Jazzhands
8hr ago
To be clear, you think it is unfair to apply the label "socialist" to a guy who spoke at the Democratic Socialists of America about the "end goal of seizing the means of production"?
Jazzhands
8hr ago
He was a speaker at the DSA, which stands for "Democratic Socialists of America."
Clip here: https://x.com/Osint613/status/1939657700553486380 Actual Quotes:
- "The purpose is about this entire project, it’s not simply to raise class consciousness, but to win socialism"
- "We have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism"
- "There are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS or whether it’s the end goal of seizing the means of production"
Full long video at https://youtube.com/live/9K7HDuoJ0MQ
Jazzhands
6d ago
The conflict between various Muslim states and Israel (which, really, is what we're talking about when talking about "Muslims and Jews" here, since there's only one Jewish state)
Because Muslims treat the Jews within Muslim states so well, right?
Jazzhands
13d ago
Then he's not mentioned again in the New Testament where he's this unseen dark mirror of Jesus.
What?
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%204%3A1-11&version=NKJV
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry. 3 Now when the tempter came to Him, he said, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”
4 But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’ ”
5 Then the devil took Him up into the holy city, set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, 6 and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down. For it is written:
‘He shall give His angels charge over you,’
and,
‘In their hands they shall bear you up, Lest you dash your foot against a stone.’ ”
7 Jesus said to him, “It is written again, ‘You shall not [a]tempt the Lord your God.’ ”
8 Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.”
10 Then Jesus said to him, [b]“Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.’ ”
11 Then the devil left Him, and behold, angels came and ministered to Him.
Jazzhands
14d ago
It's also pretty similar to Jefferson's Deism. It's an old heresy that recurs regularly throughout history. In the past few centuries it pretty consistently tries to sell itself with language like "compatible with a scientific mindset." Check out Bishop Spong (of the famously growing Episcopal church) for a relatively recent iteration of this.
Jazzhands
21d ago
I don't think we can rule out that Shapiro looked at the odds and turned them down, deciding he was better off trying in a later cycle.
Jazzhands
24d ago
The Abundance Dems aren't even real. Let us know when they pass anything of substance in a blue city; until then it's pure marketing.
Jazzhands
27d ago
What, does the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade not count?
No. The Red-equivalent of RvW would be for abortion to be banned in all states for the next 50 years. Putting an end to Blue imposition of their values on everyone is not the same.
Jazzhands
1mo ago
Raccoon-dogs aren't even that special when it comes to being covid-susceptible. For a while blaming pangolins was all the rage!
Jazzhands
1mo ago
"The Population Bomb" was published in 1968, and was very much a leftist phenomenon. At no point did the failure of its predictions hurt his prospects with Stanford where he continued to teach. Anti-natalism has always been pretty closely tied to the Environmental movement, and this is in turn a big part of why the Right has ceased to trust environmentalists. It was a probably a big influence behind India's sterilization campaign, under its socialist government. The One-Child Policy was implemented by literal Communists.
Basically, anti-natalism has been a left-wing thing longer then most of us have been alive, and implemented by the left in some of the largest countries in the world.
What's the right-wing equivalent? I think you're over-indexing on a few outliers and twitter edgelords.
Jazzhands
1mo ago
The entirely of the Testimonium Flavium, as we have it today:
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day.
That's not "diverged greatly," that's just short.
Jazzhands
1mo ago
There's been a weird narrative push here lately to blame Christianity for the worst parts of leftism (see the similar "akshally Communism comes from Christianity" upthread).
You know the expression "Fascism is always descending upon America, but landing in Europe"? Same deal here. SJWs and Communists have been consistently and outspokenly opposed to Christianity. When you see a Christian organization turning to such left-wing activism, you can usually safely bet they are also on the off-ramp from being Christian.
Atheism is a critical ingredient.
Jazzhands
1mo ago
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah%2027%3A6-8&version=NIV
Now I will give all your countries into the hands of my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; I will make even the wild animals subject to him. All nations will serve him and his son and his grandson until the time for his land comes; then many nations and great kings will subjugate him. If, however, any nation or kingdom will not serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon or bow its neck under his yoke, I will punish that nation with the sword, famine and plague, declares the Lord, until I destroy it by his hand.
I would simply remember Syria Libya. Why did the Democrats who had run against regime change in the Middle East decide to bomb them back to hell again? What was accomplished besides the reopening of slave markets? They didn't even bother selling it to the public, they just did it.
"We came, we saw, he died" was the main sober analysis offered by the administration at the time.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
Ok, sure, if you redefine "social conservativism" to mean the opposite of how everybody uses it.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
Are you under the impression that kids these days have grown up under a socially conservative system?
Jazzhands
3mo ago
Don Draper: Arranged marriages, but arranged by a computer instead of parents who love you.
Jazzhands
3mo ago
90% of the OP is about the current state of Republican epistemology, not the Left. And yet this subthread seems to be determined to prove the very intro it is complaining about.
Jazzhands
3mo ago
Depends how much you really believe in the wisdom of the crowd. If you can combine that with a general understanding that the epistemic status of any given tweet is very low, you might indeed be able to glean useful information, based on how wide a given piece of information has spread and for how long.
For example, the JFK files were just released. I ain't readin' any of that. But I am confident that if there's anything interesting in there, Twitter will surface it to me over the course of the next week. And if it's all a dud, it will surface that, too.
Jazzhands
3mo ago
Yeah, everything has trade-offs, and it's too early to say if this approach will actually be better than the previous one.
Jazzhands
3mo ago
It was a Left bubble, but now it's not. Left-wing Twitter needed to keep banning and suppressing stories they didn't like; right-wing twitter just out-tweets them.
So far right-wing twitter hasn't been used as much for cancellation (although arguably LibsOfTikTok does this); the targets are usually left-wing institutions.
Jazzhands
3mo ago
I've discoursed elsewhere on the Progressive Epistemic Crisis. Short version: they constructed such impervious bubbles that they become entirely disconnected from reality. Is the president senile? What is a woman? Is the economy good? The list of simple questions that a progressive cannot answer could go on and on.
This is problem for all of us, because they successfully marched through all the institutions that we all relied on to know what was true and what was important. The rot is evident everywhere, and has been discussed in these spaces many times before. Social sciences have a replication crisis. Alzheimer's research has been almost entirely fraud for 2 decades. University presidents dragged before Congress cannot articulate their views on calls for genocide, and cannot fall back on "free speech" defenses without everybody laughing in their faces. Nobody even knows who was running the presidency these past 4 years. And trust in the media, the institution tasked with helping to make sense of all of this, continues to crash.
The problem for the Left is how to extract themselves from these bubbles, or maybe even reform them. But the problem for the Right, which already believes them to be irredeemable, is what to replace them with. And it looks like the Right has coalesced around an answer.
Twitter. The answer is Twitter.
Legacy Ways of Knowing were highly authoritative and highly centralized; the new approach flips that entirely on its head.
The first thing you need to understand is that Twitter knowledge is delivered in a breaking-news, but very provisional, style. In Rationalist terms, every tweet is effectively tagged with "epistemic status: low certainty." Info comes in very fast, but the accuracy is also low; you have to wait and watch as the story develops and keep sampling the gestalt before you can have confidence in a given piece of info. When Elon talks about finding all these dead people in the Social Security and implies that this is a major source of fraud, he is pointing at an interesting thing he found and maybe it will grow into some more substantial as they dig into it. This is "move fast and break things" applied to epistemology. Even within the same story, you can contrast the two systems. On the left, an article was found to declare, authoritatively, that actually it's just COBOL. The pitfalls of both approaches show forth here, in that finding dead people will probably not catch much waste/fraud/abuse relatively speaking, but also in that the COBOL response was entirely incorrect.
Second, Twitter Knowing is highly decentralized. In the Legacy Knowing, you got with the party line quick if you knew what was good for you, or you were banned or cancelled. It didn't matter if they said masks were dumb last week, now they believe masks are good, and so now you will believe that too, with exactly the same certainty as the previous contradictory belief. Lefty pundits thought the Trump coalition was already cracking up when Musk tweeted in favor of more H1-Bs over Christmas, and got dogpiled for it; in their world such open dissent would have meant large numbers of purges all around. Instead, Musk retreated and the leadership received some valuable information about their coalition's views.
Of course, Musk did not quietly retreat. Instead, he changed the subject to Rotherham, and the Right united around remembering how terrible their enemies are. And this gets to the primary use of legacy media, which was not so much the transmission of information, but the directing of discussion. Leftwing institutions told them when to care about kids in cages (during Republican administrations) and when not to (during Democratic administrations)(1). Right-wingers have long struggled to match this narrative-pushing ability. But Twitter is now serving the same purpose of pushing forward stories to be talked about, and Musk is experimenting with just how far he can push that ability. Most of his current posts are mostly oriented around trying to nudge the narrative in certain directions. But note that he has this power because he is a highly followed account, not because he owns the site. Others with large follower counts can do the same thing, and increasingly will.
All of this could change very quickly, but that's where we stand at the moment. Legacy institutions already capitulated to this state of affairs when Biden resigned from the race via Twitter, with no further elaboration in any legacy media. Maybe they could have pushed back then, but not now.
tldr;
- Information is low confidence, but very fast. Confidence increases with time and retweets.
- The system is highly decentralized; there is no central arbiter of what is True.
- The system is now able to push stories.
(1) This should actually be seen as Kelsey attempting to wrest back some amount of agency.
There is one main reason it's not especially Joe Biden's fault: he's not in his right mind. One of the things about senility is that it can remove your ability recognize that you are senile.
The blame should be spread far wider. This is the fault of everybody else around him, who absolutely did know the condition he was in, and lied about it anyway. Most centrally, Kamala herself had a responsibility to say something, but she covered it up on the calculation that it was better for her personally. But she's hardly alone. Obama must have known. Pelosi must have known. Surely every senior Democrats in DC who interacted with the president knew, along with staff.
They all covered it up. The only party leaders who can claim they were not involved are governors and minor House members.
It was only 4 years ago. That's hardly an eternity. Is there some evidence he has seen the errors of his ways?
Here's what you actually said
Implication is that it's somehow unfair for people to be identifying this guy as a socialist. Given that he has called himself a socialist and he addressed a significant group dedicated to socialism where he quoted approvingly from the Communist Manifesto, seems like they got it right. At the very least, the burden of evidence is on the side that wants to claim he's seen the error of his ways.
If some people were able to determine this just from his campaign rhetoric, all the better for them! They made a correct prediction! The evidence is that their definition of socialism is accurate, not "drowned-down." You should be asking why you weren't able to see it was obvious to them.
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