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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20492 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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Scott has a new post on AI and money in politics. I'd like to take a step back and talk about how we got here.

In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that there are essentially no constitutional limits on political spending and advertising. At the time, it was widely anticipated that this would turn American politics into the wild west of corruption, crony capitalism, and corporate propaganda. But in the years after the decision, the feared corporate catastrophe failed to materialize. Trump didn't win in 2016 because of corporate support. In the primary, he bragged that he was self-funding his campaign and so wasn't beholden to special interests. On the Democrat side, Bernie Sanders got a lot of milage out of constantly reminding people that he didn't have a SuperPac.

In 2019, Scott wrote the prophetic Too Much Dark Money in Almonds, in which he pointed out that wealthy actors are probably underspending on politics and then brainstormed ways to turn money into political influence. By 2022, we started to see serious attempts at using previously-unheard-of amounts of money to systematically affect the political process. Sam Bankman-Fried was too-clever-by-half donating money he didn't technically own, but Elon Musk's aquisition of Twitter ended wokeness overnight and likely won Trump the 2024 election. If Scott is to be believed, the cryptocurrency and AI industries are well on their way to fulfilling SBF's dream of rooting the state.

Why did it take 10+ years for this to happen? My hypothesis: cultural inertia (and shame).

Despite being purported as the main beneficiaries of Citizens United, big corporations weren't really trying to spend large sums of money on politics. Exxon Mobil didn't park an oil tanker full of cash in the Chesapeake waiting for the signal to shower Washington in oil money as part of their dastardly plan. That just wasn't how buisinesses operated. It took time to develop both a theoretical framework for how to turn an abritrarily large amount of money into political power (it's a lot more complicated than simply buying ads), and to develop a philosophical framework for why this isn't cartoonishly evil.

Related 2014 SSC: Does Class Warefare Have A Free-Rider Problem?. There Scott argues that there is a collective action problem among the rich fighting for their common interests, e.g. low taxes.

Even today, the money which influences politics is mostly spent by individual private individuals or by companies held privately. (With the META PAC being a notable exception).

Also, I think that while "we are spending a few hundred million dollars of company funds on Trump to get on his good side and get juicy US gov contracts" is probably a solid business decision (even if it is not what Adam Smith had in mind), spelling out how that is profitable at the stockholder's meeting is likely to get the CEO in legal trouble. So the straightforward buying of influence is more of a strategy among tech billionaires and middle eastern autocrats than for publicly traded companies.

Even today, the money which influences politics is mostly spent by individual private individuals or by companies held privately

You say that but I was surprised to see that the list of donors to Donald Trump's new east wing ballroom includes most major tech companies: Amazon, Apple, Google, HP, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft.

These are all publicly held companies, and companies that I'd pegged as in the Democrat camp. Apparently that doesn't stop them from throwing some money Trump's way to stay on his good side.

spelling out how that is profitable at the stockholder's meeting is likely to get the CEO in legal trouble

The CEO won't have to spell it out at the stockholders meeting, because stockholders already understand how bribing the government benefits the company, and making that policy explicit can only harm the company, so they're not going to demand an explanation from the CEO. Tacit approval is clearly the best policy here.

In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that there are essentially no constitutional limits on political spending and advertising. At the time, it was widely anticipated that this would turn American politics into the wild west of corruption, crony capitalism, and corporate propaganda.

Is there someone interested in a steelman of ruling Citizens United in the opposite direction? The initial oral argument featured a claim that federal election law gave the government the authority to literally ban books. A redux argument in that case rather memorably featured Solicitor General Kagan (now a SCOTUS Justice) had the following dialog (PDF warning):

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: But we don't put our -- we don't put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats; and if you say that you are not going to apply it to a book, what about a pamphlet?

GENERAL KAGAN: I think a -- a pamphlet would be different. A pamphlet is pretty classic electioneering, so there is no attempt to say that 441 b only applies to video and not to print. It does --

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, what if the particular -- what if the particular movie involved here had not been distributed by Video on Demand? Suppose that people could view it for free on Netflix over the internet? Suppose that free DVDs were passed out. Suppose people could attend the movie for free in a movie theater; suppose the exact text of this was distributed in a printed form. In light of your retraction, I have no idea where the government would draw the line with respect to the medium that could be prohibited.

GENERAL KAGAN: Well, none of those things, again, are covered.

JUSTICE ALITO: No, but could they? Which of them could and which could not? I understand you to say books could not.

GENERAL KAGAN: Yes, I think what you -- what we're saying is that there has never been an enforcement action for books. Nobody has ever suggested -- nobody in Congress, nobody in the administrative apparatus has ever suggested that books pose any kind of corruption problem, so I think that there would be a good as-applied challenge with respect to that.

JUSTICE SCALIA: So you're -- you are a lawyer advising somebody who is about to come out with a book and you say don't worry, the FEC has never tried to send somebody to prison for this. This statute covers it, but don't worry, the FEC has never done it. Is that going to comfort your client? I don't think so.

JUSTICE GINSBURG: But this -- this statute doesn't cover. It doesn't cover books.

GENERAL KAGAN: No, no, that's exactly right. The only statute that is involved in this case does not cover books. So 441b which --

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Does cover books.

GENERAL KAGAN: -- which does cover books, except that I have just said that there would be a good as-applied challenge and that there has been no administrative practice of ever applying it to the books. And also only applies to express advocacy, right? 203 has -- is -- is -- has a broader category of the functional equivalent of express advocacy, but 441b is only express advocacy, which is a part of the reason why it has never applied to a book. One cannot imagine very many books that would meet the definition of express advocacy as this Court has expressed that.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh, I'm sorry, we suggested some in the last argument. You have a history of union organizing and union involvement in politics, and the last sentence says in light of all this, vote for Jones.

GENERAL KAGAN: I think that that wouldn't be covered, Mr. Chief Justice. The FEC is very careful and says this in all its regulations to view matters as a whole. And as a whole that book would not count as express advocacy.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you, General.

I personally don't find the government's argument here persuasive, especially in light of why Fahrenheit 9/11 (a documentary very critical of the Bush administration released during the 2004 election cycle), clearly a corporate work, was deemed acceptable by the FEC, but Hillary: The Movie was somehow not. I'd love to hear a steelman of the FEC's choices there, because I find it really unpersuasive. Maybe there's something on the "corporate" angle there, but I have trouble with the idea that such an important constitutional right disappears as soon as you band together. And if you go that route, it seems like you're limiting rights only to the monied class: it prevents crowdfunding to fly a branded blimp, but wouldn't preclude, say, Elon Musk deciding to fund that same blimp by himself. If you think "paying other people" for that blimp comes into play, I hope you don't need to pay someone else to put up billboards. It's just turtles all the way down, even if I'm not completely happy with the final decision.

ETA: I'm not even convinced that current Justice Kagan would side with General Kagan of the time here.

Is there someone interested in a steelman of ruling Citizens United in the opposite direction?

The steelman, I think, is simply that Citizens United didn't change nearly as much as people suggest it did.

And if you go that route, it seems like you're limiting rights only to the monied class: it prevents crowdfunding to fly a branded blimp, but wouldn't preclude, say, Elon Musk deciding to fund that same blimp by himself.

This is in fact a feature of US election law -- a candidate can spend as much as his own money as he likes.

I've long had an idea bouncing around my head of creating a Citizens United quiz full of all kinds of tough questions to try and get people to realize the full implications of what they're asking for when they want it overturned. Some if the questions I've thought of:

Current politician John Smith recently wrote memoirs. Knopf projects that the memoirs will likely be unprofitable to publish, but they think it will help John Smith's reelection chances if they publish it anyway and eat the loss. Is it campaign spending if they choose to publish it? Should they be required to do a profitability analysis before publishing any books about active politicians? I have several variations in mind, like if John Smith is now a retired politician, or he's dead but a current candidate is seen as the bearer of his legacy, or if the book is projected to actually be profitable, or if it's a tell-all by his daughter about he molested her, etc.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is running for governor of California. AMC owns the syndication rights to several of his movies, do they have to stop airing his films within a certain number of days before the election? My favorite variations: If AMC decides to start showingTerminator 2 and Total Recall twice as much as they had before, is that campaign spending in Arnold's favor? If they decide to start showing nothing but Junior and End of Days is that campaign spending against him?

Arnold Schwarzenegger is running for governor of California. AMC owns the syndication rights to several of his movies, do they have to stop airing his films within a certain number of days before the election?

George Takei ran for LA city council in 1973, and the local TV stations did take reruns of Star Trek and new-run episodes of ST:TAS off the air apparently because of this.

I read that post and I thought "this is nuclear-grade culture war fodder."

In his analysis, money in politics was an underused weapon- either going to groups that don't really need it (generic voting ads), or just not enough of it (very low hard-money contributions to reps in competitive elections). The one exception is AIPAC, which has apparently minmaxed the system to wield massive power for decades. Everyone knows this, every politician is afraid of AIPAC, every political strategist admires their success, but no one has managed to copy it. Not the tobacco industry, not big oil, not any other foreign country- the Israeli lobbyists are just in a league of their own when it comes to buying influence in washington. And they don't even spend that much.

If that's true (and many comments raise questions about how true any of this is)... how do you not feel incensed? It's almost literally "Jews run the government," a least on the specific issues that they care about. And maybe now apparently some tech-billionares are starting to copy that strategy, so we'll have a few of them running it to. But definitely nothing like a respresentative democracy. We count even counter them by using the same tactics because... I don't know, apparently everyone else is just too stupid and disorganized to pull off anything similar.

I think Scott wrote it just thinking it's interesting that the total money in politics is still so low. But... iti's hard not to read and that and think "something here is corrupt and fishy as hell."

I mean the question is why the tobacco industry, pharma industry, et al haven’t minmaxed their money in politics the way AIPAC has. These are industries very vulnerable to regulation and successful enough that we can assume their lobbying arms are not run by dummies. Yes hard money, soft money, but AIPAC isn’t spending that much.

The pharma industry benefits from regulation because it prevents competition. If a company is large enough before regulation, it can easily use its already-existing compliance department to comply with regulation. If a company wants to lobby, they should lobby for regulations they would find easy to meet but they know their competition will find onerous.

When Amazon realized about 13 years ago that they wouldn't be able to dodge state level sales taxes much longer, they did a whiplash inducing 180 on lobbying and started advocating for a strong detection and enforcement system to make sure that all merchants were unable to avoid the state taxes and launched a new dept. to handle the taxes of merchants who suddenly have to charge sales tax and have no infrastructure for it. Not only are they better positioned to handle the changes, but they also profit off the competition paying them to assuage the impacts of said changes.

Regulation is often a barrier to entry rather than a full on industry killer. Big incumbent companies like barriers to entry. I think tobacco industry is fine with current levels of regulation.

Pharma companies political control doesn't show up as easily because they just do heavy ad spend on all the news networks.

I think there are heavy limitations to the AIPAC strategy and I laid them out down thread. I don't think it's as much of a killer strategy as Scott implies.

Money is the unit of caring. Societies that discount the interests of their big businesses actually run worse than the ones that let big money buy favorable legislation. History is chock full of governments who strangled their economies because they had contempt for the concept of commerce. If there's a billion-dollar opportunity that requires a friendly government, letting businesses pay a million dollars to make friends with the government can result in better outcomes.

In my own personal opinion I think AIPAC can't be replicated unless you have your own Epstein. Money comes and goes but Blackmail material could very well be more valuable than gold in forcing people to your whims.

AIPAC's success could also just be a relic of the cold war. it looks to me like the west backed Israel and the Soviets backed a bunch of other states/organizations in that region and this also why now we have a lot of support on the left for Palestine. Some of the Palestinian organizations were explicitly Marxist/Leninist and also hooked up with revolutionary Marxist organizations in Europe to commit operations. It seems like this was a big thing in the 60s/70s.

Both Israel and Palestine today receive a lot of support from the left for Palestine and the right / (institutional left) for Israel because of inertia. Probably a lot of people don't know really why are they giving support to Israel or Palestine because the inertia from the Cold War is so large. There would have been massive propaganda efforts by both the Soviets and the US mainstream to push their sides point of view and is likely still having a large effect today.

Or...

  1. Have people who agree with your ends smeared across powerful institutions: Jews

  2. Have key political constituents that are amenable to messaging around your ends: Zionist Evangelicals and Jews

See also past NRA.

maybe this is the truth of the matter, but I would assume that with the degraded authority of the institutions and the rise of the more nationalist MAGA that we wouldn't see support for Israel, but it still gets its money last I heard.

Trump is pro-Israel for the usual personal reasons why most of the NY establishment are pro-Israel even if they are not Jews themselves. But the younger generation of MAGA supporters appears to be moving towards a "not my circus, not my monkeys" American First view of the I-P conflict. This is one of the rare occasions when I agree with the very online MAGA right.

I will be very interested to see what happens when the current crop of fossils leave office and the younger generation step up to it. Between the Free Palestine on the left and the Nationalist MAGA on the right, I would assume the money spigot would dry out.

In my personal opinion, I think that’s stupid. If you could wave some Polaroids around and coerce Congress, why would you bother spending all the money?

Better yet. Scott gave an example of AIPAC deploying its money to win an election. Can you give me one where they did the same with their magical kid-diddling blackmail?

But I think we’ve had this argument before.

In my personal opinion, I think that’s stupid. If you could wave some Polaroids around and coerce Congress, why would you bother spending all the money?

Regardless of anything else having to do with this conversation, there is absolutely no reason that anyone should have to explain to you that these options aren't mutually exclusive.

Of course not.

I still wanted to know how it worked in his model.

If you could wave some Polaroids around and coerce Congress, why would you bother spending all the money?

I would assume to create a narrative. Not every elite is an amoral monster, but enough of them are that internal and external pressure could convince the exceptions to vote their way. Why do you think that is stupid?.

Better yet. Scott gave an example of AIPAC deploying its money to win an election. Can you give me one where they did the same with their magical kid-diddling blackmail?

in my opinion, that they have blackmail and use it, wouldn't prevent them from also using money to create the aforementioned narratives. Why limit yourself to only one method or avenue of attack?

If money is doing most or all of the work, then it can be done without Epstein, can’t it?

wouldn't prevent them from also using money

Oh, so it’s unfalsifiable, too.

1.- I never said money is doing most of the work

2.- it's the logical thing to do, you just don't put all your eggs in one basket. And we won't know the truth of the matter because nobody that matters want it to be known.

EDIT.- Just so we are in the same page, my priors are:

a.- majority of politicians are amoral monsters, from Trump all the way to your local representative, passing through AOC and Bernie
b.- there is a VERY small minority of politicians that are upstanding that would be impossible to blackmail.
c.- The government of Israel employed Epstein to obtain blackmail material from politicians, so that it could coerce them for support or to get them to convince dissident politicians.
d.- c is logical for a nation state to do in the position Israel finds itself in, and were I in their shoes would do that and more.
e.- The state of Israel also employs groups as AIPAC to create external pressure on dissident politicians as another venue of attack.
f.- we will never know the truth about the Epstein affair because the people that could uncover it is also people involved in it or someone related to the is.

In my opinion, Congress is actually controlled by the adhesives industry. They create a lot of products that are presumably nasty, yet you never hear about an executive from Loctite or JB Weld being dragged in front of a congressional subcommittee. I have no evidence of this but it isn't implausible that this is why they keep such a low profile.

You can have my 243 and 638 when you apply the appropriate solvent and then pull them from my cancer-ridden hands.

Apparently Henkel (the Loctite owner) has been involved in some PFAS/forever chemical stuff.

I'm sure they were, but nobody knows who Henkel is, and the largest adhesives manufacturer, 3M, is known to most people for making office supplies and dust masks. They're part of the chemical industry, but they don't get the same bad rap as companies like DuPont and Monsanto.

my vote would be more for the Teflon industry, scary stuff that.

But what can you do? No one can make anything stick.

The parallel construction theory of political bribery. Seems potentially plausible.

and if you are a people that historically suffered a great deal at the hands of others, I don't see how morality or legality would play a role in your decisions to use measures to prevent it from happening again. Never again and all that.

That's the real question, isn't it? why is AIPAC so effective? if it's just a matter of get lots of individual donors to donate money on specific issues, then it should be possible to copy that approach. But if they're using blackmail or some other shady tactics, that might explain why no one else can get the same results.

Did…did you read the article?

But also, AIPAC fights hard. If some random Congressman is anti-Israel, AIPAC will swoop down on their race in Middle Of Nowhere, Missouri and pour $10 million into electing their opponent. By now everyone knows this, and the mere threat of AIPAC action is enough to keep politicians in line.

Other people can try the same playbook. Crypto billionaires just did. I don’t have any reason to believe they have unusual skill at “shady tactics.”

Yes, they can do it. But none of them did except AIPAC. And now it's this one fringe lobby group for crypto, mostly funded just by Marc Andresson. Meanwhile Big Oil, Big Tobacco, and Big Pharma get regulated to death despite their massive lobbying efforts, because apparently their lobbyists just... all suck at their jobs? How else are we supposed to explain this?

Big X likes regulation; it keeps Little X from forming and eating their lunch.

Only up to a point. Some regulations represent a dire risk to their industry. Coincidentally, Matt Ygelesias wrote [this[(https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-forgotten-politics-of-big-tobacco) today about the history of tobacco regulation, and what a political struggle it was to rain them in. It succeeded eventually mostly because people just got annoyed by second-hand smoke, rather than any sort of principles health message. But Clinton and his coalition were never in danger of being unseated in primary challenges by big tobacco. His vice president Al Gore even came from an old tobacco growing family and was a senator from Tenessee where they still grow lots of tobacco, but he could still openly campaign against the tobacco industry.

You have a second [ instead of a ] to form your link.

what a political struggle it was to rain them in

The expression is "rein them in," in reference to the reins of a horse.

rather than any sort of principles health message.

principled

Some of this is probably institutional inertia/alignment/reputation. Everyone knows AIPAC is a fearsome enemy so everyone fears to cross it.

My biggest takeaway from the article (or rather, its comments section) is that advocacy groups shouldn't throw in their lot with a single party. If you join a big tent, you lose the other big tent. The NRA should help Dem candidates affiliated with Redneck Revolt/John Brown Gun Club defeat other Dem candidates. Heck, they should help them against GOP candidates that are not loudly pro-2A.

"Their manifesto says, 'We stand against white supremacy' and 'We stand against the nation-state and its forces which protect the bosses and the rich (police and military)'? You know what, we don't care! As long as it also says 'We stand for organized defense of our communities' and 'We are an aboveground militant formation' they will have our support"

I think the AIPAC method and big money spending in general has some big limitations:

  1. Can't be an existing issue with that divides along party lines. I just don't think any urban democrats are gonna come out in favor of guns no matter how much money you pour into their primary opponents. Same with rural Republicans on abortion. Purity tests are very effective, and that's partly why attack ads work in the first place. But someone that truly and openly fails a purity test is gonna have a lot of barriers to winning within either party machine.
  2. It generally can't be something most Americans care deeply about. Or else a backlash group will form and try to negate all your progress. The Koch brothers spent decades funding small academic institutions with the goal of having more libertarian scholars in academia. They've partially succeeded but now unKoch my campus exists and the universities have gotten much worse then they were decades ago when the project started. Americans care about universities. Barely anyone cares about AI, or crypto, or foreign countries on the other side of the world.
  3. Even if they don't care about it now, you can't endlessly exploit an issue without making them care about it. For half a century Disney was able to shamelessly and repeatedly lobby to extend copyright with basically zero opposition. Two decades ago people started to notice and complain. A bunch of groups formed, none of them with massive resources. But they grew to the point that Disney finally didn't bother lobbying for another copyright extension.

The NRA should help Dem candidates ... defeat other Dem candidates.

There's not a single pro-gun democrat in the entire country who has a chance of winning a federal election. Zip. Zero. Nada.

There might be a handful who lie and say they're pro gun and turn around and vote for gun control every time anyways.

Edit: I shall eat my words. Slopgpt found that Mary Peltola is one and only Democrat to be against gun control in 2025.

Mary Peltola is the one and only Democrat to be against gun control in 2025.

A cursory search for "firearm" on Congress's website indicates a few more who may count.

  • Jared Golden of northern Maine joined 188 Republicans in cosponsoring a bill that would force all states to grant concealed-carry reciprocity.

  • Henry Cuellar of southern Texas joined 35 Republicans in cosponsoring a bill that would force the District of Columbia to grant concealed-carry reciprocity to congresspeople (but not to other people), and joined 17 Republicans in cosponsoring a bill that would "broaden the authority for certain law enforcement officers to carry concealed firearms across state lines".

These are, notably, the most conservative Democrat in the house(like praised by prolife orgs) and the rep from the reddest district to send a dem to congress.

The John brown gun club/redneck revolt are actual literal terrorist organizations. As in they advocate for political violence in the here and now to achieve their objectives.

The NRA wishes to keep political violence entirely theoretical, thank you very much, and is well aware of the hoe-scaring effects of backing groups that openly advocate for here and now terrorism and violent revolution. The tiny handful of generally leftish but not hoe-scaring pro-gun organizations get along well with the NRA in general but have trouble finding candidates to back.

Despite being purported as the main beneficiaries of Citizens United, big corporations weren't really trying to spend large sums of money on politics. Exxon Mobil didn't park an oil tanker full of cash in the Chesapeake waiting for the signal to shower Washington in oil money as part of their dastardly plan. That just wasn't how buisinesses operated. It took time to develop both a theoretical framework for how to turn an abritrarily large amount of money into political power (it's a lot more complicated than simply buying ads), and to develop a philosophical framework for why this isn't cartoonishly evil.

“Money in politics” is far too broad a term.

Say you’re a Koch brothers libertarian-ish conservative. You want big immigration (including illegal, although you’re not too invested in amnesty), very low taxes particularly on the rich and on corporate earnings, and maybe you’re culturally moderately anti-woke and especially dislike that you got hit with some very expensive civil rights based employment rulings a few years ago but you still have a gay grandson or something.

Which cause are you going to donate a billion dollars to in the next cycle? The party of Stephen Miller, or the party of AOC?

Musk buying Twitter only “worked” (and again, whether it worked has yet to be decided, both on a long term cultural and on an economic basis) because there was already a large constituency of social conservatives who could use the platform to align and organize, especially on topics like immigration. That movement long predated the acquisition, Miller and Bannon had been central to Trump’s initial anti-illegal-immigration messaging in 2016, back when Musk was still a lib centrist and openly criticized Trump as ‘not the right guy’.

Now, back your big corporation. If I want deregulation and tax cuts, I might give a billion dollars to some centrist Dems and some libertarian Republicans. But then it turns out that a future Dem administration has a heavy presence of environmentalist progressives who dislike my polluting factories. And it turns out a future GOP administration contains politicians who owe fealty to and get support from a bunch of farmers or mining interests who don’t like me sourcing cheap inputs for my big business and like protectionist tariffs. So the billion dollars will be worth less than you might imagine.

Which cause are you going to donate a billion dollars to in the next cycle? The party of Stephen Miller, or the party of AOC?

Now, back your big corporation. If I want deregulation and tax cuts, I might give a billion dollars to some centrist Dems and some libertarian Republicans.

Have you read the article? The winning tactic is to emulate the AIPAC. You talk to all candidates running for some South Dakota seat and see which one doesn't talk about mining regulations. You tell'em you will support them as long as they don't vote for mining regulations. Then your PAC trashes the reputation of all other candidates and your guy wins. Then you casually, but constantly mention this fact in every hotel lobby in DC: anyone who even thinks about mining regulations is your mortal enemy and you will gladly spend millions of dollars to tank their campaign.

The AIPAC strategy relies (or relied) on one central fact:

Most American voters and politicians were either ambivalent (which includes mild antipathy) or positive about Israel.

This meant that the average Democrat or Republican, outside a tiny handful of very progressive or substantially Muslim constituencies, lost nothing from taking AIPAC’s money. There was no tradeoff. Increasingly now there is, so AIPAC’s influence will likely decline.

You also can’t do the same thing as the libertarian. The Republican will get primaried if he isn’t sufficiently anti-immigration. The Democrat will get primaried if she supports lower taxes on the rich. These are issues where almost every voter, and every voter in the primaries, has a relatively strong opinion. “[Democrat] took five million dollars from the mining lobby to destroy our environment and the habitat of our birds and fishes” might easily be the different between winning and losing a tight primary.

This only works if a lot of people really do oppose mining regulations, so spending millions of dollars is effective.

I think a big reason money in politics didn't manifest the way the doomers predicted is because money in politics just isn't that effective when employed the way envisioned by the doomers. Taking out hundreds of hours of ads just doesn't move the needle all that much. Instead, as Elon showed, what actually matters is institutions. Buying twitter isn't really something exxon or disney is realistically going to do.

The question is, for political purposes, is any of this affordable? Can you buy Harvard and the rest of the Ivy league? Probably not. Can you buy disney, youtube, etc? For most people, the answer is going to be no. And even if you can, like Bezos did with the Washington Times*, you'll discover your ability to influence the influence your institution wields is still limited by staff.

Edit: Meant the Post.

It is easier than that. Journalists are basically rehashing press releases and are doing little actual reporting. Start a think tank and start producing press releases and your "reporting" will seep into the media as factual news. Buying entire institutions is obviously the most powerful tool but there are many less powerful tools that are cheap. Get social media influencers to promote your cause.

The Kochs have been funding libertarian think tanks for decades, it has been ineffective at making libertarian economics a winning political position.

Libertarianism with a small l is a much more powerful force in America than in other Anglo countries. You could credit the Kochs with some part in keeping it viable if you wanted to.

They have done an excellent job att providing oligarch friendly policies.

Start a think tank

I'm in. What're we calling it?

"Earthworks"

Brainpanzer.

Insurmountable Skullfort.

The helmet stayed on.

Institutions that suck simply don't get traction. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft tried to be a badly disguised quasi-DSA progressive think tank that advocated for withdrawing support from Ukraine and supporting the Global South for Peace Initiatives globally, starting with unilateral US disarmanent to prove good faith, like it was Jeremy Corbyns wet dream. Unfortunately if your reporting sucks or doesnt gel with reality then it just gets rejected.

AIPAC oversuccess can, controversially by the standards of this board, be attributed to the uselessness of the antijew factions. No muslim MENA bloc can reliably effect any policy it purports to require US support on, nor can any socialist country actually deliver on their same stated goals. Survivorship bias makes jews look like dastardly manipulators when they are more likely just shitting the bed much less frequently than any other retard trying to play big boy lobbyist.

That and Israël is reasonably bipartisan. That’s pretty unique.

Journalists are basically rehashing press releases and are doing little actual reporting.

An all-too common story:

  • Journalist: "[Source] said [claim]"

  • Me: and??? Were they correct?

If you're lucky, you'll get "...but [Source 2] said [claim 2]", but any analysis beyond that is rare.

In my experience, journalists have exactly two settings: libelously hostile and "please just write my copy for me," depending on what their deadlines look like.

You could buy an astroturfing campaign.

I sometimes wonder why this isn't more common. It should be very cost-effective, given how few people participate in online discourse, social-desirability bias, and crowd behavior dynamics mean you only need ~5% of that small minority to start forming consensus around something.

You could, with a small team and a stock of authentic-looking sockpuppet accounts, own the reaction comments around some political podcast, the chat for popular streamers, the topics in political subreddits, etc. For a pittance in paid subscriptions to influential writers, you could maybe even turn the direction of their output - audience capture is a thing.

Social media censorship is basically the same thing, and there's been plenty of that.

The difference is that hiring reddit moderators to delete wrongthink only works on reddit, hiring actual shills to say positive things about your position can work on any online platform and can theoretically convince people to parrot your talking points IRL, which is way more impactful than reducing your opponents arguments to [message deleted] in one tiny sliver of the internet

This occurred on reddit, youtube, facebook, pre-Musk twitter, and very likely others. That is not a tiny sliver of the internet.

i'm talking about converting money into political capital, not about how broad censorship can be. Paying off youtube is probably possible but not cheap, and to cover all your bases it would be very expensive (or require already having political power as we have seen before)

If i had a million bucks to run a fucky political campaign id buy more shills and pay off less censors.

Astroturfing doesn't work, the ground withers if theres no traction. No amount of leftist 'trans women are women' in vidya or policy or media made trannies more popular, the only thing that made trannies popular was bailey jay for a brief while in the mid 2010s.

Influential writers lose influence when they start pushing stupid points, Jordan Peterson went downhill when he became weird lobster medicine man, Ibram X Kendi and all the antiracism shills died when the thermostatic moment passed and you didn't get cancelled for not doing the public prayers.

Creators botting up their numbers lose real humans because real humans aren't sheep just following a flock, we don't even care about comments unless we're validating our own biases. Left wing news media are the ones that curtailed all their comment sections, right wing media all let their comment sections run free. Astroturfing comments to talk about how Mirpuris aren't actually grooming kids and its actually white pedos largely responsible for CSE doesn't make people go 'oh wow thats true I was just being racist' it makes people go 'fuck these gaslighters'.

Astroturfing is easy to blame for outcomes because it externalizes blame - we don't need to change we just need to stop the evil baddies from doing their bad thing and our Good Easy Moral Message will come forth! Staying the path is easy if you don't actually care about how destroyed your entire reputation is on the path.

Jordan Peterson went downhill when he became weird lobster medicine man

Just when did JBP become this? This seems more like a caricature by ignorant detractors rather than an earnest condensation of what he espouses. JBP always used serotonin in lobsters to exemplify how despite 500 million years of divergent evolution, we still share a lot of psychological commonality in the function of serotonin in how we process defeat and dominance.

The only woo he pushes is that carnivore diet, but considering the historically unreliable and still indecisive state of nutrition science, I don't believe this and other theory about ketogenic diets have been proven to be ineffective.

As soon as offputting woke types stopped going on live TV debates against him, the guy pretty much ran out of anything interesting or new to say. You can talk about bible metaphors on Joe Rogan only so many times. Also didn’t the guy go insane at some point?

The TV debates are what's really boring. His interesting discussion is in psychology. What I find most fascinating are his ideas of human perception, like such relating to the orienting reflex with error detection and novelty in the environment; how our value judgements shape our cognition not only in the decision making domain but in the very way that we perceive the world; and him likening such to modern AI where bottom-up approaches have triumphed over top-down manual programming of structure into ANNs because of the frame problem and such, where AI can't even see the toy environment without integrating an unexpectedly massive amount of information. I also find his ideas about the useful information narratives and archetypes to be interesting and gets me thinking about why humans find stories so entertaining in the first place.

As for going insane, that just sounds like more gossip by detractors. He did have his run-in with benzos, which seems more like an error with the medical establishment not properly advertising the risk of physical dependency that prescription use can induce. Then he tried to detox by putting himself into a coma in Russia which was also a pretty big error, and he seemed cognitively devastated for a little while, but his slump was nothing I'd say resembled insanity.

bailey jay for a brief while in the mid 2010s.

Now that's a name I haven't heard for a LOOONG time, a more recent example would be Sarina Valentina (pre-bogging) and Natalie Mars. Funny enough, all three were active posters on 4chan.

Anything that makes my dick hard is a woman. The failure of the modern trans movement is to have ugly failed men be the face of the movement instead of fuckable femboys. Get the trans movement to be astolfo crossplayers, and schedule an anime cosplay competition at the same time as the NRC. Republicans will be singing the tune of femboy superiority in no time.

The time that far right Polish politician posed for a photo holding a femboy at a cosplay convention.

“Gentlemen, is it gay to fuck another dude?” is a question that no amount of philosophizing can answer satisfactorily for a certain segment of the population.

The most impressive part is reaching that philosophical question within 5 subcomments after starting on the topic of money in politics.

On the one hand, feminism is generally hostile to the category of strategy you're suggesting, if it's too obvious. And on the other hand, there's right-wing adversarial selection of ugly failed men to publicly pin to the movement.

Sailers law of female journalism taken one step further to societal engineering? I can accept that. Feminists wanting ugly women to be social currency to enhance their own position is logically consistent with pushing disgusting unwomen into the spotlight. Agreed re the right wingers highlighting every bad example that will exist regardless of the supply of submissive and breedable femboys, but frankly that's still the fault of the trannies for pushing rupaul rejects as their modal representation.

Sailers law of female journalism

... dare I ask?

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Can't tell if you're joking or serious, but hard disagree. It's just homosexuality with better costumes. I think the particular modus you are describing is the method of grabbing 'feminine' status/power to avoid a low status position. I honestly read it the same way as those fitness videos where the now muscular bro lambasts their previous scrawny self.

Beware The Femboy Of One Study.

Results Gynandromorphophilia (GAMP) is sexual interest in gynandromorphs (GAMs; colloquially, shemales) ... GAMP men had arousal patterns similar to those of heterosexual men and different from those of homosexual men.

"Traps are gay" is the ultimate Scissor statement. The finest minds of our generation have debated this question endlessly without coming to a consensus. To some, it is clear that literally fucking a man must be gay, regardless of rationalizations. To others, it is equally obvious that, since they are straight, anything that can make them hard is a woman. And to a third group, it depends on the situation.

I'm firmly on the side that liking traps is not gay. We know what gay hentai aimed at actually gay men looks like, and it is completely different from trap hentai which is instead aimed at straight men. And, for that matter, both are completely different from gay erotica aimed at straight women.

I want to fuck Astolfo up the ass. That doesn't make me gay, that makes me straight, because only a straight man would be attracted to a trap character like Astolfo from Fate. Real gay men are not attracted to traps; they are attracted to beefcake characters like Endeavor from My Hero Academia. And women are attracted to aloof, abussive pretty boys like Sasuke from Naruto.

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The eternal question: Are Traps Gay?

I don't know, but Brigitte Lin was amazing in Swordsman II and The East is Red (which I have only seen in terribly subtitled and even more terribly edited versions ages ago). She's playing a man who was turned into a woman via magical martial arts techniques, so she's attracting both male and female lovers.

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That link has it behind a paywall, but relying on surveys is never strong evidence in my opinion. If arousal pattern is just attraction to the female form, I have no doubt GAMPs will say they're not-homosexual.

It's fairly obvious from cultures where ladyboys are a thing (most notoriously, Thailand) that the men who fuck ladyboys are not gay.

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To take a different approach if you're really into dudes, find them totally interesting, fascinating, say you have a non-trivial oriented preference. Finding out a person you thought was a dude, actually isn't, means you lose interest regardless of their appearance.

Finding out a person you thought was a dude, actually isn't, means you lose interest regardless of their appearance.

Yeah, about that. Also, tomboys in general.

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I mean the converse can be true? There was this dude I found totally cool and chill and when I discovered he was a girl I totally got the hots for her. Didn't do anything because I was a socially awkward dweeb and also raised not to be a creep but there is something primal about male female dynamics that does get activated when the knowledge is instantiated.

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Astroturfing doesn't work, the ground withers if theres no traction. No amount of leftist 'trans women are women' in vidya or policy or media made trannies more popular,

This is the literal opposite of true. It made them more popular in terms of more people identifying as trans, and seeking referrals for medicalization, it made the more popular in terms ot vast swathes of society seeing it as fine and normal, it made them more popular of institutions catering to their every demand. They were so popular that it took absurd transgressions for the tide to change, and that my prediction that it is about, from a few years ago, was seen as somewhat unhinged. Even now that the position that we want too far with the trans thing is more mainstream, we're still nowhere near back to it's levels of popularity from 10-15 years ago.

A) You're 100% right and I'm downplaying astroturfings role in creating a massive problem that I am dismissing out of hand because my own cultural circle smacks down tranny agitprop so I am, despite my presence on this board, still unaware of the depth of the rot that you guys are experiencing.

B) I'm still right that astroturfing didn't move the popular needle. It didn't make trannies popular generally it made autogynephiliacs and hormonal teenagers and mentally weak people latch onto a thermostatically salient expression of individuated maladaptations. I maintain that ROGD is the primary effector for trannification of teenage girls, and that it isn't trans agitprop that made them go one way but just idiotic teens (I realize this invalidates my statement about people not being sheep, but I thread this needle by not treating teenagers as people). Parsing the specific numbers is immaterial for whether astroturfing moved trannifycation or if trannyfication was just the latest means of Rebelling Against The System, but I maintain that the astroturfing didn't move where it needed to: the apolitical normie. Screeching slacktivists filling feeds with astroturfed agitprop talk to each other, and you can replace trannies with migrants with late term abortion or whatever cause celebre that group is predisposed to cloister around to begin with.

So, I am prepared to be wrong. I am of the belief that peoples personal beliefs are individuated and not subject to change just based on a tiktok feed telling them endlessly that Hasan Piker didn't zap his doggo so MAGA is actually evil or whatever botted message is being pumped out. The Internet Research Agency in Russia isn't inventing anti migrant sentiment out of thin air, its merely pouring gasoline onto a simmering fire. Astroturfing is pictures of flames for people to get shocked over, and maybe its fuel, but its not heat.

I maintain that ROGD is the primary effector for trannification of teenage girls, and that it isn't trans agitprop that made them go one way but just idiotic teens

I agree and disagree at the same time. Once you reach critical mass, social contagion is probably the mechanism with the strongest effect, but there's usually a ground zero. The illustrative anecdote / analogy that goes around is anorexia. Apparently in Korea (I think) it was literally unheard of until some newspaper covered the cases in America, and then suddenly they had an epidemic.

but I maintain that the astroturfing didn't move where it needed to: the apolitical normie.

I mean, look, we still exist within the bounds of the physical universe. Le Rationalists love acting like everything is an organic process that is essentially impossible to influence top-down, and Social Constructivists love to act like with enough propaganda they could literally warp time and space, but I think there's a happy middle. You can push the boundaries quite far, but at some point reality will start reasserting itself, and that point is probably somewhere far before sending rapists to female prisons, because they declared themselves to be a pretty little princess.

Those girls would have latched onto something else were it not for trans as a means of coping with the difficulty of being a teenager. These girls would have been cutting and starving themselves if their first reference point was a Sandman or a 90s heroin chic comic in the library.

As much as the real world exists we do live in Modern Times where wordcel smartypants get to distort the presentation beyond our eyes. A teenage boy in Wyoming who can't put on muscle and hates herding will latch onto the trans agitprop from Desmond Is Amazing stans, while his father will choke down Tucker Carlson slop about Portland being a drug infested hellhole overrun by diseased immigrants. Wordcels dictate the terms when reality assertion isn't proximate but when the agitators enter real world suddenly their fancy words become just hot air if they can't match the reality they've been asserting.

I'm not going to say it doesn't work, but robbing your movement of authenticity by commanding it from the top-down is a tactical play for long-term strategic disadvantage. Most reactionaries have accepted that gay marriage is beyond the reach of even the most right-wing of policy while trans is an issue they can hammer forever.

Bezos bought the Washington Post.

Thats what I meant and cant recall why I switched it up.

It always amused me how comically small the bribes American politicians took in exchange for compromising their integrity, but perhaps that reflected that it was a buyer's market. Paying tens of thousands to influence the spending of billions has a ROI that no legitimate investment could ever match.

Er, those two sentences contradict one another. If the bribe has incredible ROI, that means the seller (the politician) is in control, and you'd expect to see much larger bribes.

The real explanation is that the competent companies and politicians don't need to bother with illegal bribery. There are subtler ways for companies to "reward" loyal politicians that are near-impossible to outlaw. (For instance, revolving-door sinecures.)

By definition, ROI is a fraction with "return" in the numerator and "investment" in the denominator. It being high could mean returns are high OR bribes are cheap, but either way that means it's a buyer's market. You're essentially arguing that if potatoes are cheap and a great deal for shoppers then farmers can charge more money for potatoes. But if there's tons of potato farmers around and not many people buying potatoes then anyone who tries to raise prices will get outcompeted by their rivals.

Ok, @crushedoranges made an easy-to-understand mistake, but you're specifically trying to be a pedant and correct my correction. You really should have taken a few minutes to think this through first. (And this from an account called "MathWizard"? Really?)

If ROI is high, then more people will want to buy. That's what makes it a seller's market. In an ideal marketplace, prices rise to equilibrium (where perceived value = price). Your example is incoherent - in an efficient market, potatoes being "a great deal for shoppers" is not compatible with "not many people buying potatoes."

To use a pithy example, if we're selling $100 bills for $1, then the ROI for customers is 100, ridiculously high. If the guy next to me has 10 to sell, and I have 10 to sell, and I foolishly decide not to listen to a "MathWizard" and to sell them at $2 instead ... do you think I'm going to have trouble finding buyers?

in an efficient market

The point is that it's NOT an efficient market. For some reason fewer people are investing in politics than you would expect, therefore prices have dropped and dropped until the ROI has gotten as high as it is.

Politicians offer $100 in however many years for $90 now, no one buys. Politicians offer for $80 now, no one buys. Politicians offer for $50, a couple people buy but not many. More politicians come along and the price eventually equilibrizes at $20 until enough companies start buying so that the number of buys and sells match up.

That's a buyer's market. You can't sell your $100 bill for $90, even though it's $100, because everyone else is selling for $20. For whatever reason there aren't enough buyers waiting to snatch it up. A buyer's market is defined by having high ROI for the buyer. If it was a seller's market and they could sell for $99 then ROI would be LOW, because ROI is defined as the return "to the buyer", not to the seller.

Ok, this has been an extremely frustrating thread. I'm going to try and take a step back, unilaterally disarm, and try to figure out how we got here.

I believe I misinterpreted @crushedoranges at the start. To paraphrase, what he meant was "ROI is extremely high, which is evidence that this is a buyer's market." Upon rereading, that makes more sense, and is what you and @whatihear have been defending. But (as I stated multiple times) I interpreted it as "ROI is extremely high, which leads to this being a buyer's market." Flipping the implication makes the sign incorrect (and "the market is inefficient" is not a fix).

I could nitpick your phrasing, but I've already wasted enough of everyone's time. I basically agree with your and @whatihear's latest posts. I hope we're all on the same page now.

Mea culpa, I did not phrase it very well and your read was completely understandable.

You are assuming that demand is infinitely elastic. It is quite possible that there are just not many marginal new buyers of potatoes even if they are a great deal. Demand being inelastic would not free the farmers from competition and allow them to raise prices.

What did I do to deserve this thread? Yes, Generic Economic Trope #1 is that markets aren't always efficient. That's why I, y'know, explicitly said "efficient" in my post. It's irrelevant to the main point. "ROI being high makes it a buyer's market" is factually incorrect. The effect goes in the exact wrong direction. You don't get to say that "if my product becomes more valuable, I'm less capable of raising prices, because something something INELASTICITY."

Market efficiency generally refers to pricing correctness. I don’t think it has much to do with elasticity of demand or supply.

“If ROI is high then more people will want to buy,” is generally true, but it’s not a priori true. We have to know something about the demand curve as well. Most of the time, it will generate a sellers market and allow sellers to raise prices, but it doesn’t have to happen immediately. In the case of political bribes, the market is intensely opaque and potential buyers might not realize how to make a purchase or may not want to buy for silly reasons like honor. Over the long run I would expect more buyers to clue in, but it wouldn’t surprise me if bribes could remain really high ROI for a long time without changing market conditions much. Certainly I wouldn’t expect it to move as fast as oil futures.

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