published a month ago.

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