What I'm saying is that it's not about Left and Right, it's about the Ins and the Outs. At present, the Left is broadly In and the Right is broadly Out. (Yes, I know, Trump, trifecta, etc. The valence may change, but we're talking long marches and it mostly hasn't changed yet. Journalism schools are taking in centrist-left-educated students and producing centrist-left-aligned journalists).
The Ins are broadly in charge of the historic institutions, that's what makes them In. They pull them as far towards their own position as they can without actually destroying them. (That can be touch and go, look at the decline of Disney/video games). They have monkey-brained In stuff as well, because that's what they really like, but most of them recognise the value of being able to propagandise the middle and have their opinions/prejudices/interpretations laundered through the mainstream press, so they have to preserve them. It's the same dynamic when the Right is mostly In and the left are limited to silly student magazines.
Rather than 'the Right lacks an ecosystem that punishes partisan slop' I would say, 'the Outs by definition lack a significant ballast of centrists'.
An interesting consequence of this is that you can get good semi-mainstream right-wing media if you find a community where the Right is broadly In and include a signficant number of centrists. Religious magazines like Tablet and the Catholic Herald come to mind.
Corvos
19hr ago
Prediction markets are really an idea from 15 years ago, smack dab in the middle of the conjunction of 'software will save the world' tech optimism and 'profit incentives are the best way to solve an optimisation problem' liberal economics.
Kalshi didn't propose mass-market betting because they were too naive to realise that
the love of money is the root of all evil
but because they believed the literal exact opposite, for better or for worse.
Did you read that one Scott article on ‘The Right vs. The Centre’ or some such? The issue is that the left-tinged media is just about good enough for most people most of the time, plus a big chunk of the MAGA partisans really does want some level of monkey-brained dunking (equivalent energy on the left too of course). What’s left when you exclude those two groups is a theoretical maximum customer base of maybe 20% of population across all platforms and that’s not enough to create and sustain a full on serious investigative media equivalent to the BBC or CNN. In England, GB News just about pulled it off but it’s clinging on for dear life.
Right-tinged blogging is cheaper so Substacks does well as does this place.
In general, I think Musk's takeover of Twitter really lends massive credibility to the idea that it works for better for both sides to take over large institutions rather than to recreate them.
Corvos
1d ago
I don’t know, but I would guess this is very much ‘if you have sex at 16 and your culture regards this as abuse then you’ll probably be traumatised, but if society regards this as the natural outcome then you’ll be fine’.
Corvos
4d ago
The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy’s sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU’s approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data.
[...]
The EU’s GDPR regulations are well-meaning, but do not go very far. It will not deliver much privacy, because its rules are too lax. They permit collecting any data if it is somehow useful to the system, and it is easy to come up with a way to make any particular data useful for something.
The GDPR makes much of requiring users (in some cases) to give consent for the collection of their data, but that doesn’t do much good. System designers have become expert at manufacturing consent (to repurpose Noam Chomsky’s phrase). Most users consent to a site’s terms without reading them; a company that required users to trade their first-born child got consent from plenty of users. Then again, when a system is crucial for modern life, like buses and trains, users ignore the terms because refusal of consent is too painful to consider.
To restore privacy, we must stop surveillance before it even asks for consent.
Richard Stallman (you may have heard of him)
Corvos
4d ago
It wasn't China who gave us trans, BLM, 'hands up don't shoot' in a country with no guns, Free Palestine, and woke. That was you guys. Thanks :)
Thanks, misunderstanding cleared up. Personally I disagree, I think that once you are seriously giving life advice to anyone except that handsome devil in the mirror, you are broadly out of the part of your career where young people are competing with you directly. I think that what you consider the 'cloaking' motivation is broadly the true motivation.
Yasslighting for e.g. writers certainly happens but it happens in the peer group of young losers + young one-day-maybe-not-losers. I guess maybe your talented 20-somethings are still encouraging their less talented friends but this is more to prevent social awkwardness than anything.
Corvos
4d ago
I read you as saying that the talented encourage the talentless to enter their field as a gambit to emphasise their own relative superiority.
My theory is that they don’t want to generate bad PR by discouraging their fans and emphasising the gap between them.
If I misunderstood your argument I apologise.
Corvos
4d ago
Agreed. I'm just saying I think you're overthinking it in that quoted passage. They're just trying to be nice in public even if the long-term effect is anti-social.
Corvos
4d ago
I'm a little confused. Does Ireland not give birthright citizenship though the father's line? Or is it that he had the option to pass on citizenship rights as the father but refused, and claimed to be the mother which wasn't accepted?
Corvos
4d ago
From that post:
one would naively expect that successful actors, musicians etc. would be incentivised to discourage others from pursuing careers in their domain, or engage in rent-seeking behaviour like guilds and so on. But there may be an alternative dynamic at play, in which moderately talented actors, musicians etc. are savvy enough to know that flooding the market with talentless hacks will make the legitimately talented stand out all the more — tall poppies look all the taller when surrounded by short ones
Surely they are simply smart enough to know that:
- They are already established and can't easily be threatened by people only now beginning a career (similar to those advocating DEI).
- They know that their fans will respond much better to "we've all been there, keep plugging," than to "dude, sorry, chances are you can't do what I can do".
I don't know how to say this but you're the richest and most powerful people in the world. This kind of discussion always turns into a Bravery Debate but regulation like GDPR is more about clawing back some agency from America than it is trying to tax US industry.
As the Right discovered five years ago, and the Left discovered when Musk bought X, network effects and the overall stack just don't allow for 'make-your-own' social media.
(I don't actually like or agree with the vast majority of this regulation, though I think that GDPR specifically was a step in the right direction of forcing companies to give more than absolutely zero shits about the privacy of their customers).
Normally I wouldn't be quite so thin-skinned but the Greenland fiasco drove home for me just how worrying it is that half of the most powerful country in the world thinks of us as being essentially a pantomime villain from a Mel Gibson movie.
That is the same thing that I said, in much more polemical language, but it's only part of the story. Yes, various European and non-American (Aussie, UK, Canada) governments are very upset that, from their perspective, unfortunate dirty laundry is being aired in public. Some of them surely have things they would like to hide, others rightly or wrongly believe that the country would be better off and less febrile if matters weren't presented in a maximally inflammatory way and optimised for engagement.
But there are also lots of other things that people are concerned about. They really don't like the effect that addictive Instagram and TikTok etc. are having on the ability of young people to concentrate or socialise, they don't like Grok in general and the nudifying features in particular, etc.
Ultimately, both voters and governments generally prefer for regulation to be possible, even if they decide not to do it. Having a big part of life subject to the whims of Washington and Silicon Valley rubs people the wrong way.
No, the obvious answer is the true one here. Europe and the UK really really hate that the fundamental, society-altering technology that all of their citizens are using >5hrs a day is completely out of their control, as is the AI that they are hoping will become the new basis of their economy. And they are fundamentally incapable of conceiving that the answer might be less regulation rather than more. The closest American example is when America legislated the sale of TikTok (did that ever go through?).
I personally have mixed feelings about this. Having your public places under the control of another country is in some ways safer than having them under the control of your own country - broadly I like that Musk can tell Starmer to take a long walk off a short pier. But this cuts both ways, and I don't blame the various governments involved for being antsy around it.
Corvos
5d ago
On which note, @ZanarkandAbesFan I have to ask, are you a fan of
- Zanarkand Abe
Or
- Zanark and Abe?
I’ve always wondered.
It seems to me that a tall man who isn’t allowed to decide when and where and if he fetches things for shorter people is just a step-ladder made of meat.
What if there are 10 Alice’s who genuinely need things fetched down on a constant basis?
What if there’s only one Alice but she abuses him and makes her dislike of him known on a regular basis?
What if Alice and her fellow shorties have subjected Bob to a constant campaign of psychological manipulation since birth explaining that his tallness is a privilege to be used for the benefit of the short, or indeed that his tallness is actively oppressing them by causing shelves to be built which they can’t reach, for which he must repent by serving them in the manner they demand?
In many of these scenarios Bob appeared to be… let’s not call him a slave to avoid the noncentral fallacy, but certainly slavelike. Similar to an indentured servant.
In practice, what seems to happen is that ‘we’ or ‘society’ determine how much labour Bob is required to do for the underprivileged (in our benevolence). In which case Bob is not only their servant but even more so ours.
Civilisation does require this to some degree but the scales have tipped far too far in the last hundred years and the racial version has finally tipped far enough that all of us are Bob and we’re sick of it.
Corvos
7d ago
Muslims are clannish and always vote for muslims. Non-muslims won't not vote for muslims. Left-wingers would rather vote for Saddam Hussein than a right-wing party.
Of course, I was just surprised and wanted to check in case I was totally misinformed.
Incidentally, there are some cases where the loser doesn't have to pay costs, the most egregious of which is that if you are supported by public aid (mostly immigrants being supported by legal charities) you're theoretically poor and you don't have to pay even if a) you cause the other party to pay millions in damages or costs and b) your sponsors are rolling.
The UK's loser-pays-winner paradigm isn't perfect. My family were put off pursuing a perfectly-winnable claim because we had a 95% chance of winning but we would bankrupt ourselves trying to pay for the other side's top-tier legal team on the 5% chance we lost.
Corvos
8d ago
the winning side in a dispute has to pay the reasonable legal costs of the losing side
That's completely wrong, isn't it? In the UK, the loser pays the costs of the winner. It's very very rare to pay the costs of the winner unless their behaviour is incredibly egregious.
I don't think you really appreciate the extent to which many people really, really hate illegal immigration. 'I will endure a high and probably unnecessary cost on a regular basis just to prevent even the possibility of making it slightly harder for ICE to do their job over the next few years, until the illegal immigrants are all gone' is a valid position, even if your cost-benefit analyses don't work out that way.
Broadly, people are well-aware that the Left is the party of pro-bono lawyers and suspiciously-well-instructed activism. It's not that weird that people on the right have started refusing point-blank any restraints that are likely to turn out to be a tripwire or a trojan horse. Personally I'm not sure whether I think giving ICE absolute carte blanche would help or hinder them in the long run, but I can believe the former. It works fine in Japan.
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