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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   32611 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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He certainly seems to be pricking all the right people.

Let's hold course and see how it goes.

This post is a perfect encapsulation of the totalizing nonsense of negative partisanship.

Is it good? Who cares! It makes the outgroup angry, so it must be good in some way!

This post is a perfect encapsulation of the totalizing nonsense of negative partisanship.

You can think what you like.

Filing the Elon drama of the moment under "Kamala is vibes." A few people nervously repeating themselves loudly isn't a compelling argument.

(Doesn't seem to be moving the social needle much anymore either. Funny how that works.)

Its not just about making the outgroup angry, it is why they are angry. That reason is that they are losing money that they were deploying both as sinecures for party loyalists, and also money for straight up political activity. Every program will have its charismatic sob stories, but between USAID the Department of Education, and others, a lot of left wing money has the potential to simply dry up. I've commented a few times now, with little engagement on this point, but aren't a lot of honest left-of-center people REALLY embarrassed about how huge portions of the movement are being revealed as government funded astroturf? With that plus the ACTBlue fraud, is there any actual grassroots to the movement at all? What is the response to this? "Yes the left should be funded by the government?" That would be honest for the people angry about various cuts to say, but can they bring themselves to be honest on this point?

but aren't a lot of honest left-of-center people REALLY embarrassed about how huge portions of the movement are being revealed as government funded astroturf?

Musk has told enough lies about what DOGE have found (most notoriously, claiming that Politico Pro subscriptions were grants funding left-wing coverage on politico.com) that honest left-of-centre people have tuned him out as a lying liar. More broadly, his decision to use MAGA Twitter as his main tool for disseminating information about DOGE means that he has put himself into the MAGA Twitter bozo bin from the point of view of leftists, centrists, and Fox News watching conservatives. If someone accuses me of being the second gunman behind the grassy knoll, molesting babies in the basement of a pizza parlour with no basement, and petty corruption, I am not going to be embarrassed by the petty corruption allegations even if they are true.

The legal argument here is snark, but the underlying point is serious. Musk has now successfully defended two lawsuits (over "pedo guy" and "funding secured") on the basis that he is a notorious shitposter, everyone knows he doesn't fact-check his tweets, and only a moron in a hurry would believe anything based on a Musk tweet. Nobody who isn't in the tank for Musk is going to be embarrassed based on a Musk tweet without receipts, and the receipts DOGE have provided have been laughably inaccurate.

You are telling on yourself. Twitter isn't maga, Twitter is the lack of left wing censorship

Not all of Twitter is MAGA, but MAGA Twitter is MAGA, and Musk is part of MAGA Twitter - both in that he is a major supporter of Donald Trump, and in that he mostly likes/promotes/interacts with other MAGA accounts.

It does not seem to me that positive change can be built on just flipping off all the bad people.

If nothing else, one way to offend bad people is to also be bad yourself. There has to be a positive vision somewhere. A politics of nothing but contempt and hatred is an inherently sterile politics.

It does not seem to me that positive change can be built on just flipping off all the bad people.

What do you think the justice system and police do? Sure, they sometimes reallocate some resources to victims, but the vast majority of their job is punishing bad people.

The justice system does not exist to spite criminals. It exists to maintain public order and occasionally dispense justice.

And what actions does it take in pursuit of those goals?

To the extent that "maintaining public order" is compatible with normalized widespread criminality and the dispensation of justice becomes more and more evidently an afterthought, one notices that the justice system's capacity for performing this function declines precipitously.

It seems at least possible that sustainable maintenance of public order necessitates a lot more punishing bad people than we're currently doing.

It seems at least possible that sustainable maintenance of public order necessitates a lot more punishing bad people than we're currently doing.

Are you sure? Even last year homicide seems to have fallen again and certainly in PA's large cities we are now at a near 10 year low, and much much lower than we were in the 80's.

In Philly the homicide rate peaked at over 44 (per 100,000) in the mid 1980's. Dropping to about 16 in the early 2010's, it peaked again at about 35 in 2021 but has dropped again down to just over 17 for 2024. And so far in the year it is about 35% down on last year, which means we might actually get the lowest homicide rate in the last 50 years in 2025. Pittsburgh's numbers seem to following the same rough trajectory.

For the whole US the peak appears to have been 1991 with 10.7 before reaching a low of 4.7 in 2014 before increasing to 7.75 in 2021, and decreasing to 5.2 for 2024. So similar trends across the nation. Estimates for the 1950s and 60s put the figure around 5 then as well. So 2024 was one of the least violent (looking at homicides) years in modern US history.

The evidence seems to suggest that not only can we actually maintain a level of violent criminality much higher than we are currently at (not that I am saying that is a good idea of course!) that our current rate is not actually all that high (historically) as the Covid era increase has largely now vanished.

Just for comparison, my homeland had a homicide rate about 31 per 100,000 at the peak of the Troubles in the early 70's but had decreased to about 0.8 before Covid. It spiked up to around 1.3 during Covid and dropped back to 0.7 in 2024.

I think the evidence shows that public order can in fact be maintained with significantly higher levels of criminality and lower levels of punishing bad people. I am not advocating for that being a good idea just to be clear!

Just pointing out we do have a pretty high tolerance all in all, and that if current means whatever punishing we are doing in 2024 and so far in 2025 it seems to be working pretty well.

It seems at least possible that sustainable maintenance of public order necessitates a lot more punishing bad people than we're currently doing.

Having withdrawn from the excesses of the Floyd/COVID era, we're noticeably better off than in the Crack Era, so I don't think we're at an unsustainable point. There's a lot of ruin in a nation, or perhaps more appropriately -- "There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept"

Norms are still dropping, monotonously in sequence. It's entirely possible that Trump and the MAGA movement will fail. If they do, it doesn't seem likely to me that we simply return to the status quo ante.

If they do, it doesn't seem likely to me that we simply return to the status quo ante.

Depends on what comes after them. It could be a new leftist bad idea. It could be a new rightist bad idea. Or it could be the Return of The Good Responsible People Who Trust The Experts. In none of those cases will we return to the status quo ante. But collapse due to crime doesn't seem likely at our current level or on our current trajectory.

Not really. You could get a lot of positive change simply by identifying and liquidating the right elements. Look at the power the french revolution unleashed without any coherent vision, simply by executing entire classes of people and confiscating all their horrifically misallocated assets.
It wasn't the "temple of rationality" and the decimal calendar that let them fight off the whole of Europe. It was liquidating the existing order in a tide of violence and hate.

An awful lot of America's problems could be solved by tearing off the cover over government spending and taking a hot poker to the blood-sucking parasites clogging up the system. No other reforms needed. Suddenly ten billion dollar federal grants to build EV charging stations might actually get something done instead of being laundered into handouts for party members through dozens of layers of non-profits and agencies.

It wasn't the "temple of rationality" and the decimal calendar that let them fight off the whole of Europe. It was liquidating the existing order in a tide of violence and hate.

Correction- it was Napoleon’s willingness to direct civilian resources towards the military. Levee en masse was the main reason France broke Prussian and Austrian power so thoroughly.

Long before Napoleon, I mean the original first coalition wars.

without any coherent vision

You mean establishing a totalitarian state worshipping reason as a god (for a while) which forcibly conscripted much of the population (for the first time ever)?

fight off the whole of Europe

Historical demographics are quite different from today's. On the eve of WWI, Europe had 25% of the world's population. To copypaste an old comment of mine a bit later:

The idea that Napoleon’s odds were insurmountable in 1813-14 doesn’t add up numerically either. The demographics of Europe in the early 19th century were very different than they are today. The French Empire and its Italian, Swiss, and Dutch client states contained 56 million people. French-occupied Germany was another 20 million at least. The Russian Empire had 35 million people, Austria 23 million, Britain 10 million, Prussia 10 million, and Sweden 3 million. Britain had imperial possessions as well, but their governments were even more decentralized than in later periods and their people could not be effectively mobilized for war. So, we can see that the “inexhaustible allied hordes” are a myth. Altogether, the allies controlled 81 million people and the French 76 million. France also controlled what was then the richer part of Europe, and could more easily mobilize its population. Case in point, after the total loss of his army in Russia Napoleon had another one waiting for him in Germany already.

In 1800, metropolitan France had about 30 million people and Russia 25 million (including many Poles, just incorporated, who would support Napoleon.)

I would argue, actually, that Revolutionary France developed extremely impressive state capacity, and it was its near-unprecedented level of mobilisation of resources that allowed it to fight off half of Europe. That wasn't something that automatically appeared in the absence of the king, but rather had everything to do with the systems of government of the new republic, some inherited from before the revolution, but some built anew as well. That level of organisation just doesn't come from nowhere.

One thing I find annoying about Trump is that he generally has a zero-sum mindset. If Canada is happy with how trade with the US works, then that means that they are shafting the US. If Iran agreed to the deal, then that deal was obviously contrary to US interests. If the Democrats get really angry when he fires National Park employees, then it is in his interests to fire them.

Real life is not a zero-sum game, but often closer to a coordination problem. Sometimes, playing defect will be beneficial, but often, if you solve for equilibrium on iteration, you will find that the new equilibrium is much more inadequate than the old one, leaving money on the table because the zero-sum mindset people were unable to coordinate.

It does not seem to me that positive change can be built on just flipping off all the bad people.

TROLLING ALONE MOVES THE WHEELS OF HISTORY

My apparent new catchphrase aside, Musk does have a positive vision. Too much of one in fact, for his dissident right allies. And even if he did not, sterile politics produces results. Namely, replacing one group of elites with another, with different interests.

The managerial class has to go. Its social contract has expired. Something, anything, other must replace it. If that something is just whomever fights them the most ostensibly, so be it.

The managerial class has to go.

I agree, but I think the death of it will be the same thing that brought it into existence; technology.

A big part of the emergence of the PMC was that technologies in various domains, but most especially in transportation and communication, allowed for corporations and governments to become larger and more complex. Where, before, a company was only about as big as the number of relationships a central manager (often The President of the company) could, well, manage, telecommunications, expedited travel (for purposes of shipping if nothing else), and cheap and quick document copying made the entire idea of "middle managers" possible.

Anyone who's worked in software knows that the primary responsibility of a Product Manger (PM) is to mostly coordinate between sales, engineering, marketing, and the executives. Depending on the specific company there may be more or less stakeholders, but you get the idea. While the PM job is always marketed (and self-reported) to be about "crafting a vision for the product!" the truth of it is you're dealing with multiple groups that sort of hate each other or, at the least, don't get along. You facilitate the communication. If you do it well, you slowly accrue political capital either explicitly or implicitly. The PM vertical is often a path to COO or CEO because of the ambiguous soft-power nature of the job. It is the ultimate technical-adjacent PMC gig.

LLMs / A(G)I is going to destroy the power of the PM by making their job easier. PMs will request that all of the various stakeholders (marketing, engineering, sales, etc.) simply send various documents and reports to the PM. He or she will then point an LLM at it with vague prompts along the lines of "resolve conflicting priorities, organize a sprint plan, calculate budget" etc. etc. etc. And the LLM will do it. Well enough. And the covert power games that a lot of PMs play including hiding information between groups, playing politics and personalities off of one another, injecting themselves into obvious successes while running away from failures, and trend-chasing budget leverage matches will disappear because ... the information will simply be flowing between these groups with far, far less friction.

Bezos at Amazon had an infamous e-mail wherein he essentially told all of the product groups within Amazon that they had to work with one another using APIs only. Here's a link that explains it well. Bezos realized that if these different product teams needed to cross-coordinate, it would eventually break amazon as they would scale to so many product teams that coordination, done manually, would easily eat up 1000s of collective hours per week. LLMs 10x or maybe 100x the reduction of friction based on the same principle Bezos relied on here.

Culturing warring to change the culture (i.e. get rid of the PMC) might be noble, but, at best, its a war of attrition with a very entrenched interest who will use all sorts of nasty tricks (DEI etc.) to keep itself in place. But it's far harder to fight against a good technology. Take the best software engineer on the planet - if he has to write all of his code on a typewriter, he is now the worst software engineer on the planet. So, a PM who continues to try and run time consuming team Zoom meetings, who wants to create process forms left and right, and who plays office politics will simply start to produce less than the LLM enabled PM. But that very LLM enabled PM will reveal the job for what it is - glorified Virtual Assistant. Executives will start to realize they ought not to replace their engineers with LLMs necessarily, but that they should replace folks who's jobs' are mostly about coordination and communication. (Side note: Coordination and communication don't require absolute specific correctness the way say some financial jobs might. Hallucinations are totally acceptable as long as the "gist" is clear conveyed).

So, Elon. He's got his chainsaw, he's got his DOGEs with him, he's getting into fights with Little Marco Rubio.

A better move would be to find another $1 bn for Grok.

It seems to me that Musk might be one of the only people with a positive vision of the future, even if one finds it totally ludicrous. Everything else is rear-guard action and accomplishes very little.

I'm fairly certain the answer is quite boring; he's got daddy issues. His biography literally starts with recounting how he used to get the shit beaten out of him in school back in South Africa, it was a socially-approved thing and his dad was supportive of the beatings. It was never resolved; his dad never apologized, and Elon never accepted the emotional damage.

We can’t know that resolution would have helped. Maybe he was always going to be like this.

The only solution is randomized controlled trials. Have people take turns beating Musk up, then either have them apologize or not. Survey his opinions at regular check-ins.

If we get the pro wrestling scene involved, Trump might endorse it.

If we get the pro wrestling scene involved, Trump might endorse it.

Sell tickets! Auction off spots to fight! We'll balance that budget by the end of the year. It's about time Zuck v. Musk happened.

You would need to clone Elon and recreate Apartheid South Africa to carry out this experiment correctly.

Ah, the Cherryh protocol.

This is Bulverism.

I'd give the alternative theory that Musk moved to the right because of his son going trans. It was a socially approved thing and the left never apologized....

It’s not any more Bulverist than Hanania’s substack is it?

This is indeed a pretty banger article by Hanania. The biggest problem with disempowering the elites is that you need to have an alternative in mind to make things better. For all the hissing and screeching people do at the mainstream media, the right has been utterly unable to build anything close to a good replacement. Every attempt they've made is either nonexistent or is so much worse, like Catturd's Twitter feed.

I don't know what the heck happened to Elon Musk to make him spiral in the last few years in particular despite being pretty sane for most of the High Woke period, but it's become a problem that governments effectively can't ignore.

The biggest problem with disempowering the elites is that you need to have an alternative in mind to make things better.

Not everyone has utilon maximization as their terminal value, and some people are more than willing to take a hit to escape this insane "we'll do the opposite of what you want for all eternity, and you have to serve us, because you can't find anyone better" hostage situation.

For all the hissing and screeching people do at the mainstream media, the right has been utterly unable to build anything close to a good replacement.

I'm sorry, what? Part-time youtubers are literally better than the mainstream media.

I don't know what the heck happened to Elon Musk to make him spiral in the last few years in particular despite being pretty sane for most of the High Woke period,

Good example for the point above. Nothing happened, the mainstream media just refused to do any due diligence on the guy because he was driving clicks.

Who said you have to have "utilon maximization as a terminal value"? This is a basic element of any societal critique. "Here's what's bad... and here's a better alternative". Without the better alternative you can often just make a bad thing worse, like how the right has spiralled into being the party of Catturd.

Part-time youtubers are literally better than the mainstream media.

Random content creators are so much worse than say the NYT. The worst youtubers or substackers or whatever are so, so much more awful than the worst NYT columnists in terms of bias and adherence to truth. The best content creators can be about on par with the best NYT has to offer when it comes to op-eds and analysis, but they have big blind spots when it comes to reporting original facts in many places.

Who said you have to have "utilon maximization as a terminal value"? This is a basic element of any societal critique. "Here's what's bad... and here's a better alternative". Without the better alternative you can often just make a bad thing worse

If supposed public servants refuse to do what the public asks of them, things getting worse on other axes might be an acceptable cost for forcing them to do what you want. Like, I don't care if you're objectively a superior cook, if you're going to prepare meals I don't like, or even feed me poison.

like how the right has spiralled into being the party of Catturd.

Ah yes, so much worse than being the party of elective double mastectomies for adolescent girls.

Random content creators are so much worse than say the NYT.

Your original claim was that there is no superior replacent for mainstream media, not that the NYT will on average outperform a random youtuber. The former seems straightforwardly false, as it's pretty trivial for me to find superior analysis than even that of the NYT, which is usually done at a fraction of the budget, and often part time. This should not be possible if your original claim were true.

The latter claim might be true, but it's a pretty clear case of moving the goalposts.

Your original claim was that there is no replacent for mainstream media, not that the NYT on will on average outperform an random you tuber. The former seems straightforwardly false, as it's pretty trivial for me to find superior analysis than even that of the NYT, which is usually done at a fraction of the budget, and often part time. This should not be possible if your original claim were true.

I agree with this, as someone whose media consumption has shifted from mainstream to YouTube quite a bit over the past decade or so. But my perception so far is that, in terms of actual news, i.e. getting journalists to the physical locations where things are actually happening in order to record them and then report on them, the mainstream media still dominates, by far. The kind of funding and infrastructure necessary to do that at a large scale is probably still out of the reach of most small organizations.

But maybe I'm wrong, and the YouTube algorithm just hasn't presented it to me? Which presents another weakness in this new media ecosystem; I can pick up the NYT and get news about Ukraine, Gaza, Washington, and Mars all in one place, whereas on YouTube, I'd have to actually seek out niches, each with its own set of producers and levels of credibility.

But my perception so far is that, in terms of actual news, i.e. getting journalists to the physical locations where things are actually happening in order to record them and then report on them.

A few years ago I would have begrudgingly conceded this, but between news not being all that relevant for me anymore (I know it might sound weird, but for an extreme case consider the case of pop-culture commentary channels regurgitating news taken from mainstream media, which, for all their faults, have superior access to the industry, but have lost any advantage stemming from that due to the entertainment industry failing to create anything I'd care about for many years now), and a lot of modern journalism being done by spamming FOIAs, I'm not sure this is true either anymore.

The mirror image of this article, alleging insane beliefs by key liberal figure, could easily be written by a social conservative. I am not one, but it's quite easy for me to imagine a version of this which swaps out Zelensky's approval rating for e.g. beliefs on trans people, which many social conservatives would regard as "incapable of separating truth [that men are men and women are women] from fiction". I don't, so I will let someone else write the actual mirror image article if they want to. Regardless, at a minimum I think most would agree that regardless of right or wrong, beliefs about trans people are more politically profound and important than incorrectly claiming low approval ratings for a specific figure. This is the entire problem with Hanania's current routine. From the perspective of conservatism, there's plenty of low human capital liberalism, they just have the added benefit of sometimes getting to smuggle it through academia.

The actual mirror image article is the comedy movie ‘What is a Woman?’.

This is insulting to What is a Woman. The depiction of trans advocates in that movie is entirely honest and without hyperbole.

Haniana has this schtick that liberals misguided but conservatives are stupid. Hence this article while ignoring or obfuscating the argument to the contrary. I think his thesis is just wrong.

Yup.

He's got a microniche where he sides with conservatives/righties 95% of the time, but makes a huge deal out of the points on which he disagrees, and implies or outright says that they only disagree with him because they're hopelessly stupid and misguided, and thus he is appalled by 'his own side's' ignorance that he absolute must spend most of his time calling them out.

Lets him get more attention by pissing off the people he nominally sides with, but he also deflects or ignores any direct criticism.

I talked about it a bit:

Hanania is very much a right-leaning mirror of Yglesias. He has high verbal IQ and is versed in the esoteric and counterintuitive arguments that were born from the neoreactionary movement, but makes himself out to be the moderate and rational alternative to said neoreactionaries.

If anything, he's taking advantage of the fact that the majority of any ideology's adherents are pretty stupid, so its trivial to nutpick your way to prominence.. Well not 'prominence' but something.

This old post of his that claims Walz is clearly better liked and more likeable than Vance looks ESPECIALLY misguided, in retrospect.

Basically, he does micro-motte-and-bailey so he is never really caught in an out-and-out false or fallacious position.

When the choice is between guys pretending not to be white identitarian and guys pretending not to be zionist my wish is that we could all come together, stop pretending and just be ourselves.

The only pundits who aren’t identitarians are grey tribers who are relatively obscure. People are tribalistic like that, I dont know what to tell you. When your ethnic group is being assaulted on all sides and you’re rapidly becoming a minority in your own country, you tend to get a little defensive.

If you are only seeing white identity politics, then that is what you are looking for.

The right wing personalities worth following are rarely universal, because most people aren't infinite polyglots. And most issues aren't appropriate for all styles of people. Matt Walsh is basically a comedian. He is best followed when discussing DEI and Transgender issues, because the appropriate level of seriousness the left wing positions on those topics deserve is mockery and scorn. Matt Walsh barely talks about climate change (except to mock someone like Greta Thunburg) because its not an appropriate issue for his style, and he luckily knows it.

Someone like Bjorn Lundberg is more appropriate for talking about climate change because, while the left wing talking points around the issue are also absurd, it is a serious issue where much more nuance is actually appropriate. If you are looking for a one size fits all solution to understanding the right, you probably will not find one that satisfies you. But if you think there is one on the left I would like to know who you think that is. I would expect I would find several positions that quickly fall apart. I mean, just look at the pathetic performance of Sam Seder on that "stacked" show (I think that is the name) that is now going viral.

Then who are the online right wing personalities to follow

Not following any online political personalities is an option. I don’t know of any on either the left or right that aren’t embarrassing for their perspective.

Find the ones who are actually smart an intellectually honest.

Jeremy Kaufmann, Travis Corcoran, and maybe Robin Hanson if you're able to stomach some weird hypotheticals.

You do have to look outside the mainstream but you don't have to accept intentional flamebaiting.

I dunno, I guess read it again? I can't even tell from your comment what it is you think Kaufmann is saying in his tweet. As if we don't even share the same comprehension of that string of English words.

Like what it is that you're taking away from his tweet that is evidently blaring "intellectually dishonest" to you, somehow? Also he's criticizing Republicans—don't you at least like that?

Edit: I got got. :/

Looked up the first person, Jeremy Kaufmann. More recent xeets:

Today I will be doing my duty to help save the word libertarian

What actually changes for an average Ukrainian whether they're ruled by Putin or Zelenskyy? Superficially, Russia appears to have a stronger economy. What gets worse for a Ukrainian citizen if Putin wins?

Regardless what you think about Ukraine war, this perfect representation of Greedy American stereotype is not the best way to win hearts and minds for cause of libertarianism.

Most generous thing to say is that Mr. Kaufmann should concentrate on New Hampshire gasoline tax and leave world politics to others.

Just checking again, and Mr Kaufmann declares himself "Zionist" and "Christian nationalist" simultaneously.

It is unclear what he means by "Christian nation".

Nation that is overwhelmingly Christian? Many such cases worldwide. Excluding Vatican and tiny island countries, most significant is probably 98% Christian Romania.

Nation where Christianity is established by law and non-Christians are persecuted? No idea if there is such place today, and no idea either how will creating such place make the world more free.

Regardless what you think about Ukraine war, this perfect representation of Greedy American stereotype is not the best way to win hearts and minds for cause of libertarianism.

One tweet down the thread:

"I'm a patriotic American, which means I know almost nothing about life in Ukraine and Russia

This was a sincere question and I appreciate the answers"

You interpreted the question as a gotcha or something, when he's literally being perfectly up front about why he asked it and is accepting answers in good faith.

I think this proves the point that he's not mindkilled.

More comments

Trump promised one thing, the bill contains something different than what was promised.

Jeremy is literally stating that even Trump isn't interested in fulfilling his initial promises.

Which is to say that Massie is more intellectually honest than Trump (shocker!) and that pointing this out itself requires intellectual honesty.

I would say Robin Hanson is on Mars rather than being on the right. The only reason he reads as right-wing is that the left have put effort into hating on him after he turned out to be a secret HBD-believer, whereas the right ignore him.

Which makes him all the better to follow if you're trying to get a truly "different" or "outsider" perspective on things, honestly.

Personally I think Hanson is fundamentally more grounded than virtually anyone, he is probably more heavily tied into base reality and accepts the rules thereof more than almost all other humans.

Its just his tendency to try to extrapolate those rules into the future where he gets quite weird.

Hanson says a lot of things about creative uses of markets which make me want to facepalm because based on my own professional experience he clearly doesn't understand how financial markets work, so I assume Gell-Mann amnesia applies when he writes about technical topics I don't understand. But even if he is mostly wrong, he certainly never fails to be interesting.

Musk representing himself as a powerful man is a break with the conventional institutional 'representatives'

The strength of the 'institutional representation' system is how intangible it is. Lies get woven into 'official' reports that get represented as fact based on 'scientific consensus' by completely replaceable 'spokespeople'. And when someone seeks to fact check these representatives and what they say they are met with the rhetorical equivalent of cold hard brutalist concrete: "Are you saying science is wrong? Do you not believe our intelligence communities? Are you anti-intellectual? Do you not believe in physics?!"

To this extent academia and media are just PR firms that wash dirt off of policy positions for the people in power. Like immigration being fantastic and without any flaws. Or that we can't share one last moment with grandma on the hospital bed due to risk of spreading COVID, but that we can protest against racial inequality by joining a giant street protest, rubbing shoulders with hundreds if not thousands of random people.

So, in fairness to Musk being incorrect sometimes: So to was the prior system sometimes incorrect! And just how incorrect it got and how impossible it was to fact check is practically why we have Musk where he is now.

I'm not sure what Hanania is after here, other than whining about the fact that X doesn't boost his posts when he links to his substack and that he wasn't picked up to be involved with any of Musks projects. Or that mass media has allowed people Hanania considers lesser than himself to reach heights of clout and upvotes he can only dream of... All things directly or indirectly mentioned in the article. To that extent the entire thing is just an embarrassing pout from the author. I mean:

The right-wing clubhouse Musk has created is just repulsive to anyone who is independently minded. I wasn’t surprised when Musk unfollowed me...

Yeah... At risk of breaking the rules: lol. lmao even.

I'm not sure what Hanania is after here...

Hanania is basically a Gen Z David French. His ecological niche is writing things that flatter progressive sensibilities while ostensibly writing from the outside. In this case "look at how stupid and out-of-touch the Tea-Party/MAGA right is. Elon Musk does not trust 'the experts' do not be like Elon."

We have this same discussion about Richard Spencer.

When you add stuff to your platform that didn't used to be there, some of the people who liked the old platform will decide they don't like the new platform and depart.

When you add stuff to your platform that didn't used to be there, some of the people who liked the old platform will decide they don't like the new platform and depart.

Not being a Hanania follower, I don't really know what you are referring to here.

All the criticisms I've seen of him recently is of him staking out what I consider to be incoherent positions and/or fearmongering about right wing developments that would take 20 years of progression to get us to sanity, minimum, then another 20 years of continuing to get us to the "other end of the pendulum" wherein the right was as powerful and crazy as the left was in 2022 on whatever point he is droning on about. In other words, when I see him being talked about now, he generally just seems wrong and/or stupid.

Elon Musk does not trust 'the experts' do not be like Elon.

It's more that Elon Musk is always tweeting blatantly false stuff like that 4% approval rating stat.

That would be plausible if not for Hanania's open belief in HBD. Not all of Hanania's positions make sense to me, but I think he genuinely tells the truth as he sees it.

You can be a conservative pundit with a big red tribe audience while having a low opinion of blacks, patronizing ideas about women, hostility to non-christian religions, and anti-LGBT attitudes. You cannot hold a red tribe audience while naming the Jew, talking about Hispanic racial inferiority, etc. I'm deeply unsurprised that an outsider wouldn't just know the distinction.

I'm definitely an outsider, but surely the whole point with Hanania is that he's not pitching to a red tribe audience?

I think he partakes in engagement farming. I would point to the Sexy women stuff as strong evidence which leads me to highly suspect some of his takes are trolling for engagement.

I think the cancellation attempt right as his book was coming out damaged him more than it appeared at the time.

He can't become a "serious" right wing intellectual, either by gaining a patron in the Trump admin or being welcomed unto the Ezra Klein show and other such places when they need a steelman of what the Republicans are doing (by his own account the GOP is now too dumb to support them on its own - I suppose his behavior is congruent with his claims there).

So he's trapped in the Twitter/Substack attention economy and so has to find a niche. The current one works for him since he just seems to be of a disagreeable and trollish nature in general, and there is a lot in Trumpism to disagree with.

Who are the serious right wing intellectuals at the moment, in your view? Hanania talks a lot about the right lacking human capital, and in this very post argues that it's less and less tenable to be an intelligent person on the right. Who would some counter-examples be?

There are few, but they exist. But there are also few on the left (none really that I can recall). You have Douglas Murray, Charles Murray (coincidence?), Victor Davis Hanson, and Niall Ferguson who all talk about modern issues from mostly right of center perspectives.

Then there are also some of the more pragmatic (some will be controversial and/or considered evil by many here I think) ones like John Yoo who is a very good SCOTUS prognosticator and pontificates on legal issues from a right of center perspective, in that vein we also have Steven Miller on immigration, Molly Hemingway on media corruption, Bjorn Lomborg on climate change, and some others.

Who on the left could get invited plausibly to a DNC event that talks about any major issue of the day honestly and frankly? It is hard to say. Which, again, is why it is hard for me to take Hanania and others talking about this sort of topic seriously. If "intellectual" is just code for "politely repeats left wing propaganda" then it has no real persuasive power to me.

I suppose we should define 'serious', in a sense.

I think it's pretty clear that academics or intellectuals occupy a different place in the ecosystem of the right to that of the left. There is no right wing equivalent of, say, Judith Butler or Ibram Kendi. However pseudointellectual those people might be, they are seriously involved in shaping left-wing discourse and setting left-wing priorities. Intellectuals don't get to occupy the driver's seat on the right. My theory would be that left-wing domination of academia has made the right in general sufficiently paranoid about academia that they on principle refuse to follow academic theories if they can't see where they're going.

But if by 'serious' we mean something like 'of genuine original intellectual output', then there are no doubt some on the right, though I don't think I buy all of your examples. Mollie Hemingway, for instance, is not an academic. She may be a fantastic journalist, pundit, and media commentator, but I wouldn't describe her as a member of the intellectual class. Bjorn Lomborg is an intellectual, but wouldn't consider him a conservative or right-wing thinker - he's just a global warming skeptic.

Bjorn Lomborg is an intellectual, but wouldn't consider him a conservative or right-wing thinker - he's just a global warming skeptic.

My read of Lomborg is that he isn't even a skeptic - he is someone who is willing to spin the scientific consensus (as found in places like the technical bits of IPCC reports that activists don't read) in an anti-alarmist way. There is an obvious market for this, but it is pretty small compared to the market for mouth-frothing rants about scientific fraud by Commie conspiracies - in fact it appears to be small enough that Lomborg alone creates a supply of moderate anti-alarmist takes that exceeds the demand.

The fact that Lomborg is mostly correct makes his relative obscurity compared to the alarmist crazies and the conspiracist crazies a somewhat embarrassing failure on the part of humanity.

If you are certifying Ibrim Kendi there is no bar to clear. He's literally just a random guy who wrote a bunch of unsupported nonsense that supports left wing politics.

I'm certainly not asserting any quality or intellectual rigour to his works - I just called him a pseudointellectual! I'm asserting, rather, that he is a professional academic whose ideas have had a significant impact on the course of left-wing politics.

Mediocre as he may be, he is a university professor whose thought has been influential in shaping politics. I don't think that's the case for right-wing academics. If you want to look for right-wing thinkers with similar impacts, you shouldn't go to university, but rather to think tanks. The people working at Claremont or wherever are less central examples of academics than professors, and I think they have less influence over the political tribe as a whole.

I'm blanking too tbh. The Trump administration is doing things suggested by many right wing policy wonks but there doesn't seem to be a central court philosopher . Someone like Patrick Deneen seems welcome in the Ezra Klein bubble last I checked but I don't think he has much say in the party and seems better as a critic than someone actually charting a path conservatives listen to. Other members of the DR right with their own ideas like MacIntyre are in the same Twitter economy grinding for likes.

Maybe Yarvin? He has pull with Silicon Valley types right?

I think the issue is that we're looking for public intellectuals. It's possible to name individuals who are intellectuals and happen to be more-or-less on the right, but I take my own challenge here as being about intellectuals who intelligently comment on public, political matters from a conservative perspective.

My first thought was the late Roger Scruton, but we are feeling his absence; and I think he was definitely of a different generation to the current crop.

There are a number of intellectuals I think of as significant who might lean right-ish on a few issues - think of people like Michael Walzer or Jonathan Haidt - but who probably wouldn't identify as conservative in a general sense, and at any rate are totally divorced from the Trumpist right. I don't think the latter has to be fatal; Trumpism is a pretty nakedly anti-intellectual movement, so you don't find many intellectuals aligned with it. However, I do think some kind of positive identification with conservative or right-wing thought is a requirement.

I suppose someone like Patrick Deneen is in fact the closest to what I'm looking for, but I feel like Deneen's output has declined sharply since he went from analysing problems to proposing solutions. Aristopopulism is a bad joke. I don't rate Yarvin as a serious thinker. Yoram Hazony doesn't impress me much but he is at least attempting some kind of intellectual thesis.

You see why I'm coming up short!

Haidt is a leftist who opposes wokestupid insanity. He is about as conservative as Matthew Yglesias or Ezra Klein.

That's the definitional issue again - see the discussion we had of Lomborg.

I have heard the argument that at present the right includes you if you hold a single right-wing position, and the left excludes you if you deny a single left-wing position, and that's a standard that puts people like Haidt or Lomborg on the right. But that doesn't seem to hold up well in practice, and the right has gotten increasingly exclusive - people with conservative credentials as impeccable as David French or Jonah Goldberg are cast out, for instance, while people as obviously and deeply liberal as, say, Bari Weiss get accepted. The tribes are not ideologically consistent and often seem to just operate directionally, to me. French started conservative and is drifting, if slowly, in a leftwards direction; Weiss started liberal and is drifting, if slowly, in a rightwards direction. Even though from an objective point of view French is still way more right-wing than Weiss, the only thing people care about is the direction of travel.

Haidt was, in my sense, a fairly straight-down-the-line liberal up until his work in moral psychology, leading up to Moral Foundations Theory and The Righteous Mind, caused him to develop more appreciation for tradition and custom. I read Haidt as then moving into a centrist space overall, but avoiding being pigeonholed in any one category. Since then, unfortunately, Haidt has gotten much more focused on a kind of activism, this time around social media, mental health, and parenting, and on his pet issue he's... probably slightly on the right? The whole 'free range kids' agenda doesn't neatly map on to left or right, but if you put a gun to my head I'd say it's a bit closer to the right.

Yeah, and Yarvin's best work is in the past.

There's plenty of people offering interesting commentary, but it's all spread over sub-50K-subscriber influencers all over the social media. Just another effect (or sign) of the decline of our institutions.

Who are the serious right wing intellectuals at the moment, in your view? Hanania talks a lot about the right lacking human capital

I'm going to turn that question on you and ask who are the serious intellectuals of any kind at the moment, in your view. Who is the elite human capital I should be jealous of, and thinking "I wish this guy was on my side"?

You're mistaking Hanania's marketing schtick for an interesting claim about reality. He's not offering a diagnosis, he's trying to gatekeep wrongthink.

In the political sphere specifically?

I admit I'm blanking.

I'd go for any examples that aren't from hard sciences.

Scott Sumner and Kevin Erdmann on housing economics, and macro more broadly.

So, in fairness to Musk being incorrect sometimes: So to was the prior system sometimes incorrect! And just how incorrect it got and how impossible it was to fact check is practically why we have Musk where he is now.

His rejoinder might be that the prior system is a system. Randoms with social media sites doing it live isn't.

You've noted the downsides to systems but there are benefits.

One can imagine a different academy and press and have a coherent vision of how they might be better, even if it won't/can't happen for structural reasons. Some guy and his cronies just randomly being right continually seems unlikely even in theory. Why did we need institutions in the first place then?

That's not much of a rejoinder when this system of the best and brightest in the richest and most information dense time in known human history can't figure whether men can get pregnant or not.

The argument is not about what system to use. It's about the nature of power and how the people who wield it will push their will through regardless. I prefer to know those people by name. Rather than rolling around in confusion and conspiracy regarding how on earth the American Anthropology Association managed to deduce that biological race is a mostly imaginary social construct cooked up by evil racists in the 1700's.

Some guy and his cronies just randomly being right continually seems unlikely even in theory. Why did we need institutions in the first place then?

What are institutions?

That's not much of a rejoinder when this system of the best and brightest in the richest and most information dense time in known human history can't figure whether men can get pregnant or not.

The system is perfectly clear that cis men can't get pregnant, and that FtM transsexuals can (but are unlikely to if they are on hormones). The system struggles to say what the modern meaning of the word "men" is, but that is a question about linguistics and not medicine. For the avoidance of doubt, this is pathetic, medical organisations offering muddled views about the meaning of words is bad, and they should either learn linguistics or stick to medicine and leave the meanings of words to dictionary makers.

I prefer to know those people by name.

You know who is to blame for trans madness by name (off the top of my head Rachel Levine had a pivotal impact on WPATH's removal of age guidelines). You could easily find out who to blame when the American Anthropology Association says something batshit.

What you mean, I think, is that you can't hold them accountable. But that's not just because they're obscure.

It cuts both ways: Elon Musk isn't accountable to you either. The AAA at least has to pretend to hold to some code of conduct because that is what allegedly justifies the outsized power bequeathed to them.

What are institutions?

An organization with set of norms, traditions and procedures meant to direct people towards a goal over extended periods of time?

I know what you're getting at. I don't think an accretion of Twitter reposters make a good institution.

Who is to blame for the trans madness took years to get 'unearthed' in a publicly accessible way. Prior to 2016 you could not find any tangible info on what was happening and why beyond /pol/ schizos talking about John Money and what books the Germans had been burning in the 1930's. By the same token you can not easily find out who is to blame for the AAA spiral into insanity. The ousting of Carleton Coon is just the tip of the iceberg and 99.9% of people don't even know who that is.

To the extent the AAA needs to pretend to hold to some sort of code of conduct, so does Elon. People make fun of him online if he doesn't. The H1B/Vivek debacle is a great example. Or when he pretended to be good at video games. Even if that amounts to nothing, it's at least transparent. Elon can be yelled at personally. The AAA presents no such target for the public. It only has to pretend to maintain the disguise of sensibility to the public and to please their 'masters', who are more or less completely hidden. If it is ever attacked by the public it can hide behind the mass of media and academia that are all running the same playbook to please the same 'masters'.

I know what you're getting at. I don't think an accretion of Twitter reposters make a good institution.

Neither do I. But when the alternative is mind bending insanity from people who have made it a career to look sensible to fool the gullible I choose to pick my own poison and sort my own substack subscriptions based on a more primitive but holistic human approach, rather than pretend that there exists some 'system' of science do gooders that receive grants from heaven and are therefore definitely not in the tank for whatever is funding their existence.

To put it differently: Lift the veil on the 'systems' and it's just the left wing version of cringe permanently online right wingers. But instead of scientific racism, misogyny with anime profile pics you get feel good humanism, misandry and a LinkedIn profile.

It’s rich seeing Hanania complaining about lies when he was just recently dismissing Daryl Cooper that Christian’s were being targeted in Syria, when it’s pretty well established that this is indeed happening

Were they? There’s good evidence for a few dozen Christians being murdered in the context of widespread massacres of religious minorities, but the vast majority of the victims were Alawites(a pseudo-Islamic gnostic cult), and the heads of the Syrian churches seemed to think that churches were safe havens even during the worst of the killing.

The distinction between "there was a massacre of Christians and Alawites" and "there was a massacre of Alawites in which a small number of Christians were collateral damage" is precisely the sort of question a functioning MSM (which we mostly don't have) would be able to answer but the developing alternatives do not - because the MSM was able to put a known-trustworthy journalist in the field and do actual shoe-leather journalism. Social media amplifies the kinds of anecdote that the algorithm expects to go viral in a way which means you have no idea of the relative frequency of different events, even when this is immediately obvious to someone on the ground.

Increased drug use is one suspected reason, but I think it might just be brain rot from being on right wing twitter too much. It should be noted that left wing social media contagion has similarly destroyed rationale thinking in the last ten years.

I think another, more charitable argument would be that the media environment is saturated with so many lies and false reporting, slanted journalism, etc etc that it's easy to discount things you don't like and focus on things that seem correct.

The journalistic / expert class brought this upon themselves, as far as I'm aware. Elon doesn't have time to do the enormous amount of checking that is required in this environment to verify every claim. Perhaps he could hire someone, which would probably be a good idea, but doesn't seem like how he operates.

The journalistic / expert class brought this upon themselves, as far as I'm aware. Elon doesn't have time to do the enormous amount of checking that is required in this environment to verify every claim. Perhaps he could hire someone, which would probably be a good idea, but doesn't seem like how he operates.

The "it's ok to do it because I think other people are doing it" argument is a rather weak one. I wouldn't accept "mom he hit me first" from my kids, and I don't think it any better for grown adults to be employing as an excuse for their own bad behavior.

You don't have to verify every claim, you can also just not make claims that you haven't put any effort into checking yet. You could discount claims that you see online as unproven until proven otherwise instead of believing everything you see.

Hitting back isn't the same as starting the hitting. Responding to someone else doing something shitty by "doing something shitty" is missing the context of one person responding and the other person initiating. One is different than the other. Out of context, hitting could be viewed as shitty. In context, hitting can be good, actually, .e.g., in the context of self-defense, or punishing a person who keeps hitting the defect button.

Analyzing the world through the eyes of a lecturing mother treating others like children isn't a good way to model the world. There is no adult in the room, the other adults aren't their children, and not annoying the mother and preserving harmony isn't the purpose of the existence of the world nor the optimal outcome.

In a media space where institutions have burned their credibility through their their own lies, agenda, and manipulation to the point most ignore it or treat it for what it is which results in most people floating around in the pool of nonsense, telling a person who is trying to win in this space that they need to be a paragon of truth isn't good advice, it's more likely simply going to result in them losing, which I suspect you wouldn't mind.

I wouldn't accept "mom he hit me first" from my kids

This attitude leads to schools punishing kids for being bullied because it takes two to start a fight, and they dared try to fight back against the bully. Self-defense and initiation of force actually are things.

I don't know, I haven't seen the level of absolute lying and bullshit in other media sources. Might be the perspective if you only live in some Tucker-style right-wing echo chambers.

Many of the things he tweets out don't even require enormous amount of fact checking, simple heuristics about how the world works are enough to sense that something might be bullshit. There's no need to be charitable to someone who is one of the richest guys on the planet and blasts out nonsense to millions of gullible readers.

I have to admit that Musk's overall accuracy has fallen off a proverbial cliff, from my view. Previously he'd drop some redpill truths that others wouldn't touch but were ultimately factual. Now it feels like a coin flip as to whether or not what he's posting is real. That's not super different than the hit rate for the journalistic / expert class but it still feels lower.

You’d have to be an idiot to believe that Zelenskyy has a 4% approval rating. Has any wartime leader ever had an approval rating that low? I’m pretty sure even Tsar Nicholas in 1917 would break double digits.

Why? This is a symptom of outside thinking- Zelenskyy != Ukraine, and its perfectly possible to be Ukranian, cheer on their military, want no peace deal, and hate Zelenskyy's guts for the way he has conducted the war and turned Ukraine from a somewhat shaky democracy to a military dictatorship. This is in fact the attitude shared by several of my Ukranian friends.

But since a) elections are suspended indefinitely, b) opposition parties are banned, and c) only state-run media is allowed to officially exist, we will never have reliable poll numbers.

I agree 4% is probably low, but I think the 53% number some sources have floated is laughably high as well.

He would have been killed by his own high command if his approval numbers were actually cartoonishly low.

Obviously the support for Zelensky is high. The fact that we cannot know the percentage with high precision doesn't mean that we don't know the percentage with error margin that is less than ±10%.

Is his course good for Ukrainian people? Who knows. I personally think that Ukrainians are too obstinate to consider they could ever get Crimea and other territories back. It prevents them thinking more about how to protect the rest of Ukraine. But that's their choice. Ignoring this will not be productive. Suppose the US forces Ukraine to do elections and Zelensky is again elected. Then what? Or someone else is elected with the same aspirations as Zelensky.

And forcing to elect a certain leader that yields to the US will lead to a new Maidan. Ukrainians want free elections not some US or Russian stooge.

I could believe 53% is inflated (I've got no clue really) but I suspect anything below 10% and he'd probably have faced an internal revolution by now.

Yeah I agree in this instance it's pretty egregiously dumb.

Believing this requires significant sane-washing of the last 8 years of media. I mean, to pick a random example off the top of my head that Youtube reminded me, Joe Biden's mental decline. The behavior of those in the media is completely unhinged and totally detached from reality, not to mention nakedly self serving. They've gaslit all of the country on an industrial scale about innumerable topics, or instituted a bizarre form of cognitive mutilation where you are only permitted to think of fact in ways they have told you that you are permitted to think of them. Impossible tangles of double-think abound for sex, gender, crime, equality, equity, you name it.

I would hope Elon has better sources of information than I have. But, to pick at Zelensky's 4% approval rating Hanania leads with, is it even possible to know what the real number might be? Also, I'm supposed to be assessing these "debunks" in a media environment where all the election polling around our own election was purposeful lying. Trump's internal polls showed him winning. Biden and then Kamala's internal polls showed him winning. At no time during the entire election cycle did anyone's internal polls show anyone but Trump winning. Public polls on the other hand, with the exception "low quality" pollsters like Rasmussen, all showed Harris winning. The Harris campaign even went so far as to gaslight the nation claiming Trump was lying about his internal polls as a pretext for election denial.

So why should anyone believe anything these people say about Zelensky's poll numbers? How can they possibly claim to be more credible than just making shit up? If Trump and Elon want to parade around some fake numbers the IC gave them that serve their agenda, they are in good company. Well, maybe not good company, but you know what I mean. Don't pretend this is a deviation.

I mean, this is just naked revisionist history and sane washing right here.

When it comes to arguing about platforms and media outlets, we usually think in terms of political bias. It is true that the old system at Twitter disadvantaged conservative voices. In the past, conservatives and liberals would argue about what books you should read or where you should get your news from.

What past is he talking about? "Misgendering" was a ban on sight offense on every social media platform. Books about it were banned, at least temporarily. Liberals didn't calmly argue with conservatives about where to get news from, they banned it. It's pure imagination that anyone, anywhere, was calmly debating what sources of information were preferable to seek the truth. It was a boot stomping on a human face thinking the roles would never be reversed.

Furthermore, I keep going through Hanania's supporting evidence, like "Editor-in-chief of The Federalist joins others in repeating repeating the completely made up lie about Zelensky meeting with Democrats beforehand." except, oh wait, here is a Democrat tweeting about meeting Zelensky before the Trump meeting. Just finished a meeting with President Zelensky here in Washington. He confirmed that the Ukrainian people will not support a fake peace agreement where Putin gets everything he wants and there are no security arrangements for Ukraine. . Did the original rumor name the wrong Democrats? Yes. Is it a made up lie that Zelensky met with Democrats beforehand? Absolutely not.

Frankly it's barely worth the effort to continue to pick apart these sour grapes that Hanania isn't making the living on Twitter that he used to or expected to. Though I am especially tickled he cites Elon being on the wrong side of an argument with Sam Harris about how bad COVID was going to be. The same Sam Harris who has horribly beclowned himself with extremely motivated reasoning about the measures that he still believes were justified to deal with it. Elon might have been wrong about the numbers, but he was directionally correct about how serious to take it. Especially in retrospect, and especially compared to Sam Harris.

Public polls on the other hand, with the exception "low quality" pollsters like Rasmussen, all showed Harris winning. The Harris campaign even went so far as to gaslight the nation claiming Trump was lying about his internal polls as a pretext for election denial.

This isn't true, many had Trump winning.

Hanania actually published an article before the election expressing skepticism of the polls:

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/are-the-polls-too-close-to-be-trusted

The best anti-establishment takes usually come from people like Hanania. They don't come from "anti-establishment" conspiracy theorists who don't believe any data, election results, polls, scientific studies, and just bloviate and make assertions completely untethered to any evidence.

The best anti-establishment takes usually come from people like Hanania. They don't come from "anti-establishment" conspiracy theorists who don't believe any data, election results, polls, scientific studies, and just bloviate and make assertions completely untethered to any evidence.

Yesterday you said you weren't here to passive aggressively side talk about all these low quality populists. I didn't have time to respond and I figured the charitable thing to do would be to take you at your word, or at least not rub your errors in your face. And yet here you are not just side talking but coupling it with hilarious jokes like "The best anti-establishment takes usually come from people like Hanania" and it's complete tonal whiplash.

Jokes aside it's obvious why you like Hanania's stropfest, but you make no effort to explain why anyone else should, just another wide brush of smears against anyone who questions the neoliberal consensus. I'm not going to defend conspiracists, because that's just your nail, it covers everyone from doesn't trust polls to flat earthers and beyond.

Instead I'm going to do you a favour and explain some things populists don't like, so you can better reach those doge guys and future republican senators. Populists don't like being lumped in with the craziest people you can currently think of. They don't like people who smirk at the powerlessness of others. They don't like arguments from authority, especially when they don't respect the authority. And most importantly they don't like listening to people who are too blinded by their own petty bullshit to notice that the entire world changed in November, or who try to gaslight them into thinking Trump changes nothing even as he goes around changing everything, or whatever the fuck you were doing there.

If you think someone is "gaslighting" or otherwise stomping on the rules, report it. This sort of callout is doing no one any good.

But you are here now and the side talking and sweeping generalisations are against the rules, right?

Maybe I’m missing something here, but I don’t see it.

Calling a Twitter “fake news account” conspiracy theorists is not smearing the entire category of populists. If AT is playing that game, he didn’t do it in this comment.

The issue is that if you read his posts you notice a trend, wherein anyone he doesn't like gets called a conspiracy theorist or a conspiracist or a low quality populist, but they always turn out to be working class or red tribe and there's never an angle for engagement, they are just dropped like edicts from on high. And after he drops his ridiculous wide sweeping general attack he applies to everyone he dislikes - which includes everyone from Elon Musk to Whiningcoil - and you try to engage him he never defends or elaborates his position and usually just side talks more.

This is just petulance:

They don't come from "anti-establishment" conspiracy theorists who don't believe any data, election results, polls, scientific studies, and just bloviate and make assertions completely untethered to any evidence.

It was supported by a large majority of rural, working-class, no college degree, salt of the Earth white people

I could absolutely see this joining the stolen 2020 election, measles parties, and pedo rings as an accepted part of the conspiracist worldview. And maybe you can even get a few silicon valley billionaires doing the "just asking questions" routine. And ... what then? That coalition is, on average, poorer, less educated, and less skilled at exercising power, and plus they can be really annoying, IMO.

The future is working at the nail factory, watching the barge go down the river, raising chickens in your backyard, getting taken to court for child support, drinking raw milk, refusing to get vaccinated and various other wholesome and natural behaviors

And if you don't have a problem with it then there's no point in reporting it is there? But I don't think it would be tolerated if some guy constantly declared that niggers always vote for the plantation, and I won't tolerate this.

Jokes aside it's obvious why you like Hanania's stropfest, but you make no effort to explain why anyone else should, just another wide brush of smears against anyone who questions the neoliberal consensus. I'm not going to defend conspiracists, because that's just your nail, it covers everyone from doesn't trust polls to flat earthers and beyond.

Reading this conversation, I observe your comment has no single verifiable claim, it's all smears and claims what populists (underdefined) are or are not, whereas comment you replied to had a verifiable claim what polls did predict or did not.

Yesterday you said you weren't here to passive aggressively side talk about all these low quality populists.

That doesn't sound like me.

smears against anyone who questions the neoliberal consensus

This has got squat to do with "neoliberalism." Musk is basically a neoliberal. The problem is saying false things like the 4% approval rating stat and then doubling down when it's pointed out. It's not like he cited a real poll that, unbeknownst to him, had methodological flaws. The poll was completely made up.

Ok so conspiracists includes Elon Musk now and you don't like neoliberalism. You've fixated on Musk, despite not mentioning him at all in the previous post, but at least there's an argument to deal with. Next time say all that in the first place instead of whining about everyone you dislike.

you don't like neoliberalism

Poor reading comprehension.

Whoa whoa that's interpretation pal. I'm trying to determine a coherent worldview out of a temper tantrum, it's not easy. You could always explain yourself better, but we both know why you won't.

That doesn't sound like me.

He's referring to this comment, which on my reading does straightforwardly say that you're here for "work(ing) with them to explain your arguments and defeat(ing) theirs" as opposed to "sulk(ing) quietly to yourself and then passive aggressively side talk(ing) about all these low quality populists".

This has got squat to do with "neoliberalism." Musk is basically a neoliberal.

You're not making sense. I'm possibly the biggest Musk critic on this forum (even our resident progressives claim he's good at managing Tesla, SpaceX, etc - I don't), and you're taking swipes at people like me ("They don't come from "anti-establishment" conspiracy theorists..."), as you're trying to refocus the conversation on how wrong Musk is. Make it make sense.

I’m very confused. I feel like we’re all arguing and/or moderating past each other.

To which of the following do you object?

  • the “fake news account” Elon quoted was “anti-establishment conspiracy theorists”
  • AECTs don’t generate valuable anti-establishment takes as often as Hanania
  • Populists (Trump red tribers?) are AECTs

I don’t think Alex actually said the last one. I read his comments as a pure complaint about Elon Musk’s susceptibility to AECTs like this particular account. But you and @Fruck are taking it as a personal or at least tribal attack? What am I missing?

the “fake news account” Elon quoted was “anti-establishment conspiracy theorists”

I didn't get the impression that he was limiting his criticism to that particular Twitter account, rather it feels like a sweeping condemnation of all AECT's.

AECTs don’t generate valuable anti-establishment takes as often as Hanania

That would be a pretty big point of disagreement as well, but it's open to civil debate.

I read his comments as a pure complaint about Elon Musk’s susceptibility to AECTs like this particular account. But you and @Fruck are taking it as a personal or at least tribal attack? What am I missing?

The missing piece might be that I unironically consider myselfban AECT, so I don't know how to read that as anything other than an attack. I'm aware that there are people in my group that have a few screws loose, but a sweeping condemnation of the entire group based on that feels extremely unfair, and I was under the impression that it's even against the rules.

How is what he doing different from condemning the entirety of, say, Critical Race Theory, based on the conduct of the students of the Evergreen State College?

Educational policy shouldn’t be set by “anti-racist” activists who don’t tolerate any dissent.

If that was posted completely in a vacuum, I guess it’d be a violation. In response to a post about Evergreen? I want to say it’s okay, because I don’t know how else he’d refer to the category.

Maybe anti-racist & activist & dissent-quashing is a really small set, maybe it’s even empty, but I don’t think reasoning about it is wrong.

I suppose I’m struggling to figure out how Alex could have been more specific about the group he was condemning.

Polls spent the summer and fall showing Harris ahead because they were attempting to shape the conversation and manipulate people into believing it was true and then in the final poll they all miraculously converged to showing what the better polls had been showing for months.

This isn't a defense of the polling industry, it's a condemnation of it. The vast majority of polling, and especially the "most reputable pollsters" according to the media, didn't just happen to randomly get ridiculous Harris numbers (or Biden numbers or the alleged Biden cliffhanger after his debate) for most of the polling season and then just happened to get ties in their final poll. After years of bad misses, the pollsters converged on "okay, it's basically a tie" as a face-saving measure when the result wasn't a tie. Trump handily won.

The media and polling companies work hand-in-hand with one bullhorning what they believe people should think and then the polling industry confirming people think (or at least a decent number of people think) what the media has been bullhorning at them. These aren't people just doing their best to measure public opinion, they're part of the opinion manufacturing and manipulation process and it's high time everyone treated them like it.

But by all means, if you disagree, I encourage everyone to bet the margins of their favorite "gold standard" pollsters in the next election. And when you lose, I hope it changes not only your opinion about these pollsters' predictive capacity but also undermines your belief pollsters are accurate measuring opinions with less objective results like "support for gun control" or whatever else.

Trump handily won.

Because FPTP in the electoral college magnifies small wins, particularly in the situation we are in where most of the key swing states are in the Rustbelt, so they tend to swing in the same direction. But the actual margin of victory in terms of votes was small - 1.5% in the popular vote and 1.7% in the tipping-point state.

The only recent election where the popular vote was closer was Bush v Gore. The tipping point state in the electoral college was closer in 2016 (0.8%) and 2020 (0.7%) but 1.5% is close by historical standards.

Given that most polls claim a 3% margin of error, the polls predicting a toss-up were correct.

The presidential election isn't decided by national popular vote so going back and forth between it and intrastate popular vote which selects electors which elect the president muddies the waters. A pollster could be exactly correct at the national level popular vote and still miss badly on picking who was going to win the election.

Do you think pollsters should be judged on their actual prediction or do you think as long as they were in their 6+ point spread (depending on the poll) they were "correct" ?

I don't find a polling company which regularly gets their predictions wrong directionally (i.e., who is going to win), but within a 6 point spread to be valuable; pollsters do make predictions on winners and pick their anchor points of their 6 pt spread and should be compared and judged on them. It's not enough to merely be in their claimed error spread.

The response to a "pollster" who is predicting the outcome of a race to just answer "it's a coin-toss" is "give me my money back."

I struggle to understand what their motives are here. Are you implying the pollsters are trying to help the democrats based on the theory that people turn out for a winner? I don't know what the basis for that theory is. It seems equally or more likely that over-estimating a candidate's popularity will lull them and their voters into a false sense of security. Based on this theory of polls, it would seem more likely the pollsters over-estimating Harris's polling were trying to favour the republicans.

I don't really see evidence to think either of these is the case though. Maybe they are just incompetent or too afraid of being outliers.

Oh come on. Trying to act like the "Kamelanomicon" narrative never happened isn't going to work.

Do you want me to link 50 articles about how recent polling surges show that America has rediscovered its favorite brat VP?

The "I don't get it, what do you even mean" tactic is incredibly obnoxious. It's just a way of insinuating that someone is an incoherent schizo conspiracy theorist without openly breaking the rules. And it doesn't even work to bully people without a supporting crew of redditors jeering and snapping their fingers.

Now you're talking about articles about polling, not polling. That is a different thing and I don't dispute at all that it is seeking to 'shape the conversation'.

I am not trying to insinuate you're a schizo conspiracy theorist (though now I am wondering if your anger is causing you to lump multiple things together as your enemy, when not all of them are the same).

Ironically I am not the same person as Bleep.

Do you want me to link 50 articles about how recent polling surges show that America has rediscovered its favorite brat VP?

There's a difference between coordinated efforts to selectively highlight polls that are positive for your side and actually manipulating poll results to appear positive for your side. The discussion seems to be about the latter. The former is bad, but the latter is arguably worse.

The "I don't get it, what do you even mean" tactic is incredibly obnoxious. It's just a way of insinuating that someone is an incoherent schizo conspiracy theorist without openly breaking the rules. And it doesn't even work to bully people without a supporting crew of redditors jeering and snapping their fingers.

This, I agree with. As I've written before, I struggle to see why people would believe that polls showing their preferred side winning would improve the odds of their side winning, since I could come up with multiple equally plausible mechanisms by which it could help or hurt. But it seems common knowledge enough that many/most people do believe that this is how it works, and one shouldn't feign ignorance of this very possibly false narrative.

I think the process is "hey, we're going with kamela, give us some polls we can spin." The whole polling and media campaign is coordinated on whatever the new version of JounaList is.

That one woman with the "kamela landslide incoming!" poll right before the election was obviously not organic imo. It's all organized narrative shaping, and the line they were going with was indisputably "Kamela: it's inevitable (or you're weird)"

Saying the polls can't have been manipulated because that might reduce dem turnout is trying to ignore the evidence that all of their strategy was based around demoralizing Republicans.

I am implying pollsters vote Democrat and are Democrats by vast margins and are part of the regime media who are Democrats and vote Democrats by vast margins and do things to make it more likely Democrats would win. They're on the same team and part of the same milieu and travel in the same circles. They're not merely biased, they have an agenda and you can see them doing the same bag-o-tricks every election cycle. Under normal circumstances, public opinion just doesn't shift like that (and don't in predictive polls), but miraculously it does to drive the same cycle every single time.

Supporting candidates can mean different things at different times, e.g., cratering Biden's polling post-debate, and not just "overstating Democrat support."

It seems equally or more likely that over-estimating a candidate's popularity will lull them and their voters into a false sense of security.

A Harris campaign which is trailing by 7 in PA in late September but is getting +2 from "gold standard pollsters" is not being lulled into a false sense of security, they're being saved by allies in media when a campaign which would otherwise see voters disengage and, most importantly, have a much harder time convincing donors to continue to open their wallets to finance a flailing campaign.

There are situations where it's defensible to argue it's "equal or more likely" overstating support would lull a candidate into a false sense of security, but it's not in any of the scenarios we're talking about and also there are countervailing forces. You may think this is likely to "harm" a campaign, but why wouldn't it be "equal or more likely" it would harm your opponent whose supporters think it's a waste of time to bother when they're going to lose anyway? People like to be a part of the winning team.

For whatever it's worth, zero pollsters I know of think "overstating" support within a pretty large margin harms campaigns.

Maybe they are just incompetent or too afraid of being outliers.

Well they're definitely terrified of being outliers, there are about a half dozen pollsters who were run out of polite company for correctly polling Trump support in 2016 onwards.

To believe the "they're just bad at their jobs" explanation, you would have to explain how pollsters who have a history of failing to predict horse-races somehow manage to still get lucrative contracts from NYT (Sienna) to Reuters (Ipsos) while the accurate pollsters see themselves blacklisted, especially from lucrative commercial contracts. And also why those pollsters continue to fail and be embarrassed cycle after cycle after cycle.

If election polling was intentionally skewed to show Harris winning, wouldn't that give a false sense of security to Democrats and make them less likely to go vote?

This is what would make sense to me, but over and over again, I see people claiming to believe and acting like they believe the opposite, that good poll numbers for a candidate actually encourages more people to vote for that candidate rather than the candidate's opponent. I don't quite get it, but, well, people behave based on what they believe, not based on what they should believe.

There's no one size fits all rule for polling. It helps to boost your numbers in some circumstances, particularly earlier in the race and to downplay your numbers in others, particularly in the final stages. For example if you want to project dominance of the field you would boost the numbers to give the opposition the impression they have no hope. If you want to get your people out voting you tell them the margins are so close it could come down to a single vote. The complaint should be that polling was ideologically aligned.

I think the idea is that people don't want to waste taking time out of their day to vote for a loser. That the pain of having had skin in the game and being disappointed is enough to discourage people from putting that skin in the game in the first place if you demoralize them enough beforehand.

Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.

Why not apply this level of learned helplessness to Musk? Surely he’s burning credibility, too.

Surely he’s burning credibility, too.

You know, I want to take a longer stab at this part. This is less "What I believe" or even "How I think things should be" and more "Is this just the human condition?"

What even is credibility? Is it being absolutely truthful and aligned with reality in every word you say? Or is it delivering the goods, what you said along the way be damned? Musk has a long record of optimistic timelines for various technological achievements. I recall full Falcon 9 reusability was regularly years behind where Musk would confidently say it would be. All's said and done though, none of those "lies" mattered. SpaceX developed a fully reusable rocket and nobody else is even close a decade later, much less beat SpaceX to market in the few years Musk was off in his estimates.

I also recall the story about how Tetris was licensed to Nintendo. Some businessman shamelessly lied that he had the rights to it, signed the paperwork with Nintendo, and then flew off to Russia to do whatever it took to actually secure the rights. He lied... but he did deliver the goods. What does that say about his credibility? He certainly wasn't blacklisted or anything, and in fact goes around bragging to an adoring press, telling the story over and over again.

I was reading The Odyssey lately, and towards the end there was this peculiar part that really struck me where it's mentioned that Odysseus' maternal grandfather was a "world renowned perjurer and thief". Just the way it was phrased, as an admirable thing to be known as struck me as a hilarious bit of bronze age morality. But this more or less meshed with the rest of the bronze age morality on display in The Iliad and The Odyssey, where lying, cheating and stealing is just smart and brings honor if you succeed. Only failure is dishonorable. The line about his grandfather just served to further snap it into focus. One might think we've left that behind, but we're the same human animal now as we were then.

We still say "Fake it till you make it" after all.

So, with respect to Musk, Trump, or anyone's credibility, I think they can lie as much as they want so long as they deliver the good more often than not. Zelensky has a 4% approval rating? Fuck it, why not. Does a ceasefire get declared soon, or some sort of lasting peace agreement? That's credibility. Nobody will remember Musk's tweet when peace and prosperity returns.

World War 3 breaks out and Kiev eats a few megatons? Well, that tweet might end up in the history books, and not in a good way.

I don't especially enjoy this view of the world. And when the shoe is on the other foot, I will likely be losing my ever loving fucking mind that the other side is lying up a storm and "getting away with it".

Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.

True, but entirely over-applied by centrists nowadays when talking about the right's or right-aligned responses. In fact, I most often see it deployed as a statement when a centrist is commenting on one of the issues the left is not able to articulate a right wing argument on, and because most centrists live in left wing media environments, they too cannot articulate the RW theory of the issue.

Learned helplessness? Hmmmm, perhaps. Its been 10 years. I don’t think there is any shame in realizing I'm outgunned in an information war. I ignored as best I could the breathless coverage of polls for the entire election cycle, and I can't say I missed anything. Likewise, I simply cannot be made to care about Elon's or Trump's tweets, Cabinet drama, etc. I'm waiting for peace or world war 3, for my life to get better or worse. All the beefs Hanania has with Elon are just noise. Sour grapes that he didn't make it into the cool kids club like he hoped.

^ 100% ^

I can't argue with that.

No matter what you believe about the validity of polling, "Zelensky has an approval rating of 4%" does not pass a basic sanity check at any level. He's a wartime president, if his approval was really just 4% in a time like this he'd be shunted aside at warp speed. There are plenty of people in Ukraine at the moment with both the willingness and the ability to remove what would be a hysterically unpopular president with relatively little hassle if it came to that.

My point is not that I believe Zelensky has a 4% approval rating. It's that Hanania is point of fact wrong that the lies Trump & Elon are telling are in any way, shape, or form morally or qualitatively different than the lies the last regime told, and especially not in any way that makes them look worse. He's sanewashing the last 8 years of neoliberal hegemony in media and the deep state because in his little bubble, they weren't that bad.

OK but if you are Trump and Elon and you want to stay in power it would probably behoove you not to repeat the mistakes of the last guys.

Particularly with Elon. Like – Trump's entire shtick is being "directionally accurate" where he says "look windmills have killed a million birds, literally a million, they are counted as COVID deaths, folks" and only humorless scolds and fact-checkers take that as anything but a joke with a nugget of truth (wind turbines kill a lot of birds!)

But Elon's whole deal as I see it is that he's suppose to be a smart nerdy engineer, and so he should care about precision as part of his PR, or so it seems to me. (I suspect being "directionally correct" works much better in engineering than one might initially think, but you needn't generalize that unnecessarily.)

Maybe! But that is criticism unrelated to Hanania's thesis which he is absurdly and laughably wrong about.

No he isn't. Not one thing was wrong. Musk has a disdain for the truth and has been caught doing nothing but blatant lying. What are the lies you accuse the establishment of? Because if you look a little deeper I believe you will see that they aren't lies but a shaping of the truth and that's a massive difference. This is literally what the media has been doing forever. The richest man in the world tweeting that zelensky has 4% approval is a new level of insanity and a blatant lie. You can't equalize these two things , they are not the same. And in fact no, Elon wasn't 'directionally correct' about covid. That's a massive discussion that can't be given a 'truth' 'lie' response , and that's the exact difference. What can be true or false is sam harris's point , that 35k deaths did appear and that 600k cases did appear. These are both TRUE.

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What blatant lie? You have literally zero evidence that z's approval rating isn't 4%. Not one shred of it. You also have no evidence that Musk didn't make that claim in good faith.

Of course it's true that it's extremely unlikely that a wartime leader has only a lizardman level of support. But crazier things have happened many times. So maybe before calling Elon a liar, you should consider that you, in fact, are the liar.

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Its very easy to find evidence that shows that its not even close to 4. Its easy for me , for you and for Musk. I dont need evidence to claim he didnt make it in good faith , a lie even when said because of lack of knowledge , that also supports the position of the enemy of the person you are lying against. Certainly this statement cant then be made in good faith. It is a result of a person consuming too much Russian propaganda and there is nothing you can say that will make the facts change. I am not a liar since I havent made any wrong statements because unlike Musk I fact check my opinions heavily.

What are the lies you accuse the establishment of?

"Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
"We are building a democratic society in Afghanistan."
"Our test grades are low because we don't spend enough on education."
"Race-based caps on school discipline will lead to better outcomes."
"COVID was not a lab leak."
"Police routinely kill unarmed, compliant black people."
"Joe Biden is mentally competent."
"The laptop is Russian disinformation."
"Insurrectionists murdered a police officer on Jan 6th."
"Rittenhouse is a white supremacist murderer."
"The BLM protests are mostly peaceful."
"Antifa is just an idea."
"Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist."

...Off the top of my head. There are plenty more where those came from.

Because if you look a little deeper I believe you will see that they aren't lies but a shaping of the truth and that's a massive difference.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "shaping of the truth"?

Iraq was a failure of the establishment and also a failure of the anti-establishment. It was supported by a large majority of rural, working-class, no college degree, salt of the Earth white people. The modern Right is incapable of telling those people they are wrong on any issue, so we know what they'd do if the war happened today.

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Joe Biden's mental decline.

Although I agree wholeheartedly with you about the media cover-up / lying about the Biden cognitive decline .... I would never, ever want to get a beer with this anchorwoman (or podcaster? whatever the correct term is). It took her less than 90 seconds to go full reeeeeeee and actually use the phrase "I can't even..." Again, this is despite the confirmed fact that I agree with the general story here.

If rightwing Twitter could rot your brain, I'd expect Vance to be more affected than Musk.

The drugs aren't helping, but I think the simpler explanation is that Elon has been faking it till he makes it his entire career. Retweeting false information, and coping about Community Notes being gamed isn't actually any different than his MO of making predictions of wild-ass things happening "next year" for years on end, and complaining about the handful of voices calling him out on it a decade later.

Is Vance not pretty heavily rotted from online discourse too? He seems to have gone a deep end in some ways at least.

I saw his interview on Joe Rogan and thought he was someone who could actually be good: a moderating influence on Trump, an adult who can get some things done while being stabilizing in general versus Trump's more insane flips. I really liked his book too, and thought he might have some of the right instincts. I haven't been impressed so far, and his behavior in the Zelensky meeting and in general on social media have been the opposite at least in my perception, it seems to maximize for heat vs light in the real world.

Twitter shitposting seems to be highly contagious in general, with Rubio recently wading in to shout at Poland, which wasn't my idea of diplomacy. Seems like a clown show in general, rather than showing strength as I assume they intend.

I'm really interested in the opinions of others though... what do you all think?

Vance is interesting. At times he'll speak thoughtfully and reflectively, and at others he'll sound like a teenage edgelord ("Childless cat ladies"). He's too obviously smart for it to be brainrot IMO, so my best guess is he's trying to gain popularity with the online right who he sees as crucial to his political ambitions.

I think the Zelensky thing is actually misunderstood. What Trump and Vance were doing was asserting control. Zelensky was used to dealing with Biden and the Left and having the USA government roll over and hand him several billion dollars. In the clip, the entire point is making it clear to Zelensky that he’s not in charge anymore, and that if he wants the US to help him, he has to accept our terms — which all told, and given the circumstances Ukraine is in, are actually pretty generous. But unless the people running the country actually assert themselves m there’s no reason to take it seriously.

I would say the same for the deep state. The reason to go in and pause payments and force people to prove they’re working is two-fold. First, the obvious benefit of cutting the fat. It needs to be done. But the other benefit is that it puts the deep state in its place, where it is on notice that it serves the elected government, and the days when they could simply roll their eyes and ignore the government are over and you better get with the program.

If you want to make actual changes in how things are done, you cannot be timid or nice about it. If you show weakness, you’ll be walked all over. Better to be overbearing but get the job done than be weak and try to explain in four years why nothing of note has changed. And I think most of this posturing now will pay off later. Iran and Syria and Hamas are watching Trump and Zelensky. They know they’re no longer dealing with Sleepy Joe who will maybe pretend to be bothered by what they’re doing but be too weak to do anything but tut-tut while they walk all over him. Trump, and thus the USA are done being the teat the world suckles while getting nothing in return, and are done being openly disrespected.

which all told, and given the circumstances Ukraine is in, are actually pretty generous.

The written deal on offer at that meeting, to the best of our knowledge, was that Zelenskyy signs a mineral deal which in expectation transfers value from Ukraine to the US, and gets nothing in return. Trump was explicitly not offering any kind of security guarantee or military assistance, and can't offer a ceasefire because negotiations between Trump and Putin are still at the talking-about-talks stage. Zelenskyy had successfully negotiated the negative economic EV of the deal down to a de minimis level, and was in Washington to sign a mostly-irrelevant mineral deal as a confidence-building measure.

Assuming all parties were acting sensibly rather than having a destructive snit, something happened immediately before or during the press conference that made it clear that the mineral deal - or rather the as yet unwritten deal that the mineral deal was a confidence-building step towards - didn't work. And it is fairly obvious what that disagreement was. The two key negative turning points are when Trump asks Zelenskyy to come out in favour of a ceasefire (Zelenskyy is quite properly unwilling to do anything that reads as committing to support a US-negotiated ceasefire until he knows what it might look like) while Zelenskyy asks Trump to promise further military support against Russia if Russia misbehaves (which Trump has made clear he doesn't want to do). The disagreement is that Trump sees the end goal as Ukraine agreeing to a ceasefire negotiated between the US and Russia, and Zelenskyy sees the end goal as changing the balance of power such that Russia might plausibly agree to a ceasefire on reasonable terms.

his behavior in the Zelensky meeting and in general on social media have been the opposite at least in my perception, it seems to maximize for heat vs light in the real world.

The problem was that Zelensky was using that meeting for heat as well, grandstanding to the press and dragging the subject away from the actual purpose of the meeting, which was signing the minerals deal that his own government suggested as a backdoor tripwire security guarantee. Zelensky has a habit of double-dipping like this; Biden also allegedly yelled at Zelensky for being an ingrate, just like Trump and Vance, when, on a call to discuss an aid package Biden had just secured for Ukraine, Zelensky immediately launched into a spiel about all the additional things he needed and wasn't getting from the U.S.

I haven't been impressed so far, and his behavior in the Zelensky meeting and in general on social media have been the opposite at least in my perception, it seems to maximize for heat vs light in the real world.

Why do you think this, or Rubio's posting, us caused by Twitter? Was everythibg that made Democrats look bad in your eyes also caused by Twitter?

OP's complaint seems to be about detachment from basic reality, yours is a lot ccloser to just not liking their priorities and policies.

I mean I'm not impressed with Musk, Rubio or Vance on Twitter, and all of them seem a bit deranged on it - they're suffering from brainrot from the medium it seems to me. Though I did include some other points which are more not liking their priorities and policies, some of that also seems to be them playing to the social media crowd - maybe I'm wrong there however.

I mean I'm not impressed with Musk, Rubio or Vance on Twitter, and all of them seem a bit deranged on it - they're suffering from brainrot from the medium it seems to me

OP's baseline for "brainrot" is "making a factual statement on how much money you saved the government, and being off by a couple of orders of magnitude", yours is "they're maximizing for heat rather than light". I don't think it's correct to lump these together, and it might even be an instance of generating more heat than light itself.

I worry we're getting lost in defining terms here, possibly my mistake.

Making incorrect statements and sticking by them certainly seems to be one type of brainrot (as per OP), but I think it's fair to broaden it out, and to be clear my definition of brainrot isn't "maximizing for heat", though that's part of it, it's also more generally that many people senior in the US government seem to be basically shitposting on twitter. That seems really odd to me, and I include Vance and Rubio in that shitposting category.

I honestly wanted to discuss with people why that might be the case, and if others agree with the shitposting accusation, but if you don't want to discuss that, that's fair too.

but I think it's fair to broaden it out

Also, @mixpap.

And I believe that's a bad idea, unless you can come up with a clear definition that all sides agree on from the outset, otherise this will clearly devolve into "everything I don't like is brainrot, and the more I don't like it, the more brainrot it is". I can easily make an argument that the CDC declaring that racism is a public health emergency, or the entirety of the transgender movement is "progressive TikTok brainrot".

I don't think it's necessary to get into a deep analysis of the word brainrot , we know and you know what we are trying to express. A man that that might have been capable in a specific field , now very deluded and problematic in his statements ,getting involved in all kinds of things that don't concern him and lying constantly while doing it. If , as some have suggested , ketamine is the cause of his insanity then ketamine induced brainrot could possibly be a relatively accurate diagnosis? I am only half joking.

A definition of brainrot I found with a google search is “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”. I would argue that this is exactly what's going on with musk. He is degrading intellectually as a result of online content ( a lot of it being russian propaganda as I have many times underlined ).

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I think a common sense approach is best here. Rubio , while less then the others , is indeed showing signs of 'brainrot'. https://x.com/marcorubio/status/1898755922492588082 , this is not a serious answer to another politician who is correcting musk's nonsense, this would be considered a bad answer here on the motte , so you can't tell me it's an appropriate response for this level of communication. The US goverment is clearly confused, fanatic and out of control and the evidence is right there , no reason to trip over ourselves with analysis. There are literally hundreds of examples of this. I literally just yesterday saw a goverment official say something like ' trump is the only person in the universe that can solve the ukraine war' , yes he did say ' in the universe' , what the hell is going on? I am not even going to talk about Homan and his insane antics.

The whole thing is more performative then substantial, seems like everyone is trying to show off , with some of them being legitimately insane/incapable.

Take to task the Polish asshole who turned something clearly not a threat into a threat.

Musk's constant antagonizing of europeans is not in question. So it's not that one tweet that's problematic , but his whole stance getting involved in shit he knows nothing about and shouldnt be involved in. The only asshole is Musk , in fact I personally believe most people are way too lenient on him. I like the way the french politician put it ,' the ketamine addicted buffoon' i believe he said.

EDIT: Also did you read the tweet , musk says verbatim ' Their entire front line would collapse if it turned off' . Very well could be a threat. And considering how much of a demented asshole elon musk has been that's certainly how I would take it too.

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yes he did say ' in the universe' , what the hell is going on?

Unless he's claiming there are aliens, "in the universe" is the same as "in the world". It's just a rhetorical flourish, it doesn't actually mean anything different.

I am aware , that doesn't make it any better though .It is a cartoonishly ridiculous level of ass-licking. I could barely believe what I was hearing , rhetoric like that obviously has no place in a serious discussion. Children speak like that.

Of course it’s not a serious answer. Social media has near-zero incentive for serious answers. Televised Congressional hearings were bad enough when it came to grandstanding; why’d we have to make the feedback instant?

Twitter delenda est.

I know that’s not actually a practical option. I would like some way to convince the public that it’s not actually important, though.

What are you referring to when you say ' it's not actually important ' ?

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I know that’s not actually a practical option. I would like some way to convince the public that it’s not actually important, though.

Power Importance resides where men believe it resides

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Vance is one of those individuals who’s been rising his entire life. Him miscalculating when faced with a plague of purple people eaters is one thing, but I’d expect him to have calculated reasons for his rhetoric. Those reasons might be better for himself than for the commons, sure, but it doesn’t take twitter brain rot to do that.

[OP is breaking the rules by deleting top-level posts, removing context from the discussion. Here is their post's original text]

Richard Hanania with a new article: Liberals Only Censor. Musk Seeks to Lobotomize.

Basically, something has happened to Musk in the last two years that has caused his brain to haywire and now he appears incapable of separating truth from fiction. For example,

Last month, a fake news account claimed, based on no evidence at all, that Zelensky had a 4% approval rating in Ukraine. This was Community Noted, which led Elon Musk to lash out and declare that the system was “being gamed” and in the process of being fixed. It was becoming increasingly difficult to see how real time factchecking could last on X when it was constantly making a fool of its owner, who has decided to take a very hands-on approach to using the platform to shape discourse in his preferred direction.

Similarly, "savings" reported by DOGE are often incorrect and need to be revised.

Increased drug use is one suspected reason, but I think it might just be brain rot from being on right wing twitter too much. It should be noted that left wing social media contagion has similarly destroyed rationale thinking in the last ten years.

While not necessarily a cause of the haywiredness, I wonder how much of this behavior goes unchecked because Elon's lack of a mentor who he both trusts and respects. Sure, Thiel and Page and a handful of others played a part in shaping his (apparently now previous) worldview, but once you become arguably the most powerful person in the world, I can imagine other people's advice stops being helpful and becomes more of a hindrance. Why would I listen to someone who is less powerful than me telling me to cool it when everything I've done up to this point (SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink) has been—as most people have put it—net positive for the world, especially when I was told I would fail but ended up fine and thriving?

Having a trusted and respected mentor who can help pull your reigns in when needed is a nice thing that Elon doesn't seem to have at the expense of his sanity.

Musk's Twitter is bizarrely unfiltered. I have stopped interpreting his tweets as carefully considered positions that he is endorsing so much as random thoughts that he is just throwing out there, some of which he seriously believes but others that are just ephemeral musings. The increasingly transient and momentary nature of the platform are conducive to this pattern of behavior. I don't see how he has time to do it, so I have to assume he essentially doesn't. It seems more important for him to produce tweets than to think about them for very long. At the same time, Musk is privy to information that the general public is not, and betting against him doesn't have a great track record however crazy his ambitions might seem. If nothing else, he is quite entertaining.

I'm highly sceptical that a slow, cautious, and careful approach would serve Musk's goals better. The road to success passes through many mistakes, so might as well get through them as fast as possible. This doesn't seem to be a new style for Musk, but rather it's just new that we're getting to see it in the open on X. On the other hand, he might just be having a mental breakdown.

I'm highly sceptical that a slow, cautious, and careful approach would serve Musk's goals better. The road to success passes through many mistakes, so might as well get through them as fast as possible

And this is where the difference between a private business like SpaceX or Tesla and a democratic government comes in. A mistake in Tesla? "Oh well guys just wait for the cars a bit longer". A mistake in SpaceX? "Let's try another Starship"

A mistake in government? It can literally kill, it can have dangerous long term ramifications on both the lives of the citizens and the future of the country as a whole. And people will get pissed off way more. If you think customers can be angry about delays, wait till you see what happens if social security ever does get fucked with. Even with the relatively minimal and irrelevant cuts he's already been doing he's slowly racking up more enemies and pushback already, and not just from the Democrats, like even the Vatican was speaking up about some of it.

A mistake in government? It can literally kill, it can have dangerous long term ramifications on both the lives of the citizens and the future of the country as a whole.

This is true, but also we have had government for some time. As a calibration measure, can you give some examples of what are, in your opinion, the top five or ten worst mistakes in US government since, say, the year 2000?

That comment is filtered.

Focussing only on unambiguous mistakes - i.e. avoiding decisions which one side thinks are bad for partisan reasons:

If we are restricting ourselves to the Federal government, then the worst mistake is invading Iraq with no clear political goal or plan in place for the post-war occupation. If Scott Sumner and Kevin Erdmann are correct (and their models are based on sound theory and have a record of making correct predictions) then the second worst mistake was misreading a housing market borked by fundamentals (YIMBY supply restrictions driving mass migration out of Blue cities in general and SoCal in particular) for a speculative bubble, causing an avoidable Great Recession. With one exception (failing to approve rapid antigen tests for COVID-19 fast enough or to approve sufficiently many competing manufacturers to make them cheap), all the other serious, unambiguous mistakes seem to be downstream of those two. The botched rollout of healtcare.gov was the most embarrassing mistake, but it turned out to be orders of magnitude less expensive than Iraq or housing.

If we include Federal, State and local government failure then my list looks like (order is a guess):

  1. NIMBYism and the attempts to obfuscate the damage it is doing.
  2. Reversing the Bratton/Giuliani era reforms to policing that had successfully reduced both crime and incarceration.
  3. Iraq
  4. The US's worst-in-class COVID response, getting both more deaths and more practical damage from restrictions that any other rich country. Most of the mistakes were not federal, which is why it is lower down the previous list. Apart from the lack of rapid antigen tests, key severe, unambiguous mistakes are keeping elementary schools closed after it became clear Zoom school wasn't working and elementary school age children weren't spreading the virus, retaining outdoor restrictions after it became clear the virus mostly spread indoors, and retaining any restrictions at all after the most vulnerable groups were vaccinated.
  5. Bush Jr's FEMA, Gov Landrieu, and Mayor Nagin collectively botching the response to Hurricane Katrina.

with the Bozo the Clown award for the most hilariously stupid, most total, most humiliating failure that doesn't make the list because the cost wasn't high enough going to CAHSR.

There is one I would add to the list, but I think most people would see it as a partisan issue rather than a clear mistake - Merrick Garland slow-walking the prosecution of Donald Trump for the events leading up to January 6. If the indictment drops a year earlier - critically, before Trump was the presumptive Republican nominee - then the ridiculous New York false accounting case never happens, nor does the Section 3 disqualification litigation, both sides (and SCOTUS) have an incentive to get through the immunity litigation faster (because Trump can't delay the trial beyond election day) so either Trump is ruled immune or the case goes to trial before the first primaries, the partisan temperature around the case is generally lower, and if Trump is convicted then the Republican Party has an open primary to find a non-felonious nominee. I think all three possible outcomes (Trump convicted, Trump acquitted, Trump conclusively ruled immune by SCOTUS) are better for the health of American democracy than what we got.

Poor aerospace and automotive engineering can also kill. Ask Boeing how that's working out for them (hundreds of deaths from the MAX debacle). SpaceX has a surprisingly good, if imperfect, record, but Tesla seems to get a surprising number of OSHA complaints, and some of their vehicle design decisions (the emergency door release in the back seat of the 3 series, and such) suggest they don't take safety as seriously as Toyota, much less Volvo.

Something as simple as humanitarian aid suspension for a few weeks will kill more people than every act of shoddy automotive and aerospace engineering in the last twenty years put together.

I feel like people have difficulty grasping the difference in scale of even very large corporations versus government operations, and hence what is at stake. "Move fast and break things" is an ethos that works fine in tech where you're designing new commercial products and the worst that happens is you waste some money or cause a minor accident or invent digital heroin. It's not an ethos that works well for critical systems.

I suppose that's true, but I think the modal shoddy government decision looks more like spending absurd amounts on high speed rail that never materializes. Deaths at the hand of the government outside of wartime are pretty small in number (cops shooting people, the death penalty, maybe bad disaster planning). The PEPFAR example I'd broadly agree with, but the emotional valence of "caused death" versus "didn't save life" strikes me as not quite equivalent: if you accept that wholesale, then how many have you killed by not liquidating your life savings and giving to EA causes?

On the corporate side, you could look at Thomas Midgley, who was instrumental in popularizing leaded gasoline and freon, with drastic effects on probably tens of millions of lives. And the anti-car folks (I am not a hardcore believer) might have you found the tens of thousands of motor vehicle fatalities there in the US annually against the industry too.

I think the modal shoddy government decision looks more like spending absurd amounts on high speed rail that never materializes.

I'm not sure this is true. People tend not to fuck around with critical systems unless they absolutely have to, so visible high impact decisions tend to be rare. But I think the typical bad government decision looks more like an act of over/under/misregulation with wide-reaching consequences. Things like overly restrictive drug approval processes, inadequate clean air standards, bad land use laws, etc... And there's also more tail risk with government policy. Corporations mostly aren't tasked with public health or maintaining critical transit infrastructure or public order. The last time I'm aware of that a corporation caused a famine was when the East India Company was acting as the de facto government of Bengal, etc...

I picked on PEPFAR in particular because it is an existing program. It's true that the US could save more lives if it were willing to spend more money, but with PEPFAR you can point to specific people who depend on the program. You can point more broadly to any medical/healthcare program - breaking Medicare/Medicaid would lead to a lot of people losing healthcare access.

On the corporate side, you could look at Thomas Midgley, who was instrumental in popularizing leaded gasoline and freon, with drastic effects on probably tens of millions of lives.

I guess we're dealing a different intuition around blame, because I see these as fundamentally regulatory failures. Same with motor vehicle fatalities - private companies may build the cars and private citizens may drive them, but traffic laws and vehicle standards are set by the government.

Messing up the international relations that have led to 80 years with no use of nuclear weapons in combat has the potential to kill orders of magnitude more people than "hundreds" (and yes that's mostly Putin, and even on the less-culpable US side it's mostly Trump, but Musk is wading in a bit too).

Why not both? Extremist twitter brain rot turbocharged by copious drug use, in combination with being surrounded IRL by people competing to suck you off.

Here's a theory I've been toying with - let me start with an analogy, though.

Is it good for me, as a random American citizen, for the Chinese government to become more efficient, effective, capable, and trusted by its residents, to the point where such residents are willing to sacrifice personal things for some greater common good? Should I applaud any such efforts, or even figure out how to participate in various international organizations that could somehow encourage such things?

I think it's obviously that the answer isn't trivially "yes", because I have no reason to assume that an effective Chinese government actually has my values and concerns and best interest in mind. In fact, it's fairly likely that their values and goals might have some very zero sum consequences for me and my loved ones. The more effective the Chinese government is, the worse for me... at least possibly. This is not a crazy thing to think. And indeed, every empire that has leaned on divide et impera seems to have a similar view, because they very frequently find ways to keep their competitors divided and low trust to prevent exactly that kind of efficiency.

One of the consequences of the Reagan revolution is that it cemented a certain kind of public rhetoric about the American Federal government in relation to citizens. We've been habituated to that rhetoric being what it means to be conservative. "Of course we need good government, of course we have a shared common good... but the problem is waste. The problem is corruption. The problem is big government is too distant from local communities. The problem is that do-gooder liberals have real difficulty understanding second order consequences, and they often don't understand economics at all. Let's shrink government and make it better, let's get of waste, let's give taxes back to responsible taxpayers who work and raise families and follow the law and participate in the military."

But that rhetoric, successful as it was, still pushed the idea that there was a shared, consensus common good, and that an effective central government simply needed to be pointed correctly in the direction of the revised common good. It needed to be pruned, it needed to be tended. But that rhetoric intentionally papered over a lot serious fissures. This is especially true if you pay more attention to the kinds of people who might be labeled paleocons in their inclination. If you read about the history of forced busing in the seventies, for example, you might personally read it as a story of good intentions not being enough to achieve a desirable outcome - the right thing was done the wrong way. That's a very public Reagan conservative way to talk about it. But for a LOT of people who lived through it, they actually experienced it as the government and its utopian bureaucrats, as external tyrannical forces, actively ethnic cleansing them. For people who experienced it that way, having the government be more effective or efficient, and having it cut waste, is arguably a worse outcome, not a better one. Destroying the capacity of the government to function, if that's your view of things, is a feature, not a bug.

I'm not exactly saying Musk believes something like this in relation to either the Federal government or international institutions. But I am saying that this issue - whether or not the Federal government is intrinsically a foe, or if it can be a friend - seems much more live on the Right in positions of actual power these days than it ever has been in my lifetime. All my years growing up, seeing the government as an outside, malign force of extreme power was a really widely held position by the adults around me, but they were accustomed to getting lip service from their politicians about the issue but never any actual movement. And the issue is that all the adults around me were like the ones who were on the receiving end of forced busing and other similar liberal projects. They did not experience the Federal Government as a solution to a problem, but more like a God like Zeus at his worse - it had to be placated and otherwise avoided as much as possible.

Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying, if there is interest in wrecking government, then it's absolutely possible for public rhetoric that involves conspicuously lazy fact checking, repeated at very high volume and frequency, to be a feature, not a bug. Because anything that bolsters public trust in shared public discussion helps build trust in shared public institutions. And anything that pollutes the media environment and invites skepticism reduces that kind of shared public resource. This is part of why the high profile failures of Federal institutions during 2020 and Covid were much more damaging for pro-centralizing, pro-institution progressives; they need public trust for public authority to gain the power they want and to achieve their goals in a way that some other political strands simply don't. It's likewise why the public radicalization of so many professors and prestige journalists, spewing all their misinformed, polarized, clickbait political opinions on twitter for the last 15 years, was probably a mistake of historical proportions for the legitimacy of the American academy and legacy press - I'm supposed to implicitly trust well-credentialed voices in a way that I don't trust Alex Jones, but it turns out a lot of "smart" people sound about as epistemically rigorous as Alex Jones when you get them away from the very narrow slices of knowledge where they actually maintain rigor, and it turns out that a lot of them have very different values from me, and are deep in a Schmittian friend-foe distinction that they used to be able to hide much better, maybe even from themselves. Elon Musk being exactly as epistemically lazy as those other voices doesn't redeem them; instead, arguably it just reinforces my skepticism. There are serious asymmetries at play here about the consequences of public distrust. I'm thinking very specifically here, too, of the 2016 Adam Curtis documentary HyperNormalisation, by the way, which makes a very specific argument that established political forces under Putin in Russia had mastered a form of flooding the media environment with conflicting sensational garbage to get people to become very skeptical and disengage from political engagement more broadly.

As I say, I have no idea how Musk actually fits in in all of this. But it's a theory.

Great post. As someone that leans more libertarian, it does seem like government programs do more harm than good, especially w.r.t. second order effects and longer term unintended consequences (ie: nanny and welfare state slowly destroying the family unit, esp in poorer communities).

So yes, Musk, Trump et al. acting brash, irrational, and abusing power might be a great thing, if it reduces the government loving progressive caucus’ trust in the whole apparatus.

So yes, Musk, Trump et al. acting brash, irrational, and abusing power might be a great thing, if it reduces the government loving progressive caucus’ trust in the whole apparatus.

Why on Earth would it do that? When the opposition party makes it clear their plan is overt sabotage, you're not going to think "the system is broken, better hand even more power to people like Musk." You're going to think "we have a problem with saboteurs."

Obviously not 100% of people will be convinced but this does a lot to discredit the legitimacy and even constitutionality of our current government. If the government is only legit when progressives win, well it’s not legit about half the time. So you’re halfway there.

To correct for this, some will want to rig elections so that their side can’t lose. Well doesn’t that make it even less legit for everyone else?

Finally, there are other forms of government or organization that are not extremely top-down federal level OR full corporatocracy. State, local level? The Federal level is fucked and a money grab, we can all see this.

Can we? State and local government often makes the Feds look efficient and honest. Some of the most high-impact bad policy is attributable to decisions made at the state and local level. It's rent seeking all the way down, and half the time "local autonomy" just local elites stamping the boot on the necks of local out group members.

Obviously not 100% of people will be convinced but this does a lot to discredit the legitimacy and even constitutionality of our current government

Again, this makes no sense. Accelerationism rarely plays out the way you expect. If you start corruption and abuse-maxing, the most likely reaction is tightening accountability and proceduralism such that officials have less discretion to abuse. It also raises the risk of authoritarianism as the power abusers you enthroned to destroy state legitimacy abuse their power to hang onto to power. Bad faith participation may make sense of your goal is to literally wreck the country, but that's just a different form of shooting yourself in the dick.

Like, how do you see this playing out? Trump abuses executive discretion, therefore we're going to abolish social security?

Sure, but at least states have competition. If some state has bad policy, people will leave to a better managed one. I strongly believe in competition and some sort of free market here, where bad states fail, good ones succeed and grow, and then regimes will change and improve in bad states.

Not even about social security, what about all this immoral shit that the government does, or corporations use government to do? Like regime changes, war mongering (and how fucking profitable war is), immunity for vaccine manufacturers, all this is shady as fuck and the right seems bent on tearing it down and stopping left-wing grifts. When the left gets in power, I’d love to see them reveal and tear down right wing grifts (there are many) and after a few cycles of this, government is dramatically smaller, less grifty, and more moral.

But for a LOT of people who lived through it, they actually experienced it as the government and its utopian bureaucrats, as external tyrannical forces, actively ethnic cleansing them. For people who experienced it that way, having the government be more effective or efficient, and having it cut waste, is arguably a worse outcome, not a better one. Destroying the capacity of the government to function, if that's your view of things, is a feature, not a bug.

This strain of thought definitely exists, and I think you need to expand it to consider priorities when cutting. If your goal is to undermine public faith in government and feed new calls for new cuts in a future perpetual cycle, you want your cuts to be maximally destructive, deleterious, crippling, and you want to target visible things that people like and that benefit actual citizens.

If I were running Ford and trying to destroy Ford, I wouldn't start by cutting the cars everyone doesn't like. I would start by ending Mustang production, screwing up the engine and bed on the F150, and leaving shit like the Escape that no one likes anyway alone. Then even if the board manages to get me out of office and try to reverse the decline, the damage will be done in consumer sentiment.

To turn people against the government, make interacting with the government more unpleasant, make the headline things that people like such as national parks and the NOAA work more poorly, undermine morale and security throughout the entire federal workforce. That will turn people further against the federal government, feeding bigger cuts.

If I were running Ford and trying to destroy Ford, I wouldn't start by cutting the cars everyone doesn't like. I would start by ending Mustang production, screwing up the engine and bed on the F150

Ford doesn't have a monopoly on violence though; in the government analogy, they just make everyone drive Escapes -- which makes people hate the Forderlords but it's not like they can go buy a Camaro instead.

Whereas if they quit making Escapes and nobody cares, it's a viable argument that Ford is wasting a lot of resources on things nobody likes, and further cuts should be NBD. (of course the plan breaks down when all the CUV engineers start writing articles about how many puppies will die if they are laid off)

Whereas if they quit making Escapes and nobody cares, it's a viable argument that Ford is wasting a lot of resources on things nobody likes, and further cuts should be NBD.

I think, to torture the metaphor to death, the argument would be that if you quit wasting money on crap nobody likes, but retain the positive image of the company as a whole, the company will rebound. Ford made the Edsel, and it was a flop, but Ford survived and made the Mustang and as a result would go on to waste money on the Escape and the Edge and the Flex and whatever else.

The weird thing is that this is how some government departments have reacted to cuts in the past. They cut the things that are most visible in order to drive public support to reverse the cuts.

This is an obvious tactic, it even has a recognized name if I remember. “Washington monument syndrome”, from the act of closing a high visibility and popular attraction to affect maximum outrage.

High level bureaucrats get to where they get by knowing how to play the game and defend their turf. Cutting their budgets is a direct threat to their power, so instead of trimming the fat they immediately cut into muscle and bone to cause maximum observable negative effects.

If you’re a librarian, instead of cutting unpopular programs or reorganizing for a leaner institution you cut staff hours at the front desk, maximizing wait times, then blame it on the mean old politicians who just hate children and reading. Same thing with national parks, I rolled my eyes when I saw they cut that locksmith and shut down the bathrooms, it was so transparently designed to be maximally disruptive and silly.

But this is just politics 101, its easy to see if you’ve ever interacted with any of these people.

Sinecures for the politically connected? Untouched. Programs and initiatives that play to the party faithful of radical activists? Reshuffled, renamed, hidden from view.

Beloved symbols that are popular with a huge swathe of the public? Tragically closed, so sad, so avoidable if mean old republicans and townies just learned their place.

Utterly predictable.

I find this post to be generating a sentiment I generally agree with, and I also would point to there being a very important sub-portion of government that the split between liberals and conservatives seem to be fracturing around: Education.

If you are a conservative and went to public schools, you generally think a minority of your teachers were good and fair. If you are a progressive, the opposite is generally true. From 1st -12th grade I had 2 teachers total I would put in the category of good and fair. The vast majority were either unfair or bad, and a solid 70%+ were both.

This is all while I am a solid A student for all these years. I did not think these teachers were bad or unfair because they gave me bad grades, they were bad and unfair based on my other judgements. Usually how they treated other students, or how they expected ridiculous things from me like constantly pairing me in group projects with dumb/violent kids. Progressive kids I think generally like teachers. I think a lot of that is that they got good grades. Whence we are seeing the large M/F gap in both college attendance and partisanship. Girls keep getting good grades that are unearned in K-12, boys consistently over-perform on standardized tests now. Girls are getting more progressive, boys less so. Boys are seeing this unfairness more and more. On both ends. The 4.0 boy and the 2.0 boy are both being massively discriminated against in the most public facing institution in our government, the schools. And that is being reflected in poll results.

I doubt it. Perhaps I am naive, but I think it would be more valuable to Musk to have Musk's own mass media with non-government-affiliated Community Notes known reliable when old Blue government-affiliated media is unreliable. If you are picturing a future without trust in current public institutions because they include your "outgroup" ... Firstly, you still would need institutions for your in-group, and I doubt it is your outgroup who is relying on X Community Notes in the first place.

Mainstream media, at least their bias is directionally predictable, and they seldom invent untruths easily refuted as untruths as Zelensky's approval ratings. Musk's takes are becoming increasingly unpredictable.

Alternative hypothesis: Good fact checking when Musk has started habitually retweeting untruths is embarrassing to Musk. Like many self-appointed strong leaders before him, Musk reacts badly when embarrassed. Thus, his underlings will rather cave in than insist on reporting the truth, and Musk embraces stories that fit in his mental headspace. The principal benefit of this hypothesis is that it is common human behavior since untold generations, and requires no convoluted plots.

Only issue to explain is how come he has been leading successful engineering companies until recently, as physics won't lie. One possibility is that this is a recent development, and we will see increasing amount of SpaceX and Tesla failures from increasingly deranged management. Other possibility is that it is not a new personality trait, only its magnitude has increased lately: Musk has had a documented habit of pushing not exactly reality based visions when he has been able to get away with it (launching "Full Self Driving" when it was not full self-driving, giving timelines in "Elon time" that never held, the kids in the cave episode). Perhaps rockets exploding when physics disagreed was what kept Musk the SpaceX CEO in a productive development loop with the reality, but the social environment of politics won't provide equally direct and brutal feedback to Musk the Politician.

Other possibility is that it is not a new personality trait, only its magnitude has increased lately: Musk has had a documented habit of pushing not exactly reality based visions when he has been able to get away with it

I think this is correct. Musk can simultaneously be a narcissistic bullshitter and a highly capable manufacturing CEO. Delusional overconfidence can be a benefit in certain endeavors because even if you fall short of unrealistic expectations you may still exceed what was conventionally thought possible and you may stick with projects when less demented determined people would have called it quits. On the other hand, it can also lead you to throw away time, money, and effort on unrealistic projects that go nowhere because no amount of force of will can overcome the technical problems.

It can also lead you to repeatedly fall for obvious nonsense because you think you're too smart to be wrong, and none of your retinue dares correct you.

It can also lead you to repeatedly fall for obvious nonsense because you think you're too smart to be wrong, and none of your retinue dares correct you.

I also think there can be a malign feedback loop here, where if you start being right more often than not you start disregarding advice and overfitting being correct most of the time to being correct 100% of the time and if you start doing this and it pays off (because you're smart) then soon you can get into a sort of death spiral where you just double down on anything and never update your "I am literally never wrong" priors because you had a good run in an area where you are genuinely talented.

I have friend who worked at Twitter - he recently quit because Elon just wouldn’t listen to any feedback regarding improvements to processes he was supervising and so he felt it wasn’t worth wasting his time.

I get the feeling that Elon doesn’t listen to feedback in general so that can be helpful in areas he has savant level skill (rocket engine manufacturing) and not helpful where he his instincts steer him wrong (running an ad supported social media company).

This was basically Bad Blood's take on how Theranos happened. Young, demented girl looks out at all her SV heroes faking it till they make it. Wants to do the same thing but is too young and demented to realize it's one thing to say that for a digital widget and another to apply it to a much more unforgiving domain.

It has come to mind before with Elon, like when I heard him talking about cutting $2 trillion.

It can also lead you to repeatedly fall for obvious nonsense because you think you're too smart to be wrong, and none of your retinue dares correct you.

I've noticed that the best salesmen I know are often the people most easily sold. My friends who are exceedingly talented medical device or insurance salesmen are the same guys getting talked into timeshares or undercoats or whatever.

I agree.

I once had a salesman friend get into my industry and arrange a meeting with me to spruik a very average product that I knew was very average. I couldn't believe how strongly he seemed to believe in the product. I'd known this guy for about 20 years since childhood. He absolutely believed the bullshit that he was spouting about the peddled garbage being the best in the field.

spruik, what a useful word! I'd never heard that one before.

You're right it is. It has real low brow used car salesman or carnival barker vibes.

Man, the Chaser takes me back a bit. There are a lot of good teenage memories watching those guys.

Sure, because often those are the people who believe in themselves the most, and that means both believing (in fate) and believing in themselves, which both make falling for scams more likely.

Exactly. The quality of belief is the common thing.

While there’s definitely people in the Trump coalition who would be happy to see declining federal state capacity- I guess I’m technically one of them- I’m pretty sure Musk doesn’t qualify. He wants the federal government to be on his side, not for it to be a polite suggestion.


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