site banner
PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   33266 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Noah Smith thinks DOGE's purpose is to drive liberals out of the civil service, to make room for conservative hires. Three paragraphs from below the paywall of today's post:

It seems clear that defeating the “woke mind virus” is high on DOGE’s list of priorities — my guess is that it’s actually the #1 priority. Trump’s first action with regards to the civil service was to fire all the DEI staff. But woke attitudes are far more widespread than just the few people who are officially hired to work on DEI, and Trump and Musk are probably united on the need to root out as many as possible.

This is probably why Elon loudly made a big deal out of rehiring a DOGE staffer who was fired for racist tweets, despite having himself gone to war on X against people making similar tweets. Federal civil service workers are a lot harder to fire than workers at Twitter; many are on contract, and there’s a limit to how long they can be placed on administrative leave. Musk tried the gambit of offering a buyout to all federal employees, but very few took it. One relatively easy way of getting the government’s wokest staffers to quit is to make it clear that the culture of their workplace has changed, and an easy way to do that is to have guys who write stuff like “Normalize Indian hate”.

This also explains many of the programs that Elon is going after. Actual examples of fraud are few and far between, but a decent number of federal grants and other programs have either been outsourced to progressive NGOs, repurposed for “justice”-related goals, or had DEI programs attached to them. When the DOGE people talk about “waste” and “fraud”, it’s usually just progressive stuff like this (which, to be fair, they do consider wasteful).

This seems to fit the available evidence, but what would prove or disprove it? I'd be more convinced if there had been a clear effort to recruit conservatives, prior to this - driving out progressives by purposely making civil service jobs generally less appealing doesn't make me want a civil service job.

Wouldn't conservatives get want what they want just by driving out anyone? The "replacement" part seems like a superflous second order effect when the goal is "shrink the gov't"

...despite having himself gone to war on X against people making similar tweets.

Was there a link here that didn't copy over?

When I asked about DOGE's supposed hypocrisy last week, I got a deeply unsatisfying response that relied on hypotheticals and vibes. I suspect this is more of the same, but I'd like to be proven wrong.

Has Elon Musk fired or pushed for the firing of any left-winger for offences similar to that DOGE employee? While we're at it I'll repeat the question from last week: has any left-winger in the American public sector been fired for similar conduct?

The closest recent example I can think of is that FEMA worker who was fired for giving instructions not to go to Trump supporting houses during hurricane Helene disaster relief. It's not exactly the same though, because what that person did was in an official capacity I think? Though being charitable maybe it was really said in jest.

Also, it was not done in a vacuum with the Democrats in full control, it was done after the election, when it was made abundantly clear a large part of the american electorate had beef with the administration, so making a few public sacrifices probably seemed wise. So it's not the same as the Republicans handing over scalps of their own when they have a trifecta, the SC and >50% public approval (at least for the WH).

I think they confirmed that it was both serious and not actually her fault, because she was just passing down orders from FEMA HQ. But they threw her under the bus and pretended she was a rogue agent, with no further investigation.

The closest recent example I can think of...

Granted, I can't think of a closer one either.

There's a huge gap between pseudonymous shitposts and a government agent directing their subordinates. The raw content of their statements is similar enough (not actually that similar, but I can't be picky), but context is everything.

One problem with this is it helps those who want us to conflate wokeness with basic decency.

Well, because it was Noah who reached the conclusion, I am actually disinclined to believe it is correct.

I think that there will be some featherbedding where Conservative allies are given some cushy positions after the departments have been razed or cleared of Prog staffers, but I doubt they do 1:1 replacement and keep running the various orgs as if nothing changed.

Elon didn't take over twitter, fire 80+% of the staff, and then refill the positions with his buddies/ideological allies, did he?

Even if Elon took over Twitter, fired 100% of the staff, and refilled 20% of the staff with buddies/ideological allies, that's downsizing, not merely landing your buddies spots. If your goal is to land your buddies spots you fire 20% of the staff and replace them with your buddies.

It seems plausible to me that stocking the bureaucracy with allies is a goal but frankly that codes more to me as Trump (or any politician, each turnover election they replace the political appointees for a reason!) than it does Elon. I think Elon actually cares a lot about competency and meritocracy.

I'd be more convinced if there had been a clear effort to recruit conservatives, prior to this

Isn't that what Project 2025 actually was? Not just the think-tank collection of essays that everyone was mad about - a large component was to have people apply over the last four years to be vetted. https://www.project2025.org/personnel/ and https://www.project2025.org/training/presidential-administration-academy/ for example.

I think thats talking about the higher-level positions, where such vetting has happened by ~every administration except Trump I.

They had hours and hours of high school-level training videos on government functions, so hopefully they didn't think they could find enough conservatives with a basic understanding of government to staff the entire administrative state (even after cuts), because the alternative is that they didn't think they could find enough conservatives with a basic level of government for just the "higher-level positions, where such vetting has happened by ~every administration except Trump I." (On the other hand, Rick Perry didn't know what the Department of Energy did, both when he ran on eliminating it or when he was asked to be its Secretary, so the latter is possible...)

Given how low-level the P25 training videos I watched were, I didn't take them seriously.

Of course it is ideologically motivated. is this a surprise?

Isn't there a time limit on DOGE? I guess for Noah's hypothesis to be true, there would need to be a plan to set up a Federalist Society-type body within the civil service after DOGE has finished up.

I guess we'll need to see what happens later on to test it. It wouldn't shock me to see JD Vance go on a spree of political appointing over the next few years to put these conservative civil servants in place, but right now it all looks a bit too chaotic to be that well planned.

Taking my tax dollars to fund a transgender opera in Columbia is fraud to me. I'm pretty sure that whatever congress appropriated didn't say "transgender opera in Columbia" and stealing those appropriations for woke activism fits neatly into the definition of fraud.

It's not fraud. It's stupid and wasteful, but the money was probably allotted for bringing feminism and gender education to Latin America.

Unironically, this is why we need to bring back earmarks. Congress needs to go back on the record and be more prescriptive in specifying where and how appropriated funds should be spent. Congress did away with ‘pork barrel spending’ over a decade ago and the result hasn’t been a decrease in federal spending. Rather, it just relieves Congress of accountability and permits the kind of opaque ‘fraud’ exemplified here to take root.

A big thing on comment sections I’m seeing is something like ‘ just because you don’t like it doesn’t make it wasteful spending / fraud ‘

But transgender opera in a foreign country is one of hundreds of such things I think 90% of the country would say that their tax dollars shouldn’t fund.

I’m pretty happy calling it fraud as well.

America isn't a direct democracy. The people elect representatives, and then the representatives decide what to do. If the people don't like what the representatives do, their only recourse is to elect different representatives next time; they don't get to simply overrule the representatives' decisions while in office through a majority vote. There would then be no point in having representatives in the first place.

Do they actually need to hire conservatives? Just kicking our a lot of liberals would achieve the objectives. DOGE's prime objective is to deplatform leftists and they are doing so at an incredible rate. If the left lost its armies of professional activists they would be heavily undermined. Killing USAID doesn't just hit wokeness in America, it hits wokeness globally. The issue with building a right wing bureaucracy is that bureaucracies naturally tend toward the left.

DOGE just needs to turn thousands of full time activists away from their activist career and give them new careers selling real estate, managing paperwork at a hospital or SEO-blogging.

For those on the fringe right, imaging what the right could achieve with tens of thousands of full time activists with billions in funding and top tier connections. Now imagine losing that.

My prediction is that we are going to find that a lot of people aren't actually as woke as we thought. They just played around with it. The people who wanted to defund the police would never walk through the ghetto at night alone with no police. The middle class posers talk about body positivity and trans rights while being skinny and living hetronormatively. They love diversity on twitter but live in an all white neighbourhood.

I hesitate to accept the term "deplatform" for people whose political beliefs affect how they do their jobs.

It matches the denotation perfectly: they had a platform (government-funded contracts/publications/activities), and now they don't. The connotation got all screwed up because of cancellation campaigns, so I share your hesitation.

My prediction is that we are going to find that a lot of people aren't actually as woke as we thought. They just played around with it. The people who wanted to defund the police would never walk through the ghetto at night alone with no police. The middle class posers talk about body positivity and trans rights while being skinny and living hetronormatively. They love diversity on twitter but live in an all white neighbourhood.

Yeah. This is the luxury beliefs hypothesis.

One startling stat I saw recently from Rob Henderson: Among Yale graduates in their forties, 90% of men are employed but only 50% of women are.

The true elite still live the 1950s lifestyle. They've merely denied this luxury to everyone else by imposing a degenerate belief system on those who don't have the resources to overcome it.

The true elite still live the 1950s lifestyle. They've merely denied this luxury to everyone else by imposing a degenerate belief system on those who don't have the resources to overcome it.

What's the degenerate belief system, how was it imposed, and what resources are needed to overcome it?

What's the degenerate belief system?

Promiscuity, atheism, drug use, moral relativism, transsexuality, etc..

How was it imposed

Perhaps imposed is the wrong word. Merely "pushed". Elites promoted the degenerate belief system in, i.e., universities and media, while not actually practicing it themselves. Single motherhood is common in the working class but rare in the upper class.

And it's possible for elites to be atheist drug users and be just fine. But it doesn't work for the lower classes.

What resources are needed to overcome it

Strong social ties. Money.

Here's another example of a luxury belief. Climate change. Do elites really believe in near-term climate change? Not really. After all, they keeping bidding up the prices of luxury real estate in West Palm Beach and Nantucket. But they are happy to suggest that others pay higher taxes to prevent it or, worse, that they must let "climate refugees" into their communities.

None of these thoughts are new or original to me. I'm kind of surprised you've never heard this if you visit this forum regularly.

Perhaps imposed is the wrong word. Merely "pushed". Elites promoted the degenerate belief system in, i.e., universities and media, while not actually practicing it themselves.

Do you draw a distinction between "Elites promoted the degenerate belief system" and "Elites questioned the assumption that the belief system was degenerate?" Is it normal to practice all things one thinks should be less stigmatized than they presently are?

I'm kind of surprised you've never heard this if you visit this forum regularly.

Motters throw around phrases like "degenerate belief system" too much to infer what belief system they're referring to.

The sexual revolution; no fault divorce combined with welfare for single mothers; more than two times the average income.

I think there are a lot of the true believers in government posts, because the person most likely to take a job in government is the one with the least realistic outlook on most issues mostly for lack of experience. They’ve never been to a ghetto at all with or without police, they don’t know anything about people who live there.

Second, excluding the very top tiers of government, the job is one that you take as a middle class job of last resort. Thus those in the government are likely to be uncritical of anything popular that they’ve been told. They went from their communications degree at some middling university to answering emails on behalf of the government because the6 honestly cannot get a middle class position in the private sector.

Put those together, and you end up with isolated mandarins who believe exactly what the cathedral has told them about the world and who know that not toeing the line is dangerous anyway.

Second, excluding the very top tiers of government, the job is one that you take as a middle class job of last resort.

In addition to what @SSCReader said, this is simply incorrect. And kind of ironic, because when people complain about the "generous salaries and great benefits" that feds get, that is only kind of true with respect to feds doing blue collar or very light white collar work. Admin assistants, HR people (hate them all you want but someone has to actually process paperwork for new hires, retirees, pay issues, etc.), installation and logistics, motor pool and janitorial services, etc., as well as many specialized government functions like IRS auditors and accountants - these are jobs where a GS employee might make more that his or her private sector counterpart. The job stability is a further bonus, which means many people do not see a government job as a "middle class job of last resort."

Now if you look at tech workers- software developers, engineers, research scientists, etc. - they are usually making considerably less than their private sector counterpart. They might take the government job because they want the stability and to get out of the contractor look-for-a-new-job-every-two-years rat race, they might take it because they want the work-life balance (government workers are almost never required to work more than a standard 40 hour week), they might genuinely believe in the mission of the agency they are with or find it to be interesting work. But they are generally speaking not losers who couldn't get a job anywhere else either.

Your "isolated mandarins" mostly applies to the folks at the top who do nothing but attend meetings all day in DC, or a certain tier of low-level workers who got an in early (maybe with a "useless communications degree" but often with no degree at all) and have never known anything but government work.

These people mostly don't live in ghettos (though many do live in working class neighborhoods in Baltimore or DC), but they mostly aren't living in those McMansions in NOVA either (those aren't government workers, those are lobbyists, contractors, lawyers, and other politician-adjacent people). They know plenty about the area and have plenty of contact with "the real world." I don't know where you get this fantasy that all government workers are "true believers" living in some rarefied academic bubble, and as for the idea that they just "uncritically believe anything popular that they've been told" - well, speaking of generalizations based on anecdata, have you ever actually met a FAANG employee? (Yeah, we have some here - and my point stands. Everyone, especially here, thinks they are an independent critical thinker unswayed by what moves the herd.)

Most civil servants, numerically, have perfectly intelligible job titles like 'VA nurse', 'mail carrier', and 'border patrol agent'. None of these things require a degree in communications and all of them are things normal working class people take as a job, on the same terms and for the same reasons as they would take a job doing the equivalent for someone else. You're really only talking about senior managers of bureaucrats.

Just by numbers most people in government posts are people who deal with the public and just want a job. Your description really only applies at management layers and above. Remember only a third of federal employees even have a degree let alone one in communications or similar, and many of those are in the Medical field as part of the VA and the like. Entertainingly USAID is the best counter-example with two thirds of its workforce having an advanced degree or higher! But that is not the norm across the Federal bureaucracy.

Your social security local office people are dealing with being yelled at by people losing their welfare and the like, they are VERY familiar with the lower/underclass and all their foibles and are probably not true believers in ideology as much as they are average workers worrying about making ends meet. Their direct managers will be as well. The local DMV is staffed by people from or close to the ghetto in fact here, so that wouldn't apply even for a lot of local government jobs. Remember most government jobs just by numbers are front facing. It wasn't until I moved to the higher echelons in the Civil Service I found all the politics and classics degree types.

From the point of view of the Federal government that would probably be the Senior Executive Service, of which there are about 9,000. If I were wanting to re-organize the Federal bureaucracy I would start with those 9,000 because they manage large projects and departments (basically the steps below political appointees) But of the sheer scale of the government in the US the vast majority do not appear to match your description.

In other words, the person most likely to take a government post is a non-degree having, neo-customer service worker, who (if you have never worked a customer facing job like that) will be very clear about how the rubber meets the road. Your Ivory Tower idea really only applies to a small minority in the upper ends of the government (but they are of course much more influential.)

They’ve never been to a ghetto at all with or without police, they don’t know anything about people who live there.

Maybe at the federal level, but some of the most experienced at the local level are certainly civil servants. The police are mostly responding to calls in the bad parts of town, as are the paramedics and fire fighters. Even the health inspectors are boots-on-the-ground visiting all the establishments in the city on a regular basis. Much more so than your corporate desk jockeys or even service workers. Maybe your plumbers and electricians make it out to those areas too, though.

Tradesmen and certain service workers make it into... interesting areas. Corporate workers don't.

The police are mostly responding to calls in the bad parts of town,

I'm pretty sure that rank-and-file police are more sympathetic to the Republicans than the average person.

I just did a bunch of googling and Google absolutely refused to give me the stats. I smell the stink of filtered search results.

Anyways, duckduckgo.com gave me this interesting 2016 article.

A total of 3,652 working officers responded.

Out of that population of working officers who plan to vote in the November election, 84% say they support Donald Trump. Hillary was supported by 8%, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson received 5%, and "other" received 3%.

But that's just subscribers to this cop website clicking an option, not a rigorous polling method. On the other hand, geeze that's lopsided. Hillary barely beating out Gary Johnson with single-digit percentage support.

For another datapoint, the NYPD union went hard for Trump.

I'd be more convinced if there had been a clear effort to recruit conservatives, prior to this - driving out progressives by purposely making civil service jobs generally less appealing doesn't make me want a civil service job.

In his companies, Musk has recruited peerless employees despite being awful to them, sometimes even awful in an unfair way.

There's a paradox here, which I think is best illustrated by this comparison. Which advertisement will result in the most effective military?

  1. Come join the military. It's not that hard and we'll give you lots of free stuff!

  2. The military will be the hardest experience of your life. You might even die. Only the toughest will make it.

Recruiting people who are doing it for the money or for cushy work conditions gets you exactly the civil service we have now.

#2 jogged my memory of some insane ads for the Marines I remember from when I was a kid. They leaned hard into the challenge but with a fantasy element as well. To a teenage boy, it made being a Marine the coolest-looking occupation imaginable.

Chess is one I remember vividly, and especially the one with the lava monster in the battle arena, which today I learned is called Contest of Honor. Even as a kid I knew it was ridiculous but it still stirred something visceral in my naive little heart.

Any good info on post-Musk twitter recruiting?

Not sure. Tech is kinda easy right now because of all the layoffs in 2022/23. Twitter is doing really well with the employees they do have. The site functions better than it did before.

On a business level, Twitter is crushing it. It's profitable and, with the advertiser boycott broken, it's about to start absolutely gushing cash.

In 2021, Twitter's revenue was $5.1 billion, with expenses of $5.3 billion. Let's assume that expenses are closer to $1-2 billion now, and that revenue is starting to crawl back up towards 2021 levels. This thing is going to throw off billions in profit per year.

I don't think expenses will be down that much. Staffing costs in 2022 was about a billion. So assume that dropped by 80%, R and D was 1.5 billion lets say he cut that by 80% as well, and then sales and marketing was about another billion.

Even if he was as ruthless with all those he's cut maybe 2.5 billion. Which is a lot! But it doesn't look like most of the other fixed expenses could drop much. So it's more likely expenses are around 2.5 billion still at a minimum. And possibly with R and D particularly he might not have been able to cut so deeply but for sake of argument lets say he did.

Revenue was 3.5 billion in 2023. Looks to be about 2.9 - 3.1 billion for 2024 according to Twitter's own figures submitted as part of their applications for licensing for money transmission. But debt servicing costs are about 1.2 billion per year. So predicted loss of ~0.5-0.8 billion for the year would be more likely. It's going to take some growth before it is making multiple billions per year, just looking at the figures. Not impossible, but the debt servicing costs are off setting at least some of the savings Elon made, and self-reported revenue still has dropped from 2023 to 2024 so I can't see a way it is making multiple billions right now.

He has to find a way to arrest the decline in revenue if he wants to be making such a profit I should think.

A couple investors have come out and said that it pivoted to profit in Q4 last year. Can't vouch for accuracy.

Amazon and Apple have also resumed or increased (can't remember which) their advertising on the platform.

Yeah if everything went perfectly they might just be in profit. More importantly will be revenue through 2025 which unless they have to reveal figures when applying for more licenses we may or may not find out about.

On a business level, Twitter is crushing it. It's profitable and, with the advertiser boycott broken, it's about to start absolutely gushing cash.

How would you know? They're private and don't report financials right?

It's profitable and, with the advertiser boycott broken,

Was it?

This is a sincere question- I wasn't tracking any particular industry movement, and last I'd heard was of a lawsuit against boycotters, rather than a breakdown and return of advertisers.

All of the ads I ever see are tiny companies I’ve never heard of. Actually, “companies” might be a bit generous. Most of them seem like outright scams.

I think a few companies cracked and returned to buying ads on Twitter after Trump won, but I don't know if that's going to help much, Twitter always had pretty bad conversion rates. I wouldn't be surprised if the pre-Musk adspend was a subsidy, like those Raytheon ads on MSM.

I get scams, car dealerships, fast food, and pot- about 50/50 English/Spanish. Not exactly high status, but probably a decent sample of very heavy advertising industries.

I'm a little under the impression that Twitter was effectively never profitable, and was only sustained financially by backers entranced by Dorsey's personal charisma.

Many such cases. Reddit also never made profit, from what I recall.

On a business level, Twitter is crushing it.

Which is why the banks who financed the deal just offloaded more debt at a discount (something extraordinarily rare for a buyout of this size absent a major market crash, which didn’t happen)…

Care to expound on the implications for the less financially literate?

(I'm fairly sure I know what you mean, but it's also not something that was covered much in the coverage of the Twitter takeover deal, since much of the media coverage at the time was jeering Musk.)

When Musk bought Twitter, one of the ways he reduced the amount of his own money he had to put up was to borrow a large sum (roughly $13 billion) from a syndicate of banks. The deal is structured so that Twitter is the borrower, not Musk - if Twitter can't pay then Musk has the option to put more of his money in, but the standard result is that Twitter files Chapter 11, the banks end up owning it, and Musk is not on the hook for any more money than what he has already put in. The crucial point is that if Twitter goes bust, the lenders lose $13 billion less whatever they can get for Twitter in a fire sale.

The interest rates on these loans are floating - calculated as SOFR (the rate at which US banks make secured overnight loans to each other, considered a risk-free rate, and which tracks the official Fed Funds rate set by the Federal Reserve very closely) plus a spread. Typically these deals are structured in layers with senior debt (which gets paid first in a bankruptcy) paying a lower spread than the subordinated debt. In the case of Twitter, there is $7 billion at SOFR+4.75%, 3 billion at SOFR+6.5% and 3 billion at SOFR+10%. These are high interest rates, reflecting the risky nature of the deal (even with a relatively low loan-to-value ratio for a leveraged buyout). SOFR+2% would be more usual for the senior paper in this kind of deal. The floating rate means that the value of the loans isn't particularly sensitive to interest rates - if they are worth less than par, it is because Twitter is less creditworthy than when the deal was done.

The business model of syndicated lending is that the banks in the syndicate are hoping to sell the loan to investors. But if something bad happens in the gap between the deal being agreed and the deal closing (in this case, it becoming clear that Musk had drastically overpaid for Twitter, and was going to make things worse by making a high-risk change to the business model) then they can't sell the loans for face value. In this case banks often hold onto the loans rather than selling at a loss.

It looks like the banks have finally been able to sell a big slice of the loans for 97 cents on the dollar. (Which could be enough to break even - the normal arrangement fee on these deals is 2%, but Musk might have paid 3%.) But the fact that they are still selling at a small discount suggests that Twitter is less creditworthy than it was at the time the purchase was announced. Whereas if Musk had successfully executed a turnround, Twitter would be more creditworthy than it was, and the debt would trade at a premium reflecting the high interest rate.

My compliments for your elaboration, and a sincerely deserved AAQC.

SOFR

(a replacement for LIBOR, if any readers remember that scandal from a zillion years ago and understand what LIBOR was from reading the news articles of the time)

Interest rates have increased by just a tad since then. For comparison, TLT (20 year US bonds) are down by more than 25% since Elon bought Twitter.

The extraordinary amount of time taken to offload the debt is the point.

Rates went up significantly since the buyout happened. Banks off loading at a very small discount isn’t indicative of anything.

You have to think in relative terms, the only reason they held it on their balance sheet in the first place is because it was originally too bad to offload.

In 2021, Twitter's revenue was $5.1 billion, with expenses of $5.3 billion.

As the resident Musk critic, I do have to sometimes chuckle at my own side and sigh in disappointment. Believe it or not, I've seen people say things like "Elon Musk's Twitter can barely break even!"

Both models work, that's why the US has both the Air Force AND the Marines.

Hahahahahahahahaha

Elon if you're reading this: the Air Force could be dissolved and folded into the Army and Navy and the result would be a net positive (golf courses everywhere hardest hit).

And if you're still listening to me, ask yourself if the Army really needs to be quite so large in a Pacific Pivot model...

There are only two branches of service, the Army and the Navy. The Corps is a cult and the Air Force is a corporation.

There's also the Space Force, but they're just nerds. They only exist so the other branches have someone whose lunch money they can steal. Might as well be Coast Guard.

"I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country in his heart, and not with his lips only, follow me."

Recruiting people who are doing it for the money or for cushy work conditions gets you exactly the civil service we have now.

Singapore attracts high quality talent to its government bureaucracy by offering salaries comparable to the private sector. They avoid the same institutional ennui as the States by demanding that government officials perform accordingly.

This is the difference between marine corps ads and army ads.

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!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats