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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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In case you spent the day under a rock, Trump has been reinstated on Twitter after winning a poll by Elon Musk. Not kidding.

I'd like to keep this open & not push the discussion in any direction, so I'll keep this short.

Predictions? What does this mean for Twitter? Elon? Trump? Social media? The country? The world?

This will likely accelerate the Left's attempts to move to a more pro-censorship platform. They also might pressure advertisers to boycott Twitter.

Do not forget that Musk’s businesses such as Tesla and SpaceX wouldn’t survive a day without US government help (yes Tesla too). Musk isn’t anti-establishment, he is a part of the establishment.

The establishment has decided to let Trump back on Twitter, despite the fact that a lot of people (probably half the country) will be enraged by this.

Why they did it is an open question. My guess is they're just throwing the right a bone to cool the tides a little. They're too busy "celebrating" a minor victory while the larger and more important battles of the culture war, i.e. entertainment media, journalism and education, will remain their provinces.

“Musk needs government subsidies for his companies” is not sufficient to assume “the establishment has direct control over Musk’s adventures in twitter”. This strikes me as conspiratorial thinking. There are plenty of ways that the Musk-establishment relationship could be coloured without him being an enthusiastic and willing member, or otherwise a directly and forcibly controlled party.

This strikes me as conspiratorial thinking.

Sure, but I am yet to hear a good argument against conspiratorial thinking.

It leads to incorrect predictions if it makes predictions at all. It's usually used to explain rather than make useful predictions. It's model involves people smarter, more cooperative, and more disciplined than they really are. It promotes either inaction or ineffectual flailing.

It leads to incorrect predictions if it makes predictions at all. It's usually used to explain rather than make useful predictions.

Not compared any of the alternatives. Same applies to Hanlon's Razor, or various forms of "skeptical", "assume good faith from the system, or any other "respectable" type of thinking I see contrasted with conspiratorial thinking.

It promotes either inaction or ineffectual flailing.

Again, same, except other types of thinking promote shrugging things off, and pretending nothing happened.

It's model involves people smarter, more cooperative, and more disciplined than they really are.

That's just flat out untrue. Conspiratorial thinking does not involve levels of intelligence, cooperation, or discipline beyond what we've already seen from human behavior.

You seem to be contrasting conspiratorial thinking with blind trust in authority. I don't think that's the only alternative. I think the default assumption is that any given individual or group is foolish and treading water and build your hypothesis up from there.

No, like I said, I'm comparing to a typical skeptical framework, commonly used to dismiss conspiracy theories. I see how "assume good faith" could lead to a misunderstanding, but I specifically brought up Hanlon's Razor to take "any individual group is foolish and trading water" into account as well.

Notice how that approach also explains rather than predicts, and promotes inaction.

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