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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   18415 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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In between blogging about fursuit collections, former motte moderator TracingWoodgrains has started to blow up on twitter after wading into an ongoing feud between Steve Sailer and propagandist Will Stancil.
Something in the replies must have really upset him (possibly interactions with a number of replyguys making not-so-veiled threats about what happens to people who associate with bigots or question "lying for the pursuit of good aims"), because he suddenly got really invested in proving that the recent FAA-DEI scandal is real.

After giving up on conservative journalists and deciding to do the legwork himself, he's now posting PACER documents from the recent FAA lawsuit, proving that the FAA HR department sent black applicants a list of resume buzzwords that would get their applications fast-tracked, via the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.

A few hours ago this got the attention of Elon Musk, and Tracing is promising a follow-up, somehow trying to juggle 1L coursework with doing more investigative journalism than the entire conservative media put together. Obviously one of these things takes more time than the other, but I'm sure he'll have a coffee break free for the journalism bit.

One reason I think this could be important is that it's going to paint a huge target on Tracing's back. Propagandists have been claiming that the FAA DEI story was fake, the test designed to favor black applicants never existed, etc. They're going to get very angry at this evidence becoming widely known, and tracing is in a unique position to spread it outside the right wing news ghetto that prevents most liberals from ever encountering facts like these.
I'm not saying it's certain they're going to go after his law school, but he's in a uniquely vulnerable position right now, with very few allies in a position to help him (and probably a number who will suddenly decide he's on the enemy side of the fiend-enemy distinction.) So if anyone is in the position to help if he needs it, maybe start reaching out early.

Unfortunately all of this is getting difficult to follow without a twitter account (I even have one, but they're not letting me log in right now for no apparent reason). It's going to get even harder as Nitter instances die off. If anyone has a reliable account and would be willing to make screenshots, I'd love if you could take over covering the story as it develops.

Edit: his effortpost is now out on twitter and at his blog. I'll copy it into a reply below in case the nitter instance goes down again.

Just a note, this has obvious parallels to colleges letting DEI departments screen out the 80% of applicants before any objective hiring process begins:

they recommended using a biographical test first to "maximiz[e] diversity," eliminating the vast majority of candidates prior to any cognitive test.

It's a very effective method of manipulating procedural outcomes, isn't it?

Trace,

At some point in the past, iirc in a discussion of LibsOfTiktok, I wrote that you can be counted upon to investigate only in the political direction that doesn’t threaten your daily kibble. I was wrong and you have my apology.

I appreciate the apology. I have always been upfront about precisely who I am.

Very commendable and honorable on your part.

Let me see if I understand this

1: we must increase diversity of ATCs

2: let’s impose AA style quotas

1: no that would cause backlash

2: what about a final exam that’s actually a biographical questionnaire?

1: what, and only hire people with black-sounding upbringings? too blatant

2: but what if the right answers to the questionnaire are random but we separately and secretly tell the people we want to hire how to answer?

1: let’s do it!

Is that really it? Tell me I’m misunderstanding this!

It's really blatant. If I summed up the Biographic Assessment right, there are 28 actually-scored questions, with 179 possible points. To pass, you need a 70%, or 126 points, meaning you can miss no more than 53 points. EDIT: maybe 114 minimum score, and 65 missed points?)

30 points are the "lowest scoring class" grades (15 for science in high school, 15 for history/polysci in college), 3-4 points go for not playing a lot of different high school sports, 2-5 points if you worked too much or too little during your last year of college, 2-10 points if you were unemployed too long or not long enough before applying, 5 points if you took the wrong number (1-6 hours) of art/music/drama/dance, 3 more points if you had three years of formal training.

I dunno if "random" is the right word, but it's pretty close. You lose 2 points compared to someone who had been unemployed the last three years if you didn't submit formal suggestions to your boss, but three formal suggestions would cost you 8 points. Peers describing you as a person who "takes chances" is worth points, rather than costing them. You lose a point for "Baccalaureate-transfer oriented" rather than "Other" to describe your aviation coursework, which is just a mess.

It's possible for someone to pass without the answer sheet, but I don't think the model air traffic controller would.

If the class allegations are true (and they seem well-evidenced!) the Biographical Assessment was issued before you could even attempt the AT-SAT, rather than a final exam. Worse, you could only take the Biographic Assessment once; while some questions like "how long unemployed/how long training" change over time.

EDIT: I'm not sure on the 70% number. I could have sworn I saw it leafing through this stuff yesterday, but I'm not seeing it now. The plaintiffs cite a FAA e-mail saying the pre-cognitive-testing weedout would filter out 70% of applicants (139-24), but the grading rubric for that comes with the Biographical Assessment Answer key says that the score calculation was...

= 70 + (((((Sum of all answer scores in the Biographical Assessment Section - 105.88)/13.25) * 2.5) + ((AT-SAT score - 69.82)/7.62)) * (30/7.48)) - 6.25

(yes, literally: that 30 divided by 7.48 is at least not my typo.).

With the final score requiring the output of that math equation of 70, and the Biographical Assessment score at or over 114. 114 is a weird percentage (63.68%) of 179. Might have been selected as the outcome of picking the second-'best' answer in every scored question, although I think someone actually being in that category would be impossible for college/no-college reasons.

I don't know the range for the (non-cognitive?) AT-SAT score mentioned at the end of that score weighting sheet is, but assuming that the final metric is taken against 70 as a number rather than a percent of something, a perfect Biographical Assessment score would let you pass with an 86, and a minimum 114 Biographical Assessment would require a score of 180 on the other test.

= 70 + (((((Sum of all answer scores in the Biographical Assessment Section - 105.88)/13.25) * 2.5) + ((AT-SAT score - 69.82)/7.62)) * (30/7.48)) - 6.25

What kind of formula is that??? They could've written =0.757BAS + 0.526SAT - 53.122 and removed six numbers. Heck, they could've set it to =BAS + 0.694SAT and set the threshold to >=162.6 to pass instead of 70 (assuming I didn't mess up my algebra, of course).

See here:

https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183748?context=8#context

They didn't use stereotypical black-sounding answers. The test was totally rigged.

Is there any way to impose consequences for the lies required to pass the test? You get a bonus for saying you were unemployed--how many of the people who passed were actually unemployed? I'd hope to use that to reverse the damage somewhat.

There's a precedent for the bulk firing of ATC, but even if it worked, it's not an elegant fix. And at best it's hating the players, rather than the game.

That's true, no need to be vindictive. I think we have a shortage of qualified air traffic controllers anyways.

Colluding to cheat your classmates out of a job seems like a fireable offence to me. It's actually more straightforward than the usual DEI case because (per other comments) you won't even pass by having a stereotypical 'minority' background, you basically have to cheat to win. Firing such people isn't vindictive, it's restoring justice to a really screwed up situation.

And at best it's hating the players, rather than the game.

I get that it's a little cruel, but if the lesson people take away is "when you hear about something like this, you're better off blowing the whistle rather than taking advantage, because otherwise you'll be blacklisted for life" I think that's a step towards a better world.

I think you are not

Propagandists have been claiming that the FAA DEI story was fake, the test designed to favor black applicants never existed, etc.

And they're going to keep claiming that. And those with power will keep believing them because they want to believe them. Already you see people in his replies:

this reads like 2 friends trying to spread a cheat code they they found, not something systemic or interesting

Others have pointed out that the email is salesmanshipy and could have dubious connection to actual hiring decisions.

Basically "nothing to see here".

Nobody's going to get arrested. Nobody's going to get fired. Some people might get a token monetary settlement. The FAA already stopped this practice (it took an act of Congress), but they won't be deterred from doing it again.

Oh obviously there won't be any consequences for the left. That's why I only talked about risks to Tracing for being what he called "an autistic alien fact-checker who cares about things that are true"

I'm not saying it's certain they're going to go after his law school, but he's in a uniquely vulnerable position right now, with very few allies in a position to help him

I think this concern is highly exaggerated. Trace has visibility on his side, and a longstanding relationship with two prominent journalists who have shown no aversion to controversy. For what it's worth, I'd devote my full legal practice to defending him if he faces any retribution I can do something about.

Now featuring a semi-interactive version of the quiz itself.

Thanks for posting this here, by the way! I've, uh, had my hands full with a few things.

I scored 29 points on the 11 questions, which if there are 28 in total as @gattsuru says for 176 points, wouldn't give me enough to be picked (a life-long dream crushed! Not really, I've never wanted to be an air traffic controller).

I scored best for being non-college, not sporty, introverted, and kind of employed not too unemployed just prior to hearing about this test 😁

Tracing's effortpost https://nitter.adminforge.de/tracewoodgrains/status/1752091831095939471

A scandal at the FAA has been moving on a slow-burn through the courts for a decade, culminating in the class-action lawsuit currently known as Brigida v. @SecretaryPete, brought by a class who spent years and thousands of dollars in coursework to become air traffic controllers, only to be dismissed by a pass-fail biographical questionnaire with a >90% fail rate, implemented without warning after many of them had already taken, and passed, a skill assessment. The questionnaire awarded points for factors like "lowest grade in high school is science," something explicitly admitted by the FAA in a motion to deny class certification.

Mainstream outlets have given it sparse coverage, for reasons that will become clear shortly. Right-wing sources paid attention initially, but few ran follow-ups or took a close look at the court filings. So: What exactly is going on? How did all of this happen?

I am not a professional. I am a law student with a part-time job on @TheBARPod, a podcast about internet nonsense, and a side hobby of sticking my nose where it doesn't belong. I wanted, and want, to do a thorough report on this when I get the time. But the story is big enough, and spreading fast enough, that I want to make sure that people have access to accurate info as quickly as possible.

First, though: court filings are public records, but they are often expensive and difficult to obtain. Tools like RECAP help, but I was lucky to have people around me willing to pay the $80 in PACER fees for a few of the documents. This story is much larger than me and I do not want people to have to rely on me for it. Here are the court documents I have: drive.google.com/drive/folde… Most of the interesting exhibits are in 139. Please look for yourself if this story catches your interest.

With that out of the way, my current understanding of the situation is as follows. It will be dry at times; others can editorialize more:

Historically, the pipeline into air traffic control has followed a few paths: military veterans, graduates of the "Air Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative" (AT-CTI) program, and the general public. Whichever route they came from, each candidate would be required to take and pass the eight-hour AT-SAT cognitive test to begin serious training. This test was validated as being effective as recently as 2013.

The FAA has faced pressure to diversify the air traffic control for generations, something that seems to have influenced even the scoring structure of the AT-SAT cognitive test used for pre-employment screening of air traffic control candidates. Leading up to 2014, that pressure intensified, with the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE) leading the push.

To start with, in 2000, a three-member task force, including NBCFAE member Mamie Mallory, wrote "A Business Case and Strategic Plan to Address Under-Representation of Minorities, Women, and People with Targeted Disabilities," recommending, per the lawsuit, a workplace cultural audit, diversity "hiring targets" for each year, and "allowing RNO- [Race and National Origin] and gender-conscious hiring." They were advised by Dr. Herbert Wong, who helped the NBCFAE analyze FAA diversity data in 2009. Wong authored a report concluding that the FAA was "the least diverse agency within the executive branch of the federal government." Mallory and Wong were consulted as part of the 2014 test replacement process.

From there, the NBCFAE sent letters in July and October 2009 to the FAA administrator and the Secretary for the Department of Transportation claiming disparate treatment, adopted a strategic plan "advocating for affirmative employment, obtaining an 'independent valuation of hiring and/or screening tools,' and pursuing litigation," a "Talking Points" document pushing the FAA to address diversity, and the creation of a group called "Team 7."

In 2012, Team 7 members met with the secretary of the Department of Transportation, the FAA administrator, and senior FAA leaders to discuss diversity, after which the FAA commissioned a "Barrier Analysis" with a number of recommendations. Central to this: the cognitive test posed a barrier for black candidates, so they recommended using a biographical test first to "maximiz[e] diversity," eliminating the vast majority of candidates prior to any cognitive test.

In 2012 and 2013, the NBCFAE continued pushing this process, with members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push diversity among ATCs. By July 2013, the FAA created a "Barrier Analysis Implemention Team" (BAIT, and I swear I am not making this acronym up).

Around this time, the FAA decided to pause the hiring of CTI graduates pending the implementation of the biographical assessment. Neither the schools that ran the CTI programs nor their students were informed of this when the decision was initially made. A number of students, including the class representative, passed the AT-SAT (in the case of the class representative, with a perfect score), not knowing they would never get to use it.

In 2014, the FAA rolled out the new biographical questionnaire in line with the Barrier Analysis recommendation, designed so that 90% or more of applicants would "fail." The questionnaire was not monitored, and people could take it at home. Questions asked prospective air traffic controllers how many sports they played in high school, how long they'd been unemployed recently, whether they were more eager or considerate, and seventy-some other questions. Graduates of the CTI program, like everyone else, had to "pass" this or they would be disqualified from further consideration. This came alongside other changes de-prioritizing CTI graduates.

ojs.library.okstate.edu/osu/…

CTI schools were blindsided and outraged by this change. A report on FAA hiring issues found that 70% of CTI administrators agreed that the changes in the process had led to a negative effect on the air traffic control infrastructure. One respondent stated their "numbers [had] been devastated," and the majority agreed that it would severely impact the health of their own programs. The largest program dropped from more than 600 students to less than 300.

Concurrent to all of this, NBCFAE members were hard at work. In particular, one Shelton Snow, an FAA employee and then-president of the NBCFAE's Washington Suburban chapter, provided NBCFAE members with "buzz words" in January 2014 that would automatically push their resumes to the tops of HR files. A 2013 NBCFAE meeting advised members to "please include [on resumes] if you are a NBCFAE Member. [...] Can you see the strategy", emphasizing they were "only concerned" with the employment of "African-Americans, women ... and other minorities."

After the 2014 biographical questionnaire was released, Snow took it a step further. As Fox Business reported (related in Rojas v. FAA), he sent voice-mail messages to NBCFAE applicants, advising them on the specific answers they needed to enter into the Biographical Assessment to avoid failing, stating that he was "about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question."

Per a 2016 Yahoo Finance article, an internal FAA report cleared the NBCFAE and Snow of wrongdoing.

finance.yahoo.com/news/faa-a…

A few changes were made by 2015. In 2016, Congress passed Public Law 114-190, which among other things banned the use of biographical assessments as a first-line hiring tool for air traffic controllers.

People snubbed by the process filed dozens of lawsuits as a result, culminating in the class-action suit now underway as Brigida v. Buttigieg. In arguing to deny class certification, the defendants argued that the "underlying grievance--that they pursued college degrees in reliance on their perception that the role of the CTI program in the FAA's hiring process would never change--is not actionable."

In a moment with a certain bitter irony, black CTI graduates who were left adrift by this process are the only demographic left out of the class: while the plaintiffs tried to include them initially, the court denied certification until they were excluded. The class has been granted certification, and the suit is slowly rolling forward.

Finally, in 2024, @whstancil picked a fight with @Steve_Sailer, who like many in right-wing media had released occasional articles touching on this case. Their scuffle stirrred up enough attention towards it to catch my eye. @SashaGusevPosts, almost alone out of many who accepted my points and moved on, pushed me to look with a more skeptical eye. To win a petty bet with him, I elected to spend an evening digging into this. @raspy_aspie, who I shared early info with, drew my attention towards the initial exhibit I posted, and I went from there.

To get a bit personal for a moment: I was a day-one donor to @PeteButtigieg during his presidential campaign, impressed by his deep understanding and articulate defense of liberal principles. He has been saddled with a messy, stupid lawsuit built on bad decision after bad decision, from predecessors who--between a rock and a hard place in the impossible task of avoiding disparate impact while preserving objective standards--elected to take the easy road and cave to political pressure to implement absurdities. He has extraordinary power to end this mess in a moment and begin to make things right for those who were directly denied a chance at the jobs they had worked towards thanks to an arbitrary and perverse biographical questionnaire.

People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of institutional failure at every level. A thousand things had to go wrong to get to this point, and if people want to harp on it—let them. But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that questionnaire, wants to defend it. Everybody wants competent, effective air traffic controllers. Everybody, I suspect, can sympathize with the people who paid and worked through years of education to have their career path suddenly pulled away for political reasons far beyond their control. I am confident that Buttigieg can see that just as well as the rest of us, that for many, it is simply the same neglect everybody else has shown towards the case that has led it to linger awkwardly unresolved for a decade.

There is nothing to be gained from fighting the suit further. It is a black eye on the FAA, a black eye on the DOT, and a black eye on our public institutions as a whole. People have paid shockingly little attention to it as it's rolled through the courts, in part, no doubt, because anything touching on diversity is a hot topic that becomes a culture war football in a moment. My instinct, looking at the whole mess, is that the DOT and FAA should publicly apologize, settle, and do their best to begin making right what was so badly broken

But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that questionnaire, wants to defend it. Everybody wants competent, effective air traffic controllers. Everybody, I suspect, can sympathize with the people who paid and worked through years of education to have their career path suddenly pulled away for political reasons far beyond their control. I am confident that Buttigieg can see that just as well as the rest of us, that for many, it is simply the same neglect everybody else has shown towards the case that has led it to linger awkwardly unresolved for a decade.

And TW is still pushing mistake theory. Yes, no one wants to defend that questionnaire. The people who developed it and ran it don't want to have to. However, they also don't care about and won't actually sympathize with the people injured. They really do want more black Air Traffic Controllers, and they don't care much how they get them. We've seen this over and over again; DEI pushers will engage in open discrimination (as with the recently canceled race-based internships at NYC financial firms) when they can and covert discrimination if they think they can't do it openly. Their goals are what they say they are -- more people in favored groups being allowed into the positions they gatekeep for, and fewer people in unfavored groups.

Good point. We might as well argue that "everybody wants clean, safe and efficient public transportation", "everybody wants mentally ill homeless violent drug addicts off the streets", and yet we know what the reality is on the ground.

People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of institutional failure at every level. A thousand things had to go wrong to get to this point, and if people want to harp on it—let them. But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue.

This is, of course, a blatant lie. I understand why that lie is getting made here, of course- TW is trying to get liberals to pay attention instead of ‘lalala anti white discrimination isn’t a real thing in the real world affirmative action is just undoing prior discrimination I can’t hear you’. But it is still a lie, and it’s a lie that won’t work.

Obviously, we can imagine if the roles were reversed. But I think it’s more reasonable to imagine a different cultural group, and a specific one, that isn’t favored by TPTB. Let’s go with Mormons; they’re an actually unpopular group that probably does suffer from some light discrimination, and it’s readily imaginable to think that they could do something like that. Do you really believe that an officially-unofficial Mormon whisper network gaming resume acceptance in a meritocratic-for-good reason field like aviation would go unnoticed? How about requiring you to have lived rough in a foreign country(mission year) to sit for the exam when it’s totally irrelevant? Prioritizing applicants from a not-highly-regarded program at BYU because of probably technically illegal collusion between the LDS aviation association and the FAA?

Nobody will ever get punished for this and it’s all who/whom, and that’s a damn shame for the smart, capable blacks who already made it. It also sucks for whatever white applicants lost out. But it sucks even more for the people affected by the accidents.

It's not really a lie. If you, as Trace appears to, believe that most liberals wouldn't disagree with his conclusions -- creating a fake ATC exam for black union to cheat on is bad -- then it's more of a strategic framing. Jesse Singal's Signal Boost had the same sort of framing. "Gee, look how legitimate, uncontroversial, yet juicy and important this story is. Shouldn't Real Journalists be covering this very uncontroversial story?"

People like Singal and TracingWoodgrains use the soft, strategic framing, because they think they can walk some Real Journalists, Real Progressives, and so on back to a more honest(?) space. They, probably correctly, assume that journalists aren't touching it, because of the discourse. If there was no National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees involved in the story, and instead was the National Coalition of Italian-American Aviation Employees that cheated the hiring process for ATC jobs, then this may have been front page on the the New York Times 6 years ago. This is a terrible failure for Affirmative Action advocates, so it is needs to stay hidden, but it doesn't have to be that way

If you believe you can change minds for the better, then using a story few serious people will disagree with is a good way to walk the Overton Window a little closer to your ideal area.* Conservatives see this and, understandably, it makes them angry. Media, progressives, liberals, and the rest of us walked -- or were led -- into the political landscape we live in today. There has to be a way to walk and lead towards another place, right?

Let's say the Murder Is Okay party rolls into your town, organizes protests advocating for senseless murder, hangs up posters, writes long essays about why murder is okay, and otherwise directly and obviously advocates for murder. The extremists in the party genuinely do seem to think murder is okay, but can't fully act on their beliefs with laws as they currently are. The moderates think the extremists are just using figurative language and really mean that you should murder your flaws, or figuratively "murder" bad influences by kicking them out of your life.

Eventually a murder happens. The extremists in the Murder Party spend years hiding the murder and internally promoting the murderers, praising them for their actions. Finally the murder is discovered by people outside the Party, but surprisingly, everyone in the Party, including the "moderates", closes ranks around the murderers. Only people outside the Party seem to care at all. The extremists are still celebrating, and I have no idea what the Moderate party members are thinking, but they're going along with everything.

Yes, framing this as uncontroversially wrong is a strategic decision, but it's the wrong one. Really you're carrying water for the extremists of the Murder Is Okay party by framing this as a surprising outcome of their actions and policies, rather than an inevitable and intended one. This gives anti-Party members less ammo to attack the Party, and gives the Moderate party members a great excuse to keep their heads buried in the sand even while they continue to defend the Extremists. "This is not partisan; everyone knows murder is bad" is an outright lie, and one that benefits the extremist partisans who continue to support and advocate for murder, because the guys who gave them power are given a potent way to avoid any accountability.

In short, I think that this:

using a story few serious people will disagree with is a good way to walk the Overton Window a little closer to your ideal area.

is very misguided. People need to know just how far the Overton Window has stretched to the left. The way to convince people that their side has gone too far is to show them that their side has gone too far, not to tell them that the extremists on their side aren't actually on their side and can safely be ignored.

The trick is, specifically, to cast this behavior as "nonpartisan" when it was obviously extremely partisan. Doing this allows the partisans who made this happen to be safely disavowed by the rest of the party in public, while privately they continue to be hired and given enormous amounts of power. It's an even more dishonest version of the motte and bailey. The motte is that obviously their actions were despicable and we can't condone that and they're getting fired immediately and this doesn't represent our party. The bailey is that we do condone that, they're getting promoted, but in public we'll have to act sad and have the government fine the government a few million dollars, and next time the people we put in place to do the same thing will be smarter and their actions harder to catch. @TracingWoodgrains, whether he wants to or not, is doing a masterful job of constructing the Motte for them.

If you disagree, please show me anywhere that any moderate or progressive criticizes the people who put these people in power, rather than sadly lamenting the unforeseeable and inevitable circumstances that inexplicably led to a coalition of extremists being given the reins of the government.

Yes, framing this as uncontroversially wrong is a strategic decision, but it's the wrong one. Really you're carrying water for the extremists of the Murder Is Okay party by framing this as a surprising outcome of their actions and policies, rather than an inevitable and intended one.

Those dastardly murderers.

People need to know just how far the Overton Window has stretched to the left.

I understand the frustration, but I'm not sure why people need to know this to change their mind. I suspect left-right framing is about the fastest way to not change minds, which is why so many people, even those adjacent dissidents like Freddie deBoer, always take the time to say their not-a-conservative mantras. That this is a requirement to have any sort of movement in a rightward direction for progressives may very well be a flaw of their own making, but I do not blame people for respecting the fact it is a reality.

It was predictable that we'd have racial interest groups engaging in racial spoils when we decided racial preferences were a good thing to institutionalize. I mean hey, if the price for increased diversity is every once in awhile some dirty union takes advantage and gets caught, that's a price worth paying. The fact that the Federal government is actively defending a lawsuit about it is unfortunate, but that's what lawyers do, ya know?

The not a problem to actually a good thing pipeline is a problem. Do you have any examples of more effective aggressive methods of moderating progressive beliefs in the past? Practically speaking, dissidents on the left don't keep reach, influence, or stay on the left. 'That's what a conservative would say' is a powerful antibody. If we go back in time 48 hours, rewrite TracingWoodgrains post for maximum effect how would you change it? Who would be the speaker? I'm not a person out there exists that can deliver what you want to happen.

Apologies this is all I have time to respond to at the moment.*

I understand the frustration, but I'm not sure why people need to know this to change their mind.

Because it doesn't do any good to have people turn against one policy that's already been rescinded. They need to turn against the people pushing this stuff, and those people's general philosophies. Being mealy-mouthed about it makes that impossible.

In practice, as long as the "Murder is Okay" party has what amounts to a direct line into the hearts and minds of the Moderates, it really doesn't matter how you put it. You can't move them by argument, they're not responsive to argument, they're only responsive to the signals they get on the Murder is Okay line. But if they were responsive to argument, softening the argument to such an extent would make it worthless.

I understand the frustration, but I'm not sure why people need to know this to change their mind. I suspect left-right framing is about the fastest way to not change minds, which is why so many people, even those adjacent dissidents like Freddie deBoer, always take the time to say their not-a-conservative mantras. That this is a requirement to have any sort of movement in a rightward direction for progressives may very well be a flaw of their own making, but I do not blame people for respecting the fact it is a reality.

For the purposes of this discussion there are two groups of people:

  1. Partisan conservatives, and open-minded moderates, who recognize bad behavior coming from the left and are willing to condemn it.
  2. Partisan progressives, and close-minded "moderates", only willing to condemn bad behavior if it's not coming from the left

Your claim seems to be that some people in group 2 can be fooled into condemning bad behavior if they're told it's not coming from the left. I don't think this is accurate--whether the issue is framed as partisan or nonpartisan, they will recognize it as partisan, and close ranks accordingly. This is already happening at the federal level and is why everyone involved is still employed. Those who don't close ranks are already part of group 1 and are willing to hear out your claims even if they are partisan claims.

So I don't think calling this stuff "nonpartisan" fools anyone in group 2. I do think it fools some people in group 1, who are eager to find any excuse not to be seen as partisan. "I don't have an issue with the left, just with opportunist extremists who say they're on the left," they'll say, conveniently ignoring those who deliberately put those "opportunist extremists" into power and are still enthusiastically supporting them now that their "opportunist extremism" has come out.

This means that framing the issue as "nonpartisan" does nothing to convince people in group two, but does give them a powerful defensive weapon to use against group one. Moderate progressives were the ones who put these "nonpartisans" into power. Calling the issue nonpartisan fundamentally distracts from that inconvenient truth. Parties must take responsibility for the power which they give to their extremists.

Those dastardly murderers.

The point of the name is that the extremists are very forthcoming about their values, yet the moderates support them anyways.

Do you have any examples of more effective aggressive methods of moderating progressive beliefs in the past?

The biggest example I can think of is the expulsion of NAMBLA from the ILGA in the 90's. As far as I can tell this happened due to external pressure from group 1, not because people told those in group 2 that expelling NAMBLA is "nonpartisan."

If we go back in time 48 hours, rewrite TracingWoodgrains post for maximum effect how would you change it? Who would be the speaker? I'm not a person out there exists that can deliver what you want to happen.

My central point is that the Left has always been advocating for this sort of thing. It shouldn't be surprising that this is what happens when they're given power. Drawing attention to their success stories, e.g. the situations where they've been able to enact their preferred policies, is inherently partisan. They want to do this and way more and the only reason they haven't is because even this is barely skirting the line of legality. "Maximum effect" defined by me would focus on the systems that put these extremists in power, and the fact is that those systems are nothing special, just the results of moderate amounts of progressivism. So "maximum effect" means being maximally partisan, and trying to paint people like Pete as consciously supporting this kind of policy.

Knowing what you know, does this paragraph sound honest to you?

To get a bit personal for a moment: I was a day-one donor to @PeteButtigieg during his presidential campaign, impressed by his deep understanding and articulate defense of liberal principles. He has been saddled with a messy, stupid lawsuit built on bad decision after bad decision, from predecessors who--between a rock and a hard place in the impossible task of avoiding disparate impact while preserving objective standards--elected to take the easy road and cave to political pressure to implement absurdities.

I don't believe for a second that these people were put "between a rock and a hard place." This is what they wanted and they went way out of their way to get it. Framing them as innocent victims of circumstance is not a nonpartisan attempt to reach understanding with those on the left, it's a partisan attempt to cover for those on the left, and should be seen as such.

The not a problem to actually a good thing pipeline is a problem. Do you have any examples of more effective aggressive methods of moderating progressive beliefs in the past?

Chris Rufo and libs of tiktok had a fair amount of success.

Something like the affair of the casseroles?

That showed up as haha-fun-trivia on one of Scott’s link posts. It was so outlandish! What a crazy conspiracy!

court filings are public records, but they are often expensive and difficult to obtain. Tools like RECAP help, but I was lucky to have people around me willing to pay the $80 in PACER fees for a few of the documents.

And then he uploads the documents to a random Google Drive folder, rather than telling his "people around him" to install the RECAP extension in their browsers so that they will automatically upload the documents to RECAP. This makes me pretty angry.

I now have purchased document 139 (memorandum in support for motion for class certification) and all its exhibits, using the RECAP browser extension so that they have been added to RECAP for public viewing at this link.

In the Google Drive folder, I shout at people to install RECAP. I went with the first guy who had PACER access, a stranger to me, trying to get into the story as quickly as possible.

Sorry, you just explained it and I still don't know how it works. They'll upload it to the courtlistener website for public viewing when your extension uploads it to them? That's a really neat system, and looks a lot more official than a google drive link.

Normally, whenever you download a document from the federal government's official PACER website, you must pay ten cents per page downloaded, capped at thirty pages (three dollars). If you have installed the RECAP extension in your browser, then the extension automatically uploads to the third-party website RECAP whatever you download from PACER. (You can create an account on PACER and download stuff from it even if you aren't a lawyer.)

Dang. Why doesn't someone (maybe the government itself??) just do that for every single public-but-paywalled document?

Ten cents per page is a reasonable fee for an archivist digging up and photocopying some documents, but it seems wildly out of touch with the costs of hosting a pdf.

Realistically there is a small but hopefully-growing set of folks advocating to strike the PACER paywall completely. Perhaps the pricing made sense when it involved paper copies, but no other federal branch of government demands fees for seeing the law these days.

no other federal branch of government demands fees for seeing the law

To be fair, documents submitted by parties to a lawsuit are not "the law". The judicial opinions that constitute "the law" are uploaded to the individual courts' websites plus GovInfo, not just to PACER.

A full understanding of the opinions requires seeing the exhibits and briefs that inform them.

I anticipate significant unintended consequences from such a decision.

Looking forward to seeing the fuller version. This looks pretty terrible.

I hadn't realized that this was a thing that had stopped in this form, though I'm sure that that sort of thing is still happening everywhere, even if not this exactly.

Disparate impact needs to go.

Everybody wants competent, effective air traffic controllers.

I know we do our best to not typical-mind around here, but goddamn, when it's staring you right in the face and they are telling you exactly what they think, to deny it in this manner is like watching someone deny the walls they're walking into. From the suit alone and the tireless, documented efforts of the NBCFAE, it's clear that the competency and effectiveness of air traffic controllers mattered less than if they were African-American or not.

I remember TracingWoodgrains' attempt to try and start an offshoot of The Motte he believed needed to exist with "less of a right-wing slant". I remember thinking that the attempt was idealistic, misguided and naive at the time. It's nice to know that he hasn't changed that much. I wish him all the best, but when the leopards eat his face I won't be at all surprised.

Honestly the most interesting thing to me is How does Elon Musks have some much time to be involved in every single twitter controversy. The amount of twitter stuff he’s involved in is like a typical unemployed sleeping in moms basement always online level not a guy whose like CEO of 3 companies. Makes me curious if he’s outsourced all the CEO stuff yet and just tweets or if there is some dude with a job title that is Elon Musks professional tweeter.

And Tracy should be getting a NYT article in about 72 hours including all of his personal information.

I don’t know, many of us have jobs and spend hours here every week, seems possible Musk might do the same. I also get the feeling he spends relatively little time with his kids, lives alone and so doesn’t have family obligations most of the time.

At this point I can easily see his life going something like

5 minutes checking up on each of your companies: 4hrs
Hyping up investors: 7hrs
Shower + food+ anime: 1hr
Aww yeah twittertime: 8hrs
Sleep: 4hrs

More fairly, the man probably spends a lot of time being driven around, sitting on planes, etc. where there isn't much else to do except txt and tweet.

More fairly, the man probably spends a lot of time being driven around, sitting on planes, etc. where there isn't much else to do except txt and tweet.

I am sure he has a top-of-the-line teleconferencing solution in all of his vehicles, so he can talk to any of his executives or engineers and access any internal document whenever he wants or needs to. He's just a big fan of shitstorms on twitter.

Bravo to Trace, I suspect this investigation will gain traction, he should embrace it and maybe we'll see him on the Tucker Carlson podcast soon.

It's been interesting watching this argument continue to unfold between Stancil and Sailer, and it's still going on. A couple weeks ago we had the CW thread about BAP saying that Sailer-style race-realism is a dead end and the right-wing should embrace the myth of colorblindness. This thread shows why that conclusion is wrong. HBD is not a mythological replacement for progressivism (and that is actually what we need), but this thread shows it's needed because it's incredibly disruptive to the liberal mind.

BAP and some others on the DR who are critical of HBD-focus rightfully point out that liberals and the establishment are not driven by the factual belief in racial equality. They are driven by other myths and what is essentially a religious impulse to achieve racial equality as an ideal they are striving for. When confronted with truthful arguments demonstrating HBD they can react in various ways, lashing out in public HBD denial like Stancil is doing here, or privately coming to accept it but publicly avoiding the topic altogether. But ultimately, accepting HBD as true wouldn't necessarily change their minds, this FAA-DEI scandal is an artifact of conflict theory and not mistake theory. They have different ideals, ideals that mean diversifying ATC (however that's accomplished) is a good thing, and their minds are not going to change by being presented with HBD arguments, no matter how respectfully those arguments are presented.

But this also explains why public debate and DR emphasis on HBD is necessary. Although this FAA-DEI scandal was driven by an idealism rather than mistaken belief in non-HBD explanations for racial inequality, recognizing HBD functions as a significant disruption to the underlying ideals that are accepted by almost everyone without question. Trace says that this nasty conversation is just a sad failure of two people to exchange ideas productively, or who are cynically just trying to build their own brands. It's more significant than that, Sailer is slaughtering sacred cows in the public square. That has an important place even though it is not a replacement for the harder task of building a replacement civic religion for this nonsense.

Stancil shows the incredible difficulty liberals have in reconciling HBD with their ideals. Sailer's dogged commitment to that topic is not going to help the other side resolve their factual errors in their worldview (as Trace may hope), it's going to weaken the foundation of what is essentially religious ideology. And yes, ugly spats in the public square are how that happens.

It's been interesting watching this argument continue to unfold between Stancil and Sailer, and it's still going on. A couple weeks ago we had the CW thread about BAP saying that Sailer-style race-realism is a dead end and the right-wing should embrace the myth of colorblindness. This thread shows why that conclusion is wrong. HBD is not a mythological replacement for progressivism (and that is actually what we need), but this thread shows it's needed because it's incredibly disruptive to the liberal mind.

This is also proof that no press is bad press. Did Stancil lose? Yes, if you have to resort to calling your better-prepared opponent a Klansman then I think that is an admission of defeat, but he also got a lot of fans who agree with him. So both sides benefited. I think it shows how weak or ideologically motivated the anti-HBD arguments tend to be. Anyone had the opportunity to shutdown Steve but no one rose to the occasion.

When we were having the atheist culture wars of the 2000s, the side representing Christianity may have earned more followers after some public spat with an internet atheist, for example. But that wasn't a victory for the Christian side. The victory for the status quo of the religious order is there is no debate, because it's beyond the pale to even consider this a question that warrants argument. So even if a Christian won some debate against the atheist, he still lost by virtue of debating something that only works if it is taken as true on faith.

Stancil is falling into the same trap. Maybe he gains more followers than Sailer. But his followers are being increasingly conscious of and exposed to a debate they were previously not aware of (and a debate they cannot win with the scientific methodology they hold in high regard). That lays the groundwork for real seismic shifts in ideological thinking down the road.

"No press is bad press" for growing a personal brand, maybe, but for maintaining a civic-religious ideology certain things have to be so true they are beyond debate. Then when you start debating them in the public sphere the cracks begin to show in front of an audience that had never even previously considered the debate at hand.

Anyone had the opportunity to shutdown Steve but no one rose to the occasion.

No they didn't - where's the actual counterargument to HBD? If you want to shutdown Steve you either need to beg/force(presumably with legislation) Elon Musk to ban him, or present a factual and robust counterargument to HBD. The problem is that even if this robust counterargument exists, nobody has ever seen it - and I don't think it does exist.

I don't know what Stancil actually thinks, but he is very much not honest and not acting in good faith. He's focusing on attacking the weakest and nastiest replies in an attempt to stigmatize and inoculate people against racial discourse, in an effort to help out the left. He minimizes engagement to what he thinks he can get a dunk with, because his goal is to delegitimize.

Where did Trace say that it was the two of them trying to exchange ideas productively?

Sadly, for the 'Third Side', it finds itself falling into the very same trap it laments the 'good' side falling into.

Steve Sailer isn't a racist. He's just correct about the wrong things. Calling him a racist is just an appeal to the mercy of the 'good' side.

The 'good' really want to replace Cpt. Sully with Cpt. Shaniqua. Sailer is not wrong or racist for pointing this out.

The 'good' dress up their efforts that pervert the meritocratic process and discriminate against the more qualified to lift up brown people to a level they don't deserve by using pretty looking brown ladies in advertisements. Sailer correctly points this out and mocks it. He is not racist for doing so unless, of course, you presuppose the browns to be better than they actually are. Which makes you not just racist but also wrong.

The 'Third Side', spearheaded by the likes of TracingWoodgrains, can't handle this. I don't know why. Though I'd theorize oversocialization, social status and the trauma of watching Civil Rights propaganda took their toll on them like it did everyone else. In any case, if I had to read 5 paragraphs of excuses and 'well actually' every time a racist had been proven right before I could allow myself to acknowledge it, I'd start thinking inward as to why I'm doing this to myself. Because this entire rigamarole is absurd. It would take less effort to get through the cognitive dissonance of a 15 year old.

I can accept liars who just ignore these things or tow the party line to not lose their jobs. At least they know what they are. But the 'Third Side' is not that. It genuinely believes it's honest and standing up for truth. When in reality truth rests with the likes of Sailer. There's nothing 'more right' about not mocking the perverted and shameful nature of modern DEI. There's no respectability in claiming that, whilst the Emperor might not have any clothes, it might be because he was sleepwalking, and not because he is vain and has poor judgement. It's just groveling at the feet of those with power.

Is your point is that if "strong HBD" is right you can't be racist or that Sailer isn't negatively biased against black people? Because I seriously doubt the latter. And I don't see the former either, you can still be discriminatory against people with intellectual disabilities.

My point would be: If "strong HBD" is right, what does being 'racist' even mean, and why would it be bad to be one?

It's not just that we can be discriminatory against people with intellectual disabilities. We actually are. We make rules, laws and train professionals to deal with all sorts of people who fail to meet whatever standard society sets. Does that mean we are 'racist' against those people? Should we let people with Down Syndrome play with power tools on a construction site because we are not 'racist' and don't want to perpetuate 'harmful' hiring practices?

Should we let people with Down Syndrome play with power tools on a construction site because we are not 'racist'

how is it relevant example? on constuction site, only workers are allowed and workers do not 'play' with tools but do what they're expected to do.

Great work @TracingWoodgrains! This is some fantastic investigative journalism.

I recommend taking a few days off school somehow if you possibly can and working this thing as hard as possible while it's hot. Do interviews, get exposure, build your profile.

Thanks! I’ll see what I wind up doing—I don’t think taking time off school is necessary, but I was definitely more than a little distracted in class today. I figure I’ll see who reaches out to me about what, if anything.

Trace, you posted a few days ago about Scott demurring Prophetship. Your recent stuff, vast quality and quantity, is reminding me of 2013-era Scott.

A few things I'd point out :

  • Trace's effortpost mentions that the FAA paused hiring in 2013 awaiting the new test, but I'll spell out that the FAA had previously expected to hire over a thousand ATC each year.

  • At best, this means a lot of people didn't retire when they were planning to do so; more likely, this resulted in a lot of shuffled schedules and reduced overlap (and not-ideal workload).

  • ATC work is hard, and important, often in stupid small ways. The New York, Chicago, and Southern California TRACON are some of the busiest in the world, and even with modern radar and computerized systems you're juggling a half-dozen aircraft in three-dimensional space moving at high speeds (and often with incomprehensible accents). There are major accidents where ATC, including overworked or undersupported ATC, have been responsible.

  • Ostensibly, everyone who passed this test still had to pass a cognitive AT-SAT test (though now mixed with biodata?), though not the Centralized Selection Panel. But with a now vastly reduced numbers taking that test (FAA expected 70% failure rates at the Biographical Assessment score), the final group to pull from was drastically smaller, and they almost certainly had to pull from wider ranges scores than before.

This test feels like it is cartoonish. To the point where it was either the KKK who were assigned to boost AA and decided let’s make black people say they suck at science and then go collect our bonus for boosting AA or some senior dude just got pissed he had guys not on merit and created a test so dumb it wins a lawsuit easily. Basically got pissed at the politicians.

There has to be less obvious ways to cheat on an exam than this.

Take a look at Trace's follow-up thread:

https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752197404768571629?s=20

I remember when this story came out years ago. I remember how it got covered by conworld and how it got ignored by MSM.

The story at that time was like you describe: Obama admin wanted more black recruits, so they made up a questionaire that would favor blacks. With such expected answers as doing poorly in science.

What Trace makes clear, and was never covered well even ten years ago, is that this was much more malicious. The test was rigged. The answers were impossible to get right by accident. The only way to pass this test was to cheat by knowing the right answers, which is exactly what the union did.

Look at the questions after "bad at science". That question asks "what was your worst subject in high school". One of the very next questions is "what was your worst subject in college". Here, the answer is completely different: you're supposed to answer "public history". Each of those questions is weighted to 15 points, for 30 points total (out of a few hundred or so). So you're not passing this exam unless you know exactly what the answers are supposed to be.

Agreed it gets a little less cartoonish after the initially are you bad at science question and just becomes you need to cheat to win.

To the point where it was either the KKK who were assigned to boost AA

"Aspects & Assumptions of Whiteness & White Culture in the United States" put out by the National Museum of African American History. An info graphic sandwiched between the the following two paragraphs:

Direct and violent forms of racism that promote white supremacy have been on the rise in recent years. These acts are more directly linked to white nationalism.

White supremacy is an ideology where white people are believed to be superior to nonwhite people. This fallacy is rooted in the same scientific racism and pseudo-science used to justify slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and genocide at various times in throughout history. White supremacist ideologies and their followers continue to perpetuate the myth of white racial superiority.

Some hallmarks of Whiteness & White Culture:

*Self-Reliance

*Emphasis on the Scientific Method

*Objective linear thinking

*Adherence to rigid time schedules

*Plan for future

*Delayed gratification

*Decision-Making

Note: These ideas have been around since at least 1990. [PDF]

I think it was on /r/stupidpol where someone said "Since I don't get to decide which side of the race war I'm on, I'm glad I'm on the side the plans for the future."

There has to be less obvious ways to cheat on an exam than this.

Yes, but why bother when you know you can cheat obviously and the institutions will have your back?

It only looks this way because you've rejected blank-slatism. If, instead, you believe that all groups and maybe even all individuals are born with the same cognitive abilities and that observed differences in measurement are a product of either biased testing or oppression/oppressor dynamics in their lives, this is a good test. If you start from that premise, finding people who had terrible science scores in high school is a filter for finding the people that were most oppressed, not a filter for people of low cognitive ability. I promise you that I have encountered people that insist that the only thing you can learn from racial differences on a test is how biased that test is towards different racial groups. Whether they truly believe it or no, I couldn't say, but if the approach taken here follows logically from it.

See my comment here:

https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183748?context=8#context

The test was not designed to filter for kids bad at science. The test was designed with arbitrary answers to filter out everyone but those with the cheat codes.

Yeah, I see that now.

I think my post above is still worth noting for people that have never been exposed to that worldview, even though this specific instance seems more like plain corruption than a genuine disagreement between parties.

Those are not actually the only two options.

FYI most of the key documents filed in the case are available on the law firm's website https://mslegal.org/cases/brigida-v-faa/.

The judge granted class certification in 2022 and discovery is currently ongoing with the trial coming up probably sometime later this year.

When NY Times starts investigating this page and wants to interview me as the one sympathetic-to-their-audience 'progressive' venturing into the lions den, I promise to tell them y'all are just misguided victims of radicalizing social media algorithms. Probably the best I can do.

I was radicalized by interacting with the kind of progressive who calls people racist for not believing Jussie Smollet and then refuses to acknowledge the case ever again once it becomes apparent that they've made a booboo.

Good thing the mods don't consider this type of post antagonistic in any way...

  • -13

You know, it's just possible that had you waited to see whether or not we would mod that comment, after you reported it, one of us might have agreed with you that it was in fact antagonistic. But no, you reported it and then immediately posted a passive-aggressive whine about what the mods do or don't consider antagonistic.

FWIW, my personal metric is the "Shoe on the other foot" test. If a leftie said something equally snide about why he's been "radicalized" by righties, would I mod it? Eh, maybe, but probably not. Now if you feel that the comment was a personal dig directed at you, well... sometimes a jerk's got a point, you know?

I wouldn't normally report a comment like that (if I did, your queue would get pretty clogged up). I decided to do it after posting because I realized it was unfair to accuse the mods of a double standard when they could just be unaware of that comment.

I don't actually want you to mod people who are mean to me, but I do want you to hold me to the same standards you hold them.

The way you instead agree with them pretty much confirms my expectations, but w/e.

Well, yes, I think the point he was making was accurate (you did that), and I also think it was antagonistic. And if you hadn't been whining about how the mods are unfair at the same time you reported the comment, I might have made a comment about not being a jerk and grinding old axes, but now I'm just rolling my eyes since you have to push buttons as hard as you can, especially after you claim you "wouldn't normally report a comment like that." (The heck you don't.)

(you did that),

I of course didn't, but since that's a meme started on here by my #1 long-term stalker who also happens to be a mod, I don't expect people to be much interested in being careful about the facts of the matter.

(as per any slander, it's a bunch of lies and mischaracterization built around a true seed of a real event. You'd think 8 years of seeing the left lie about Trump and Trump lie about the left would make the pattern clear to people discussing those events every day, but w/e)

  • -11

Who do you actually think you're gaslighting here? The list of people eager to call you out after the hoax became obvious was practically endless, and the way you shamelessly feigned blindness to all of it was an instant meme with no moderator help required.

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I of course didn't, but since that's a meme started on here by my #1 long-term stalker who also happens to be a mod, I don't expect people to be much interested in being careful about the facts of the matter.

@gattsuru is not a mod. He's not a stalker either, just unusually well-organized.

In any case, what's the response you're looking for with this comment? I'd like to provide it, if possible. I can't speak for anyone else, but I would like to be as careful of the facts as possible. I certainly am not interested in perpetrating lies or mischaracterizations. What's your understanding of events, and how does it differ from the description above? The original thread and subsequent threads aren't hard to find, and if there's a misunderstanding or a mischaracterization it shouldn't be too hard to demonstrate. Even if trawling the old threads is too much trouble, I'd at least be interested in hearing a more detailed description of events from your perspective.

It seems to me that this post, like many of your posts, is essentially a lament that people are treating you unfairly despite considerable forbearance on your part. I would like to treat you fairly; normally I would do that by responding directly to your statements, but given past experience I have some doubts that would be productive. So instead, I'll ask you directly: what sort of response would you like to the above? This is a discussion space, which means if you're posting here, we can presume you're looking for discussion. What should that discussion look like, in your view? What would be the proper way to proceed constructively? I can't promise that you'll get it from anyone else in this thread, but I can at least try to provide it myself, and maybe it can set an example.

To lay my cards on the table, I don't think you post in good faith, and believe that your general strategy is to push the edge of the rules as hard and as skillfully as possible, and then concern troll and play the victim when people push back. I think this has been your pattern for pretty much as long as I've been interacting with you, and believe I wasted a lot of time trying to have productive discussions with you before I got a handle on how your schtick works. If that model is correct, the next logical play would be for you to ignore this message and focus on the lowest-quality and most angry responses in the thread.

On the other hand, it seems to me that even if that is your schtick, the best response is to exert a bit of effort offering you what you appear to be asking for, and then make it clear that you probably won't take it. And if I'm wrong and you will take it, and we can actually have a high-quality dialogue, well, mission accomplished, as they say.

So, again, we have a clear disagreement here. You think you've been slandered, I think you are objecting to people pointing out your very real bad behavior. It doesn't seem to me that this disagreement should be unsolvable; people have criticized me for posts I've made in the past, and I've always been happy to discuss the issue with them at their pleasure, and will remain so in the future. So what's the proper way to proceed?

You'd think 8 years of seeing the left lie about Trump and Trump lie about the left would make the pattern clear to people discussing those events every day, but w/e)

When do you personally think the left has ever lied about Trump?

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I of course didn't, but since that's a meme started on here by my #1 long-term stalker who also happens to be a mod, I don't expect people to be much interested in being careful about the facts of the matter.

Hey, I'm not a moderator.

... as per any slander, it's a bunch of lies and mischaracterization built around a true seed of a real event.

Source.

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It probably helps that this was an actual thing that actually happened here by a rather infamous, and since moved on, member of the "community". In fact, the person who called the blatant hoax a blatant hoax earned a warning or temp ban, I can't remember which.

It was very radicalizing.

You might see whining about a hypothetical strawman, but it's actually "Oh yeah, I remember that..."

It helps even more that the member of the community in question did not move on, and you are, in fact, talking to him.

Hahahahah. Oh boy did I ever walk into that one. Had no idea. Definitely adds a pretty amazing color to the whole back and forth.

This is actually a debate space to make progressives better at debunking alt-right trolls. TheMotte plays a critical part in deprogramming radicals.

(this isn't even necessarily untrue)

It is untrue because there are no progressives here…

I used to be a token progressive on here but then I left because I took shrooms and decided hiking was a better use of my time than arguing on the internet.

Probably true, but heterogeneity of opinion keeps things interesting.

I'm a progressive! (circa 2014)

Me too! (circa 300 A.D.)

You actually support Diocletian's reforms? umm, yikes.

There are plenty of true-to-the-name progressives here, but few "progressives" who buy into the definition of progress as whatever it is currently most socially beneficial to clamor for. The latter seek validation rather than progress, and can get it far more easily on other platforms.

Well, not many. Would you consider yourself a progressive, @guesswho?

No category label is ever fully accurate when applied to a person. But of the handful of major political labels we currently acknowledge in the US, it's the group I'm most likely to try to support, sure.

TheMotte plays a critical part in deprogramming radicals.

This is true. Shakesneer used to be a leftist if I remember correctly, and judging by the recent podcast he's joined the many people deprogrammed by participating here.

We can't help ourselves, we are victims of systemic racism unearned privilege and white supremacist thinking 😔

Eh, not terribly true for me, unless "sort by new in reddit style threads on themotte," "read newest substack articles of people I run across" or occasionally, "look at the newest (not algorithmically generated) tweets for someone on nitter" count.

I don't know that his post will prompt lefty investigations here; it's not like he's acted terribly right-wing besides merely investigating the matter, and it's pretty egregious.

I assume he can flee to conservatives, even if he's not really one, for defense for this kind of thing, if needed.

That said, can you imagine the articles they'd write about themotte? (I suppose that would solve any evaporative cooling problems for the short term, but lead to large quality and moderation problems.)

Edit: Actually, maybe the anon (I believe?) account with enough biographical information to make doxxing not hard might be pretty attractive to some journalists. (How many gay-married ex-mormons in law school are there?)

It's kind of amazing to me that we've stayed under the radar for so long.

Really? This is a forum comprised of ~100 nobodies and maybe 3 D-list Twitter celebrities (Sorry, TracingWoodgrains and Kulak).

This is one of the least-important corners of the internet. A fun distraction at best.

Who knows. I’ve always been a fan of a Scott Summer quote that the top 10% read the NYT and the top 1% spend their time on some obscure blog/message board. The DEI and critical theory types were all obscure before they took over everything.

The rationalist were obscure before they took over AI and Bitcoin. New ideas come from people who skim the NYT but develop their mental models elsewhere. Mass adoption of ideas won’t flow thru here but the laboratories upstream of say a Hannania weren’t developed on big twitter followings.

I would say in past generations ideas like neoliberalism were developed in academia by a Friedman toiling in anonymity but my guess is that’s not where the big cultural ideas will come from in the future.

I’ve long wandered if anyone I know in real life posts here and there’s a few who seem to fit the mold.

I would say in past generations ideas like neoliberalism were developed in academia by a Friedman toiling in anonymity but my guess is that’s not where the big cultural ideas will come from in the future.

Neoliberalism (horribly vague word but the meaning here is clear from context) wasn't developed by (either) Friedman toiling in obscurity. There was an organised movement of classically liberal economists, founded by Hayek just after WW2, which recruited people like Milton Friedman and encouraged them to get involved in advocacy.

The Mont Pelerin Society is attacked by lefties as a vast right-wing conspiracy, but it was no more conspiratorial than any other professional network - it was just a professional association of like-minded politically-engaged economists that conducted its affairs in public. Arguably it is the prototype for the modern ecosystem of right-wing think tanks.

But to some degree neoliberalism was invented by a bunch of economists toiling away in academic semi-obscurity - the MPS was treated like a bunch of kooks (Friedman wasn't, but he was a serious economist because of his macro work, not his libertarian work) until the 1970's when suddenly there was a political need for what they were selling, and Reagan and Thatcher found a ready-made intellectual edifice to tell them both how and why to do the things they wanted to do anyway.

The Mont Pelerin Society is attacked by lefties as a vast right-wing conspiracy, but it was no more conspiratorial than any other professional network

Nah, I'm going to side with the lefties here. "No more conspiratorial" doesn't mean much, when these sort of organizations are plenty conspiratorial. I don't even know if there can be "just a professional network" of economists. Economists aren't plumbers, there isn't a neutral way to judge their practices, and any way they will associate themselves will have more to do with ideology than professional practices.

it was just a professional association of like-minded politically-engaged economists that conducted its affairs in public.

Oh come on, this is literally "it's not a conspiracy, it's just a group of people acting together toward's a common goal!".

Arguably it is the prototype for the modern ecosystem of right-wing think tanks.

How is it a prototype? This whole model of influence goes way back to how the Catholic Church gained it's influence over Europe, if not to ancient philosophers whispering into the ears of emperors.

and Reagan and Thatcher found a ready-made intellectual edifice to tell them both how and why to do the things they wanted to do anyway.

Not necessarily what they wanted to do anyway. I think someone (possibly Friedman) remarked how it was weird, and basically dumb luck, how someone like Pinochet would go for a market system, rather than more fashy ideas associated with military dictators. From what I understand he just wanted to be notAllende, and the Chicago Boys happened to be at the right place at the right time.

I am highly disgruntled at being linked with those in the company of a Twitter celebrity, even a D-list one. You take that back!

The mainstream media tends to avoid signal-boosting intelligent dissident voices. They want controlled opposition and/or clownish opposition. Much easier to write about Alex Jones or @420MAGAPepe1488 on X.

Similarly you don't see LibsOfTikTok engaging with Noah Smith. Much easier to dunk on the squad

The last time I saw Noah Smith get into a twitter argument it involved him giving an extremely common word (Growth) a novel and unintuitive definition and then "dunking" on people who didn't use it. I'd rather get into an argument with him than the squad to be honest.

We've stayed under the radar because we are very small. Even Scott is only recently on the radar and he's orders of magnitude larger.

What's with the concept 'radicalizing social media algorithms'? This is like that idea that 'Putin hacked the elections'... by putting ads on facebook or something? How can people simultaneously defend democracy and believe that the average person is the cognitive equivalent of a fast food public wifi network?

If democracy is so great, why do we need to ban doctors from posting their opinions online? Why do we need to prevent people from taking horse deworming medication but make sure they get to vote?

If AI is racist, if Silicon Valley companies, the most powerful, data-driven, progressive companies ever, still can't seem to make DEI quotas, then perhaps they have a point?

Attributing to stupidity that which is usually attributed to malice is helpful when you're not allowed to outright call your outgroup evil.

How can people simultaneously defend democracy and believe that the average person is the cognitive equivalent of a fast food public wifi network?

By redefining the word "democracy" to mean something much more disconnected from the views of "the average person"?

How can people simultaneously defend democracy and believe that the average person is the cognitive equivalent of a fast food public wifi network?

I've made a few effortposts on this topic, ussually around the question of 'shouldn't we just let only the smart people vote?'

The basic idea is that if you have a true and powerful signal and a large enough amount of data collection, you can be ok even in a system with humongous amounts of noise.

It's ok if the average voter is so dumb that their voting behavior is near-random. So long as it's not completely random and they're probabilisticly influenced by the true signal of 'good candidate' at least a little, then if we average over tens of millions of voters we can recover that signal with high likelihood.

(whereas choosing any nonrandom subsample of the population to do the choosing, like 'the smart/informed people', is more likely to produce an artifact since their homogeneity makes them more likely to be biased in the same direction by the same factors)

true signal of 'good candidate'

Isn't the point of democracy that all candidates are 'good' candidates?

The alarming headlines about 'Russian bots' and 'radicalizing algorithms' are especially jarring. If 10 years of government work can be undone by a few hours of exposure to a Russian bot or an algorithm, perhaps your 'true signal' is not that true.

'Our glorious democratic education' vs their 'abhorrent authoritarian brainwashing'.

I suppose these media products are not to be taken at face value. Just an nth reinforcement 'you are a good person for not falling for the Eastasia propaganda'.

It's ok if the average voter is so dumb that their voting behavior is near-random. So long as it's not completely random and they're probabilisticly influenced by the true signal of 'good candidate' at least a little, then if we average over tens of millions of voters we can recover that signal with high likelihood.

This sounds rather like the "wisdom of crowds" argument — or at least adjacent to it. But, AIUI, that only really applies when the "noise" is unbiased; like in the classic "guess how many items in the jar," the average of people's "noisy" estimates converges toward the true value because people are equally likely to overestimate as underestimate. Does that still apply in voting? I think a case can be made that for various reasons — ranging from human cognitive biases to media institutions — the "noise" is not unbiased; the average "dumb voter" will tend to deviate from the "true signal" in particular directions, ensuring the aggregate "wisdom of the crowd" will be similarly biased away from the "true signal" in those same directions.

That is probably the largest falsifiable assumption underlying the rationale, that the noise is not normally distributed around the true signal.

The truest answer is 'that is possible and is a major weakness of the theory,' but, 3 mitigating arguments:

  1. We have a 2-party system, in which each side has arguments and narratives trying to push people towards their direction. Voting simulations tend to suggest that in this situation, or even situations with 3 or 4 parties, it is natural for those opposing parties to center around the true center of public preference, and pull in either direction away from it. Since both parties have roughly similar number of devotees (which is not coincidental, they will change their positions until that equilibrium is reached in the long-run, which is part of why it centers that way in real life), we can expect/hope that the noise produced by those things roughly cancels out. (of course this conflates 'central voter preference' and 'the best government', but that gets into deeper philosophical discussions of what a 'good government' even is, which we're eliding atm)

  2. Even if the population has net biases where everyone/the large majority are off in the same direction, these should be for specific issues or domains. Government is hugely complex and multi-faceted; it's possible for the government to be bad on 5 axes, ok on 10 axes, and good on 20 axes, or w/e. Even if there's some big universal bias that drives people away from the true signal on on axis or another, hopefully any axis without a singular such factor will still have pretty randomly distributed noise, and we'll do well on a lot of other metrics anyway.

  3. In particular, I was comparing universal voting to some type of restricted voting where (for example) only people with a certain IQ or passing a certain competence test or etc. are allowed to vote. While it may be true that the general population of all voters could be systematically biased in some way, it's still much more likely that a smaller group selected on a specific metric, which therefore has less cognitive and experiential diversity, would have a similar or stronger bias of some kind. If you are trying to avoid systematic biases, it's really hard to do better than huge random samples in a situation like this, even if huge random samples aren't guaranteed to be perfect either. (and ofc I personally don't think you're going to do better hoping to get lucky with a benevolent monarch or any other system humans have tried, but maybe better non-voting systems are theoretically possible)

Replying to myself to copy/paste one of those long posts, in case anyone is interested. Huge wall of text warning, with a lot of stuff that's probably too basic for the audience here:

This was in response to someone basically asking 'Wouldn't elections work better if only people who are educated on the issues and know enough to make good decisions were allowed to vote? Isn't it crazy that we let stupid and ignorant people make these decisions when they can't possibly know enough to decide well?'

My response:

So this is a really basic research methods question that scientists often have to deal with, mainly concerned with how to find a weak signal in a noisy data set.

Lets say that there's some 'correct' result for everyone election, the result that will lead to the best outcomes for the most number of people based on each of their individual preferences and needs, or whatever. The question is, what is the best way to arrive at that outcome as often as possible, or to arrive as closes as possible to it every time?

There are two main reasons this is a difficult problem. The first is that no one can see the future and it's impossible for anyone to truly know what the long-term consequences of any particular electoral outcome will be. The second is that it's impossible for anyone to truly know and understand the needs and preferences of all 350 million citizens and determine what the best outcome for all of them would be, even if they could predict it.

This creates a ton of uncertainty and disagreement about what the best electoral outcome is (who people should vote for), as we can see clearly at every election cycle.

In terms of statistical analysis, we would call this disagreement and uncertainty 'noise' - lots of disparate, high-variance, semi-random data about how people think everyone should vote. And we would call the 'correct' electoral outcome the 'signal' - the true result that we're trying to discover.

In this framing, an election is just a measurement, designed to try to capture the signal, and filter out the noise. Our elections tend to have a low signal-to-noise ratio, because it's so hard for anyone to know what the actual best outcome would be, and there's so much disagreement about what we should do.

As it turns out, scientists have been dealing with this problem in all kinds of domains since the invention of statistics, and they have a good handle on what works and what doesn't.

What you're suggesting is, basically, take a smaller number of data points from a restricted domain (people who pass the test), which you believe to have much less noise (less misinformation) and a much stronger signal (better understanding).

This is a good method in many domains - physicists, for instance, will go to great lengths to reduce noise in their experiments by shielding equipment or working far underground, even if this is expensive and limits the amount of data they can gather. If they can eliminate enough noise, they only need a very little data to confirm their hypotheses, because those hypotheses are very precise, and the systems they deal with are well-understood.

But the danger with restricting your domain and excluding subjects based on a specific criterion is that it can introduce bias into your measurements, leading you to very accurately measure the wrong signal. Physicists don't have to worry about this much, because physics works the same underground and behind shielding as it doe anywhere else. But any science that has to deal with people has to worry about this a lot, because people are very easily biased, and different groups of people can vary from each other in all kinds of ways.

In your example, it may be that people who pass your test know more about the world overall, but have some specific set of strong, incorrect beliefs that is currently in fashion among the educated classes, or was introduced to the curriculum they tend to study by the agencies that make that curriculum, or that concerns areas of study or ways of life (like plumbing or farm work) that the educated tend to have little contact with. And even if they have no systematically mistaken beliefs, their priorities and needs may still be systematically divergent from the rest of the general population - they may not appreciate the true needs of the poor, they may prioritize art and science over industry and safety, they may fall preferentially along one political or religious alignment, etc. Basically, as long as they have any systematic biases that make them different from the rest of the population, you cannot get the 'correct' signal from any type of measurement of them, because their 'signal' is something different that aligns with their biases. Their 'signal' may still be pretty good, but it can't ever be 'correct'.

How do scientists who deal with these types of problems try to measure the real signal amidst tons of noise, then? The answer is random sampling of lots and lots and lots of data points, averaged out with each other to converge on the correct signal.

See, when you have enough data points, it doesn't really hurt you much to add a 'noisy' data point (ie someone who knows nothing and acts randomly). Because that noise will tend to be randomly distributed, and cancel out with someone else who was randomly noisy in the other direction when you average everything together. So letting people with 'zero knowledge' vote is not a problem. The only type of voter that's a problem is one with 'negative information' - beliefs and preferences that actively drive them away from the correct signal. And even those people will tend to cancel out with people who have negative knowledge going the other direction... if you sample from every walk of life and every group, instead of limiting yourself to a single specific group with a tendency towards one specific flavor of negative knowledge.

Because the thing about a true signal is, that we expect it to have some impact on most data points, even if those points themselves have huge variance. Like if you give all the kids in one school platform shoes with 2" heels and measure their heights, there will still be lots of variance in height and there will be tons of kids in that school who are shorter than tons of kids in another school even with their shoes on, but if you take the average height it will still come out 2 inches taller, because the shoes still increased everyone's random noisy heights at once.

With elections, it's a bit more complicated, but it's the same idea. Maybe one person is an idiot about everything except farm policies, but they can tell a good farm policy from a bad one and that true information affects their vote. Maybe another person knows nothing about policy, but is a really good judge of character and will tend to vote for more honest and benevolent candidates. Maybe a third person has been through civil forfeiture and understands the reality of that situation much better than the average person, and lets that influence their vote when politicians make a proposal about it. etc.

Each of those people may have a lot of 'noise' in their heads about every topic other than the one they're good at, but that noise will be mostly random across individuals and will cancel out. As long as they have some knowledge or understanding that gives them good, 'correct' beliefs about the way to vote, and those beliefs influence their actual vote in some way, then that means they're being influenced by the 'signal' and will be adding true information about the signal to our data set when we measure them.

This is how psychologists, social scientists, and other scientists that deal with people and other complex and unpredictable phenomena, almost always design their studies: random sampling of as much data as possible, with statistical analysis to find the signal among the noise. It's simply the most practical and reliable way to go about things with situations this complex. And in the case of elections, that translates to allowing everyone to vote, and encouraging as many people to vote as possible.

It sounds counter-intuitive when you think about a single idiot voting. But when you think about that idiot as someone who only has one tiny spark of good information, and then think about the electoral process as adding the tiny sparks of tens of millions of people together to illuminate the truth, it makes a lot more sense.

Much obliged, but please tell them I'm one of the radicalising algorithms instead, I'm embracing aspirational identity.

A number of users have reported this as "antagonistic" and I rather see their point. We've talked about your trolling before, and while I can appreciate its artfulness, even gentle sneering constitutes objectionable disdain.

You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. Or, if you prefer--you're not venturing into the lion's den, you're just another lion. I don't know if you and I have had this particular discussion before, but I've had it with many others: I will always enforce the rules more strictly when the target of criticism is this space and the people in it. That doesn't mean we can't be self-effacing and self-critical, but it does mean that such posts require maximum charity and effort. This post doesn't really cut it.

Are you really serious about this?

Set aside whether I can state my actual opinions or beliefs safely, now good-natured, ironic, self-deprecating jokes are going to be taken as sneering and antagonistic by the mods as well?

I just got a day ban for I have no idea what, ignored it, now a warning for a joke that's obviously aimed at the foibles of my own tribe (The signifigance of choosing NY Times for the bit cannot be lost on anyone here, surely?), and which others are engaging with in that spirit.

If certain mods have made up their mind or are going to be swayed by number of downvotes and reports, then there's no behavior I can take that protects me. Sure, 'don't link to meme images' is an easy arbitrary rule to follow, I can remember that. But these last 2 times have been complete surprises that I cannot understand the motivation behind, and could not have predicted in any way.

We've transitioned from 'I expect to be held to a different standard, but if I keep my head down enough and don't make my points with the same tone that others use against me and my side, I'll probably be ok' to 'I literally cannot predict what the mods will interpret as antagonistic anymore, I may as well just post honestly and see what happens'.

So, yeah.

"Humor" is often a tough moderation call. I don't know if you have many interactions with children, but "just joking!" is not an uncommon protest from kids who want to say something they know (or suspect) they shouldn't say, because it is actually unkind, or otherwise objectionable, but they understand that humor can sometimes help one speak more plainly than is normally permitted. Well, most of your joke was basically fine. This is the specific part that I found troublesome:

y'all are just misguided victims of radicalizing social media algorithms

This is something people actually claim in earnest about their outgroup, particularly when their outgroup is the alt-right or something similar. So "come on, I'm just joking" becomes a convenient cover for reinforcing a weak man stereotype. If you didn't mean it that way, like... great! Now that I've pointed out the problem with letting "I'm just joking around guys" tempt you to make reductive claims about this community, maybe you can avoid the mistake in the future.

And, I suppose, to take the meta up a notch--there is at least one moderator who has already raised an objection to my moderation here, so don't imagine yourself to be on the wrong side of the mod team or anything. Apparently a lot of people here think you are reddit user darwin2500, in part because you appear to have claimed to be darwin2500, even though on reddit darwin2500 implied (though admittedly did not outright say) that he had left this space and found it amusing that people still imagined him to be here. I do not know whether you are darwin2500; I am actually skeptical because you have yet to post anything approaching the quality and insight that darwin2500 brought to the old subreddit when he wasn't eating bans for various rule violations. But whoever you are, one way to get charity weighing more heavily in your favor in moderation cases is to post good stuff. It would also help if you developed a reputation for posting honestly, instead of a reputation for posting dishonestly. One reason your posts get so heavily reported is that you have taken on darwin2500's burden, whether you are actually him or not: darwin2500 was a notorious troll who repeatedly refused to engage honestly when it became clear that he was wrong about something. Whether you're him or not, that is a behavior you also appear to exhibit here.

In other words--the kind of self-critical humor that you were exercising was not, in fact self critical, as far as I could tell. If you'd been poking fun at yourself instead of everyone else, well, it would have been easier to let that slide.

ETA:

If certain mods have made up their mind or are going to be swayed by number of downvotes and reports, then there's no behavior I can take that protects me.

This is bullshit. No one on the mod team has it out for you; if anything, I think you have a couple mods acting somewhat protectively of you for "affirmative action" reasons. The behavior you can take that protects you is to follow the rules. In particular, I actually have very little time for moderation these days, so unless I see you trashing the community I'm very unlikely to moderate you. Stop imagining yourself to be separate from (much less above) the group, here, and you'll be fine.

This is something people actually claim in earnest about their outgroup, particularly when their outgroup is the alt-right or something similar.

To kill the frog: yes, it's the type of claim that people who read the NYTimes believe, and the joke is that I can trick them into being nicer to you with this obviously dumb narrative because they only operate on pre-approved narratives and this is one they're programmed to accept.

darwin2500 was a notorious troll who repeatedly refused to engage honestly when it became clear that he was wrong about something.

When it became clear to the people who already disagreed with me, sure.

But don't expect me to be persuaded by the one argument you find persuasive, any more than you are persuaded when I make the one argument I find persuasive.

Obviously you think you are presenting arguments and evidentiary claims sufficient to justify your belief, that's why you hold that belief. But the people who don't hold that belief didn't just tragically fail to be exposed to those arguments and claims, they're generally aware of them and still find the balance of evidence to go the other way. I know that about you, you should know that about me.

I acknowledge when someone here convinces me of something I didn't believe before, but it doesn't happen all that often because the disagreements are much deeper than that.

as far as I could tell.

Yes, this has always been the central problem between you and me.

Others seem to have gotten the joke, you take it as a directed sleight instead, and at this point I don't have much hope of convincing you otherwise. We've danced this dance a lot and it's tiring.

I will, however, keep saying what is true about my meaning and intention, whether or not it convinces you.

It's ok, I still get jokes, and this was a good one. I don't understand how anyone could read it in any way other than obvious sarcasm. Just another tick in the "dead internet theory" column.

If the NYTs does do this at least someone should point them to https://www.vault.themotte.org/ it wouldn't take a journalist that long to get a feel for what the community values outside of picking some nuts in a community oriented around allowing nuts to cook.

That is a mistake theory recommendation, and the Times isn't running on mistake theory.

It'd depend on the reporter a think and what kind of story they can get out of it. "There are obscure forums where people are discussing wrong think" is a dog bites man story.

I doubt reporters are going to do that much leg work.

A transexual antifa paedophile arranged a hit piece on bronies with The Atlantic, and similarly David Gerard organized one with the New York Times. I can see it happening. It always seemed like your end game.

Okay, that was definitely antagonistic. If you got the impression from my exchange with @guesswho below that it's open season on him just because a lot of people have old grudges, you are wrong.

And blowing flames on old grudges seems to be your thing.

You are obviously an alt who's here to stir shit, and so far you've contributed nothing but trolling and knife-throwing. Banned for a week, and I'm going to recommend we just burn this alt next time you pop off.

... I guess I should also put down a marker, here.

This isn't going to work.

Trace done an excellent job presenting fine details from the case, and I'm sure he'll put together some first-hand stories and highlight some of the most ridiculous behavior even better in the next couple weeks. Even for the broadly cynical, he's shown that the behavior was worse and more blatant than we would have imagined. More than a couple fellow Mayor Pete fans have joined his call for the FAA to settle. His argument about the dire status of conservative journalists is absolutely correct, and even if I disagree with no small part of the oft-recently-linked Republicans Are Doomed, it definitely applies for the specific case of 'people who can present this in public and be taken seriously'. But this was a story back when it was Rojas, and it's been a big story in general aviation circles for a couple years, now. It's great to see how the sausage is made, if you care, but that's a big if and only if.

Maybe the plaintiffs will end up with a settlement that exceeds their legal and school fees, but they're not going to be made whole -- they're not even trying to become ATC at this point, and the federal government isn't in the habit of giving people years of their lives back. The curious loss of critical e-mails that would prove or disprove the matter aren't going to result in criminal charges or broad warrants; the systems to even attempt to handle FOIA non-compliance on that scale simply don't exist, no when everyone involved is committed. Stancil's not going to eat crow, even beyond his normal bit where he'd have an aneurysm were he forced to try. Very close to zero skeptics of the Rojas or Brigida claims will be persuaded on this matter, no matter how elegantly a friendly helper providers a Forms example of the test, or how nice the eventual powerpoint presentation looks, or if there's a sufficiently fancy animation of the whole process.

Most critically, the people doing this won't be stopped from trying other highly-similar ways to do the same thing, nor found personally liable, nor even face the credible threat of being personally liable in the future. They won't even be embarrassed.

Fifty dollars to a charity of Trace's choice, otherwise: I'll admit I've been too cynical a few times before. But I'll still bet it's not going to happen, and it's not going to happen no matter how smart and quickly and connected and clever a team of well-education people who care come into a room Substack and give a Sorkin speech. I'd like it to be another way, but it's not.

Does anyone know where I can find the class-membership criteria?

I know a guy who graduated from one of those CTIs. He says he was rejected 3 times based on a questionnaire. I’m not clear on when in the process it was taken, because he didn’t graduate until after the 2016 act of Congress. Maybe he failed it legitimately! Or maybe he’s eligible.

Document 146 on this page

The Court hereby certifies the following class:

All non-African American CTI graduates who:

(1) By February 10, 2014, (a) graduated from a CTI program at one of the 36 FAA-partnered CTI Institutions between 2009–13 and (b) passed the AT-SAT;

(2) Applied to be an ATCS trainee through the 2014 all sources vacancy announcement but failed the Biographical Questionnaire that was incorporated into the 2014 ATCS hiring process and was therefore not hired;

(3) Have never been offered employment as an FAA ATCS.

Excluded from the class are CTI graduates:

(1) Who were not US citizens as of February 10, 2014;

(2) Who by February 21, 2014 had reached 31 years of age (or 35 if they had 52 consecutive weeks of prior air traffic control experience);

(3) Whose academic records as of February 21, 2014 explicitly stated that they were ineligible to receive a letter of recommendation from their CTI school;

(4) Whose AT-SAT scores had expired as of February 21, 2014.

One reason I think this could be important is that it's going to paint a huge target on Tracing's back. Propagandists have been claiming that the FAA DEI story was fake, the test designed to favor black applicants never existed, etc. They're going to get very angry at this evidence becoming widely known, and tracing is in a unique position to spread it outside the right wing news ghetto that prevents most liberals from ever encountering facts like these. I'm not saying it's certain they're going to go after his law school,

The nice thing about twitter, and also platforms like substack, is once you blow up, you can sustain on the income without as much fear of cancellation or income loss. This would have been harder pre-Musk Twitter or pre-Substack. If he wants to make a full-time career as a lawyer , then probably stay away from social media. Being a full time pundit may not pay as much as a law but it seems more fun.

The issue with full time pundits is that they become more beholden to their audience, both in terms of having to constantly produce and in terms of playing to their audience's biases. The best things about Tracing are that he only writes about things he finds interesting and that he isn't motivated to suck up to any particular viewpoint.

I do like the independent investigative journalist for hire angle. Give him $10k for 80 hours of work (does that sound right for pricing?), let him nerd out on some obscure corner of the world for a few weeks, and at the end you get something interesting.

It's going to get even harder as Nitter instances die off.

What's happening to them?

I'm really glad now that I have an old school account that doesn't need my phone number. All these loops one has to jump through are anoying.

People are being dramatic, they periodically go down but come back up again after a while, I never had to rotate between more than 2.

I guess there's some arm's race between nitter and twitter. For a while it even looked like nitter won, and twitter won't be doing any more fuckery, but they must have changed something again.

Nitter is probably actually dead this time. (Zedeus is the primary maintainer, and has never called it dead before)

The last way left in was a guest-account system used by an old version of the Twitter Android app. Nitter was hanging on by creating thousands of these rate-limited guest accounts using a network of proxies.

Twitter shut down guest account creation 5 days ago. Guest accounts expire after 30 days, so some instances might keep going for a little while, but will all be dead within a month.

People are not being dramatic. There was indeed an arms race, but twitter just shut down the functionality core to nitter. The dev behind nitter has given up and declared nitter dead. The instances still working will stop working soon.

Oh damn...

I wanted to write something about this, but old dickie Hanania beat me to it.

Conservatives are losing the "don't be weirdos” contest

I can’t resist commenting on how the ongoing freakout over the Kansas City Chiefs making the Super Bowl perfectly encapsulates everything that has gone wrong. Taylor Swift may have endorsed Biden in 2020, but as Max Meyer pointed out after attending one of her concerts, everything about her aesthetic and place in the culture is implicitly conservative. Her fans want to be attractive and meet men. They’re not interested in changing their sex or cheering for urban mobs looting the local supermarket. If you simply give them some semblance of normalcy, they’ll be on your side and vote in opposition to the left and what it has become. But instead of that, they get conspiracy theories about the Super Bowl being rigged so Swift can then endorse Biden.

We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it, not racist but not feeling particularly guilty about the sins of their country, and who will naturally gravitate towards whichever political coalition comes across as the most normal, willing to let them go about their lives watching football or buying makeup from Sephora. People like this used to be natural conservatives, and especially given the Great Awokening, they still should today. They’re not, mostly because Republicans were able to overturn Roe and went out and created a cult of personality around perhaps the least normal politician the country has ever had.

There’s something deeply poetic about this freakout centering around football, the sport that has always served as a symbol of wholesome American normalcy. The old mantra of “the personal is political” always reflected a major electoral weakness of the left. It revealed an inability to have any thoughts or passions that aren’t part of an ideological agenda. Most people don’t care about politics all that much, and feel more positively inclined towards whichever tribe doesn’t try to make them feel guilty about that fact. If you’re watching the AFC Championship game and try to steer the conversation to which players are vaxxed, most sports fans aren’t going to want to talk to you anymore. For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.

As a Republican, I’m amused and horrified. One common reaction was summed up by a tweet reading simply “We don’t deserve to win.” Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.

Vivek, so recently a Republican candidate for President widely taken seriously, added to this genre tweeting out:

I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.

Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!

The problem is that even if you believe that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are artificially propped up, that Taylor is the result of media coverage and that the whole NFL is WWE with end zones, saying it doesn’t actually help you capture the millions of people who are fans of them. “Media Influence” is nearly always a Russell Conjugation: other people’s tastes are the result of media bias, my tastes are pure and formed entirely individually. People will almost never change their tastes as a result of being informed that they were “influenced” by the media, they will get angry. People will easily be convinced that other people are sheeple, they will almost never be convinced that they are. “Pop singers” Swifties will react angrily to this accusation, as will Chiefs fans. Neither will react kindly to the insinuation that their favorite thing is bullshit.

I can’t go through a week without hearing about Kelce from my mother or Swift from my wife. My wife is deep into the swiftie Gaylor conspiracy universe and asks my opinion on them when we’re stoned. My mother listens to every episode of the Kelce Brothers’ podcast, and gives me the highlights. Both are wealthy married white women, who own homes and cars, who value family and capitalism. My mother is not going to be convinced that she likes Travis Kelce because of the deep state and not because he is really good at getting open and he’s funny on mic. My wife is not going to be convinced that she doesn’t really like singing along to I Can See You. It’s a losing strategy to try to convince them that it’s all fake: most people start from the emotional opinion that everything is fake, they aren’t rationally convinced. Just as most atheists turn against the church for personal reasons and then become aware of all the rational arguments and contradictions involved.

The far better strategy by DR types would be to try to unwillingly recruit Swift and Kelce. The old “Aryan Princess” meme. Make them an icon of your side, and you make them problematic. Even when the inevitable Swift endorsement comes, it will feel hollow. Swift will be put in an uncomfortable position, weakened by being forced to deny being a white supremacist. Her fans will be offended by being called racists for liking the music they like, and start to turn against those calling them racists.

Of course, this isn’t happening because I doubt that Trump is declaring “Holy War” on Swift. That’s just a little unsourced TDS tidbit the liberal media couldn’t resist. This is just various hustling influencers seizing on a big name. But if you want to be an insurgent party, discipline is key, and this isn’t it.

AND YET

I find Hanania is being very uncharitable to the right, and buying into an essentially progressive framing of the world. The captured version of the NFL that we watch every week, with “STOP RACISM” written on helmets and in the end zones, with required interviews for minority coaching candidates*, with the mildly absurd farce of wildly-celebrated female coaches in minor functionary roles buried on the staff, with every ad break featuring female athletes (and especially the hypothetical female high school football player featured over and over). Equally, I saw the Eras Tour movie with my wife, and friends of ours went to the concert. It was clear that comparing what was on camera to the crowd at the actual concerts, they went out of their way to make it seem less white than it was. Prominent romantic roles were given to Black Male dancers on stage, despite Taylor herself dating only white men historically, prominent roles were given to flamboyantly gay and trans dancers. Taylor put in the effort in advance to make it a comfortable experience for liberals.

So when Richard says:

For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.

He’s ignoring the context. Liberals were “that guy” for years, and they were loudly whiny, and they succeeded. The NFL and pop culture and ordinary speech changed to accommodate liberals. And it seems to be working, with ratings rebounding from 2016 downtrends. But Hanania is praising liberals for being able to watch a football game telecast that has been designed to soothe them, while blaming Conservatives for being unable to watch a telecast that has been designed to soothe their enemies. It’s a trap Conservatives have fallen into, and they should be shamed for it! But it’s also the fruit of the Long March Through the Institutions.

*The Rooney Rule originally struck me as fairly decent, fairly fair: teams must interview one minority candidate for coaching positions. No requirement to hire, but you have to interview. The results have become increasingly absurd. The Eagles had black Offensive and Defensive Coordinators who had a terrible embarrassing end to the season, but had done well before. Both got a few token Head Coach interviews, to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and as a result the Eagles did not fire them, hanging onto them for way longer than anyone believed the Eagles would bring them back. Because if you get a black coach hired away, you get a compensatory draft pick for it. It was a silly spectacle to watch.

I think honestly it’s impossible not to see politics everywhere simply because conservatives have had a very long lesson in politics entering even things that had long been fairly apolitical. They cannot essentially participate in mainstream life without politics and specifically liberal politics being brought into the mix. And so now after nearly 8 years of politics invading every cultural touchstone, it seems a bit unfair to expect conservatives to try to play “cool” as liberals are coming after one of the few remaining mainstream entertainment outlets that they didn’t have to watch with their guard up.

This came up in the Bud Light thing too.

I get why liberals would pull the whole "what's it to you? It's just the thin end of the wedge!" . It has clearly been incredibly successful.

I'm always surprised that nonliberals who've seen liberals attempt to infect everything - decolonizing bird watching! also seem to share the same sentiment.

There is a reason people are on a hair trigger.

I’m surprised it took so long for conservatives to grow a spine on the issue. I wouldn’t consider myself super conservative. I’m egalitarian more or less, and I think that some of the culture war issues are overblown. But I can absolutely understand why conservatives, especially conservative parents are so unwilling to put up with the encroachment. It seems more or less that liberals are unwilling to allow anything mainstream to exist in an apolitical way. And this comes a problem precisely because it end up being a no quarter situation. A person wanting to raise their kids in a traditional manner has to be hyper vigilant on every piece of culture allowed in the house. Even down to children’s shows like Paw Patrol.

It feels like being colonized in a sense. The elites have decided that the old traditions must die, and have taken over everything in order to force the issue. Just like might have happened in the old west when Indians were forced to send their kids to boarding schools to kill off their culture and religion. Of course people are going to resist their culture and way of life being actively killed.

because conservatives have had a very long lesson in politics entering even things that had long been fairly apolitical.

The knee-jerk rejoinder would usually be 'they were always political, the politics was just made explicit', but obviously it depends what you're talking about and how you define politics.

Again depending on the context, probably relating to the concept of 'white man as default', you know, 'it wasn't political when everyone looked and acted like me, it's political now that other people are being represented too.' That whole cultural dialogue is sort of an awful slog unfortunately, but it's the natural response to your perspective here.

This entire discussion is just painfully terminally online.

My experience is that nobody who spends the majority of their time in meatspace is thinking about this stuff. The weirdo conservatives you see online are just as rare in real life as the weirdo antiwork type communists you see online. Yeah there are weirdo conservatives...but the guy wearing a MAGA hat at this point is considered a weirdo even by his conservative friends, unless he lives in an extremely rural area. Most cons just want the economy to go back to the way it was, and wand their kids left alone.

My experience is that nobody who spends the majority of their time in meatspace is thinking about this stuff.

Where's the border? Fox News has a host calling Swift a "pentagon asset". If your claim is that no actual R is watching Fox News...idk what to say here. Ross Douthat covered this in a column in today's local paper.

Mainstream Rs are going to have a hard time if they have to run against the online right conspiracy types this year, because Trump has cozied up to them so effectively.

Relatively few conservatives are in MAGA hats these days, but get rid of that percentage of the party and the Rs are dead in the water.

I mean, yes, but, from the article:

The key difference, however, is that Democrats did not pick the worst caricature of everything their party stands for and make them their leader. Also, while no Democratic legislature abolished the police, state Republican parties are ensuring that women have to risk their lives and health to deliver doomed pregnancies. Each side has freaks. But the problem with the current Republican Party is that the most unappealing members of the coalition, in this case Trump and pro-lifers, are the ones in charge.

The people saying that Taylor Swift is an FBI agent or w/e-the-fuck may only be known to the terminally online.

The fact that abortion is getting outlawed or regulated in a bunch of states is not. That actually affects people in meat space.

Meat space people tune in to the conversation when they find out something like that now applies to them or their niece or their sister or w/e and is frightening them.

Hanania's schtick seems to be the Republican who exclusively criticizes Republicans for being unlikeable and out of touch.

The problem is that he himself embodies the very things he criticizes in others.

  • Unlikeable? Check
  • Unattractive? Check
  • Trollish behavior? Check
  • Obsessed with weird online drama? Check

The argument Hanania goes like this: When the Republicans do have genuinely nice, non-weird leaders like Romney or Mike Johnson, those leaders still have massive amounts of shit slung at them. Is it any wonder that the Trumps and Musks of the world don't want to play the nice and normal game?

But for the record, I think Hanania's right. All thing's being equal, nice and normal wins. The average urban cat mom will still see Mike Johnson as the devil incarnate, but there are swing voters out there that will see a beautiful smiling family and think "maybe this guy's not so bad".

Hanania's a good writer. He should take his own advice and I bet he'd be more popular. He's trolled his way to a small amount of attention. Now it's time to pivot. When you're on the right, you need to save your weirdness points for what matters.

Hanania's schtick seems to be the Republican who exclusively criticizes Republicans for being unlikeable and out of touch.

This isn’t really a problem. If you want Republicans who primarily criticize Democrats you can switch on Fox or try any of dozens of other outlets or commentators.

Hanania’s point, which he kind of keeps drilling in, is that a lot of Republicans aren’t serious people. They have a poor understanding of their own voters, their own principles and political strategy in general, kind of a trifecta of disastrous realities.

The argument Hanania goes like this: When the Republicans do have genuinely nice, non-weird leaders like Romney or Mike Johnson, those leaders still have massive amounts of shit slung at them.

Romney did fine but was up against a hugely charismatic president on his second term who drew out the black vote and was a darling of white progressives.

Romney would have won in 2016, I’ve had arguments on this topic before and it’s an unproveable counterfactual but his problem was his opponent, not that he was ex-Bain or looked like a hedge fund manager. Similarly, 2008 McCain would also have won in 2016.

And of course the general perception of Obama was that he was a wholesome “nice, non weird” leader who loved his wife and kids, didn’t publicly cheat and seemed like a friendly enough guy, so Romney didn’t exactly have an ‘advantage’ in that area. Hillary, by contrast, was hated and seen as a soulless mercenary who chose to stay with her husband not out of love but out of a ruthless desire for political power.

Hanania's a good writer. He should take his own advice and I bet he'd be more popular. He's trolled his way to a small amount of attention. Now it's time to pivot. When you're on the right, you need to save your weirdness points for what matters.

I see Hanania more as a provocateur, less in the Fuentes or BAP sense where establishment conservatives will just switch off because of the language and overt extremist views, and more as someone who asks interesting questions about where US conservative priorities actually are.

The challenge for the right - which Hanania correctly diagnoses - is in converting little bursts of public outrage about things like BLM, trans bathrooms, the bud light controversy, Asian anger around affirmative actions, uproar in some southern states about critical race theory in schools etc into a coherent ideological program with policies at the local, state and federal level.

People like Rufo, Tucker and LibsOfTikTok have a big reach and make people angry, but their shtick is outrage bait. That’s not a bad thing, but it often goes nowhere.

Romney would have won in 2016, I’ve had arguments on this topic before and it’s an unproveable counterfactual but his problem was his opponent, not that he was ex-Bain or looked like a hedge fund manager. Similarly, 2008 McCain would also have won in 2016.

not just an unprovable counterfactual, but a belief of yours which is apparently immune to any sort of evidence against it

whenever you fill in the any details or support for your counterfactual argument, significant claims of yours are wrong and yet when it's corrected the belief survives

it's the great myth of alternative GOP winner who will win resounding victories for the electorate of... 1984

Not only would Mitt Romney have won, but John McCain, a candidate who represented George W. Bush's 3rd term, a president so disastrous it caused a cultural shift making right-wing behavior and words as low-status and the opposite as high status and whose admin was so unpopular by the end of it that a near 60 Senate majority of the opposition party which made substantial changes to law and government which fundamentally shifted the entire apparatus leftward, was going to win in 2016? Okay.

not just an unprovable counterfactual, but a belief of yours which is apparently immune to any sort of evidence against it

Do you not understand the difference between low turn out midterms and high turnout presidential election years?

And 2rafa is right: 2014 was the best recent Republican Congressional year, when they peaked at 54 Senate seats and 247 House seats (more than any time since the 1920's in the House). The fringes of the Tea Party cost the GOP Senate seats in 2010. Remember the Witch? Republicans could have had a Senate seat in Delaware.

Your claims are typically that Trump won because he energized some hardscrabble white working class communities in a handful of key states. Regardless of whether that’s true, it’s ridiculous to suggest that it represents the sole possible route for a Republican candidate to win in 2016.

Not only would Mitt Romney have won, but John McCain, a candidate who represented George W. Bush's 3rd term, a president so disastrous it caused a cultural shift

This section is entirely your opinion about vague cultural shifts and the qualities of Bush as a leader. The brief “60” seat majority for the Democrats was during the biggest financial crash in postwar American history. The GOP losses in 2006 were within normal bounds well into the term of an existing president (Obama lost as many just two years into his first term).

There’s no actual argument to your thesis, and certainly no evidence. By contrast, Hillary was the most unappealing Democratic candidate in decades, possibly ever, reviled in polling data and distrusted even by many Democrats. All suggest any Republican would have won, as does polling from the 2016 primaries in which match-ups between candidates and Clinton (while Trump was already by far the dominant candidate) show Cruz and even Kasich outperforming Trump.

Eg.

The Republican front-runner holds a 3-point lead over Clinton statewide, 46 percent to 43 percent with 11 percent undecided. Trump’s advantage, however, falls within the margin of error, while Cruz and John Kasich safely carry the state by double-digit margins.

Bush-era congressional Republicans had already harnessed the tea party movement to do extremely well in 2010. They understood some of their constituency. Blue voter turnout would be depressed with Clinton against a neocon type and 8 years of minimal change™️ minus a Trump-tier villain, which no amount of CNN could turn a Romney into. There were plentiful routes through the suburbs (which had done very well for the GOP in 2010) that didn’t require Trump’s county-by-county path to victory.

The onus is on YOU to prove that polling from 2016 clearly suggesting many or even all GOP candidates could beat Clinton in a match-up is somehow wrong.

Yeah. My perception at the time was that the Democrats nominated the only candidate who could have lost to Trump and the Republicans nominated the only candidate who could have lost to Clinton.

My basic argument is Trump motivated non-regular voters and non-voters (as well as swapping Obama voters) in key states to win in 2016, some of which the GOP hadn't won in over a generation, and these states were necessary in order to make the electoral college math work for GOP victory. I didn't say white nor working class, although "working class" likely correlates. Trump made the election about trade and immigration while the non-GOP wouldn't have. I would address your alleged "other way to win," except I've never seen you make that argument. The comments I've seen on this topic are typically short and lacking an explanation or details for support. Any details provided, as I've linked, are at best missing details.

In this comment, your suggested "pathway to victory" is "There were plentiful routes through the suburbs (which had done very well for the GOP in 2010) that didn’t require Trump’s county-by-county path to victory." So like what routes in which states? Mitt Romney didn't do "very well" in the suburbs in 2012. Presidents aren't elected by national polling, they're elected by individual states. When you talks about a pathway to victory, you need to talk about states which you're going to win and why. I made those arguments in linked comments.

The GOP losses in 2006 were within normal bounds well into the term of an existing president (Obama lost as many just two years into his first term).

Losing 6 Senate seats isn't within normal bounds of a midterm for a 2nd term president. Losing another 9 Senate seats in 2008 with McCain on the ballot isn't within normal bounds either for a "recession," one which only in hindsight is described as "the biggest financial crash in postwar history." Winning 6 seats in 2006 and 9 seats in 2008 is not within the normal bounds of 2 cycles. This fact-pattern supports my narrative of a deeply unpopular admin leading to a turning point. And a ~65 seat swing in the House and a 5 seat swing in the Senate in Obama's first midterm wasn't the norm either.

There’s no actual argument to your thesis, and certainly no evidence. By contrast, Hillary was the most unappealing Democratic candidate in decades, possibly ever, reviled in polling data and distrusted even by many Democrats.

the linked thread includes "evidence" at least as good as the "evidence" you present here; it's good enough for your argument, but apparently represents "zero evidence" when on the opposite side

what are we to make of that?

All suggest any Republican would have won, as does polling from the 2016 primaries in which match-ups between candidates and Clinton (while Trump was already by far the dominant candidate) show Cruz and even Kasich outperforming Trump.

Mitt Romney lead in some early primary polls over Barack Obama in 2012 and yet he lost. Using early primary polling data even in election years where the polling wasn't garbage (and it was in the 2016 cycle) is tricky because it doesn't have much predictive power; it's an unknown versus an unpopular known. Trump was known. Hillary was known. Mitt Romney was not. Mitt Romney was going to beat Obama! And then he didn't get close.

The Republican front-runner holds a 3-point lead over Clinton statewide, 46 percent to 43 percent with 11 percent undecided.

The onus is on YOU to prove that polling from 2016 clearly suggesting many or even all GOP candidates could beat Clinton in a match-up is somehow wrong.

If only Democrats had run someone like Hillary Clinton in 2016, she would have made even Mississippi competitive! We have good early polling data clearly suggesting Trump was a terrible candidate who would certainly lose. It's too bad that other Hillary Clinton actually did run in 2016 and lost the state of Mississippi by over 17 points.

Your own example shows the issue with relying on this sort of polling data to support your counterfactual.

A case could have been made that Trump mattered in the swing states which delivered his 2016 win. A more mainstream candidate would not have delivered those key votes.

A more mainstream candidate could probably have won Virginia, New Hampshire, and Nevada. And maaaaaybe New Mexico.

Plus, Bush '04 lost Wisconsin by a few thousand votes. Michigan and Pennsylvania may or may not be taller orders.

The challenge for the right - which Hanania correctly diagnoses - is in converting little bursts of public outrage about things like BLM, trans bathrooms, the bud light controversy, Asian anger around affirmative actions, uproar in some southern states about critical race theory in schools etc into a coherent ideological program with policies at the local, state and federal level.

This is very slowly happening, with conservative normies coalescing behind positions like ‘the race narrative stuff has gone too far’(that is a direct quote) and ‘Ukraine lost, get over it’ and ‘trans are .3% of the population or whatever, they don’t need any accommodation if they don’t want to be reasonable’.

People like Rufo, Tucker and LibsOfTikTok have a big reach and make people angry, but their shtick is outrage bait. That’s not a bad thing, but it often goes nowhere.

The outrage bait fuels a bunch of this stuff. Yes the right needs better thought leaders and narrative setters, but having too much of an ideology is actually counterproductive. To run as an ideologue you need a specific program, and the only specific programs available to the right are mostly very unpopular. It’s better to be a little vague on ideology and lean into it not being ridiculous or unworkable. Center-right parties the world over do exactly this; the usual term is something like ‘pragmatic good-governance’ or the like.

Center-right parties the world over do exactly this; the usual term is something like ‘pragmatic good-governance’ or the like.

Center-right parties the world over go into coalition with far-left and center-left parties and let them drive the bus, rather than go into coalition with far-right parties, so I don't think center-right parties are really a good example of anything.

And, notably, the US party structure makes that failure mode much more difficult. RINOs caucusing with the democrats exist but it’s generally an extreme minority of the party.

Keeping center right normies married to the actual right wingers by not talking about 0 week abortion bans(which is what the Republican Party would dearly love to enact) is a key part of a republican strategy for the foreseeable future.

There are very few viable coalitions that could include the far right that don’t. It happened a handful of times but when they hit 20% the center-right almost always capitulates, as happened in eg Austria several times and in Sweden recently. In France the center-right would vote with Le Pen in parliament on most issues. Vox could easily become part of a future Spanish coalition. The AfD is a unique case because there are some state member parties with relatively close NPD / neonazi ties through figures like Höcke, but even in Germany it’s not impossible to imagine a CDU-AfD coalition at some point in the future.

Hanania’s point, which he kind of keeps drilling in, is that a lot of Republicans aren’t serious people. They have a poor understanding of their own voters, their own principles and political strategy in general, kind of a trifecta of disastrous realities.

He's pragmatic, which I think helps. He knows that sentiment, getting people mad on twitter is not good enough. Change comes from affecting institutions and in the courts.

I have to respect the hustle though. It's 2020-2021. Biden is inaugurated following Jan 6th . Trumpism and election-fraud and anti-vaccine conspiratorial thinking dominates discourse even on Twitter despite old ownership, as does right-wing economic populism. In early 2022, Elon buys out Twitter. The Jan 6th people get picked off one by one. Wokeness seems to get worse. Hanania comes along and carves a niche, so-called high status conservatism, which brings the likes of Marc Andreessen, Chamath, David Sachs, and other high-status influential important centrist/middle people under the fold. This style of conservatism harkens back to neoconservatism, in rejecting populism and the victimization and conspiratorial thinking that otherwise dominated pre-2022. It found a huge success even if it is still overshadowed by Trump-populism, plus the rise of the Musk-approved HBT-left/center, like @eyeslasho and @cremieuxrecueil that came later. He was smart to find this underserved niche of center-right people who were tired of Trumpism and seek practical solutions to wokeness where Trumpism failed.

The far better strategy by DR types would be to try to unwillingly recruit Swift and Kelce. The old “Aryan Princess” meme. Make them an icon of your side, and you make them problematic.

There is still a fair bit of that on the right; “Taylor Swift marrying Travis Kelce will save the white race” memes are going strong, although you and Hanania are correct that they’re currently being outcompeted on the DR by the edgier contrarian takes. I myself have half-joked that if Swift and Kelce get married and have at least a couple of beautiful, tall, talented white children, it could serve as a genuinely impactful cultural signal to other white Millennial women. If anyone could make having blue-eyed excellent babies cool again - and prove that such a thing is actually still possible even for women in their 30s like Swift - it’s those two.

However, Swift and Kelce themselves have certainly gone out of their way to make themselves poor vessels for right-wing hopes. Kelce acts black, in a very low-brow way, and my understanding is that Swift is the first white woman he has publicly dated; before that he was the center of a reality show where a bunch of ratchet (mostly black) women competed for his attention. The carping about his appearance in an ad campaign for the Pfizer Covid vaccine is cringeworthy and represents the DR at its most pointlessly oppositional and conspiratorial; that being said, it does suggest that Kelce might be willing and eager to act as a mouthpiece for whatever culturally-approved shibboleths he feels like he needs to parrot. He is apolitical in a way that makes him useful to forces larger than himself, and he appears to have no deeply-held principles which would countervail against attempts to leverage his cultural influence for political ill.

Swift, meanwhile, expresses political views that are totally typical and standard-issue for white women of her age and social class. This doesn’t reflect particularly poorly on her, so much as it just reflects poorly on women in general and of the ever-widening ideological gulf between men and women. I have no contrarian stance toward Swift; she’s a gorgeous, extremely talented woman, with considerable intelligence and impressive levels of personal agency, and she has a pleasant and dorky (and very very white) personality which I find very endearing. She’s a shameless theater kid; she appeared in the ill-fated Cats film, with zero concern for whatever damage it could have done to her career, even going as far as to co-write a new song for it with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, all because she had always loved the musical and wanted to dance around in a catsuit. (And say whatever you will about that film, but as far as that specific scene is concerned… furries, I kinda get it now.)

She is, though, also a serial monogamist who has slept with an order of magnitude more men than even the average slutty urban Millennial woman ever will. The extent to which this reflects poorly on her character is debatable. Perhaps her odd and sheltered upbringing doomed her to be susceptible to the entertainment industry’s temptations in a way that she wouldn’t have been if she’d had a more normal teenage years. From a conservative perspective, it’s undeniable that this makes her at best an imperfect role model for girls. Much of Swift’s lyrical content is still quite wholesome and aspirational toward conservative ideals of fidelity and young love, but it’s impossible not to notice the contrast between those sentiments and the way she’s actually lived her life.

However, a Swift-Kelce marriage - and especially some beautiful blue-eyed Swift-Kelce babies - could still be a momentous cultural whitepill for normal white people. Kelce’s black-centric cultural interests and Swift’s endless string of disreputable boyfriends are not heritable traits; their children, brought up with a stable wealthy upbringing and able to learn from the youthful mistakes of their parents, could unironically be ubermensch paragons of American bourgeois excellence. I’m rooting for the Swift-Kelce romance (although there’s still time for her to change her mind and decide that she’d rather go for the type of guy who leaves fawning racially-aware comments about her on rationalist-adjacent internet message boards) and I think Taylor can still be our Aryan Princess whether she wants to be or not.

I think the important thing is that it’s the message, not the person, that’s most relevant when it comes to pop culture. There have been ‘red tribe’ movies or shows about grizzled macho white marine super soldiers or whatever and invariably the lead actor is a progressive and the screenplay is written by some nebbish guy in Hollywood but everyone understands, implicitly, that it’s a ‘conservative’ movie. Yellowstone is another example, it’s created by a progressive and is if anything a wholesome™️ tale of plucky farmers and natives up against evil white capitalist business republicans, but it doesn’t matter, the vibe is red.

Taylor Swift’s image is a wholesome blonde blue-eyed Americana cheerleader prom dress ‘50s diner vibe, played completely straight (unlike, say, Lana, for whom it’s ironic and a little postmodern). That’s the image she sells to hundreds of millions of people around the world, of that image of America. Her personal politics or lifestyle aren’t relevant in the way they would sometimes be if she was a politician.

There is still a fair bit of that on the right; “Taylor Swift marrying Travis Kelce will save the white race” memes are going strong, although you and Hanania are correct that they’re currently being outcompeted on the DR by the edgier contrarian takes

The twitter-right so badly wants to bring her under the fold. Not going to happen, I'm afraid. She is a 'cat person' which is not a good sign either for those hoping she will repopulate the Aryan race.

There's no doubt that plenty on the right are going after Taylor Swift in cringey and conspiracy-minded ways. But I don't get Hanania's idea that she and her fans should be natural allies for the right. She's the icon of modern feminism.

Normies are the natural constituency of the center-right - the sort of people who think "life's good, don't rock the boat too hard". Swifties are generally weapons-grade normies and the female equivalent of grillo-centrists. Yeah, they're "feminists", but it's an extremely anodyne feminism whose practical beliefs are probably mostly shared by a lot of conservative women (e.g. I have a hard time imagining what my mother or her sisters would say if their husbands suggested they shouldn't have careers). The problem for the American right is that the center-right is dead and the Republican party is (or is at least perceived to be) dominated by reactionary populists and religious conservatives. Not only does this coalition want to rock the boat, many of them are saying the boat is rotten and needs to burned down and replaced.

Rich, mainstream white people are the right's natural constituency. Taylor is an icon the most shallow of feminisms, the kind that can easily be co-opted by the right. Women have lead right wing parties across the west at different times.

Here's the question at the core of the article, for me: if the Right can't attract the support, or at least the tolerance, of white men who like the NFL and white women who like Taylor Swift, who does that leave?

if the Right can't attract the support, or at least the tolerance, of white men who like the NFL and white women who like Taylor Swift, who does that leave?

Nobody. The left has won.

Edit: OK, you all don't like short answers to rhetorical questions, there's a longer version. The longer version is given by others here but not in so many words. The schools, entertainment media, and most news media have been for generations now pumping out the message "Left is good, right is bad". The counterculture message has been "left is good, right is bad". At some point the message "anyone who says right is not bad is bad, don't listen to them" got put in too ("Faux news"). And this has never stopped. The exceptions in entertainment (a few right-wing action stars) are gone. So why would you expect anyone to be attracted to the right any more?

Someone reported this as:

You need to ban Nybbler for his own sanity.

Which is funny but also, man, maybe he has a point?

I am not officially warning you here, but this post was kind of low effort and you really have been sort of a one-note piano lately, enough that even people who broadly agree with you are getting annoyed.

I am not officially warning you here, but this post was kind of low effort and you really have been sort of a one-note piano lately, enough that even people who broadly agree with you are getting annoyed.

But is he wrong though?

Being right doesn't mean you aren't being an annoying one-note piano.

Yes. Frequently. Regularly, even.

it's not so much that her fans will become allies, but the right's hardline position on abortion and alleged conspiratorial thinking turns off potential normies, which can make a difference for close elections.

Conservatism has often been criticized as the "Coalition of the Comfortable;" Hanania is nodding towards it as a positive rather than a negative. I've argued here before that conservatism, to appeal to its natural constituency, has to try to preserve the world as it exists today and as I grew up in it, not try to tear that world down. Chesterton's Fence and Chesterton's Ruins denominate the proper area of conservatism.

Conservatism has often been criticized as the "Coalition of the Comfortable;" Hanania is nodding towards it as a positive rather than a negative.

It seems to me that the problem with this analysis is that a lot of actual conservatives aren't on board with that idea, do in fact have values beyond comfort, and are willing to both endure and inflict significant discomfort to ensure those values are conserved.

...More generally, would it be fair to say that Hanania is taking a Blue stereotype of Conservatism, and complaining that Reds aren't conforming to it? Is Hanania a Red or a Blue? If, as seems likely, he's a Blue, why is any of this surprising at all? Ingroup member confused and horrified that the outgroup doesn't act like the ingroup, news at 11.

do in fact have values beyond comfort, and are willing to both endure and inflict significant discomfort to ensure those values are conserved.

But a conservative must, by definition, be comfortable with how things are. If they weren't, they wouldn't be trying to conserve it. They would be trying to destroy it, to uproot the world as we know it and create a new one, a progressive or reactionary utopia. I always return to Chesterton's Fence as the definition of conservative: before you tear down a fence, know why it was built. But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

But a conservative must, by definition, be comfortable with how things are.

That is not a definition of Conservative that seems useful. It's conservatism as a tendency, an unreflective inclination, a mood.

I always return to Chesterton's Fence as the definition of conservative: before you tear down a fence, know why it was built.

Chesterton's Fence does not preclude Chesterton from believing that he does, in fact, understand exactly why a fence was built, and why tearing it down is vitally nescessary.

But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

Yes. Hanania's problem is that, increasingly, the general class of people he is complaining about are confident that they can do this, for what seem to me to be good reasons. It seems to me that this portion is growing fairly rapidly, and its presence is starting to have serious real-world consequences. When it gets large enough, which fences are up and which ruins are down will change.

But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

That's not exactly hard. We've been swimming in propaganda for why fences must be torn down. Some of us are even old enough to have seen a fence or two being torn down, and all the promises of what would and would not happen after it's gone.

But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

As a general rule, the answer is "because the people tearing it down didn't care about/didn't know about X thing, and if X wasn't a concern the fence would be obviously insane".

Haidt made the point in The Righteous Mind that conservatives understand progressives much better than the other way around, because it's easier to hypothetically take things out of your moral compass than to correctly conceptualise and hypothetically insert things into it.

Is Hanania a Red or a Blue?

Almost positive he's a Red. He unabashedly endorses HBD, he's an outspoken critic of wokeness, wants to repeal the civil rights act of 1964, he recently published an article arguing that average female intelligence is lower than average male intelligence, has little sympathy for the Palestinian cause and thinks Israel should crush any hope of Palestinian independence, was outed as having routinely used ethnic slurs before writing under his own name etc.

On the other hand he's anti-Christian, anti-populist and pro-euthanasia.

(His dismissal of the Palestinian cause stems from lacking any bleeding heart Abrahamic universalism.)

That world was probably as degenerate if not more so compared to today. Drug usage was rampant, as was smoking and drinking. Instead of computer porn, it was done at home. And lots of brothels and adult film theatres. Except for LGBT+ going mainstream, America was in many ways as deviant.

I wonder if listening to a bunch of Cole Porter songs might help. The sound is unmistakably early 20th century and there is plenty of sex and drugs involved - he references cocaine, morphine, cannabis and drinking to excess, all as if they are totally normal elements of life.

Meh, its a thing with football itself. A decent portion of the game clock time is spent not playing the game. Not even counting how often it is paused, or that there are long breaks like half time. Whats the camera gonna do during all that break time? Gotta do something, might as well look at the most famous people at the game. As someone who doesn't really care about football or find it super interesting, this has always been a plus for me. I can go to a party where people care about football and still interact with the people that like football for about half the time, and then be on my phone the other half the time.

I was watching the last Chiefs vs Ravens game with someone that was actively annoyed at Taylor Swift coming on screen. They are a political junkie. They work at a think thank. They've been involved with politics for many years. They could probably come up with a multitude of reasons why this is a political annoyance. Wasn't my impression though. They were eager to see the actual game, and any of the interruptions were annoying to them. There are basically only two outcomes for things between football plays: immediately ignoring the thing, or immediately hating it.

The smart ad money should ironically be on the people that don't care about the games at all.

Think about it. You have a football fanatic that is definitely going to watch the game. The TV will be on in a semi public setting. The non-football fanatics will have lost interest in the game very quickly.

The game stop (like it does every thirty seconds). The football fanatic is on the edge of their seat waiting for more action (which usually happens). Everyone else is bored on their phones. The football fanatic is denied their fix (a commercial, or a cut to some celebrity in the stands). The football fanatic exclaims in anger or frustration built up from watching the game. Everyone else is temporarily jerked out of their phones. Boom! Play the ad, get two audiences instead of just one.

One of my favorite ads in recent football memory is for Tide. A laundry detergent. They basically did an aggressive campaign of being a part of every commercial break, and tricking you into thinking it was an ad for a different product. But Tide isn't really a great product to advertise for men watching football. However, its the perfect product to advertise to wives, mothers, and girlfriends who have men watching football.

That is my pet theory for the Taylor Swift ad spots.

The smart ad money should ironically be on the people that don't care about the games at all.

You are right if course, but I'm pretty sure this philosophy is why sports broadcasting have been haemorrhaging money in recent years. Scratch that, why every form of entertainment has gone to shit in recent years. Everyone is so eager to disrupt and get that new audience that we've turned everything into focus grouped bullshit.

I enjoy video games, stand up comedy, podcasts, and youtube videos. Low barriers to entry hasn't stopped enshitification, but new entrants in the art just take over.

I don't understand, what does that mean for sports media?

You are right if course, but I'm pretty sure this philosophy is why sports broadcasting have been haemorrhaging money in recent years. Scratch that, why every form of entertainment has gone to shit in recent years.

Emphasis added by me. If you'd left it at the first sentence I would say I don't disagree or have much of an opinion (since I don't watch sports). I just disagree with the stronger claim that all entertainment has gone to shit.

I would not be surprised if sports is extra shitty, partly because they intentionally put up barriers to entry in order to squeeze every penny they can out of the broadcast rights.

Hanania is known for being known. Known, quoted, known more. His writing is bad and his reasoning is worse. His best piece wouldn't get an AAQC, or wouldn't deserve if it I missed his time mostly lurking here ahead of just lifting ideas from his intellectual betters--a descriptor that applies to every regular Motte commenter. That said there is a niceness to his name in this discussion because Taylor Swift is also--in a real but not total measure--popular for being popular

It's not her music. It's not bad, I don't call music bad, but I can name individual songs in her discography I like. There are artists with categorically superior lyricism and vocals and production who don't have her success. Unappreciated or especially fan-asserted "underrated" acts are the nature of music but where artists might have solid radio play, single and album sales, merch and ticket sales, it's not the music that results in an Instagram with close to 300 million followers. Swift is a saint next to Whore of Babylon Kylie Jenner who sells makeup, filters and utterly disastrous self-concern and narcissism to her 400 million followers. It's because winners win. The perception of being popular makes a thing more popular. Swift has been on the literal side of "highly newsworthy" this year, and that attention brings more attention, young people, especially women, seeing her popularity become interested if not before and/or more interested in her for that popularity. Her endorsement will produce votes, I don't think many, but any is bad. Those not at consequence for their politics should not be listened to about politics. You gotta have skin in the game or your ideas will become informed by privilege and what ought to be rather than what is.

My only skin in this game is living in Chiefs country, Missouri. I know a lot of people who I saw wearing Chiefs gear 10 years ago, 20 years ago, who were hoping for the success they now enjoy. I'm happy for them, I don't give a shit about the Chiefs but there's always a bit of a pleasant feeling with the local team winning the big game. I also know people who never said a thing about the Chiefs, not after two Super Bowl wins, not until Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift became a thing. I've seen them gleefully posting "I wouldn't care about the Chiefs otherwise but go Taylor Swift's team." Same sans Swift, I was rooting hard for Tom Brady to get his 7th when the Bucs thrashed KC in 2021.

So what I've been thinking about for the last week or two, what's missed by Hanania (no surprise) and also commenters here, is the timeline:

  1. Swift and Kelce couple; stories come out of Swift at Chiefs games

  2. The season goes on, more and more Swift at Chiefs games; Mahomes has the worst season of his career (still ending in a Super Bowl lol); some memeing about the Swift Effect

  3. At this point the only grousing I've heard from Chiefs fans is "please just let us watch football"

  4. Chiefs in the playoffs, they keep winning

  5. ~3 weeks ago stories start rolling out about Swift's presidential endorsement and how she's "Biden's best hope"

  6. I hear political grousing from some Chiefs fans / Swift, once again a political target, is attacked by twitter righties

Swift is being attacked by righties because of politicization from lefties. The animus was preexisting sure but it only emerged because of the "Swift-Biden endorsement" articles. Assuming her guaranteed endorsement of whoever's going against Trump in November, there are people who will vote, and shouldn't be allowed to, because Swift told them to. Attacking her is a reasonable move for the right, but I agree head-on is a bad angle: 4chan-style trolling I've begun to see of /pol/tard Tay is a better angle, though still maybe not the smart one.

Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!

Mahomes is superb and as long as he maintains form KC will compete, but football is a terrifically easy game to rig. One no-call or flag can be the game. It's exactly what happened in Super Bowl LVI. 4th quarter, under 2 minutes, 3rd & Goal, Rams down by 4. Holding: Half distance to goal, automatic 1st down. On the same play, the Rams had a false start (5 yard penalty) that went uncalled. At the critical moment a bad flag gave LA a touchdown and the Super Bowl.

Hanania is known for being known. Known, quoted, known more. His writing is bad and his reasoning is worse. His best piece wouldn't get an AAQC, or wouldn't deserve if it I missed his time mostly lurking here ahead of just lifting ideas from his intellectual betters--a descriptor that applies to every regular Motte commenter.

Pretty strongly disagree. Bryan Caplan's characterized him as maybe the greatest essayist alive. I don't know that I'd go that far, but he seems fairly consistently innovative and insightful.

Yes, he's often obnoxious, and frequently says things I disagree with. But there's a lot to be gleaned.

What are you conservative about? Why are you a Republican?

Taylor Swift is an attractive, unmarried, childless white woman who 'puts in efforts to make a comfortable experience for liberals'. Should conservative white parents see her as a model for their daughters?

We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it

The role that is currently assigned to white women is to not have any children. Many conservatives see that as a bad thing.

The role that is currently assigned to white women is to not have any children. Many conservatives see that as a bad thing.

This goes too far. I decry stigma against women with 4+ children, but having kids(probably two, possibly three but definitely not more than that) remains the cultural ideal and a handful of weirdos in the progressive coalition ranting about how white women shouldn’t have babies doesn’t actually change that.

and a handful of weirdos in the progressive coalition ranting about how white women shouldn’t have babies

That's the far end of the curve. The more important messaging is education/career uber alles or Chelsea Handler-esque "kids are a distraction from all the cool shit you could be doing (if you're a rich white lady)" (see also , for a less absurd example)

I am honestly trying to recall recent major progressive-themed media where having three kids was presented as any such cultural ideal, particularly without one of the kids being cast as a negative influence (i.e. mentally divergent / physically impaired / morally lacking).

Wouldn’t Modern Family fit this bill? I only watched the first few seasons, but unless something changed significantly, Claire and Phil are portrayed as an admirable white family with a normal family structure and three loving children who, though flawed in ways conducive to humorous sitcom hijinks, are fundamentally blessings in the lives of their parents.

Law of conservation of detail. If the kids are there, they're important to the story. Three kids probably won't be important to the story without having something wrong with one.

That might be a narrative reason in isolation, in the same way that the 5-man-ban trope really tends to support 2-siblings (so that 3 outsiders can be added), but that also doesn't really change that it's not terribly hard to find counter-examples in American media of sibling-ensemble casts. Swiss Family Robinson, Little House on the Prairie, Bradey Bunch, the Cosby Show, Boxcar Children. If you're willing to go animated, the Incredibles, Brave, Brother Bear, the Aristocats, Peter Pan, or the Simpsons. Even Disney's Coco and Encanto- which I'd consider far more 'conservative' than 'progressive' in theme- carry on with large families, albeit maybe in an ethnic stereotype fashion.

Not having families of 3 or more is a narrative choice, not a narrative constraint.

I know nothing about gridiron football or Taylor Swift but it seems obvious that it was an ad. I can point to the fact that during the entire NFL season the entertainment news site Deadline (which doesn't do celebrity gossip) ran a weekly story basically about Taylor Swift sitting in the stands during the games. It had the same vibe as these SNL ad stories they do every weekend where they basically describe the opening monologue from SNL and two sketches as if they need to be covered and are part of the zeitgeist but it's just another crappy sketch from a show that hasn't been relevant in years. I mean it's likely a circle of different media companies (Taylor, NFL, entertainment media) feeding and trying to broaden all their fanbases. Like a car commercial inserted into a TV show that's handled clumsily. Even people that don't realize it's a commercial can recognize that something is inauthentic about it. Maybe there's nothing intentional on either Taylor (probably impossible to tell) or the NFL (I haven't seen any of the broadcasts with her) about this but the entertainment media is absolutely using this, stoking it, and reveling in it when it might not even exist as a thing if they didn't.

My thought was, at first, that it must be a huge spectacle style distraction for them to run a news story about it. But the consistency of the articles and lack of any substance made it obvious it was an ad. The complaints make sense to me "Why do you care they're cutting to Taylor three times a game?" Because it's an ad and ads are annoying. Ads recently have an ideological bent which makes conservatives especially wary of them. Conservatives, to some extent rightly, see weird astroturfed media shit all the time dedicated to hating/destroying them because the media is mostly their enemy. The fact that they decide to create a conspiracy because the astroturfed weirdness of this is obvious and they're just making the mistake of thinking that this is political because most of the weird astroturfed stuff from the NFL in the past years has been political is understandable. And the fact that conspiratorial complaints get platformed to discredit real complaints is just business as usual for the media.

This is probably a large part of it. The NFL has for a long time been trying to appeal more to women. Taylor Swift fans are mostly women. Thus, more Taylor Swift = more interest for the women in the audience. Of course, that doesn't excuse this from being part of the Culture War. Why is the NFL, whose audiences were long a bastion of couch-locked junk-food-eating cheap-beer-swilling men, concentrating on attracting women? The innocent explanation is they are (or were, when this started) an untapped audience. But that doesn't really hold up; neglecting your core audience to attract a new one when your core is that big and that dedicated doesn't really make sense. You don't see soap operas adding car chases to get men interested! So I think there's quite a bit of "women are a more acceptable audience" mixed in.

How does it neglect the core audience?

It doesn't. Until it does. See: Marvel and Star Wars for increasingly bad pandering and weaponization of victimhood against the toxically masculine audience when the old audience complains.

Of course, sports doesn't need writing so it may not lead to any difference in this case.

But I get why people in the culture war are suspicious.

It's usually an active rejection rather than neglect. "Expanding the audience" is just what they say to the moneymen. In practice, it's always about rejecting an audience who don't deserve to have nice things. I used to be more charitable about this, but fool me once and twice and all that.

This is only for the online too much people and needing people to either be with us or against us with them.

On net hottie marrying beefy football guy is trad and good.

The only thing really here is Kelce took a knee for BLM. But he’s also a football player so he fell for the propaganda in my opinion and didn’t dig deep enough to realize the stats on police killings were nothing like reality.

Yep.

I was laughing at how this union is just an arrested development version of the most stereotypical teenager romance for the last 70 years.

The hyper-popular prom queen marrying the football star. Granted Kelce isn't the quarterback, but if his team wins the Superbowl and he proposes to her on the 50 Yard Line it'd be almost the most cliched Americana-style union one could conceive of.

Literal rivers of happy tears will be shed by the women looking on and living vicariously through them.

High School never ends, it seems.

High School never ends, it seems.

Reese Witherspoon - she’s the prom queen

Bill Gates - captain of the chess team

Jack Black the clown, and Brad Pitt the quarterback

I’ve seen it all before… I want my money back!

16 years since that song came out and a most of those specific lyrics are still accurate.

Jack Black the clown

https://twitter.com/jasoncrouch/status/1748507393128869929

Time is a flat circle, Hoff.

While publicly obsessing about Taylor Swift is a bit nutty, actual democrat policies like releasing criminal suspects without bail, gender "trasitions" for minors and refusing to enforce the border are way crazier and have a real life impact. Hanania just wants craziness with a luxury belief flavor.

Craziness that causes real life harm is attractive because it shows strength. Conservative craziness is cringe because it's impotent and doesn't harm anybody.

He's opposed to all of those?

I think he's talking more about how publically unhinged you are being, vs how crazy your policies are, because the former is more closely tied to public opinion, even if the latter is objectively more important.

Hanania is not opposed to lax border enforcement. He thinks Americans should embrace lax border enforcement and cultivate a servant class of Mesoamerican dwarfs similar to the domestic workers of Asia and Africa, and that failure to do so is self-sabotaging racism that stops us from living like feudal lords.

I am admittedly a progressive, which I'm sure colors my perspective, but I can't help but read your paragraph after the "AND YET" as exactly the kind of stuff Hanania is complaining about. If you roll up on some Normie Who Just Wants To Grill and start talking about the number of black people Swift has dated compared to the number of black people she danced with in what's basically an extended music video... what do you think their response is? How does the conversation proceed? I submit that a Normie does not spend one iota of brain power thinking about this fact and, if so confronted, would struggle to understand how the two things are supposed to relate to each other. Is this a particularly progressive perspective? Am I the one out of touch?

I don't think I was clear there, my apologies.

Hanania states that liberals are no longer the people who can't watch a football game or a Taylor Swift concert, who would be compelled to complain about some obscure political gripe. My point is that liberals have no problem watching the Eras Tour or a football game because the movie and the football game have already gone out of their way to make sure they don't offend liberals.

Swift and her team planned the Eras Tour movie specifically to avoid that kind of criticism from liberals. Wokie friends of mine gushed over the prominent placement of fat and trans and flamboyant dancers. Swift has been the subject of critique in the woke press for her taste in friends and in men before, she choreographed the event to avoid criticisms. She planned the whole event to avoid criticisms from the woke left.

If she had not done so, the film would have been the controversy in the woke press. There would have been articles about how her dancers weren't representative, how her romantic duet with a white man elevated white cisheteronormativity over black and brown bodies etc etc.

If Swift had not specifically planned her film to avoid those criticisms, we would be having the conversation about how lefties can't just watch a fucking movie without complaining about race.

Lefties are better at being normal, if you first go to a lot of trouble to make sure you're not offending them.

I think my point is that the median "normie" position is much closer to the "liberal" or "progressive" position than you realize.

I suspect most people think a slogan like "end racism" being on helmets or in end zones is anodyne. The same way people are fine with the NFL turning everything pink for Breast Cancer Awareness month. When people see ads highlighting female athletes or coaches or whatever they don't think "Cringe Progressive Propaganda" they think "Neat!"

You characterize the actions taken by Swift, the NFL, etc as being directed towards liberals but I think you underestimate the extent to which "normies" either agree with or don't care about those actions.

As the French critics of American cinema asked: is it everywhere because it is universal or is it universal because it is everywhere?

As you say, I think a lot of people just go along because they don't care to get into this stuff . But if they had been asked ahead of time if they wanted X Allegedly Anodyne Liberal Pandering what would they have said?

I suppose my intuition is they also would not have cared, had they been asked in advance. I'm imagining this kind of caring as being symmetrical about whether something has happened. If you would have objected to, or had a problem with, the thing happening before it happened why wouldn't you have the same objection to its happening after it happened?

I'd love to see this falsified one way or the other.

IRL I've never met a male sports fan that is plussed by antiracism slogans and pink ribbons. Not nonexistent, but I would have assumed I'd come across one at some point. I'm not 'in the mix' as much as I was ten years ago, but they either had no comment on such things or were lightly mocking. Women could be effusive despite not really following the sport closeley.

Personally, I question if the "normies are surprisingly OK with all of this" is really true or a product of astroturfing. It's a popular sentiment online that I don't ever see materialize in the world, with the exception of 'normie women' who are more progressive at baseline than I ever see men being vis a vis conservatism. Like many other things, my sense is men have learned to keep their opinions to themselves.

I'd also be curious if any recent polling data would indicate a turn for or against pink ribbons. I could tolerate it as a minor cringe thing up to a point, but maybe I feel very different about it now after seeing what else the NFL picked up afterwards.

I think the vast majority of men would just as soon watch the game and ignore all the ancillary crap. So to the extent that pink ribbons etc. exist, it is merely an annoyance - commentators talking about that rather than something actually game-related. However, when it reaches the point of not being able to ignore it (franchise name changes probably the #1 example) people will get actively mad. Also of course if someone is pushing a message that is diametrically opposed to your beliefs, that's going to rankle.

Admittedly most of my experience with dedicated sports fans was around a decade or so ago. I do not watch it much myself nor do most of my friends. I absorb its happenings via some combination of social media and family osmosis. It's possible things have shifted since then, although I'm skeptical.

Personally, I question if the "normies are surprisingly OK with all of this" is really true or a product of astroturfing.

Insofar as "all of this" refers to the specific examples in the OP, I think it is organic. Beyond that I would need more specification to have an informed opinion.

I think my point is that the median "normie" position is much closer to the "liberal" or "progressive" position than you realize.

I don't think he's arguing that... what he's arguing is that normies have been influenced dramatically over a short period of time by extremely aggressive and disingenous political moves from the left. As others have discussed, basically entryism and underhanded tactics to force public spaces to cater to their norms.

Once you have the norms changed, by definition the "normies" will follow along. They're really just people who default to what the norm is, and don't think too much about it.

What people on the right are complaining about is that there used to be, seemingly, a sort of 'gentleman's agreement' not to use tactics that are too underhanded to change norms. The left recently with all their policing of language, pronouns, media, etc. seem to have thrown that informal agreement out of the window. Which, to be fair, is very explicit in leftist who/whom political philosophy. It's part of why people on the right have been warning about communism for the last century.

If you have a political opponent who will stop at nothing to enact their views, it's hard to impossible to work with them in a liberal democratic setting.

Could you tell me what underhanded tactics the left used and describe this agreement not to use them in more detail? As best I can tell the way the left has effected societal and institutional change is some combination of (1) joining up with an organization to change its culture from the inside and (2) criticizing various aspects of an organization or culture in media (social or legacy) to effect change from the outside. What is "underhanded" about these tactics? Similarly what was disingenuous about these attempts to change the culture? I'm pretty sure leftists believed their own criticisms of these institutions and cultures.

It's hard to pin down exactly - but Venkatesh Rao gives an excellent overview of the types of underhanded, manipulative tactics that 'sociopaths' use to protect themselves and advance their goals at the expense of others in The Gervais Principle.

C.S. Lewis also writes about this sort of maneuvering in his novel The Hideous Strength. There are plenty of other examples of this type of thing.

Of course these tactics aren't limited to leftists exclusively, but leftists and Marxists explicitly embrace the "win at all costs" mentality, while their opponents typically do not. This means that on average more leftists are going to be willing to throw moral scruples to the wind and use whatever manipulative techniques they must to advance their cause.

I made an effort post describing my experiences here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/184826?context=8#context

The flip side of that is, for instance, action movies where the good guy blasts criminals that has conservatives and normies cheering together, and liberals clicking their tongue "this is so problematic, this is encouraging people acting vigilante violence against the underprivileged and minorities who are driven to crime by this racist, unfair count..." and so on.

My position is that normies are, almost definitionally, people who don't notice or care about these things. They just want to watch football.

Circa 2002, when I was watching football as a youngster, watching Andy Reid coach Donovan McNabb and the Eagles to the playoffs every year but fall short in the playoffs, it was liberals who noticed and complained about things. I remember this because I was there, if you want me to dig up a bunch of NYT and Atlantic and Slate articles about it if you want proof. They noticed all the Iraq-War Era "Support Our Troops" and called it jingoism, they noticed that all the coaches and owners and pundits were white and all the players were Black, they noticed that there was no place or respect for women anywhere in the NFL unless they're wearing a slutty cheerleader outfit. And they complained about it, constantly. In print and in person. They called it toxically masculine, they said watching players get injured and carted off the field was to prepare us for American soldiers dying overseas, they said the idea of white "owners" "trading" and "bidding on" black players was bad, etc etc etc.

This kind of thing marked those liberals as weirdoes, and cut them off from a significant part of the mainstream. Normies shrugged at all that stuff, they just wanted to watch the game not get lectured by the politically correct. When Tim Tebow kneeled, atheists seethed, my grandmother thought it was great, I mostly just wanted to watch the Broncos (I still think they should have given him another year).

Today, it's the opposite. Because the NFL has sought to address all those criticisms. There's a lot less jingoism than there used to be. There's all these efforts to say they care about women, there's less of the cheerleaders and they wear more clothing. They have tried in many ways to force teams to hire some Black coaching staff (and I actually think there are a lot more white players outside of the QB and OL than there used to be, so there's that). They talk a lot about racism, and domestic violence, and all kinds of other causes, many of them liberal coded.

Now, instead, it's the edgy right wingers who want to lecture me on politics that they notice while I want to watch Andy Reid coach Pat Mahomes and the Chiefs. And political correctness is calling out affirmative action for Black coaches and not for white wide receivers, and calling Travis Kelce Captian Vaxxxx.

Did you and I listen to the same sports media in 2020? The sports media is absolutely still populated by a class of chattering scolds who are determined to bend sports leagues to their will by relentlessly manipulating narratives. This includes commentators who are employed by the NFL itself! I was there in 2020 when Steve Wyche and Patrick Claybon went on the Around The NFL podcast (an official NFL-owned media product) to literally drum up political and financial support for Democrat candidates.

I listened to these same commentators - Wyche, Claybon, Gregg Rosenthal, Mina Kimes, Cynthia Frelund - *refuse to say the name of one of the NFL’s teams (the Redskins) out loud for about a year, in a blatantly obvious attempt to force the league to force the owner to change the name.

Every time I listen to an NFL podcast I have to hear Cynthia Frelund read a long and lecturing ad about how the NFL is sponsoring programs to get more women involved in men’s sports.

I could bring up myriad examples of the same behavior by NBA commentators, NHL commentators, etc. (I finally stopped listening to the No Dunks guys - AKA The Starters, AKA The Basketball Jones - because they also had a whole episode where they fawning interviewed a Democrat political operative urging people to vote for Raphael Warnock. There was not a single piece of basketball commentary during the entire episode.) It’s just fundamentally not true that liberals have stopped hectoring people about politics just because they’ve had so many successes already; I’m sure I’m going to hear yet another offseason of incessant carping about why Eric Bienemy hasn’t gotten a head coaching job, and hmmmmm isn’t it interesting how so many other white retreads are getting offers but not him, our league still has so far to go, etc. Conservatives may be indulging their own cranks momentarily, but the left still absolutely owns the “can’t shut up and let people enjoy things” label.

Yes, but 2020 was four years ago. It was a whole presidential administration. A lot has happened since then. The BLM overreaction effort they put in is exactly what I'm talking about when I say they've done a lot to soothe liberals.

It used to be that sports media was more or less conservative, and the liberal media criticizing it was made up largely of people who hate sports. Now the sports media is largely liberal. And the right wing attacks on it are from people who seem to hate sports, like Vivek.

Sorry for the off topic question, but it's the first time I've seen it in the wild -- are you intentionally capitalizing "Black" and not "white?" If so, may I ask why? I always thought this was just a progressive journalist signalling thing.

I think it's a useful separation. Black is referring to African Americans, American Descendants of Slavery and those later black skinned immigrants who have assimilated into that community. It's a proper noun because it's a proper community, with a sense of itself and some unifying customs.

White to me isn't. Whiteness is much more fraught with questions of community and boundary drawing. I prefer terms with more precision like Amerikaner, redneck, SWPL, etc. Whites in America are more defined by class, politics, profession, religion. And speaking about whites as a group necessarily involves Europeans, in ways that are fraught.

I'm not really that committed to the bit, but I thought all that at some point, and autocorrect started doing it for me.

Interesting, thank you.

I'm not too interested in this topic at all to be honest, but I think it would be hilarious if Swift just came out in a few months and said "actually, I'm endorsing Trump."

One of the things I hate about celebrity culture is how managed all of a celebrity's opinions and stances seem. There's always 'leaks' about things months ahead, or this sort of manufactured controversy that ends up being true. For once I'd like to see a big celebrity just shake things up and show some actual humanity and agency.

Then again, the type of person who would do that would probably select themselves out of super-stardom unfortunately.

That kind of person exists, his name is Kanye West and it was hilarious until it started being sad as it became harder and harder to ignore that his outbursts, his inability to read social cues (to play armchair psychiatrist, I think he is likely a savant autist), were not only selecting him out of super-stardom but alienating him from friends and family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West

Kanye West openly is bipolar and been on a variety of medications. His anti-semitisn was not a result of him vile racism or careful research to uncover the truth, it was a result of ill paranoia making him believe conspiracy theories. Regardless of whether you believe the jews are the most persecuted minority in history or you're part of the Dark Enlightenment who thinks the Jews are very suspicious, it should be obvious Kanye believed what he did because of mental illness not because he's also part of the dark enlightenment.

That was not his only outburst though, his first big moment in the spotlight (outside of his niche) in pop culture was the "George Bush doesn't care about black people" incident, something he probably believed outside of mental illness paranoia (it was commonly believed in liberal circles), but it was just indelicate to say in a charity marathon.

Or the "imma let you finish" incident, which had nothing to do with politics or paranoia but everything to do with misunderstanding what's appropriate.

Up until he touched the third rail his outbursts were just that of someone telling his mind the way you're not supposed to, doubly so when you have a public persona to maintain. I'm not convinced if his touching the third rail is meaningfully different except in the severity of the pushback he got.

Outbursts are one thing. Those are just lact of tack. I am saying what led him to believe Hitler made going points was the paranoia. Without mental illness, maybe he would've still said "fuck Biden" or "fuck Trump". But without mental illness, he'd have never said

“Well, I see good things about Hitler also. I love everyone, and Jewish people are not going to tell me, ‘You can love us and you can love what we’re doing to you with the contracts, and you can love what we’re pushing with the pornography.’ But this guy that invented highways and invented the very microphone I use as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good and I’m done with that. I’m done with the classifications.”

That's just not something someone, especially a black musician who used to be liberal, would ever believe without mental illness.

I've found Kanye to be a good illustration of how politically captured large swathes of my field (medicine) are.

Everyone hates Kanye. A lot. Even if you point out that it's clearly mental illness. Even to psychiatrists. In fact you may end up a pariah just for reminding everyone that Kanye has mental illness and that this informs his behavior.

It makes me feel gross.

Then again, the type of person who would do that would probably select themselves out of super-stardom unfortunately.

Tell that to Nikki Minaj.

Why do you think they just sicced Roc-Nation affiliated Meg Thee Stallion on her?

Who's Jay Z's best buddy? Democratic potentate Obama

Think about it! ( Huh, I see the appeal now. Conspiracy stuff is fun)

She endorsed Biden the last time and endorsed democrats running in Tennessee. Since Trump is likely to be the Republican candidate she's going to endorse the democrat again.

I'd want to see Taylor decide to release an artsy jazz-fusion concept double album. Think of the collaborators she could bring in! Every Jazz virtuoso living would happily work with her on an album guaranteed to go number one despite being relentlessly weird.

it would be hilarious if Swift just came out in a few months and said "actually, I'm endorsing Trump."

Or as Freddie puts it, The World Needs Taylor Swift Goblin Mode.

Isn’t that person Kanye?

Edit Should’ve kept reading…others mentioned it and actually added context

Is this MAGA/Taylor conflict even real or just a media ploy to worsen Trump's chances by creating conflicts out of nothing?

I have no doubt that there are some Trump people who really dislike Taylor and have come up with conspiracy theories. Trump supporters and conspiracy theories go together like peas in a pod. Is this specifically a significant or representative thing worthy of global coverage on its merits? It even filtered through to Australian newspapers.

There was a Simpson's episode where Bart manipulated the Principal and teachers into a strike over pay, whispering in their ear that the other side was about to crack, or telling the teachers that Skinner thought they would chicken out. After Haley got run over by the Trump train, the plotters wouldn't have gone idle, they'd have searched for some new method to attack Trump.

I suspect that the direct Trump stuff is bullshit. It's too good to be true for the worst people in the world.

But the Taylor stuff is coming organically from Fox News and Vivek and co tweeting it out. There's somebody out there who organically believes this, or thinks it's a good MAGA play for whatever reason.

Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.

The world is turned upside down: conservatives and liberals are extremely confused because they are accustomed to and expect to be setting and rebelling against norms respectively. Obviously, this is far more discomforting for conservatives than liberals. They lack the mindset, the institutional capability, and the practical knowledge to be good counterculture rebels. (This, incidentally, is a major reason why conservative protests are usually incompetent). The coalition members with the most energy for this kind of politics are the people you least want to hand the microphone.

I don't see any confusion. The left is going leftward, as it historically has done. Conservatives are in the strongest position in a long time. So many wins over the past few years, like Elon Twitter buyout, successful buycotts of brands, plagiarism scandals, SCOTUS, etc. . Biden's approval numbers are among the lowest ever for an incumbent. They right just needs to step back and let the left hang itself by its petard. Wokeness does not need a counter-response; its existence turns off enough people.

So many wins over the past few years, like Elon Twitter buyout

They retaliated first by cutting off Twitter's ad money, then by taking all of Elon's compensation ($55B in options) for being CEO of Tesla away from him. Looks like they're still ahead on that one -- if the pattern continues there will be no Twitter and Musk will lose his fortune, unless he gets with the program.

Wokeness does not need a counter-response; its existence turns off enough people.

No, every "win" you've mentioned is part of a weak counter-response.

Alternate theory of the difficulty conservatives have with being counter-culture: they are still for the most part, speaking demographically, the type of people that the current system most benefits and enriches.

No doubt, parts of the system are being updated in ways that will decrease the amount by which they are preferentially enriched, which is a net loss in real terms for them personally. And no doubt they can and will get extremely mad about that.

But they are still enriched by the system in both absolute and relative terms, and therefore cannot be too enthusiastic about burning it to the ground. A reshuffling would not be likely to benefit them by chance, unlike the more typical style of counter-culture member who is relatively disadvantaged by the system and might benefit from seeing it overturned.

  • -10

Alternate theory of the difficulty conservatives have with being counter-culture: they are still for the most part, speaking demographically, the type of people that the current system most benefits and enriches.

Can you expand on this? Who are these conservatives that are being enriched?

When I look around at my incredibly rich and favored city, all I see are far left progressives.

No point, just an observation: They are also, in most places, the people who contribute the most to the system.

Enh, I'll just submit my mistrust and dissatisfaction with every metric and framing that would lead to that conclusion, while admitting that it is true if you accept those very common metrics and framings.

That's a pretty huge conversation that I'm not an expert on and probably don't have time for today anyway.

I wonder why Taylor Swift blew up over the past year despite having originally entered superstardom in 2010-2011. There was a decade cooling off period in which other singers like Lizzo, Katy Perry, and Beyonce held the mantle, and then she suddenly blew up. I think this shows again the power of Twitter to create superstars and affect news cycles. The Musk effect is real. Sure, Meta is a far bigger network of platforms and YouTube is bigger overall, but Twitter is where the discourse and culture are shaped.

I don't think Twitter has much to do with it. The night before Thanksgiving, I attended a Taylor Swift trivia night that my cousin's boyfriend convinced me to attend because it was at a local brewery. The vast majority of the attendees weren't the typical brewery clientele, but suburban moms and their young daughters. Not too many men. And the place was absolutely packed; there were at least 20 teams. I guarantee you very few of these people have Twitter accounts, or care too much about Elon Musk. I attribute Swift's sudden blowup to the following factors:

  1. She was already very famous. This may seem obvious but it seems like there's more staying power when an already famous person reaches this level of popularity compared with the meteoric rise of an unknown. She's 34 years old and has been in the public eye for nearly 20 years; there's no sense that she's the flavor of the month.

  2. She has a history of making risky professional moves that have the potential to wreck her career but end up bolstering it. In 2014 there was some serious discussion as to whether she'd be able to appeal to the pop market in the same way she appealed to the country market. There have long been country stars with crossover appeal, but most of them never stop ostensibly being country musicians, no matter how pop they get. The only other musician I can think of who pulled this off was Linda Ronstadt, but she gets an asterisk because she was at the fringes of the country world; she came out of the more rock-oriented Laurel Canyon scene rather than being a product of Nashville. I think a big part of the reason Nashville artists are hesitant to break out like this is because country is a sort of security blanket. The country world wants something that's ostensibly country, and they will loyally buy it if it's marketed as such. Making a full transition out of Nashville means casting off the last vestiges of this to make it in the wider world. You run the risk of losing your old audience and failing to find a new one. But she correctly calculated that the country fans who were buying her music were probably already buying pop records anyway, and that her pop audience was where all the growth was. And when I say she I mean whoever does her marketing. So she managed to get two audiences for the price of one, so to speak.

  3. Then — and people often forget about this — she pulled her music off of streaming services because she didn't like the business model. For three years. I'm not going to attempt to quantize the impact this had, but I doubt it did her career any favors in the short-term. However, it probably helped her career long-term, because it encouraged people to buy her albums rather than stream them. This probably fostered a sense of loyalty that she wouldn't have had if she'd been available at the touch of a button to anyone with a Spotify account. And then it was a big deal when she got back on the streaming services, which again increased her audience.

  4. So at this point she's been steadily consolidating her power for over a decade. This is important in and of itself because most pop stars don't stay on top for that long, especially just by being pop stars. Contrast this with Lady Gaga, who is still famous but more because she did things like movies and albums with Tony Bennett. No one has cared about her pop records since 2011. The fact that Swift is in her mid-30s and has been able to sustain a career since her days as a teen idol without making any major changes is an accomplishment in and of itself and probably feeds into our current moment. She's been around long enough that women who listened to her in high school can take their kids to her concerts.

  5. Despite her fame, and her numerous celebrity relationships, she's managed to avoid the kind of scandals and tabloid gossip that surrounds other pop stars, especially ones who become famous at sixteen and have to navigate the transition to adulthood while in the public eye.

  6. She has an uncanny knack for making decisions that are totally about money and convincing people that they're not about money. The whole "Taylor's Version" thing is a prime example. She didn't like the fact that she didn't own the rights to her old recordings. The main advantage of owning the rights to her recordings is that she can collect all the money they generate. Otherwise, there's no real advantage. This is a big deal for most people, but for someone like Swift, who has more money than she's ever going to be able to spend, the schlubs at whatever private equity firm owns the rights to them probably need the money more than she does. But she casts it as a matter of principle, rerecords new versions she owns the rights to, and convinces her fans to shell out money for five different collectors' editions of the same albums they already own. The whole thing was about as transparent a cash grab as you could find, yet she pulled it off in such a way that even people who could care less about her career thought it was a slick move to stick it to those fatcats. It got her the kind of publicity you can't buy while minting her a pretty penny.

  7. And, finally, in the same vein, we have the Eras Tour. At some point in every pop star's life, there comes a point where they are no longer a "frontline artist", by which I mean a contemporary artist who makes contemporary music for a contemporary audience. At some point, people don't go to your concerts to hear the new album but to hear the old favorites. It's usually the obvious sign that a band is over the hill — there's a new album out and the kind of people who paid 70 bucks to hear you play don't give a fuck. And if your biggest fans no longer care... Becoming an oldies act is depressing. Bob Dylan and Neil Young have defiantly refused to go down that path, regardless of the crap they take for it, and insist on being contemporary musicians who will tour the new album and maybe throw in a few old favorites. Mike Love's insistence on the Beach Boys playing touring their 60s hits in the wake of the compilation album Endless Summer's success in the mid-1970s drove a wedge between the band that they never really recovered from. (And most of the band was younger then than Swift is now.) The huge appeal of the Eras Tour was that, for the first time, Swift would be taking listeners on a musical journey through her entire career. She was becoming an oldies act, proudly and deliberately. At a time when she was still viable as a frontline artist. This is almost unheard of. Sure, contemporary bands usually play some older material at all their shows, but it's unusual for someone to actively embrace what is usually the sure sign of a has-been. Because the dirty secret of oldies acts is that they're very profitable. People like hearing old favorites, even when they're still willing to pay good money for the new shit. And the whole Taylor's Version thing was perfect cover. Combine this with the fact that she hadn't toured in half a decade and the stage was set for all hell to break loose.

7.

I think this is an often underappreciated aspect of an artist's career. Many of them just do not know when to throw in the towel on new stuff. Mad respect to Billy Joel who has not released new material in 30 years but still plays a few concerts (including Madison Square Garden) every month. He's someone who knew when he was done.

Mad respect to Billy Joel who has not released new material in 30 years

Or since yesterday:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/billy-joels-turn-the-lights-back-on-1234958448/

How can you be a pessimist when life is this funny?

I wonder if the whole "lottery" aspect to the tickets also made this go crazy. They were so exclusive! I know people who couldn't get tickets. I know someone who bought tickets online (Stubhub maybe?) And flew to brazil and when they landed found out their tickets didn't exist! There were all these stories and tales of great sacrifice to go to these concerts.

great write up. nominated

Doesn't require a comment.

Thank you for providing positive reinforcement.

Do I have to beat my usual drum again? Fine.

I find Hanania is being very uncharitable to the right, and buying into an essentially progressive framing of the world.

I agree. He's just buying into it in a deeper way than you even imagine. A terminally online way, where people arguing about niche topics supposedly disrupts normalcy and is therefore maximally uncool. But is this actually relevant? If you want maximal normalcy, should you follow Hanania's advice?

When it comes to attacks on normalcy and normal life, forget Republicans arguing about sports and Democrats arguing about Trans people. Forget that an orange man and a dementia man are competing to be president. The amount of time either matters for anyone's normal, daily routine is <1% of their life. You know what did matter for seriously disrupting normal life?

Covid restrictions.

Every other policy or political event is a rounding error for your life in comparison. And for these restrictions, Democrats consistently sided against normalcy. Whether it be demanding that people wear weird clothing, sit in weird arrangements, attend or not attend certain places at certain times with certain people etc etc, and none of it was normal. The majority of political decisions affect very few people. Arguments about drug law only affects drug users, arguments about violent crime affects only the criminals and the victims. But masks? Business closures? School closures? Vaccine mandates? Each of these is broadsiding a huge swath of the population with anti-normalcy. And a few rants about WWE or NFL or Taylor Swift is never going to be equivalent to that.

This feels to me like he's going for embodying the "No, it's the children who are wrong." meme. Millennials (who aren't remotely "children" anymore but make up the plurality of Swift's fans) and younger are mostly wondering what is wrong with Republicans constantly going on about the existence of hair dye and queer people; those are normal to most of those age groups. And just maybe it's a hard sell to women looking to date men and/or intentionally have children to vote for the party who has state officials making national news for actively trying to prevent women from getting medical care to prevent infertility due to pregnancy complications; that seems a lot more likely to be popular with older women who can feel ideologically pure about opposing abortion without being worried about it affecting themselves directly.

The real question is why people think the NFL has a left-wing bias. Yeah, they have the End Hate messages and whatever, but that seems more like a sop to their predominantly black employee base in the wake of the Kaepernick scandal and 2020 protests than a serious political statement. If you look at the political leanings of the actual owners, you have:

  • Arizona Cardinals: Bidwell — Republican, but supports Sinema, so probably moderate

  • Atlanta Falcons: Arthur Blank — Democrat

  • Baltimore Ravens: Stephen Biscotti — Inconclusive, but a pretty big Catholic, for whatever that's worth

  • Buffalo Bills: Pegula — Moderate, made his money from fracking (I personally worked on the sale that raised the capital for him to buy the team)

  • Carolina Panthers: David Tepper — Republican, but pro gay rights

  • Chicago Bears: McCaskey (Halas) — Inconclusive, but George openly feuded with Trump during the national anthem controversy

  • Cincinnati Bengals: Brown — Republican

  • Cleveland Browns: Jimmy Haslam — Republican

  • Dallas Cowboys: Jerry Jones — Republican, Trump supporter

  • Denver Broncos: Joe Ellis — Republican

  • Detroit Lions: Ford — Democrat

  • Green Bay Packers: n/a — Inconclusive. Held by stock, but the team president leans left

  • Houston Texans: McNair — Republican

  • Indianapolis Colts: Irsay — Republican

  • Jacksonville Jaguars: Shahid Khan — probably more interested in British politics, but sided with the players during the anthem controversy

  • Kansas City Chiefs: Hunt — Republican

  • Las Vegas Raiders: Davis — Inconclusive, Mark doesn't talk about politics, but the old man seemed pretty liberal

  • Los Angeles Chargers: Dean Spanos — Republican

  • Los Angeles Rams: Kroenke — Definite Republican lean, Trump included, but also supports some Democrats

  • Miami Dolphins: Stephen M. Ross — Republican, Trump supporter

  • Minnesota Vikings: Zygi Wilf — Democrat

  • New England Patriots: Robert Kraft — Probably a Democrat, but an open Trump supporter

  • New Orleans Saints: Benson — Republican

  • New York Giants: Mara/Tisch — Democrat

  • New York Jets: Woody Johnson — Republican, Trump Diplomatic Appointee

  • Philadelphia Eagles: Lurie — Democrat

  • Pittsburgh Steelers: Rooney — Democrat, Dan was an Obama Diplomatic Appointee

  • San Francisco 49ers: DeBartolo — Inconclusive. Denise is a Democrat, but Trump pardoned Eddie. It should be noted that Eddie was forced to give his sister control of the team after he was convicted of public corruption.

  • Seattle Seahawks: Allen — Inconclusive. Paul was a Republican, but he's dead and team ownership is held in trust. Jody controls the team and she's pretty bipartisan.

  • Tampa Bay Bucs: Glazer — Moderate, Eddie's a confirmed Trump supporter.

  • Tennessee Titans: Adams — Republican

  • Washington Commanders: Josh Harris — Republican

  • Commissioner: Roger Goodell — Republican

By my final tally, there are 16 confirmed Republicans, or over half the league, plus the Commish, plus Kraft, who may not be a Republican but likes Trump. Of the remainder, I'll count 10 confirmed Democrats or left-leaners. That leaves five who are inconclusive. At best, you might be able to argue that half the league wants to fix the country's biggest sporting event to get a political endorsement that may or may not have any impact on the election. The team that would be the beneficiary of this would be at odds with the politics of the whole thing, since the Hunt family have been big Texas Republicans for a long time. On the other side, Denise DeBartolo York has donated to Democrats in Ohio. She's also from Youngstown, and the Democratic Party there is a lot more conservative than in the country at large; it's mostly Trump country these days. It also has corrupt politics, so I wouldn't put taking a dive past her if they sweetened the pot enough. Steve was already busted for political corruption (and he lost a lot of money financing the Jacksons Victory Tour in 1984 because he didn't know what he was doing). I'd say it's unlikely that there's enough motivation among ownership and the commissioner to do something like this, and there's certainly enough conservative owners that even if the league did try it you'd have quite a few screaming about it publicly.

I think the problem is that people have a tendency to think of "The NFL" as this faceless behemoth that has whatever characteristics they want it to have depending on how they're feeling that day. They don't stop to consider that this is an organization run by real people with real personalities and real opinions, and that the only thing they really agree on is that they all want to make as much money as possible. I don't see how the NFL, viewed in that light, would have any reason to fix a championship for political reasons.

But it’s also the fruit of the Long March Through the Institutions.

I know nothing about the NFL and its cultural context. That said, this phrase is typically meant to imply that there was some kind of anti-democratic, inorganic effort by leftists (meaning Marxist, not just progressive or necessarily radical) to take over the NFL. I would like to see some proof of this sort of thing. A cursory search of the issue with the helmets and endzones saying "stop racism" or other anti-racist slogans suggests this happened in 2021. You don't need much "Long Marching" to make an institution think that it might get them some positive attention if they were to do this while not alienating enough people who would disagree.

(meaning Marxist, not just progressive or necessarily radical)

Huh, why? I mean, I think a case can be made that a lot of these progressive ideas are Marx-derived, but I don't see why the idea of the long march through institutions requires that the effort be explicitly Marxist.

I would like to see some proof of this sort of thing.

I'd similarly like to see proof of it being organic. I see no reason to grant it null hypothesis status.

A cursory search of the issue with the helmets and endzones saying "stop racism" or other anti-racist slogans suggests this happened in 2021.

By 2021 the March was over and done with. If you want to see it taking off you have to go back to Atheism+ or GamerGate, where community after community started going through struggle sessions about how it is no longer enough to be [the core subject the community was centered around] you must now be [whatever the whole your group does] plus, and stand for anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc., etc., etc.

You don't need much "Long Marching" to make an institution think that it might get them some positive attention if they were to do this while not alienating enough people who would disagree.

If the NFL made helmets saying "all lives matter" do you think blue tribe would just shrug, because they don't support grooming? There's an infinite number of messages you could be putting out that "should" get positive attention without alienating anyone, but only blue-coded ones ever get put out.

Huh, why? I mean, I think a case can be made that a lot of these progressive ideas are Marx-derived, but I don't see why the idea of the long march through institutions requires that the effort be explicitly Marxist.

The original phrase was coined by a socialist and is often used by people who do think the Marchers are all Marxists. We have neutral words, like entryism, and it's possible that the OP meant something neutral, but I'm on a platform where I don't think people are so obviously using it as a perfect substitute for entryism.

I'd similarly like to see proof of it being organic. I see no reason to grant it null hypothesis status.

I'm totally fine shrugging my shoulders and saying I don't have proof of that, because I'm not going to do a deep dive into the NFL and its politics. But then we're left with the position of simply not knowing one way or the other.

By 2021 the March was over and done with.

I was indicating what incidents I could find that matched the description. I don't know what the OP was necessarily referring to sought to indicate what seemed likely. But even granting your point about Atheism+ and all that, why should I assume the NFL was subject to the same thing? Atheism+ was about the split between people who would go on to be SJWs and the Skeptics/Anti-SJWs.

If the NFL made helmets saying "all lives matter" do you think blue tribe would just shrug, because they don't support grooming? There's an infinite number of messages you could be putting out that "should" get positive attention without alienating anyone, but only blue-coded ones ever get put out.

Whether the blue tribe would shrug isn't the point. We're asking about the intention behind the slogans and rhetoric being deployed, not whether one tribe would or wouldn't react.

Moreover, one issue with this line of analysis is the asymmetry in what ideas are part of the status quo or not. The idea of non-whites facing systemic discrimination isn't in the water, it is the water. Why this matters is that people who don't have an axe to grind against the status quo on this point don't, in my view, engage with politics the same way as those who do. Put simply, as long as blue-coded messages are the water and red-coded ones aren't, you cannot point to the disparity in promotion and claim a conspiracy because people don't need a conspiracy to "support" the water.

Put simply, as long as blue-coded messages are the water and red-coded ones aren't, you cannot point to the disparity in promotion and claim a conspiracy because people don't need a conspiracy to "support" the water.

That's what I'm getting at. There's no conspiracy to make the NFL blue, because the NFL turned blue as a result of a conspiracy that came to fruition years ago. The nutso-types claiming that the NFL is fixed so that Kelce will win the Super Bowl for the purpose of benefitting the Democrats are expressing a feeling of unsettled-ness. But it's not a mustache twirling, cigar chomping villain actively fixing games like Meyer Wolfshein; it's in the air, thanks to a decades long process of conservative retreat from the institutions making room for the Left.

it's in the air, thanks to a decades long process of conservative retreat from the institutions making room for the Left.

Is this what you meant by "Long March through the Institutions?" I have never heard that phrase be used to describe conservative retreat over leftist entryism.

They are two sides of the same coin. Prior comment on the topic.

The OG Long March is widely seen by revisionist historians as being stage managed by KMT forces, who didn't put real effort into destroying the Communists under Mao, preferring to let them shuffle off into the hills never to be seen again. In the same way, the Long March Through the Institutions, leftist entryism as you put it, has been largely unopposed. Conservatives have been criticizing academia since the Eisenhower years, probably before!, and leftists walked in to the vacuum. Conservatives assumed that the crazy college kids would never hold power, and they were wrong. Just like Chiang Kai-shek was wrong about Mao's forces dwindling in the mountains.

The original phrase was coined by a socialist and is often used by people who do think the Marchers are all Marxists.

And it's also a reference to Mao's "Long March" during the Chinese Civil War. Several of modern China's space program rockets are named after it as well.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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