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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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SBF had a long interview with NYT where they were remarkably soft on him. The whole thing can be read read here.

For my part, it seems like he has little remorse and is spinning things as "things expanded too fast and I made a mistake". The fact that his hedge fund (Alameda Research) was propped up by client deposits without their knowledge is not something he wishes to mention.

Over at Twitter, he has been consistently deleting tweets such as his Nov 7th tweet assuring everyone that FTX has a "long history of safeguarding client assets". Some are speculating that his recent gibberish tweets are in fact a way to keep his tweet count constant, so to not alert bots when a large amount of tweets are suddenly deleted (as some bots may begin to do auto-archiving). In his interview with NYT, he instead spun his new tweets as some kind of cryptic message he wants to send.

All these things re-affirm my view that he's basically a manipulative psychopath. What's disappointing but not surprising is the soft gloves treatment he gets in the NYT. One cannot help but ask whether his status as democrat megadonor plays a part in that.

From our own point of view it's clear that SBF is grey tribe, so we've been focusing on the Effective Altruism angle, but I don't think the mainstream knows of the grey tribe yet, and if the blue tribe has recognised him as one of their own (with him being a democratic donor and all), then it makes more sense that the media would be defending him.

I think he's blue. What has he done or said that makes him grey?

from wiki:

Contributions for the year 2022, through August 15, 2022, also went to members of both parties, with $105,000 donated to conservatives (0.3%) and $35,872,000 to liberals (99.7%) .[81]

Being an effective altruist basically makes him grey, no? He's certainly politically aligned with democrats, but so is Scott, and that doesn't make him blue tribe.

His parents teach at Stanford. His gf at MIT. His mothers been a Democratic and Biden bundler for a long time. His Aunts like Harvard and work in public health. Deep administrative state people with Democrat connections.

I remember asking a question a while ago on whether effective altruist were just Democrats who came up with new branding so they weren’t Democrats but the upper class Democrats to seperate themselves from the peons in the party.

Honestly EA just looks like Democrats to me now even more. People who want to say the ends justify the means to take other peoples money and spend it. Old school tax and spend Dems.

Perhaps grey tribe just doesn’t exists. Thiels just a conservative with edgier branding and libertarians are just conservatives.

She talked about HBD on her blog! Both of them were scott fans! A lot of the gray tribe came out of elites and top universities.

I mean, a lot of white nationalists came out of top universities. Jared Taylor went to yale. just being democrat-related doesn't tell you everything.

Sounds like you are just describing grey tribe as being a bit smarter than your tribe and a little autistic so able to think outside of social pressure.

But I basically defined him as claiming grey tribe as it lets him be in the upper intellect of blue tribe and above the peons so are definitions don’t really disagree.