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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34397 thread views

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.

After reading through his ballot discussions, there is nothing that makes me thing Scott is anything other than a party-line blue triber. In every case he is maximally charitable to the D candidate, and maximally uncharitable to the R candidate (ex: he states anyone disputing the 2020 election is an automatic no vote from him, yet conveniently forgets a large number of Ds did the same in 2016, and as happens in every presidential election). While he discusses and presents the issues in a very thoughful manner- why most of us read ACX in the firet place- I dont see him ever voting a majority not-blue ballot.

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