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I've discoursed elsewhere on the Progressive Epistemic Crisis. Short version: they constructed such impervious bubbles that they become entirely disconnected from reality. Is the president senile? What is a woman? Is the economy good? The list of simple questions that a progressive cannot answer could go on and on.
This is problem for all of us, because they successfully marched through all the institutions that we all relied on to know what was true and what was important. The rot is evident everywhere, and has been discussed in these spaces many times before. Social sciences have a replication crisis. Alzheimer's research has been almost entirely fraud for 2 decades. University presidents dragged before Congress cannot articulate their views on calls for genocide, and cannot fall back on "free speech" defenses without everybody laughing in their faces. Nobody even knows who was running the presidency these past 4 years. And trust in the media, the institution tasked with helping to make sense of all of this, continues to crash.
The problem for the Left is how to extract themselves from these bubbles, or maybe even reform them. But the problem for the Right, which already believes them to be irredeemable, is what to replace them with. And it looks like the Right has coalesced around an answer.
Twitter. The answer is Twitter.
Legacy Ways of Knowing were highly authoritative and highly centralized; the new approach flips that entirely on its head.
The first thing you need to understand is that Twitter knowledge is delivered in a breaking-news, but very provisional, style. In Rationalist terms, every tweet is effectively tagged with "epistemic status: low certainty." Info comes in very fast, but the accuracy is also low; you have to wait and watch as the story develops and keep sampling the gestalt before you can have confidence in a given piece of info. When Elon talks about finding all these dead people in the Social Security and implies that this is a major source of fraud, he is pointing at an interesting thing he found and maybe it will grow into some more substantial as they dig into it. This is "move fast and break things" applied to epistemology. Even within the same story, you can contrast the two systems. On the left, an article was found to declare, authoritatively, that actually it's just COBOL. The pitfalls of both approaches show forth here, in that finding dead people will probably not catch much waste/fraud/abuse relatively speaking, but also in that the COBOL response was entirely incorrect.
Second, Twitter Knowing is highly decentralized. In the Legacy Knowing, you got with the party line quick if you knew what was good for you, or you were banned or cancelled. It didn't matter if they said masks were dumb last week, now they believe masks are good, and so now you will believe that too, with exactly the same certainty as the previous contradictory belief. Lefty pundits thought the Trump coalition was already cracking up when Musk tweeted in favor of more H1-Bs over Christmas, and got dogpiled for it; in their world such open dissent would have meant large numbers of purges all around. Instead, Musk retreated and the leadership received some valuable information about their coalition's views.
Of course, Musk did not quietly retreat. Instead, he changed the subject to Rotherham, and the Right united around remembering how terrible their enemies are. And this gets to the primary use of legacy media, which was not so much the transmission of information, but the directing of discussion. Leftwing institutions told them when to care about kids in cages (during Republican administrations) and when not to (during Democratic administrations)(1). Right-wingers have long struggled to match this narrative-pushing ability. But Twitter is now serving the same purpose of pushing forward stories to be talked about, and Musk is experimenting with just how far he can push that ability. Most of his current posts are mostly oriented around trying to nudge the narrative in certain directions. But note that he has this power because he is a highly followed account, not because he owns the site. Others with large follower counts can do the same thing, and increasingly will.
All of this could change very quickly, but that's where we stand at the moment. Legacy institutions already capitulated to this state of affairs when Biden resigned from the race via Twitter, with no further elaboration in any legacy media. Maybe they could have pushed back then, but not now.
tldr;
(1) This should actually be seen as Kelsey attempting to wrest back some amount of agency.
This takes the cake for the biggest load of nonsense I have ever read. It blusters a lot with only a few actual points made in defence of the notion that government economic statistics failed to capture true economic conditions post-Covid, all of which are very silly indeed.
In the first place I am disinclined to give this any credence because their calculations are very opaque. Even if you got to their website the 'data' section and 'white paper' for their 'True Living Cost' don't seem to give their actual weights or the changes in weightings (other that impressionistic statements like saying that 'luxuries' have been deweighted). However, even if I could trust their numbers it doesn't at all resolve the 'vibecession' question because based on TLC the Trump years were ones of economic decline too. However, the economic discourse in those years was uniformly positive. So what gives?
Aside from the fairly preposterous gambit of saying that we can count some people in full-time employment as unemployed if their wage is too low (words have meanings, if you want to talk about wages then just do, don't crowbar it in to unemployment figures). More importantly though, what you will see again is that his 'true' unemployment figure tracks exactly the common U-3 figure over the years. So again it's totally worthless in explaining post-Covid dissatisfaction because the post-Covid 'true' rate was actually the lowest it has ever been since his data series starts in the 90s.
This is insultingly dishonest. Why does he say 'since 2013' in an article about the post-Covid economy? Because the trend doesn't hold true - after over a decade of sharply rising inequality, the 2021-23 period was actually saw bottom quintile income rise as a proportion of top quintile income.
This article is utterly irrelevant to post-Covid economic perceptions. What is might prove, if one believes the statistics, is that Americans ought to have been pessimistic about the economy throughout the 90s, 2000s and 2010s as well as post-Covid. But they frequently weren't. It still doesn't answer the question of why Americans get specifically upset in the post-Covid period.
Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.
This is talk radio 'why are my enemies all so thick' slop. Take it elsewhere.
Then why don't you provide such a scheme? Why so few on the left have given precise definition of a woman that got traction. The left keeps extremely vague on the topic what is a woman, the only concrete thing that they say is that trans women are women.
Our view is that whoever says they are a woman is a woman. You can argue all you like that this is overly permissive, socially corrosive, whatever, but you can't say it isn't simple.
Would you agree that the simplest, most obvious solution to the wage gap and indeed every other politically significant, statistically-measured gender gap in existence is for all men to say they are women?
That is to say, "whoever says they are a woman is a woman" is indeed simple, in atomic isolation. It is also completely incoherent with, at a minimum, the entire edifice of Feminism. When people say that the progressive position is not simple, they do not mean that the definitions offered have too many words, but rather that the position is evidently incoherent, and that this incoherent state is only maintainable in a safe space and with an ocean of squid ink.
Hah, this immediately made me think of Dr Seuss's The Sneetches. That'd be an interesting state of affairs to live in.
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