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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Elon Musk has suspended a slew of liberal journalists and pundits from Twitter. It is, as Benjamin Braddoc puts it, a red wedding for the liberal establishment. I initially believed that he was just the "controlled" opposition of the deep state, obviously he's stepped on way too many toes for that. This imo underscores an important truth to the ultra principled who believe in free speech absolutism and neutral institutions, the overton window won't shift the other way just to punish the "heretics" who've assailed this sacred virtue. Social media, our Frankenstein, has made it insanely easier for mob rule to influence culture (not that it wasn't already).

I still don't believe we're witnessing complete course reversal, but this could just be the first legitimate W for the right.

EDIT: It looks like he's lifting the suspension.

  • Right-wing politicians, journalists and public personas suspended, banned and shadow-banned for years - "It's a private company, just don't be an asshole!"

  • Left-wing journos suspended for one day for doxing Musk - "It's fascism! Regulators, come and save us! It's free speech apocalypse!"

It is utterly fascinating how there's not a shred of even trying to apply fair standards here. Everything is completely motivated reasoning all the way down.

To be fair: European leaders were pretty against Trump being banned because they prefer censorship to happen on the national government level where they have control the power to decide speech to be in the hands of the people.

I feel in Europe it's a bitt different since there nobody gives a hoot about things like freedom of speech from the start, and there's no need to pretend. So you can just come out and say "we're going to control your speech for your own good, ordnung muss sein!" - and people will be ok with it. So maybe they can afford more principled approach since they are already in control. That said, given how they were pretty much silent over the era of censorship on Twitter 1.0, and started screaming immediately after Musk took over, I suspect they are also not as principled as they may say they are.

Welcome to society, enjoy your tote bag. There has never yet been a political principle that withstood the slightest shift in power dynamics.

But I feel like lately the veneer is peeling off more and the raw unadulterated tribalism is proudly paraded everywhere. We used to have people that are genuinely committed to things like freedom of speech, society control over government, limited government, due process, journalistic standards, etc. We used to have people that tried to at least maintain the facade of evenhandedness and principles. Some of them are still around - but virtually none of them are part of the "establishment", whatever that means in a particular area - they are either forced out or left, foreseeing being forced out. The rule of the day seems to be "2*2 depends on whether we are talking about something useful for my tribe, or something harmful". People openly and vigorously defend opposing viewpoints in the timeframe of months sometimes, and they are not flustered anymore when reminded they said the opposite only a short while ago - they just shrug it off as "enemy propaganda" and march on. I don't know, maybe I am just noticing more, but it seems like it not used to be that way 10 years ago or so.

We never had a single person anywhere who believed in "freedom of speech, society control over government, limited government, due process, journalistic standards, etc."

What we did have was a common understanding among educated people that they wouldn't win every election in perpetuity, what with roughly half the country voting each way. So it behooved intelligent people to maintain some of the facade of even-handedness. Once one side decided they didn't want to play the game, they wanted to win it, even this degraded hypocrisy exited stage left. Now it's only a matter of time.

We never had a single person anywhere who believed in "freedom of speech, society control over government, limited government, due process, journalistic standards, etc."

Hello. I believed, and still believe, in those things. Your assertion is false.

And I believe you just haven't found the situation to falsify your "principles" quite yet.

Maybe we're both wrong.

Кто кого? All the way down.

But let’s not kid ourselves here- right wingers seeing their enemies get suspended are totally going ‘free speech? It’s a private company and you’re being assholes.’

Ya except this was a decision actually made by the private owner of the company, not the FBI sending threatening communiques and making demands.

This might be the only instance in the past 3+ years where the "private company" argument actually has any weight since at least in this instance we're pretty damn sure it wasn't the fascist security-media-intelligence complex state.

This is a reasonable point, I just don’t usually see twitter warriors making it.

Of course they do. In the middle of a culture war, you can't really expect it to be fought just by one side.

But let’s not kid ourselves here

… A statement which is rarely followed by good faith characterizations or steelman arguments.

Here’s who I’ve seen in my right-wing spaces

  1. Some “might makes right” folks cheering their outgroup being silenced and anticipating helicopter rides.

  2. Some “stand on principles of liberty” people asking, confused, why someone in their free-speech principles ingroup would apparently go against his stated principles, then seeing the suspended lefty journos posted links to Elon’s family’s locations in realtime followed by someone in black bloc getting on the hood of his kid’s car, and saying, “well that explains it.”

I know most peoples commitment to free speech is tenuous at best, but how many of such utterances are sincerely stated beliefs versus snarky backhands intended to remind progressives who was singing this tune not long ago?

And we cant just paper over the differences in application here. A sufficiently non-partisan crowd with warm sentiments towards the concept of free speech could be totally on-board with banning the amplification of public tracking data on completely generic grounds regarding public safety. That is not the same thing as banning people over jokes or misgendering.

I know that Elon's statements in support of 'free speech absolutism' has confused so much of the discourse around this. But he also said the platform would attempt to comply with the law, and ultimately wants Twitter to be a place for the 'sane 80%' (should such a thing exist), which of course would entail discrimination of some kind. Who exactly was expecting or wanting Twitter to turn into 4chan or kiwifarms?

It’s totally understandable to me why a South African billionaire is hypersensitive to people doxxing him after someone threatened his child. But the dominant mood I see from right wing twitter isn’t that, nor is it ‘well what goes around comes around’. It’s ‘inshallah censor our enemies’.

From outside it is sad and hilarious.

Reminds me about https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8363.msg337784.html#msg337784 (about Peru and still worth reading if you do not care about Peru)

(...)

This led to left wing protests and riots and a new state of emergency. The same people who praised Castillo's use of such tactics a few months ago flipped for pretty transparently partisan reasons. The left wing considers this a coup (despite it being completely constitutional) and the right wing considers this the successful prevention of a coup (which it was). The father of the right wing presidential candidate, Fujimori, staged a coup in exactly this way in 1992. And the left considers him a dictator. If there's a difference beyond partisan hypocrisy why it's different I can't see it. (Though this does add a wrinkle that the daughter of someone who can credibly be described as a dictator might end up as president. And that the right has the opposite position on legitimate/illegitimate coups making them hypocrites too.)

(...)

The opinion of the left is that the removal was illegitimate for... uh... reasons. Seriously, they don't have a legal argument as far as I can tell. It's all about neoliberalism and capitalism and that Keiko Fujimori is the daughter of a dictator. And her father's a dictator because he dissolved the Congress extra-constitutionally with the support of the military without calling an election. Which is completely different from Castillo because... he succeeded and Castillo failed I guess.

(...)

Fujimori speaks very highly of her father's presidency.

(...)

People on both the left and the right who are interpreting this as a strike against "leftists" or "journalists" are missing the plot, I think. Musk freaking out after some whacko followed a car with his kid in it is not great, it's not how policy should be made at Twitter, but it's not a mirror of the sort of deliberate viewpoint censorship that Twitter previously practiced. It's just not the same category of thing.

And I’ll point out that a South African billionaire has personal reasons to freak out over something like that.

This imo underscores an important truth to the ultra principled who believe in free speech absolutism and neutral institutions, the overton window won't shift the other way just to punish the "heretics" who've assailed this sacred virtue.

Alternatively, it suggests that right wing "free speech" warriors never had a principled commitment to free speech as a value and were just angry that they were getting moderated and criticized.

Alternatively alternatively, it suggets that Elon Musk never had a principled commitment to free speech as a value and given the opportunity will punish people who criticize him.

this could just be the first legitimate W for the right.

What is a "legitimate W" and why would this be the first?

Alternatively, it suggests that right wing "free speech" warriors never had a principled commitment to free speech as a value and were just angry that they were getting moderated and criticized.

Name 3.

My impression is that libertarians and various other flavors of principled free-speech absolutists have always been vanishingly thin on the the ground and that support for free speech amongst the mainstream right has always been much more about a valuing tradition and a preference for "your rules enforced fairly" than classical liberalism and free speech as principles.

I'm reminded of a comment from a week ago or where someone said something to the effect of "it would be terrible if people were actually held accountable for all the mean things they say" and I got downvoted for asking "would it?".

Free speech is a Nash equilibrium we left long ago. It's not coming back for a while I fear. For even if one has principled commitment to the idea they would not be able to enact it and sustain political ends as we stand. As Popper would have it pistols are meeting pistols at the moment.

Your best bet is getting Dorsey or some of the other decentralization people to manage some technical solution to make censorship impossible. Or to win a culture war so thoroughly we can be high trust again. Both difficult, if worthy, endeavors.

Free speech is a Nash equilibrium we left long ago. It's not coming back for a while I fear.

Hot take: Free Speech is basically fine and getting kicked off Twitter is not that big a deal. Most discourse around "Free Speech" has very little to do with actual freedom of speech as opposed to winning/losing popularity contests. And, perhaps more importantly, the attendant influence it gives you over defining the standards of intellectual respectability and polite conversation. Notably, there is ferocious concern over moderation policies on private forums and very little attention given to actual legal constraints on speech, of which there are many (hate speech and anti-discrimination laws, defamation laws, BDS laws, false advertising laws, IP laws, SCOTUS rulings detailing exigent limits on speech, police violence against protesters, etc...)

The promise of freedom of speech has never been that you wouldn't be judged for what you say. At any given time and place, there are opinions which are considered out of bounds despite being perfectly legal to hold and say. These will get you tagged as an asshole, idiot, or lunatic if you espouse them and which may induce people to exercise their freedom to disassociate from you and encourage others to do the same. This is not a matter of freedom of speech, this is basic human social dynamics. The sticking points now are:

a) conservatives have generally held sway in public spaces while liberals were transgressive. Very recently, this has ceased to be true in many spaces. This puts a lot of conservatives, especially on the far right, in the novel position of risking opprobrium for expressing their social and cultural views. (Of course, there have always been views that were too right-wing even where conservatism was the 'default', but that has usually meant actual mask-off Neo Nazis as opposed to, say, spouting racial slurs or harassing trans people).

b) there's been a divergence in viewpoints. Compared to 20 or even 10 years ago, liberal and conservative social views are significantly further apart. Combat with the above and you wind up with a recipe for conflict, since you have a significant fraction of the population with non-overlapping ideas of what constitutes respectable behavior. This is the break in equilibrium.

c) the creation of large, centralized for a designed to stir shit (i.e. Twitter and Facebook) creates discursive FOMO where not have access to these platforms feels like being silenced, even though its actual impact on your ability to speak freely is pretty marginal.

Free speech is at least the ability to express unpopular political opinions unmolested. If it does not include this it is useless.

Given twitter fads have led to legislation and formal and informal organizations that target people with specific opinions to destroy their lives, I find it hard to call buy in to the public square a fear of missing out. Yeah it's fomo alright, of missing out on your ability to use your natural rights because your declared ennemies will punish you for it. Not to mention all the people whose business requires online outreach.

And unlike your characterization, people are indeed mad about Austrian blasphemy laws and the general tyranny of the British State in this particular area.

Free speech is at least the ability to express unpopular political opinions unmolested. If it does not include this it is useless.

Define 'unmolested'. If you go out and say "I think eating babies is good and we should legalize it" and as a result everyone decides you're a creep and ostracizes you, have you been 'molested'? If the answer is no, we're just quibbling over what should get you ostracized. If the answer is 'yes', how do we reconcile a conception of freedom of speech that requires people to listen you with the listeners' own freedoms?

I find it hard to call buy in to the public square a fear of missing out.

Twitter is not the public square. It is a popular private forum. You have no more 'natural right' to use it than you do to use the bathroom at the Carlton Club. If Twitter wants to ban people - whether for transphobia or orchestrating harassment or criticizing Musk - that's their prerogative.

It can be economically beneficial to have access to Twitter for business purposes, but that doesn't oblige Twitter to grant you access any more than Amazon or FB or spacebattles.com. Today Twitter unveiled a policy prohibiting linking to other social media. This is probably going to be a mutually harmful policy, but it is well within Twitter's right to make.

And unlike your characterization, people are indeed mad about Austrian blasphemy laws and the general tyranny of the British State in this particular area.

In the United States, which we were clearly talking about, discourse around free speech revolves almost entirely around the moderation policies of social media sites and only very occasionally touches on actual legal restraints or state violations of free speech. I am not a fan of British policies but they are not the policies of the United States.

If the answer is 'yes', how do we reconcile a conception of freedom of speech that requires people to listen you with the listeners' own freedoms?

My answer is yes and it doesn't require you to listen. It does require you however not to destroy the lives of baby-eating supporters by refusing to do business with them. Ostracism without due process I don't see as a legitimate form of punishment.

There are only two equilibriums I see here: either we go for the no and do pure libertarian contractualism and abolish the CRA, you don't have to bake the cake and "niggers need not apply" is allowed. Or we go for the yes, which is my preference, and the State actively prevents you from dissolving things like employment contracts on political grounds as it does in my country.

Twitter is not the public square. It is a popular private forum.

De jure nonsense. It is the public square, that you refuse to acknowledge it has become so because it is privately structured means nothing.

Besides, I don't recognize the difference between public and private institutions as meaningful. Especially at that size. Twitter, much like the NYT, is a part of the US government.

In the United States, which we were clearly talking about, discourse around free speech revolves almost entirely around the moderation policies of social media sites and only very occasionally touches on actual legal restraints or state violations of free speech.

You easily forget about obscenity and "prurient interest".

My answer is yes and it doesn't require you to listen. It does require you however not to destroy the lives of baby-eating supporters by refusing to do business with them.

These are contradictory statements. If I can't disassociate from baby eaters because I find them objectionable, I am in effect required to listen to them.

The US has an equilibrium on the subject: there is a defined list of protected classes which you cannot use for a basis for discrimination. Despite the hand-wringing over Twitter's moderation policies from people like Hawley or Cruz (or Trump), there is little appetite on the American right for making political affiliation or views a protected class. You may see it floated occasionally in an op-ed, but no one in Congress has taken up the torch. Likely because making political affiliation a protected class would be materially costly to Republicans in ways far more substantial than the gains (making political affiliation a protected class isn't going to stop you from getting banned from Twitter for violating content policies or inciting harassment, but is it going to effectively require non-partisan redistricting).

De jure nonsense. It is the public square, that you refuse to acknowledge it has become so because it is privately structured means nothing.

Expand on this. What makes it the public square? This invariably seems to be made as an unsupported assumption. As far as I can tell, the unstated argument is that Twitter providing access to a large audience, but the same can be said for almost any successful social media platform or traditional media outlet.

(To say nothing of the idea of there being a singular public square being ridiculous)

You easily forget about obscenity and "prurient interest".

I'm not sure what your point is here? My list of legal exceptions to free speech rights in the US was not intended to be exhaustive, and Obscenity is not a major element of contemporary discourse around free speech.

Hilariously Wikipedia included "without fear of social sanction" in its definition of freedom of speech. This was eventually narrowed to the current definition of only legal restrictions to prevent reactionary elements from using it as cover

It's always the "cultural heterodoxy" that campaigns for free speech to accommodate as many dissidents as possible and freely criticise the regime, the left used to be the champion of free speech as early as the 2000s and now that they've ascended to "orthodoxy" status, they treat it as a far-right dogwhistle, their own rendition of "heresy". And of course, the right has been guilty of censorship for the longest of times. It just shows that you're either in control or you aren't.

And given what a huge platform Twitter is and its ability to influence culture, given that it so easily enables mob rule like I said, I do think it is a W for the right now that it's veering closer to them.

Anyone who thinks either party takes free speech seriously hasn't been keeping score for long enough. I know "both sides are bad" is a a very tepid take, but its just true on this one. Both sides have stuff they wish everyone would just shut up about, and unscrupulous enough legislators to give a shot at enacting controls on speech given the right political climate.

This is why organizations like the ACLU are important, in theory at least.

I don't think many people are surprised to see a Republican turn out not to care very much about freedom of speech. The interesting things is that Elon Musk, specificallly, has turned out not to care about freedom of speech very much and is doing things he explicitly said he would not do not long ago, using very similar excuses that the left has used to censor its political opponents, namely a nebulous concern for safety.

People keep repeating this, but none of them have bothered to make the apples to apples comparison of discriminating against political viewpoints versus banning real-time location doxxing. Until they do, this is just more 'Boo Musk' weaksauce.

Wake me up when Elon starts banning people for referring to Rachel Levine by their preferred pronouns.

It may not be the same or even as bad, but it is certainly noteworthy that Elon Musk is turning out to be a hypocrite who doesn't care as much about free speech as he said he did.

I will consider it noteworthy once everything in the Twitter files and the incestuous relationship between SV, the state, and the media (some of banned themselves being implicated in the drops) receives the same measure and moreso.

Unt then - No. I really dont find this noteworthy at all despite your insistence. The last 10 years has been a graveyard of high-minded tech companies loudly pledging their allegiance to free speech suddenly doing an about-face and reneging on that promise when it was convenient. The mainstream conversation about hypocrisy on social media platforms will not start at Elon Musk.

real-time location doxxing

Is it though? I haven't followed this Musk saga, but aren't they just tell where the jet that belongs to Elon is?

It's like if Lady Gaga had a concert, than some people on twitter would say "hey, Lady Gaga will be at this Concert Hall at 19:00", it wouldn't be considered "doxxing" really. Flight radar and such are great tools that are beneficial to our society.

Someone named Scott Alexander had this essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/29/against-signal-boosting-as-doxxing/

I don't think those are comparable. Signal-boosting some offensive tweet written by a nobody might increase his visibility tenfold. Meanwhile signal-boosting public information about Musk will increase risk to him or his family only marginally.

Sadly the ACLU has completely betrayed its principles. It makes me sad; I was so impressed by them as a teen, and now they're up there with the UN Women's Twitter account.

ACLU was formed as the legal defense fund for CPUSA - they haven't betrayed their principles.

https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/blog/baldwin.pdf

The famous cases like Skokie Illinois was classic "signal boost people that make the other side look bad" (only works when you have total control of the press) combined with "create a reputation for our organization as principled that will allow us to be more effective a boosting left wing causes".

yeah thats why my support for them is only theoretical and not practical.

I still don't believe we're witnessing complete course reversal, but this could just be the first legitimate W for the right.

It's not, though, and the people crowing about it don't understand how the game is played. And I'm not saying that because I'm butthurt that some journo I've never heard of that's supposedly 'on my side' is the unlucky ox du jour.

When the left deplatforms someone, they genuinely believe (rightly or wrongly) that they're righteously fighting racism/inequality/injustice. They're saving lives from COVID. They're supporting the downtrodden in society and giving them a chance to improve their lives. Contrary to the conflict theorists, it's neither arbitrary nor intended to make 'disfavored groups' suffer.

When Elon (or some figure on the right) deplatforms someone, 1) best case, he's having to grapple with the realities that many people said he would (thus the smugness) or 2) worst case, he's being driven by petty personal or 'own the libs' revanchism. The small fraction of principled libertarians are slinking off, having lost again, while the conservatives pretending to be principled libertarians are cheering the fact that the libs are getting owned.

They miss the fact that really winning, and not just eking out a transitory term in the white house, requires articulating a vision for the future that wins the hearts and minds of the people. And it needs to be more inspiring than 'we're going to keep things the way they are/turn back the clock to the 1970s/1950s/1776!' People need to believe that tomorrow can be better than today. It needs to be more than 'I'm really angry after the last 5 years and after forfeiting all my morals I just want to hurt my outgroup,' which, I don't mean to pick on that commenter personally, but that's the vibe I get from most of the conservatives here.

And you know what? There's plenty of room to articulate a vision for the future that is better than what democrats have to offer. I wish someone would try, and we could see two visions of utopia competing for popular support rather than the depressing political morass we've been languishing in for the last decade. Something has to change; I'd welcome any thoughts people might have on what that might be.

"My ingroup does the bad things for understandable and laudable reasons, while my outgroup does the same bad things for horrible evil reasons."

Come on man, as an argument, this is "Nuh-UH" and "No U". If the left manages to lose whatever cosmic thing you think they're winning, it will be because they followed policies informed by arguments as shallow and pathetic as this.

The last time we all played this game, it went a little something like this:

https://youtube.com/shorts/-4udwY4nvBE

Come on man, as an argument, this is "Nuh-UH" and "No U". If the left manages to lose whatever cosmic thing you think they're winning, it will be because they followed policies informed by arguments as shallow and pathetic as this.

I'm skeptical I could make any argument along these lines that would impress you. I'm doubtful that my comments that are critical of the left or wokeness are any more incisive or insightful, but they never draw the same accusations, so /shrug. Most top level posts are naked culture warring cutting the other way that again, never draw this objection. To some extent accusations of being a shallow culture warrior is just table stakes for participating in this community regardless of how careful I am. If I truly took all Your (not you personally, the royal You) criticism to heart I would never say anything, and indeed, I delete half my abortive comments without them seeing the light of day. Maybe you'd like that better. I suppose if I got enough replies like yours I'd stop writing long before I became Darwin 2.0, but at least some people seem to find the discussion useful.

Anyways - many of you are taking this as some value judgment. That I'm trying to say 'This is why I'm a blue blooded Democrat damnit, because those dumb-dumb Republicans can't come up with a vision beyond robbing the poor and cutting taxes on the 1%.' Rather, I'm trying to make an argument along these lines although no doubt much less skillfully. I'm also trying to leave an opening for people to tell me I'm misunderstanding the problem, that this is the vision being articulated by so-and-so and I've just never encountered it, or that I'm typical-minding half the country who don't respond to the same incentives I do. I've gotten precious little of the former, maybe half the replies are the latter, and half the comments make me think I'm right and reinforce my belief.

All I can offer is to do my utmost to give your perspective a fair shake.

I'm skeptical

I could make

I'm doubtful that

my comments

how careful I am.

If I truly

I would never

I delete

Maybe you'd like that

I suppose

if I got

replies like yours

I'd stop

I became

Think the flak is on target, personally.

More effort than this, please.

Alright, thanks for the feedback.

I'm also trying to leave an opening for people to tell me I'm misunderstanding the problem, that this is the vision being articulated by so-and-so and I've just never encountered it, or that I'm typical-minding half the country who don't respond to the same incentives I do.

Would you take any such argument seriously? Because it's kinda hard to treat 'we're going to keep things the way they are/turn back the clock to the 1970s/1950s/1776!' from the guy who's gone whole-hog on "Do you want to drive over to my apartment and put a bullet in my head, or set off a bomb at my workplace?" as someone who would.

((Even for this specific case. It's not like libertarians and the Gray Tribe haven't had long arguments over the scope of 'dangerous' or dangerous public information!))

It's not like it's hard to find! There's a (not unreasonable!) reputation for libertarians specifically being seen as the exact class of people being skewered by the "world if X got their way" meme, where small or inconsequential policy changes are supposed to lead to tremendous unrelated benefits, but it's not like this is a thing limited to Reason. Even on the specific matter of the gender culture wars, it's not like the positive vision from social conservatives is something that requires a microscope to find, as much as I disagree with it.

Rather, I'm trying to make an argument along these lines although no doubt much less skillfully.

I'll note that this, likewise, doesn't look like an unusually Positive Vision -- indeed, even if Scott hides it, I'd argue it's more 'turn back the clock' than a lot of mainstream conservative ones! -- so much as a vision you don't disagree with. Which is part of why stamping out whether you actually want what you're asking for, rather than Policies You'd Like, is important as a first step.

((And, uh, your tendency to ghost.))

((And, uh, your tendency to ghost.))

People should be able to leave conversations for any reason at all, including no reason. Posting is not a job. I don't think giving people flak for "ghosting" helps foster a healthy community.

I don't think people owe responses in the general case. I think situations like the post, where there is charitably only one response that pretends to minimally engage with the serious criticisms of a controversial top-level post, out of many that instead try to incorrectly nitpick or simply joke, however, are far more unhealthy.

(I'm assuming you're saying "ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr made a crappy post, people called ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr on it, and ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr didn't engage with them".) I think the sin there is making the crappy post, not failing to engage.

For the record, I wrote 30,000 some odd words about that post and related topics with gattsuru already, hence my frustration at being told I'm guilty of ghosting. I was banned for a day and then took a month or two off from writing anything on the sub after that.

I've since also written 30,000 odd words in multiple conversations with FCfromSSC that you could dig up if you're so inclined. I don't think the other two people I specifically called out would be particularly interested in doing the same, but if they really want to rehash it, I'm willing.

No, I don't think that post (or even this thread!) are crappy. I think they're controversial. Which isn't a sin: the last thing we need is a forum full of 'so controversial yet so brave' that's specifically not.

It's very specifically not supporting them, or bringing false support and then neither changing your mind nor finding better facts, that risk turning into unintentional self-weakman.

More comments

I often leave some replies un-replied-to because I can't think of anything good to say--which is technically within the theme of this forum, so.

((And, uh, your tendency to ghost.))

I've never known CPAR to ghost. Pretty sure I owe him a whole bunch of replies, and he owes me none.

Would you take any such argument seriously?

Of course not, I'm just a mindless Pelosi-bot regurgitating whatever normie talking-points the NYT and George Soros tell me to.

Because it's kinda hard to treat 'we're going to keep things the way they are/turn back the clock to the 1970s/1950s/1776!' from the guy who's gone whole-hog on "Do you want to drive over to my apartment and put a bullet in my head, or set off a bomb at my workplace?" as someone who would.

I don't see why those two are incongruent. The spirit of '76 is practically synonymous with civil war/violent revolution/boogie boys in some parts.

As for the actual violent rhetoric, it seems to have quieted down a bit. Particularly here, but I also think in the broader political arena.

((Even for this specific case. It's not like libertarians and the Gray Tribe haven't had long arguments over the scope of 'dangerous' or dangerous public information!))

So, if I'm understanding correctly, you're upset at the drive-by about 'libertarians slinking away' from Musk when 90% of the post was about conservatives? Okay. For all my very limited criticism of libertarians, I think they do have a fairly grand vision for the future. A Randian utopia where personal freedoms allow the ubermensch to throw off their shackles and accomplish wonders. I don't see this much on the right these days; they seem to want just as much government regulation and interference as the left does.

I'll note that this, likewise, doesn't look like an unusually Positive Vision -- indeed, even if Scott hides it, I'd argue it's more 'turn back the clock' than a lot of mainstream conservative ones!

Hardly. I used that as an example of Scott giving commentary or advice to Republicans, not necessarily the object level arguments themselves. I'm trying to express that my intention wasn't to put down conservatives but rather to point out a real deficit in their platform, and that I think filling it in would benefit the entire country regardless of political affiliation. Perhaps my position in this community just precludes me from making that argument, or I just don't have the chops. Who knows.

((And, uh, your tendency to ghost.))

I'm sure you have some lovingly nursed examples ready-at-hand, but regardless, this one misses the mark. I've written a novella-sized series of replies to your previous objections, 2-3 novellas to FC, another few for professorgerm, others that I can't remember at the moment. When I get 10 replies to something I write I just physically can't give all 10 an effortpost, and if I did anything less, you'd be sitting there smugly accusing me of low-effort posting.

Other times, I find people offensive or off-putting enough that I leave the conversation rather than say something that would get me banned. As you already know, I'm not particularly intelligent; you should add thin-skinned and poor impulse control to your list, and laud me for knowing when to leave the conversation rather than writing something that would get me banned.

Of course not, I'm just a mindless Pelosi-bot regurgitating whatever normie talking-points the NYT and George Soros tell me to.

I get that this is intended as a self-deprecating joke, but it's the sort of joking-not-joking that reads like it's also yes.jpg.

The spirit of '76 is practically synonymous with civil war/violent revolution/boogie boys in some parts.

That's a bit of a weird contrast with the other examples, but ok.

So, if I'm understanding correctly, you're upset at the drive-by about 'libertarians slinking away' from Musk when 90% of the post was about conservatives? Okay. For all my very limited criticism of libertarians, I think they do have a fairly grand vision for the future.

No. My objections are that:

  • There are a number of Grand Positive Visions on the general 'right', with the libertarian ones being the most-generally-known and most-generally-critiqued. (And the Big Head Press comics are particularly goofy about it: the setting features sapient dolphins and apes partly for the gonzo effect, and partly because of course libertarians would recognize sapience, right?)

  • There's a lot of Grand Positive Visions from specifically social- or Trumpist conservatives, for better ( some of the saner socons even if I disagree with their policy goals, some of the economic conservatives) or worse (MAGA isn't just an acronym, David French, the obnoxious Common Good Conservativism). As I point out in one of the lines just after that aside, that "Even on the specific matter of the gender culture wars, it's not like the positive vision from social conservatives is something that requires a microscope to find, as much as I disagree with it."

  • If your critique is that these Grand Positive Visions aren't presented often in the Culture War Thread, it's probably worth considering if that's a result of the limitations of the medium.

  • Even within those limits of the medium, I don't think extrapolating from posters responding to a top-level comment clearly trying to evoke sympathy for their political enemies under norms they've never avowed is going to be a particularly good place to go hunting for examples of grand positive vision...

  • And I think that an emphasis you've selected -- "vibe you get" from "conservatives here", selected from the posts you read -- leaves far too many degrees of freedom. Not because I think WhiningCoil specifically spends a lot of wordcount on positive vision (even if you could steelman one), but because "They're supporting the downtrodden in society and giving them a chance to improve their lives. Contrary to the conflict theorists, it's neither arbitrary nor intended to make 'disfavored groups' suffer." becomes so wide you could drive a truck through it, in the same way that someone here on the right trying to turn the various 'waiting/hoping for cis white guys to die off' memes into some utter damnation of the progressive movement is missing a lot of what's happening.

I get that this is intended as a self-deprecating joke, but it's the sort of joking-not-joking that reads like it's also yes.jpg.

It's neither. This is either getting lost in the gaps between our cultures, or the speech-to-text nature of the internet so I'll be blunt. It's me saying you're being a jerk, and Go Away.

Remarkably, when I complain about SJWs my writing drastically improves, my arguments are unassailable and we're all great friends. If I'm writing about immigration, guns or other touchy subjects, you pop up with a list of standards that the majority of top-level posts, let alone replies, come nowhere near meeting. Yet you never seem particularly upset with much more inflammatory and low-effort right-wing takes.

I've tried to keep an open mind and I appreciate the breadth of your knowledge, but frankly, the criticism isn't constructive anymore (if it ever was) and I don't enjoy the back and forth at this point. Gonna have to do what I do and ghost after this.

There are a number of Grand Positive Visions on the general 'right', with the libertarian ones being the most-generally-known and most-generally-critiqued.

I'd argue that there were, but that times they have a'changed over the last 6 years. Trump was as profligate as the democrats and aligned more with them on i.e. covid relief welfare than his party to great acclaim from his base. The Tea Party is a joke, mostly revealed as a means to stymie Obama's legislative agenda rather than any real desire amongst conservatives to reduce spending. Libertarian and evangelical Christian ideals don't hold the same pull they once did, the Republican party is in flux, and a new vision has yet to emerge. Like...David French having a vision widespread among modern conservatives? The guy who writes in support of prosecuting Trump and how Trumpism has been a disaster for the American evangelical? When's the last time Breitbart or Fox News were meaningfully influenced by any of the ideologies you mentioned? I'm sure there are many Christians on the right, but to suggest that Christian morals is the animus of the modern conservative just isn't true anymore.

Even within those limits of the medium, I don't think extrapolating from posters responding to a top-level comment clearly trying to evoke sympathy for their political enemies under norms they've never avowed is going to be a particularly good place to go hunting for examples of grand positive vision...

Ah, yes, because my entire argument was based on that one comment thread. Speaking of limitations of that medium.

And I think that an emphasis you've selected -- "vibe you get" from "conservatives here", selected from the posts you read -- leaves far too many degrees of freedom.

I do that to 1) try and be less inflammatory because clearly it's a touchy subject and 2) because if I didn't couch my argument in 'I thinks' and 'vibes' you'd be ranting about how ridiculous it is that I have so much confidence in such a stupid argument with no citations. You'll be critical whichever choice I make short of just not writing anything, so why should I engage?

Not because I think WhiningCoil specifically spends a lot of wordcount on positive vision (even if you could steelman one)

He got 40 upvotes for saying that he has no morals anymore. I think we can drop the ridiculous charade that anyone is upvoting based on post quality rather than what they agree with, so it's frankly hilarious and pathetic that so many of you agree with that. And it's not even like that's the only example I could dig up! You're trying to avoid confronting that fact by prevaricating about the medium, or I'm looking in the wrong place, or scare quotes around 'vibes' and 'conservatives around here.'

... you're complaining about 'scare quotes' when I was literally pointing to your own words, in this very thread. Is the problem that I should have ignored the grammar problems and just taken the full "that's the vibe I get from most of the conservatives here" directly?

So be it.

It's me saying you're being a jerk, and Go Away.

As you wish.

More comments

Okay. For all my very limited criticism of libertarians, I think they do have a fairly grand vision for the future. A Randian utopia where personal freedoms allow the ubermensch to throw off their shackles and accomplish wonders.

There are two kinds of libertarian utopias.

One promises world of peace, freedom, prosperity and progress beyond our imagination, the other promises ... other things.

"Of course there will be no poverty and homelessness in libertarian society! All these problems are caused by socialism, true free market economy will create such universal abundance that even for few hours of lowest paid work you can afford to live like multi millionaires of today!"

"Of course there will be no poverty and homelessness in libertarian society, because all poor and homeless will be, hahaha, PHYSICALLY REMOVED! Where? Do not ask, if you do not want to join the ride!"

edit: link to web archive fixed

One promises world of peace, freedom, prosperity and progress beyond our imagination, the other promises ... other things.

Thanks! I'd never seen that comic before, I'll take a look.

"Of course there will be no poverty and homelessness in libertarian society, because all poor and homeless will be, hahaha, PHYSICALLY REMOVED! Where? Do not ask, if you do not want to join the ride!"

Interesting, I'm not sure I've ever come across this one.

The "physical removal" theme is unfortunately common among the Hans-Hermann Hoppe set.

I'd welcome any thoughts people might have on what that might be.

Something along the lines of Trump's "Make America Great Again" but more concrete and effective.

1: Small businesses. Make it way easier to start and run a small business. Slash regulations, maybe taxes too. Take like half the forms and policies and regulations that businesses have to do and either remove them or make them only apply to businesses over a certain size. Make harsher anti-monopoly anti-corruption laws or just enforce existing ones more harshly on large businesses. The American dream isn't that one day you might be a wageslave to a megacorp, it's that you can make it big by your own hard work. Freedom and perseverance and all that. This also will help the balance of power between labor and corporations, more small businesses means more competition for megacorps trying to convince employees to work for them, and a more credible threat that an underpaid employee can just quit as start their own business.

2: Infrastructure. Build fancy buildings and cities and parks and bridges and highways. A modern first world train system would be nice. Cut the cost disease, be less wasteful, and do great things. Create employment for working class people who build stuff, and probably bring some manufacturing jobs back.

Elon Musk seems remarkably well-suited towards being a figurehead or inspiration or actually in charge of parts of the above points. He's good at taking things that everyone has been doing poorly, like space travel or electric cars or internet, things which everyone knows could be better but for some reason aren't, and actually doing it better. And, importantly, these can be part of inspiring utopian visions about the future, not the past. The internet allows for new decentralized employment like Uber or Airbnb, maybe self-employed tradesmen could use similar things to be plumbers or electricians or something, and maybe weird crypto stuff could allow workers and customers to coordinate without some large corporation pulling the strings and leeching the profits. And fancy new technology makes building fancy new infrastructure possible.

3: Family/Community. This one is largely a return to the past, but part of the point of the right is that you don't destroy things just because they're old, you keep the good stuff. The leftist future is one in which you are either an individual who can do whatever you want and cut people's throats to get ahead, or you are a member of a collective group determined by your sex/race/orientation determined by your birth. The rightist future is one in which family and neighbors are bond together by shared traditions, cultures, and mutual duties to each other. You don't just pack up and move to another city abandoning your friends and family every four years even if it would maximize your career trajectory. You are loyal and act with honor even when it goes against your self-interest, because you actually care about the people around you, and they care about you. Also, I think there is potential for this to go in future directions, as telecommunications, and the easier work-from-home meta caused by Covid allows for increased career opportunities for people who stay in their small hometowns with their extended families.

Republicans are too busy playing defense against the Democrats to build such a utopian vision, and too afraid of being cancelled to shrug off accusations of "-isms" and stick to their own vision of moral goodness. And most of the voters are too uneducated and unambitious to demand such a utopian vision, or to demand honor and loyalty from their own politicians. And the Democrats have been crying wolf against Republicans for so long that all such accusations are now ignored by Republican voters, allowing some actual wolves to mingle among them unnoticed. It's a mess, and I'm almost as upset at the Republicans as I am at the Democrats for ruining the country. But at least theoretically a utopian right wing vision of the future is possible and would be inspiring to people to vote for and genuinely good if accomplished.

The leftist future is one in which you are either an individual who can do whatever you want and cut people's throats to get ahead, or you are a member of a collective group determined by your sex/race/orientation determined by your birth. The rightist future is one in which family and neighbors are bond together by shared traditions, cultures, and mutual duties to each other.

Since when is there no such thing as a libright?

Take like half the forms and policies and regulations that businesses have to do and either remove them or make them only apply to businesses over a certain size.

This is already true. There's a huge cliff at 50 employees, and a few lesser ones lower down.

Infrastructure. Build fancy buildings and cities and parks and bridges and highways. A modern first world train system would be nice. Cut the cost disease, be less wasteful, and do great things. Create employment for working class people who build stuff, and probably bring some manufacturing jobs back.

Passenger trains are for leftists; the American right drives. As for the rest of it, the reason for that cost disease is largely public-sector unions and their cozy relationship with politicians, and you can't break them without losing the working class.

The rightist future is one in which family and neighbors are bond together by shared traditions, cultures, and mutual duties to each other.

And nobody wants that except the old people who want to be able to set those traditions and duties. This is why conservatism can never really attract the young. You can make it sound appealing in campaign literature but it's really totalitarian gerontocracy of the worst kind.

More accurately, everyone wants the ends - the society that would exist that way but almost every erosion that progressives put through was individually popular.

"Cut cost disease" is exactly the same as "get rid of public sector feather bedding" AND "get rid of 'reasonable environment protections'" AND "get rid of simple rules to ensure justice in hiring", etc.

Ultimately it's a case that the framework of rules that progressives push for that is somewhat popular simply because it permeates all society is "everything must be approved of by a committee using lots of words to ensure fairness". None of it changes without a cultural change and it takes something pretty extreme to change a culture that way.

And nobody wants that except the old people who want to be able to set those traditions and duties. This is why conservatism can never really attract the young.

You make good points, but I actually think we're seeing a (small) shift here, that could be expanded upon by the right leaders and messaging.

All the hip young professionals I know fled the cities during COVID, started having families, and took up gardening and canning peppers and shit. And they all secretly love living in red/purple suburbs where they dont have to deal with homeless encampments. And they're all secretly terrified of what the public schools are going to do to their kids. They're practically Republicans already, they just don't want to admit it because they think the brand's so toxic.

All those hip young professionals will vote for politicians who make those places worse. They may like suburban living (which is not the same as traditional conservatism; it's the liberalism of the post-WWII generation, and almost as atomized as cities. What holds suburbs together is families with children, but actually forming families there is difficult), but they know in their lefty-educated bones that it's immoral and terrible and they'll work to destroy it.

And nobody wants that except the old people who want to be able to set those traditions and duties. This is why conservatism can never really attract the young.

I don’t think this is the case. In my experience the trad right is mostly young, pushing back against older conservatives who are economically right-wing but socially liberal. The traditions in question are also more likely to be those of dead ancestors than current elders, and in practice there’s nothing preventing the young from interpreting those as they please.

In short, I think conservatism in the sense of keep-doing-what-we’re-doing-now skews elderly but RETVRN style rightism is inherently riskier and relies on youthful zealotry.

The online trad-right is just play-acting at conservatism. They like the aesthetic (or the aesthetic they've invented for it, anyway), but they're not actually practicing the substance.

As I understand it, we’re talking about whether such ideas can appeal to groups other than old people. I would say the existence of the online trad-right is proof that they can.

Moving on to the substance, you’re largely correct. To get personal, I’m currently working far from home, I’m not married, I don’t manage to go to church very often, etc. This bothers me.

I would say that the core insight of the trad right is that modern society inherently conspires against living a good life.

  • You can’t keep a sense of community if everyone half-intelligent has to choose between leaving home or committing career suicide.

  • It’s hard to marry when many jobs are effectively gender-segregated and most romance takes place on the Tinder meat market.

  • If you do, you have to choose between being childless, working long hours to afford childcare, and career suicide for at least one parent.

  • Et cetera.

Now, you may feel that this is all whining but the reality is that even if driven individuals can push back against this stuff, it’s too hard for most of us to swim against the current. I think the stars re: loneliness, celibacy bear this out.

In short, I predict that if we do see a return to trad conservatism (which frankly I doubt) there will be a generational gap where trad ideas are popular but the necessary reforms and innovations aren’t yet there for the majority to live according to those ideals.

This is mostly shooting in the dark, though. I would be interested in discussing previous successful traditionalist movements - I have a hunch that the Meiji Restoration is one, and the Great Awakening in America might be another.

I have to point out that the Meijj Restoration wasn't at all a conservative movement, but the exact opposite, where the Imperial government was embracing Western and modern influences and destroying much of the traditional social structure of Japan. The fact it "restored" power to the Emperor instead of the Shogun and Daimyos really doesn't make it conservative.

As I understand it, we’re talking about whether such ideas can appeal to groups other than old people. I would say the existence of the online trad-right is proof that they can.

My claim is the ideas as fully fleshed-out do not actually appeal to the online trad-right; rather, the online trad-right likes the aesthetic associated with them and has not really considered the consequences.

You can’t keep a sense of community if everyone half-intelligent has to choose between leaving home or committing career suicide.

Traditional conservativism does not solve this problem; it simply makes the choice of "career suicide"

It’s hard to marry when many jobs are effectively gender-segregated and most romance takes place on the Tinder meat market.

Traditional conservatism keeps the jobs gender-segregated; you (assuming you're male) marry a girl from your community (school, church, etc). This does solve the problem, though not for the online right: it only works if you actually grew up in a traditional community and married a girl there.

If you do, you have to choose between being childless, working long hours to afford childcare, and career suicide for at least one parent.

Traditional conservatism also does not solve this problem; it simply chooses "career suicide for the woman".

When the left deplatforms someone, they genuinely believe (rightly or wrongly) that they're righteously fighting racism/inequality/injustice. They're saving lives from COVID. They're supporting the downtrodden in society and giving them a chance to improve their lives.

Oh ditch the fucking halo, it doesn't fit.

Most of the time the facts behind racism claims don't bear out, like when asked to estimate the amount of unarmed black men they will wildly overestimate. They defend career criminals and violent recidivists purely on tribal allegiance to skin colour. Lab leak? Hunter laptop? Vaccine efficacy? The "misinformation" turned out to be closer to the truth all along in every case. And with masks the Powers That Be initially claimed they didn't work and nobody needed them before harsh-reversing course and mandating them! Were any of these errors ever acknowledged and apologised for? Were they fuck.

When Elon (or some figure on the right) deplatforms someone, 1) best case, he's having to grapple with the realities that many people said he would (thus the smugness) or 2) worst case, he's being driven by petty personal or 'own the libs' revanchism.

What if owning the libs is, in itself, a moral good? What if you see these people leading us down the path of speech authoritarianism, transing of children, diversity quotas, quality of life selfdestruction in the name of the climate gods, cultural suicide, race to the bottom globalist economics and paedophilia apologia, and simply think that stopping or impeding them is the single greatest good you can do in the world right now? We have to stop things getting worse before they get better. If someone is destroying your sandcastles, you need to stop him before you can rebuild. This much seems incredibly obvious.

Oh ditch the fucking halo, it doesn't fit.

There are a lot of people here arguing "My side is sincere, your side is all unprincipled conflict theorists," but this post stands out for its naked belligerence and culture warring.

If you're saying things about your outgroup that you would consider inflammatory and unjustified if they said it about you, then you are not making rational arguments, you are booing.

Hello,

Have you perchance read the post I am replying to?

Thanks.

Yes, I did. Now read and take heed of my warning.

Most of the time the facts behind racism claims don't bear out, like when asked to estimate the amount of unarmed black men they will wildly overestimate.

You're missing the point because you're too focused on waging the culture war and winning object level arguments about how bad the outgroup is. All of those things could be true and still orthogonal to the point I'm making.

What if owning the libs is, in itself, a moral good? What if you see these people leading us down the path of speech authoritarianism, transing of children, diversity quotas, quality of life selfdestruction in the name of the climate gods, cultural suicide, race to the bottom globalist economics and paedophilia apologia, and simply think that stopping or impeding them is the single greatest good you can do in the world right now?

Yes! Much closer.

You're missing the point because you're too focused on waging the culture war and winning object level arguments about how bad the outgroup is. All of those things could be true and still orthogonal to the point I'm making.

I don't think they're orthogonal at all. If your animating principles are derived from lies and misinformation, they're not worthy of respect. If verifiable reality contradicts your beliefs, your beliefs are simply wrong. If you don't even know the underlying statistical reality beneath your own beliefs, I have trouble calling your beliefs sincere. If you felt that strongly about it, wouldn't you know the truth? But it seems not.

I really, really don't care if the crazy guy in the street genuinely, truly, sincerely believes that the Blue Men who live in the TV will murder his daughter if he doesn't provide them a blood sacrifice, if the fact is that he's waving a knife at passers-by. However real it is to him doesn't matter at all.

If your animating principles are derived from lies and misinformation, they're not worthy of respect. If verifiable reality contradicts your beliefs, your beliefs are simply wrong. If you don't even know the underlying statistical reality beneath your own beliefs, I have trouble calling your beliefs sincere. If you felt that strongly about it, wouldn't you know the truth?

This line of reasoning can be found on any number of /r/politics posts about the conservative talking points you gave in your earlier post in this thread. "My ideological opponents are lying / tricked by misinformation" isn't exactly an uncommon belief in the Culture War. And we frequently have discussions in this thread arguing over the object level truths of most, if not all, of the claims you list.

But there's still a difference between claiming the moral high ground and being wrong and just straight-up claiming the moral low ground, which, uh, isn't a phrase because it's not something that people usually (ever?) do. I think @Chrisprattalpharaptr is observing the Elon Musk appears to be doing the latter and wants to know what is going on (or what he's missing?) and how this fits into the stories the right tells itself about free speech and their ideology in general.

You appear to have proposed the principle that the left's ideas are harmful and reducing their spread as much as possible is good to reduce the harm they can cause. Which seems like a coherent principle to me even if we disagree on the object level facts.

People here tend to be overly literal, so you get arguments of "well, they're not lying".

There's some equivalent of "reckless disregard for the truth" that should apply. Someone who doesn't check facts, doesn't understand when purported facts look suspicious, and engages in motivated reasoning such that he doesn't look closely at facts that seem to support him, is sincere. He's not lying. But morally, willful blindness is pretty close to lying.

There's plenty of room to articulate a vision for the future that is better than what democrats have to offer. I wish someone would try, and we could see two visions of utopia competing for popular support rather than the depressing political morass we've been languishing in for the last decade.

I think maybe left type people misunderstand right type people's vision for the future. The idea isn't that things shouldn't get better, it's that things are already getting better on their own, capitalism and investment are making all of society more wealthy and we need to avoid killing the golden goose responsible. Tomorrow will be better than today just implicitly so long as we don't do some foolish nonsense like destroy the whole system in a frenzied desire to make sure wealth is equally distributed among the different hair colors or dismantling our industrial base because it offends people that those who invested critical dollars early get the biggest return.

To conservatives progress is sound investment and carefully maintained stability for that investment to grow. Like a carefully planted garden. And to conservatives much of the progressive proposals are of the "Brondo has what plants crave" variety. Conservatives see themselves are pleading with angry short sighted people to leave the plants alone, it's better to eat the fruits than the seeds.

Just so you know it's Brawndo*. Good reference though.

When Elon (or some figure on the right) deplatforms someone, 1) best case, he's having to grapple with the realities that many people said he would (thus the smugness) or 2) worst case, he's being driven by petty personal or 'own the libs' revanchism.

Or (3) righteously toppling a would-be tin-pot tyrant who had a (metaphorical) boot on their necks. Jussayin' there's far more than two ways to characterize this, and I recommend being cautious when speaking to someone else's internal state and motivation.

They miss the fact that really winning, and not just eking out a transitory term in the white house, requires articulating a vision for the future that wins the hearts and minds of the people.

Many (initially) successful revolutions started with no unified positive vision except "the status quo is intolerable." And few groups manage to implement their vision in the event anyway.

Or (3) righteously toppling a would-be tin-pot tyrant who had a (metaphorical) boot on their necks.

I think it's more likely to be a Straussian conjugation of (2).

I recommend being cautious when speaking to someone else's internal state and motivation.

True, I try to be mindful that I'm typical-minding conservatives.

Many (initially) successful revolutions started with no unified positive vision except "the status quo is intolerable." And few groups manage to implement their vision in the event anyway.

When the boog boys are kicking my door down I'll die yelling about how their reactionary vision is inadequate to win popular support.

They miss the fact that really winning, and not just eking out a transitory term in the white house, requires articulating a vision for the future that wins the hearts and minds of the people.

I've read this thread yesterday. It asserts that Musk stands for a compelling and coherent vision:

As Tara Isabella Burton explains in her excellent book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, traditional organized religion is in freefall [...]

Taking religion's place as a source of meaning, purpose, community, and ritual are various ideologies:

Mindfulness/yoga, tarot/astrology, social progressivism, LGBTQ+, wellness/self-care, online communities like Reddit & the Rationalist community, new age spirituality [...]

Burton identifies two as the leading contenders for the title of official civic religion:

Social Justice Culture and Silicon Valley Utopianism

Social Justice Culture (SJC): The belief that racism, sexism, & other forms of bigotry & injustice must be struck down at all costs in order to achieve a better, fairer world on which all our fates depend. The think tank More in Common estimates 8% of Americans agree

Silicon Valley Utopianism (SVU): Holds a deep faith in our ability to optimize human performance, ultimately leading to a utopian future in which humanity transcends its limitations using technology. Includes subgroups like Rationalists, Transhumanists, & Effective Altruists

While they might seem to be at odds, they are really two versions of the same underlying belief: That the orthodoxy of the past must be abolished in order to usher in a bright new future for humanity, one that treats personal experience as the ultimate source of meaning

[...] With all this in mind, Elon's purchase of Twitter isn't just a business transaction. It represents a hostile takeover by the SVU of one of SJC's most sacred sites – as if the Palestinians occupied the Temple Mount and began using it as a base of operations

Not defending the Temple Mount frame or California-centric analysis, I have to admit that the Civic Religion angle is apt. As @2rafa observed, my support of most tenets of Muskianism is essentially irrational and quasi-religious, following from my basic Cosmism (that Musk, as a deathist, unfortunately disagrees with) and qualified belief in technological solutions to problems that, while social in nature, partially follow from scarcity and technological limits.

Compared to SVU or SJC, what do libertarians offer in the marketplace of ideas? If they know what's good for them, I think they should position themselves as a minor sect allied with the former church.

Likewise for many others. The vision of SJC is totalizing and unforgiving to competitors, being rooted in absolute zero-sum philosophy.

I think the point is essentially that Musk stands for a very slightly different form of progressivism. This is fundamentally still not only Hegelian grand narrative, humanity’s destiny, march of history type stuff, it’s the specific variant of that stuff that emerged in mid-20th century America. America has been liberal from the start, but this is a sub-variant of a sub-variant of liberalism that seeks to bring about the same thing as sought by the social justice advocates, just slightly differently.

What? Progressivism? Is this just nonstandard terminology, like when libertarians call themselves Classical Liberals, as though libertarianism bears any resemblance to liberalism in the modern taxonomy? Or do you see Musk as actually caring about anything that Nancy Pelosi fights for? In the modern world, "progressive" means "the liberal wing of the liberal party." It's the Squad, John Oliver, pronoun-ism and anti-racism.

Best I can see he is purebred John Galt: low taxes, OSHA can get off his property, openly ridicules pronoun people, doesn't give a shit about worker protections, busts unions as hard as he can, acts like every pointless midwit diversicrat who draws a salary from his companies is effectively stealing from him, and has the absolute audacity to think that people who achieve things deserve more credit and power than people who don't.

No it's not nonstandard terminology, it's standard terminology. What is "progressivism" if not a belief in capital-P Progress? That there is a "right" side and a "wrong" side to history and that being on the "right side" is the same thing as being on the "winning side".

Any fight between Elon Musk and Nancy Pelosi is an intra-tribal squabble between two wealthy secular bay-area liberals.

What is "progressivism" if not a belief in capital-P Progress?

I already defined it in the post you're responding to. It's somewhere between tedious and dishonest to insist that words should be used to mean the opposite of what people actually use them to mean because of their etymology.

Here's the dictionary:

pro·gres·sive

/prəˈɡresiv/

noun

1.

a person advocating or implementing social reform or new, liberal ideas.

"people tend to present themselves either as progressives or traditionalists on this issue"

2.

GRAMMAR

a progressive tense or aspect.

"the present progressive"

Can you describe the mainstream definition of "social reform" or "new, liberal ideas" without invoking "progress"? I'm not sure you can.

That is a completely different kind of "progress" than the progress that Elon Musk believes in. What are we even disagreeing about at this point? You think Elon Musk is a progressive in the mainstream sense of the word?

working in a tech hub and knowing a lot of this type of person their response would largely be that those problems are trivial. First off in a post-scarcity society the amount of problem would be greatly reduced. Hundredfold the economic base of humanity and most problems will be cheap to deal with. With boundless resources, a huge number of jobs performed by AI and a massive economy most problems can be solved by spending small sums of money.

The second assumption is that tech runs the world and everything else is a sideshow. Going from primitive agricuture to the nuclear age is a much larger step than deciding who does the dishes or writes meeting notes. The idea is that tech leads and the rest is mainly commentary to it. The big issue is having a trillion people living in rotating space habitats with a GDP per capita 20 times that of a current western nation, not figuring out how many members the local school boards will have on each rotating habitat.

These types of technoutopians tend to favour descentralization and not really want a specific system for the whole solarsystem. The idea is 3D printing and AI can allow for relatively small groups of people to achieve autonomy and with tens of billions or more people spread out in the solarsystem many different systems will exist in parallel.

First off in a post-scarcity society the amount of problem would be greatly reduced. Hundredfold the economic base of humanity and most problems will be cheap to deal with. With boundless resources, a huge number of jobs performed by AI and a massive economy most problems can be solved by spending small sums of money.

This assumes that the relevant problems are, in fact, material. What if they are instead zero-sum games of pure status? That's what the last 20 years increasingly looks dominated by.

Prosperity and the huge gain in productivity created by the internet and the computing revolution has hardly made culture war less salient than it was a few decades ago

Salience is a subjective metric. Plebs are more placated than ever. Folks here have been losing their minds about excesses of BLM, but compare it either to the '92 race riot or the terror wave in the 70's.

There's a great deal of simulacra running wild; most are ephemeral. With actual virtual reality we may wage entire world wars that'll amount to moving bytes around.

I suppose techno-utopians wouldn't count the current condition as a win. But it is largely a product of tech, and economy built on top of technological improvements.

In any case, not caring a lot about the culture war is a legitimate position to hold, and one expected of people who are more interested in objects than in other people – as in, most STEM nerds.

How will the Martian cities function? Will they be full of men who, like Musk, leave behind a dozen children raised by three single mothers, one of whom was likely never even romantically involved with the father of her children? Will they contain men who run several vastly important businesses (in addition to the above family) but who spend hours every day engaging in banal reciprocal bitching with irrelevant minor press figures on twitter dot com? What is the structure of this society? How is it to be governed? What will its social systems consist of? What will provide its spiritual, religious core? These questions remain unanswered

All these things are details. The main question that is unanswered - aside of question whether Earthly life can survive and prosper long term in Martian gravity - is:

Why? What exactly would the settlers on Mars do, how would they make money, where exactly would come the promised super profits that would justify the super expenses?

Old time colonialism was not done for "destiny", if was done for very concrete benefits (gold, silver, slaves, spices, sugar, tobacco etc...). What Musk promises is, at best, 19th century flag planting in most remote shitholes of the world for "national honor", only several magnitudes more expensive.

The only reason technoutopians justify Martian bases seems to be “in case Earth is destroyed”.

Some libertarian types see space colonies as "land of freedom", as place to hide and escape from "the gubmint". This is even more delusionary take.

If/when Elon delivers what he promised, Mars will be as remote and hard to get to as Antarctica and Arctic are right now. Are people fleeing to Antarctic bases or Arctic oil platforms for freedom or for place to hide?

Some libertarian types see space colonies as "land of freedom", as place to hide and escape from "the gubmint". This is even more delusionary take.

Indeed, Heinlein's Lunar Authority as it existed before the unlikely events of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is probably a better model. Whoever controls the air is the totalitarian leader of society, and if you don't like it you can breathe vacuum.

I think your persistent schtick of grilling leaders over being poor role models doesn't make for good critique. We may live in a fatherless age, but that doesn't mean it's healthy to seek a Daddy in Musk, Peterson, Trump or any other vaguely authoritative and charismatic male; thus, irrelevant if they are underwhelming in that capacity, as most remarkable figures throughout history have been, in any case. We need some way other than celebrity worship to impart values to laymen. There was a certain institution called Church that worked on that, if memory serves.

it’s the specific variant of that stuff that emerged in mid-20th century America. America has been liberal from the start, but this is a sub-variant of a sub-variant of liberalism

From a stratospheric (say Duginist in Noomakhia) point of view where Pharaohs and Plato and actual Nazis and Haredim stand on the same ideological game board as early 20th century progressivists, SJWs and Musk, it may look like «SVU» is a tiny elaboration on a basic Enlightenment take, an unremarkable niche within a niche. But that a priori search space only exists in the abstract; most of those regions either cannot be upscaled for purposes of industrial civilization, or accessed without a catastrophic transition event. Progress may not reveal the Hegelian truth of social organization; it certainly prunes branches away, and all the diversity that practically matters is the diversity we have left on the table. In this sense, Muskianism – or Thielism, or a more broad techno-optimistic «SVU» coalition – is very meaningfully different from «SJC». Space colonization as opposed to penny-pinching footprint optimization, the doctrine of growth as opposed to degrowth, supply side thinking as opposed to grievance-driven spoils system – all that is consequential, more so than speculative details of communal living and sexual mores in eventual Mars colonies. Even if it doesn't have enough verbal novelty to entertain you.

One can read the Quran and Hadiths and come up with a relatively firm picture of the ideal Islamic society in practice.

Are you bullish on Islamists inheriting California? What would you suggest to invest in?

I agree having more explicit and legible work in the ideological direction would be nice. These rich dudes should employ someone talented for that purpose, like their opponents do.

Neal Stephenson, maybe.

There was a certain institution called Church that worked on that, if memory serves.

Lazy counter: isn't God simply the ultimate surrogate father figure, the Biggest Daddy, if you will?

That's not a lazy counter, that's the fucking point.

I recently re-watched the old George C Scott adaptation of the Christmas Carol and the thesis of that film could be summed up as "what's the point of being rich if you 'aint going to get a bitch pregnant". Less flippantly it's about legacy, it's about what's going to out-live you and who racking up a high score on your bank balance doesn't mean shit if it all just goes back to the bank when you croak. Accordingly, reject nihilism and all that liberal nonsense about your life belonging to you. Embrace parenthood. Raise children, train protege's, and build institutions. Choose life.

In terms of leaving a legacy, spreading your memes is better than spreading your genes. Is Andrew Carnegie remembered for his children or for the various universities, charities and other organizations he founded?

But if the goal is to spread your genes, a billionaire today could easily have hundreds of children using IVF. Though I imagine he wouldn't be a very good parent.

The play would be to offer couples with infertile men/lesbians access to your (presumably pretty high quality to begin with) banked sperm in exchange for an annuity valued at several thousand per year in perpetual income and all the expenses of IVF paid. Then your child has two parents, and instead of the parents paying out thousands to get pregnant someone pays them. Sperm banks exist, make your product negative cost there will be pretty good demand.

That's not the point of what I was responding to, though? Dase was pointing out the celebrity-as-father-figure thing, and I was raising the point that replacing the fake-but-physical father figures with one that is completely intangible and invisible probably isn't much of an improvement, even accounting for the "reject false idols" and "the concept of God is less impermanent than a mortal human" aspects.

Well, I alluded to «what would Jesus do» prompt, and Jesus Christ is not just God and ultimate role example for Christians but a Superstar, of course. Still, he has the advantage of not being an erratic American CEO.

And even Church doesn't recommend following Jahweh's example.

They do add some confusion with the whole Trinity thing.

They do add some confusion with the whole Trinity thing.

I was always under the impression that BPD is part of the traditional Middle Eastern conception of fatherhood.

You're modeling the entire right here as a completely cynical enterprise with no goals beyond hurting their outgroup. I think perhaps you could make some sort of case for an individual, such as Elon himself, but to model the entire right that way is missing the point. And worse, it is inaccurate.

I think you're underestimating the sincerity of the believe that the right has, that ruin and destruction will come from the left gaining unchecked power. Be it the economic conservatives who think a command economy will result in famines and shortages, or the religious factions that tend to believe in literal divine retribution, the beliefs held are sincere.

Now, are there cynical and petty people on the right? Absolutely. There are. But, taking the most cynical interpretation of the right, and comparing it to the left's most noble intentions is not a fair starting point.

You're modeling the entire right here as a completely cynical enterprise with no goals beyond hurting their outgroup. I think perhaps you could make some sort of case for an individual, such as Elon himself, but to model the entire right that way is missing the point. And worse, it is inaccurate.

That's not it at all, although I can see how I communicated my point poorly. I don't think either side has any reasonable claim to moral superiority.

However, regardless of whether it's a better model of reality, the story the left tells itself for why it does what it does is much more compelling than what the right does. Particularly in these cases of 'tit for tat' where we're measuring winning or losing in who gets banned from a platform. Leftists wanted to deplatform people to avoid COVID misinformation to save lives. Elon wanted to stand for free speech until his ideals made contact with reality, and now he wants to deplatform people who fucked with his family. Maybe things will balance out, and it will turn into 'your rules but applied fairly' and all doxxers will get banned regardless of affiliation. But 'your rules applied fairly' is still not a particularly proactive or compelling vision for the future.

You could argue, with some merit I'm sure, that the greatest harm comes from the best intentions, and self-righteousness or believing too strongly in your cause is a great way for the left to coast down some slippery slopes towards making the world a worse place. But I'm not even convinced that the right cares about solving the same problems anymore. Is there a competing vision for dealing with homelessness, besides putting them on buses to San Francisco and New York? For drug use, besides being angry at PMCs/neoliberals/deep state traitors who sold out the country to China (maybe the law and order messaging? It's conspicuously absent in discussions about the opioid epidemic though). For social alienation, for assimilating immigrants, for spreading democracy in the world, for poverty? Please, if I'm ignorant fill me in, but to varying degrees I get the impression that these issues just aren't very salient to the right anymore. Nor can I discern any kind of cohesive messaging or worldview the way I can with Reagan or Obama.

However, regardless of whether it's a better model of reality, the story the left tells itself for why it does what it does is much more compelling than what the right does. Particularly in these cases of 'tit for tat' where we're measuring winning or losing in who gets banned from a platform. Leftists wanted to deplatform people to avoid COVID misinformation to save lives. Elon wanted to stand for free speech until his ideals made contact with reality, and now he wants to deplatform people who fucked with his family.

This just shows the tribal differences in viewpoint. The way I see it, retribution against people who threatened your family is a much worthier goal than any anti-misinformation or generally stochastic, society-wide aim. I'd wager at least a third of the nation feels the same way.

Does the left care about solving these problems?

That's distinct from ideology, but I would hope so. Also a question that's impossible to answer without further defining 'solving' or 'trying to solve.'

The most progressive cities in the country have no solution to homelessness (maybe you'd say "at least they're trying," but SF's efforts do not look like they're trying to solve it so much as a bureaucracy trying to make sure everyone is able to skim a few dollars from the effort, in perpetuity

There are a large number of programs, which, as you've pointed out, don't seem particularly effective. And as you expected: at least they're trying.

The stories, though: Ruthless Shkreli wannabes jacking up meds prices, leading to mental breakdown and eviction! White supremacist patriarchy refuses to employ trans women of color, of course they have to work the streets! These people just need a helping hand to be productive members of society #latestagecapitalism

I don't profess to be an expert on homelessness, but I assume it won't be that easy.

The answer to drug use appears to be legalization and "freedom."

Legalization of less addictive substances. Probably methadone clinics, heavy investment in therapy/support groups for addicts, nationalized healthcare, etc for the heavy drugs. The ideology feels a bit lighter on this issue, but I'm not sure what people would say if you asked them.

The answer for social alienation? Crickets.

Probably true. I'm curious what people would answer if I asked them.

Assimilation is racism. Speaking of racism, is the left trying to fix that one or reinvent it?

Fix, by their definitions.

Spreading democracy is colonialism.

Depends. A righteous crusade to rescue trans, gay, women and people of color from the privileged classes probably wouldn't register as colonialism.

Frankly, yeah, "the right" sucks right now.

I'm not even trying to make a value judgment. I'm trying to make an argument that they need to think bigger, stop being reactionary and provide ideological explanations/solutions to problems in society.

When I think visions of the future, I think people like Dryden Brown and Justin Murphy. They have visions for the future; they are also, basically, nobodies.

Thanks for the recommendations!

"Believe in the righteousness of your cause, regardless of actual effects" is not exactly a glowing endorsement.

Well, of course they should do better at trying to actually trying to track down the effects of their policies. In their defense, a lot of these problems are fairly complex and intractable even for people who study it full-time.

What is their vision of the future? Does it make any sense? I have no clue what their vision for the future is. Maybe the Democrats have a vision for the next five minutes, they have a vision for the resistance or the revolution, but that's not comes to my mind when I think of a vision for the future.

Perhaps 'the future' is the wrong concept to use. It's fairly rooted in and focused on the problems of the present, more so than the utopians dreaming of metropolises on Mars.

(Maybe had a boring Friday?)

Occam's razor would suggest that I'm a loser eating cheetos in my mom's basement, arguing on the internet in between World of Warcraft raids.

Maybe sanity (like your clinics and therapy) can win out in other places, but the way ever progressive move slides towards Berkeleyism doesn’t give me hope for that.

Oh, uh, I definitely wouldn't call it my approach or particularly effective. The block hosting the methadone clinic at my alma mater had the worst reputation on campus and was always a mess. Then again, who knows what the counterfactual would be like?

I've only driven through San Francisco once so you would know better than me.

I’m going to keep picking at this, because I think asked a good question but your defenses of the left are so “damning with faint praise” that I’m still not sure exactly what you’re expecting to find.

“Tell a compelling story, regardless of reality” and “fix, by their definitions” is surprisingly effective for modern progressives, completely horrifying, and a cheer for nonsensical propaganda. I don’t think that’s actually what you want from the right or from a competing utopian vision.

You likely won't find much of substance after scratching the surface, I'm afraid. I identify with the left because they speak to the problems I care about; if someone had a realistic alternative that was more effective without committing atrocities (i.e. gassing the homeless to clean up the streets) I'd be on board. If rationalism could actually proselytize to the masses to focus more on data and results, we might get somewhere. Like, you say you care about black homeownership? How do you not know that it's largely unchanged in 50 years despite all the policies we've tried? Maybe we shouldn't hold such strong opinions about things we haven't seriously researched in any meaningful capacity...

“Tell a compelling story, regardless of reality” and “fix, by their definitions” is surprisingly effective for modern progressives, completely horrifying, and a cheer for nonsensical propaganda. I don’t think that’s actually what you want from the right or from a competing utopian vision.

Good, bad, it seems like reality, no? Many people are rabidly woke. People want to do the right thing, people want to feel good about themselves and many need ideology as a part of that identity. I'd like us to all have a nice dispassionate discussion about how to run society led by the relevant technocrats who haven't been captured by one interest or another, but that isn't the world we live in - and many problems are big and complex enough that even the people who study them 24/7 don't know the answer.

That being said, I don't think the liberal project has been a failure on every count. Poverty is down. Global poverty and death/disability from many preventable diseases is way down. 20 million fewer uninsured Americans from 15 years ago. Broad social acceptance of interracial and same-sex marriage. Sometimes you tell a compelling story and the world is a better place. Sometimes, you tell a compelling story that diverges from reality and you bonk your head against the wall for a decade or two before society finally lumbers back to the drawing board.

Really elaborating on my views would take a longer post than this.

then I’ll assume you’re an accelerationist.

Quite the opposite, I'm afraid. Although Kendi doesn't get my goat the way it does many people here - I'm not sure I agree with his worldview, but it's certainly an interesting one that makes me question how far I'd be willing to go for equality. I strongly support affirmative action and even quotas for some positions (largely political), but I'm not interested in Harrison Bergeroning society into homogeneity. Many of the quotes that do circulate (I mostly remember the 'white people are literally aliens' one) are cherry-picked to generate ridicule and outrage.

Don't think I've read the other authors.

Redefining evil as good, and telling a good story about it, should not be our goal.

Agreed.

Progressives have been able to tell themselves what is apparently a convincing story on racism, that it can only be answered by EVEN MORE RACISM- this has, to date, spawned a bunch of grifters, an increased murder rate, and more misery for everyone, making the world worse for everyone that’s not profiting from the grift. You can call it “at least they’re trying” if you want, but that just sounds like an action bias; their “trying” is actively counterproductive.

The failures are what gets highlighted, because we're American and our failure mode is to bitch about every single thing the government and opposition do endlessly (as opposed to China whose failure mode is the global times assuring me everything is fantastic until the day there's no food on the shelves and the condo I paid for is never going to be built). As I've said, I don't think it's all been negative. As for the actual, undeniable failures like the mess of a crime rate or vaccines ending the pandemic, I think they'll collapse under their own weight - as they should! Just always more slowly than I'd predict, the way I thought everyone would give up on mask mandates and lockdowns after widespread vaccination in summer of 2021.

And of course, some failures whose causes aren't so tightly connected to their consequences will slip through the cracks to plague us for decades to come. Such is life.

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As for the actual, undeniable failures like the mess of a crime rate or vaccines ending the pandemic, I think they'll collapse under their own weight - as they should! Just always more slowly than I'd predict

Hi! Can you please stop radicalizing me in the direction of violent extremism? Thanks!

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The stories, though: Ruthless Shkreli wannabes jacking up meds prices, leading to mental breakdown and eviction! White supremacist patriarchy refuses to employ trans women of color, of course they have to work the streets! These people just need a helping hand to be productive members of society #latestagecapitalism

You're correct to call them "stories," and right now the left seems to care a lot more about allegiance to its stories about the world than whether or not acting on the basis of those stories actually brings about the results they profess to care about.

The answer to drug use appears to be legalization and "freedom."

The war on drugs has been an unmitigated disaster, the amount of money spent chasing weed farmers and purveyors of psychedelics as if they were the same as heroin producers is insane. Legalizing and regulating the production and sale of illegal drugs would solve a whole lot of problems. Junkies do suck though, and some drugs are legitimately dangerous, so i can't get on board with universal drug legalization, but we have a long way to go before being too permissive becomes remotely concerning.

The answer for social alienation

this isn't the government's job, and as far as i can tell the right's prescription to the problem is to go to church. this doesn't work well for a country with a very large and growing atheist population.

Assimilation is racism

don't confuse the progressive avant garde for the platform dem position. 20 bucks says if you ask joe biden if assimilation is racism he will say no.

Spreading democracy is colonialism

same here, but i'm actually a bit more sympathetic to this one. Democracy is great, but if some other country wants to be a monarchy or whatever, how would you describe strong arming them to do otherwise?

my mental model of "the left"

"the left" is not a political party, but a diaspora of actual politicians and activists and twitter users etc. By and large the more zealous progressives have very little actual political cache, and garner far more twitter likes than votes.

As for wether the left wants things solved, i'm sure that having every dem-proposed initiative that makes it to congress get tanked on arrival might have something to do with the image of dems not getting shit done.

You're modeling the entire right here as a completely cynical enterprise with no goals beyond hurting their outgroup.

With two word changes, I think he'd be correct, though: "no unified goals beyond stopping their outgroup."

I'll give you that one, the right does not seem to be a single cohesive group at the moment.

Except on the point of stopping the left, where it is extremely unified.

You know, I think you're usually more even-handed than most (or at least seem to make an effort)

Thanks.

but that is an utterly preposterous claim completely unsupported by evidence.

It's a claim about the story they tell themselves, not an actual evaluation of their character.

You're correct that there are people on the fringe who are irredeemably toxic people who just want Republicans to suffer. I think there's a much larger cohort in the middle who can be toxic at times, but justify it to themselves with the rationale I laid out above. And some smaller cohort of idealists who actually try and live up to their principles. I think this dynamic is probably also reflected on the right.

But what I also see is the near hegemony of 'woke thought' or left-leaning answers to social problems. The right would say this is due to censorship, biased media, the deep state, etc and there's certainly some grain of truth to that. But I think it goes deeper than that - I don't think the right currently has a cohesive ideological framework (at least that I can articulate or grasp) for dealing with society's ills in the same way that Reagan did (cut taxes/regulation, business does great and the lower strata of society will prosper along with everyone else) or that woke people do (patriarchal white supremacist ableist society needs to be checked for the lower strata to prosper).

Do you think that's fairer, or still off the mark?

But I think it goes deeper than that - I don't think the right currently has a cohesive ideological framework (at least that I can articulate or grasp) for dealing with society's ills in the same way that Reagan did (cut taxes/regulation, business does great and the lower strata of society will prosper along with everyone else) or that woke people do (patriarchal white supremacist ableist society needs to be checked for the lower strata to prosper).

Do you think that's fairer, or still off the mark?

That's fair from my perspective but it's also necessary due to the asymmetry between the left and right.

The left is the side of "do something [that just so happens to make the problem it's claimed to solve worse and enriches my team and hurts my enemies] then never look at the results of that something but use the failure as evidence that the problem was not enough progressivism".

It can and does work piecemeal (even if you think my above description is "uncharitable") - you can support "more money for better teacher pay" and "more enforcement of diversity quotas in employment" and "more money for addict services" and etc. because each of those is ultimately a parasitic drain on private society - parasites are only in competition if the host is terminal.

On the other hand, the right has to come up a positive vision of what society should be and how it should be ordered - can't have a monarchy and some kind of restored republic so the only thing the right can agree on is that the left has to be stopped from doing more things.

I don't think the right currently has a cohesive ideological framework (at least that I can articulate or grasp) for dealing with society's ills

There absolutely is one: "Stop the left from transing your kids, burning down city centers in the name of low-life criminals, pretending it's still 1965 for blacks and using it as an excuse to discriminate against whites, outlawing the internal combustion engine, and generally screwing everything up for everyone."

Whether or not that's TRUE is a separate question. But that is absolutely a cohesive (if minimalist) ideological framework.

Is it cohesive? It strikes me as an ad hoc, reactive stance against perceived Democratic policies. To illustrate, let me invert it:

Stop the right from torturing trans kinds, covering for police brutality, ignoring and perpetuating racism against black people, ignoring the looming climate crisis, and generally trashing the country out of reactionary spite.

Whether or not it's a fair assessment is beside the point - it is very much not a cohesive framework. It might descend from one, but as articulated it's just "we're against things our opponents are for". The only unifying theme is that whatever the right does is bad.

I see your point, but I disagree. The idea that "things would be fine if only [outgroup] would stop messing everything up" is cohesive; it provides an explanation for why things are not good. It's not maximally cohesive, because it does not go on to define what "good" is. However, leaving "good" undefined actually leaves room for anyone who is not with or akin to [outgroup] to have their own view of the good, which is both politically advantageous (allows for a big tent with a lot of policy variation), and moral (it maximizes liberty and freedom for [ingroup]). So it's not surprising that it's a schelling point for political organization.

So, it looks like it's pretty clear who's "on top" in the West and can't be interfered with without consequences:

https://twitter.com/VeraJourova/status/1603689440710369281

News about arbitrary suspension of journalists on Twitter is worrying. EU’s Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights. This is reinforced under our #MediaFreedomAct. @elonmusk should be aware of that. There are red lines. And sanctions, soon.

When right wing journalists and conservative commentators were being banned by Twitter wholesale there was nary a peep out of the Powers that Be; however now that Elon is giving left wing censorship fans a taste of their own medicine they have come out in full force crying foul play.

Twitter now also seems to be preventing people from tweeting links to Mastodon and gives you an error claiming your profile description is malware if you try to put your Mastodon profile in your Twitter bio.

Good to see that I'm back to disagreeing with Musk. Banning journos who report on you isn't the same thing as banning vigilantes who stalk you.

Person X was banned for content Y.

Journos go "Nudge-nudge, you can still find Y at link Z if you want it."

How is that not blatantly attempting to circumvent the ban on content Y, exactly? Imagine applying that standard to other things. "No officer, I didn't post any child pornography, I just gave people a link to a place where child pornography is easy to find."

One guy obsessively following Musk around is a stalker. Elon having a meltdown about it... that's news.

In this case the journalists were suspended for tweeting links to the "stalkers."

(Twitter under its previous ownership didnt block links to most outgroup sites).

Defcad would beg to differ: for a period of time, you couldn't even link sympathetic stories that did not include the actual print files.

I don’t really understand how his rationale holds any water and am convinced that this is probably the stupidest thing he could have done to preserve the longevity of the platform. I think he taking ambien again…

Not everyone is a coward. What's the point of being a Billionaire if you're going to let the WEF crowd tell you what you can and can't say?

Oh I agreed with basically everything he’s done at twitter up to this point. Banning a lot of obnoxious journalists just seems like a huge self own.

People have pointed that out, most notably Niccolo Soldo. [1]

TL;DR: Twitter makes sense insofar as a place where journalists go and where you can fuck with them (e.g - use bots to nudge their preferences by liking things) or just dunk on their bad takes, or make them mad.

If he drives them out, Twitter will lose a lot of its present value. Not that there aren't ways Musk could make it great, but what made it unique were the network effects..

[1]

Why Elon's move this evening is potentially bad for the right and why the point of Twitter is to shit on journalists.

Elon's purchase of Twitter did one very, very important thing: it showed just how vital this social media site is in terms of political power, which is why he is under attack now. /2

This app has been from the get-go the favourite social media tool of the US Deep State and particularly its intel faction. Iran's failed Green Revolution, Arab Spring, and so on. All were Twitter-heavy. /3

Thanks to Elon, we recently learned just how big a role Twitter played in fixing the 2020 election in favour of Joe Biden. This did us (almost) all a huge service. We knew it, and now we have proof. /4

Just before the Twitter Leaks release, Elon also cleared out all of the political commissars that worked on behalf of the powers-that-be, and without any drop in site performance, showing just how superfluous they were to the perceived core business. /5

So far, so good. Elon came in to "re-balance" and to "reinforce free speech". These moves would naturally be opposed (and have been) by the shitlibs, because it exposes them for what they have done, and who they are. /6

The paradox of Twitter is that it is both not real life and is the world's town square. For years and years and years, it strongly tilted one way due to the obvious political slant of its operators and key outside influencers. /7

Elon's corrective acts have worked to make Twitter appear much more impartial than it was previously. A level-playing field was being created, one that was demanded by conservatives and right wingers. /8

This level-playing field therefore allowed Twitter to retain its political importance, as all journalists/political types continue to use it despite the bankrupt claims against Elon by many of them. /9

This is how Twitter retains its value. Twitter's value comes from being the only place where the hoi polloi can interact daily with important, famous, and/or notable people. No other site has anything like this. /10

Without the presence of these people, Twitter would have failed well over a decade ago. This is why these types need to continue to feel ownership over Twitter. /11

During 2015-16 when moderation was much more lax than the five years following it, all sorts of anons managed to inflict daily meltdowns on dozens and dozens of these journalists who insisted that we were wrong/evil/etc. /12

It was this energy that helped propel an outsider into the White House. A lot of the fight happened right here on Twitter. News was broken here constantly, as were the brains of those that hate us /13

Yet they still came here, because they had to, and because they set up shop here and felt comfortable here, despite getting rocked day in, day out. Fast forward to COVID era, and even with the scales tipped much more in favour of one side of the political divide, many anons still >managed to make bluechecks look idiotic, and not just journos but health pros as well, winning over those watching /15

None of those health pros/journos would have been here had this not been the world's public square. All of the efforts of those anons would have been for naught, and no one would have seen it /16

You need these institutional types to lend perceived legitimacy to Twitter. Our job is to kick them in the balls repeatedly, day after day after day after day, to drive them crazy like what was done during 2015-16 /17

That cannot be done if Twitter is shown to tilt to the right, because its newly-won impartiality goes up in a poof of smoke with those who are not hysterical 24 hours a day /18

Cheering on the suspension of fckhead shtlib journos that we all hate is empty calories: it takes away from the perceived newly-won impartiality of this site, neutering the impact of kicking them in the balls day after day after day /19

No one should cry for sh*theads like Rupar and Olbermann. What they should want is for them not to "learn a lesson" or "learn how to behave", but to continue to show up here and expose themselves for what they are on a level-playing field /20

...so that we can kick them in the balls over and over and over again on a daily basis, driving them crazy. /21

Banning these fuckheads due to ego is not a 'win'. At most it is a pyrrhic victory, because at the end what is won with a Twitter that has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the normie? You have won a $44 billion TruthSocial/Gab/Parler /22

If he drives them out, Twitter will lose a lot of its present value.

I am afraid you are stuck in your bubble - Twitter is worldwide phenomenon, and political content - especially US political content - is microscopic part of the whole.

What is Twitter about? Turn off your location, and set "worldwide trends" to see.

You will see that Twitter is about sports, celebrities, media and (according to the time of day) Japanese anime or Korean pop. This is the network advertisers are paying for.

Headline news sometimes get there like comet that shines brightly for a short time, but this kind of content prevails.

For example, what is the world talking about right now:

Worldwide trends 1 #DalySunScreenxENGLOT 120K Tweets

2 Entertainment · Trending #NARUTOP99 8,672 Tweets

3 Trending worldwide #遊戯王JF2023 20.8K Tweets

4 Only on Twitter · Trending #cumartesi 3,155 Tweets

5 Cricket · Trending #AUSvSA 8,025 Tweets

6 Horse racing & equestrian · Trending ミスニューヨーク 5,897 Tweets

7 Horse racing & equestrian · Trending ターコイズS 21.8K Tweets

8 NBA · Trending Thomas Bryant 3,637 Tweets

9 Central League · Trending A.R.E 77K Tweets

10 Trending worldwide ジャンフェス 60.9K Tweets

What journalists and other 'thought leaders' are thinking about or what seems popular in the minds of strivers matters vastly, vastly more than some advertising revenue.

What journalists and other 'thought leaders' are thinking about or what seems popular in the minds of strivers matters vastly, vastly more than some advertising revenue.

When they leave Twitter for Mastodon, no one can hear what they are thinking.

article you cited:

Why Elon's move this evening is potentially bad for the right and why the point of Twitter is to shit on journalists.

Twitter is now private property (insert your favorite meme), the point is what Elon wants it to be.

So, what is Elon's plan with Twitter?

Make money?

Twitter has user base of hundreds of millions normies(give or take few billions bots), minuscule minority of them came to hear latest takes of blue check journalists. This is the real capital of Twitter, the real legitimacy.

Elon could rake in advertising cash, unless there is succesful worldwide advertiser boycott.

Spread his message (whatever it is except ELON ELON ELON)?

Even easier when he can kick out anyone who dares to diss him and broadcast his latest hot takes to the whole world unchallenged.

Banning journalists might be bad for "the right", but I do not see any downside for Elon.

I think "irritating journalists daily" is something that has a limit--the Nash Equilibrium is surely "many journalists subscribe to an uber-blocklist that filters away anyone with the slightest sniff of antagonism or criticism," no? And that's obviously rather toxic to the public consciousness, so we probably shouldn't pick at the total-epistemic-closure scab like that.

I know we're not supposed to do the "reply as super-upvote" thing, but this is exactly what I was groping for last night with that toad-boiling comment. Blatant manipulation of the rules is is fun and cathartic, but counterproductive when all you need is a bloodsport arena.

Some technical notes:

  • ADS-B Out is a newer signaling technique. Where conventional transponders provide data squawks with temporary identifiers in response to outside radar bursts, ADS-B Out constantly transmits with a relatively weak ISM-band transmission. The original intent and focus was anti-air-air-collision efforts, but it does also provide coverage where radar ground stations are impractical or ineffective, and does help for flight safety on cross-countries where people don't set up flight-following correctly. Among other things, it transmits aircraft identifier (usually tail-number), model, GPS location, (pressure!) altitude, and speed/vector. It was mandated (with some exceptions not relevant here) starting January 2020, which was an absolute mad scramble for general aviation.

  • ((A few other countries use different approaches: I know Australians have a weird cell phone setup. But for US/EU/Canada, it's the standard.))

  • Because the transmission is weak, it's fairly short-range, but easy to set up a private ground station. I've gotten ~40 miles in clear weather with a big directional antenna from a PiAware, but in practice expect closer to 10-20 miles. Professional ground stations are on a lot of cell phone towers and are rumored to sometimes get 80-120 miles (marketed for 250), though I dunno how much of that actually happens.

  • But there's a lot of agglomeration schema out there. FlightAware is the fancy user-friendly one, but FlightAware also allows people to delist their aircraft from the service (for a fee!). Others do not: ADS-B Exchange is the one being referenced here at length, and afaik doesn't remove flight records periods. It is an absolute pain to use the historical search tool, though.

  • In theory, you can talk with the FAA and join the Privacy ICAO Address program, which gives out a unique non-N-number ID you can use once a month. In practice, the program doesn't work: it requires physical modifications that are a pain, adds a lot of hassle with ATC at irregular intervals, complicates international flight (since it's a US-only program), and doesn't actually obscure the aircraft identifier if it's anything more unusual than a Cessna 152 (since it's not that hard to look for the closest aircraft model of the same type at a given airport).

  • So this is 'public' information, but it's public information in a really weird sense.

  • Bellingcat Discord claims to have found the location of the video Musk tweeted. I don't think these are strong ground markers, but I'm not going to bet my reputation against the sort of internet auties that do a lot of this OSI work. On the other hand, it's not hard to mix their claims and the ADS-B records from that night and make a pretty straightforward story (not accurate, but I'm not making it more accurate, and I'm not going to explain why it's slightly wrong), and the part where they don't seem to be doing so publicly suggests that they either don't have a good understanding of the logistics of private aviation, or they're not really interested in it.

  • In theory, you can talk with the FAA and join the Privacy ICAO Address program, which gives out a unique non-N-number ID you can use once a month. In practice, the program doesn't work: it requires physical modifications that are a pain, adds a lot of hassle with ATC at irregular intervals, complicates international flight (since it's a US-only program), and doesn't actually obscure the aircraft identifier if it's anything more unusual than a Cessna 152 (since it's not that hard to look for the closest aircraft model of the same type at a given airport).

This is exactly what Elon Musk did, however Jack Sweeney explicitly worked around it.

Yes, although it's not clear whether Musk's jet was using an ICAO Address at this time, or even in the last few months. ADS-B Exchange is listing the flights under its normal tail number, and while that could reflect individual reporters or ADS-B Exchange itself doing an automatic translation, the default software package doesn't, and that covers a really wide geographic range including international flights where it would be impractical (impossible?) to use PIA.

Now, even if he stopped using PIA, it's quite likely that's at least in part because of people like Sweeney puncturing the veil of privacy.

You know... I'm surprised by all this, and also not.

I currently work around the FAA LAANC program. And among the edicts to come down to LAANC providers over the last few years is an ever growing emphasis on protecting PII specifically, but data generally. Basically, nobody should ever be able to tell, through you, or the FAA, when any specific person flew a drone. You aren't supposed to keep data forever, users are supposed to be able to purge all their data, providers aren't supposed to share data, it's a whole thing. Privacy is a high concern, probably second only to safety.

So on the one hand, I'm shocked that the FAA is so absolutely shit at private flight data. On the other I'm not, because it's such a legacy application with decades of industry built up around the expectation that the data is public.

Yeah, I'd expect the FAA to be one of the last organizations to lead the charge for data privacy in the modern age, not out of any initiative against it, but simply because it's so peripheral to their job.

Musk's stated motivation for the bans claims that they all posted (or posted links to) ADS-B records, and that Musk had a significant change of heart on the matter after the car his toddler was in was tailed by an activist. I don't think it's a good policy for a few reasons, but understanding how these things work explains a lot of the details of the policy change.

Definitely the biggest W for the right since Trump. If Elon can succeed in bringing "the press are regime shills, institutions are all controlled by progressives, progressives only care about who/whom" to the mainstream, then a lot of the hard work is done. All these institutions have going for them is credibility. Once it's gone, it doesn't come back.

I'm amused by the implication that "these institutions" have any credibility at all.

It illustrates just how deeply embedded in the secular progressive bubble the average mottizen is even if they might identify as otherwise

At risk of mod intervention: does your "Mottizens are secret socialists" view even matter here? We all know that Congress is one of the least-popular things around, and yet, you'll notice that the institution continues to exist and has not been abolished in favor of an autocracy. You can probably get enough Americans to admit that they hate the media, enough to occupy every square inch of Capitol Hill, and yet it's probably not going to force the entire corporate media landscape out of business in a week. It doesn't matter how "Fake and Gay" something is, so long as it has inertia.

What does it practically mean for something to be un-credible? Maybe once upon a time, that meant the thing would lose, in rough order, trust, profitability, mindshare, and power. Nowadays, a social faux pas is just as much an opportunity for defenders to rise up as it is for critics to come out. The NYT will continue to be an entity whose lifeblood is money, regardless of how many "normal" Americans they turn off. Same with all other corporate media.

Sure, most people aren't so disconnected from reality, as you allude to. Doesn't matter, the people who set the tone of the national conversation are the ones least-connected to reality, whatever silent-majority-salt-of-the-earth Americans who make up the "real world" don't.

EDIT: Another thing: I sympathize with the idea you're getting at, that maybe all of this doesn't really matter, but as I've tried to point out in this comment, the few-and-insane sure seem to have more timeline-steering power than most people could ever hope to do. Writing for the Paper of Record is a small seed of changing the minds of the people who have the power to re-order society, to shift great monies around for whatever project they want to see, to possibly destroy the world. I said this in a thread about HBD, that it really doesn't matter, but on the other hand, for those who believe in it, it sure as hell looks like the people who hold the levers of power are poised to drive America off of a cliff--and given the sheer political, military, cultural, and economic power of America, that might as well be tantamount to driving the entire human race off of a cliff. So, this is to say that it doesn't matter, and yet it does at the same time.

does your "Mottizens are secret socialists" view even matter here? We all know that Congress is one of the least-popular things around, and yet, you'll notice that the institution continues to exist and has not been abolished in favor of an autocracy.

First, it's not that the motte is full of "secret socialists" it's that the motte is overwhelmingly secular, progressive, and politically left wing. Yes, there is a difference. More specifically my view is that atheism is the default here. Being college-educated is the default here, A belief in the fundamental correctness of; "Science!", progress, identity politics, elite theory, external loci of control, Marx's model of class consciousness, Hegelian opprossor/opressed dynamics, and so on is the default here. Accordingly, anyone who doesn't already buy into all of these assumptions faces an uphill struggle if they want participate in the discussion.

What does it practically mean for something to be un-credible?

Well this is the 64,000$ question isn't it. One of the core cultural differences between "Red" and "Blue" America is how they think and talk about questions of "authority", letter vs spirit of the law, and similar issues. I know what being credible or (un-credible) means to me. I know what it means when I talk to my friends, family, and co-workers in meat-space, but it's equally clear that what it means to me is very different from what it means to most of the users here. The simple answer from my perspective is that "credibility" is the quality possessed by an "authority", and that someone becoming (or being) un-credible is analogous to loosing one's authority. However because of the issue I observed above about shared assumptions, or rather the lack there of, this probably ought to be unpacked a bit. The traditional conservative definition of "an authority" is the combined qualities of being listened to and believed, both being necessary requirements. Someone who is listened to and not believed is not credible nor are they an authority, and vice versa. Hence the classic formulation of the "appeal to authority". You might not trust me but you can trust so-and-so can't you?

The thing is that the model of authority I have just described is substantially different from the one that is typically used here. The average Mottizen seems to view authority and credibility as things that are bequeathed or imposed society's elites rather than as emergent properties. See @The_Nybbler's line about "The NYT has credibility because they are among the definers of credibility" above, or Scott's long-form posts in defense of Fauci (either removed or retitled at some point because I can't seem to find it atm) and on Bounded Distrust for examples this in action. The difficulty from my perspective is that the whole idea of there being a "definer" or "arbiter" of credibility outside the people being spoken to comes across as complete nonsense because I do not share the sort of underlying assumptions listed above.

At risk of mod intervention myself: The less charitable interpretation of both @The_Nybbler and Scott's posts is that it doesn't matter whether Dr. Fauci and/or the NYT have been demonstrated to be liars, we need to trust them because that is what intelligent rational well-educated people do, and you wouldn't want to be mistaken for someone who is not intelligent, rational, or well-educated would you? To which my impulse is to reply with an eye roll. My ego/perception of my own self-worth is apparently not as wrapped up in being perceived as intelligent or well-educated as theirs are.

The less charitable interpretation of both @The_Nybbler and Scott's posts is that it doesn't matter whether Dr. Fauci and/or the NYT have been demonstrated to be liars, we need to trust them because that is what intelligent rational well-educated people do, and you wouldn't want to be mistaken for someone who is not intelligent, rational, or well-educated would you?

It is not that we need to trust them; I don't. It is that in denying what the New York Times says or what Fauci says -- no matter how much evidence you bring to the table -- you are reducing your own credibility and not affecting theirs at all. You're an "anti-vaxxer" or "lol a Faux News listening Drumpf supporter". And yes, authority and credibility are imposed; perhaps credibility should be emergent, but it is not. Anybody with power and authority will act as if Fauci and the NYT are telling the truth; if you act otherwise you will either need to find other cover for your actions, avoid judgement of them, or be penalized for them.

don't. It is that in denying what the New York Times says or what Fauci says -- no matter how much evidence you bring to the table -- you are reducing your own credibility and not affecting theirs at all.

Reducing your own credibility among whom exactly? What's so bad about being a "Faux News listening Drumpf supporter"?

And yes, authority and credibility are imposed; perhaps credibility should be emergent, but it is not.

I get that you as an ambiguously gay Manhattanite who has chosen to spend their entire life immersed in a progressive environment believe this, but I don't think that history bears it out. Defeat is inevitable until it is not. The captain's word is inviolable until the mutiny.

What credibility the NYT has comes from people like you. You talk a big game about not trusting them but talk is cheap and your actions say otherwise. You could walk away at any time, why don't you? Simply put, I don't see much of a difference between you and the Soviet-era party apparatchik who nods along to the latest news in Pravda even when he knows it's a lie because he values his status within the party more than he values the truth. Ironically, being a practicing Catholic, I'm probably more inclined to sympathize to that position than a lot others in the rationalist diaspora, but don't pretend that isn't the choice you've made.

I get that you as an ambiguously gay Manhattanite who has chosen to spend their entire life immersed in a progressive environment believe this

LOL. I think you have me confused with someone else. I'm neither ambiguous, gay, nor a Manhattanite.

The captain's word is inviolable until the mutiny.

And even if the mutiny succeeds, every hand turns against the mutineers. Your mutineers can't win unless they defeat the entire Admiralty and the state behind it as well. And they can't.

What credibility the NYT has comes from people like you. You talk a big game about not trusting them but talk is cheap and your actions say otherwise. You could walk away at any time, why don't you?

So walk away from my job and become what, a subsistence farmer in Iowa until the BLM (the government agency, that is) decides the land I'm using is too environmentally sensitive for farming? How does that reduce the NYTs credibility?

Simply put, I don't see much of a difference between you and the Soviet-era party apparatchik who nods along to the latest news in Pravda even when he knows it's a lie because he values his status within the party more than he values the truth.

I don't nod along. But my not nodding along doesn't hurt them; sometimes it hurts me.

LOL. I think you have me confused with someone else

No, I don't think I do

And even if the mutiny succeeds, every hand turns against the mutineers. Your mutineers can't win unless they defeat the entire Admiralty and the state behind it as well. And they can't.

Are you familiar with the history of mutinies? Forcing the admiralty to the negotiating table is actually a more common outcome than one might expect. It turns out that de facto control of a capital ship is one hell of a bargaining chip. Spithead, Gibraltar, Invagadon, Kiel, just to name a few.

So walk away from my job and become what, a subsistence farmer in Iowa...

Or, as our previous conversations have covered, there are plenty of decent tech and legal jobs in places like Hunstville, Orlando, and Fort Worth. Your rejection of them as beneath you is on you.

I don't nod along.

Yes you do, you're doing it here, and then you try to paint yourself as a victim for doing so, because victimhood complexes is what progs do. I notice that you never answered my question. What is so bad about about being an "anti-vaxxer" or a "Faux News listening Drumpf supporter"?

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Like Scott once said:

They can publish as many bad articles as they want, & I lose reputation each time I try to review them. Effective Gish Gallop strategy

Kolmogorov Complicity is still complicity.

First, it's not that the motte is full of "secret socialists" it's that the motte is overwhelmingly secular, progressive, and politically left wing.

I doubt that Mottizens would overwhelmingly vote for US Democratic party or UK Labour (or equivalent in other countries)

Yes, there is a difference. More specifically my view is that atheism is the default here.

Most of issues debated here are issues where existence of God/Supreme Being/Great Architect/Intelligent Designer is not relevant at all. When was the last time you saw here atheist/religious debate in the noughties style?

Being college-educated is the default here, A belief in the fundamental correctness of; "Science!", progress, identity politics, elite theory, external loci of control, Marx's model of class consciousness, Hegelian opprossor/opressed dynamics, and so on is the default here.

If only ;-(

When people here talk about Marx and Marxism, they mean in 99% cases "cultural Marxism" other than anything that Marx or anyone folowing him actually said and wrote.

I doubt that Mottizens would overwhelmingly vote for US Democratic party or UK Labour (or equivalent in other countries)

...What percentage of Mottizens do you think voted Obama? I would guess at a number north of 75%.

I doubt that Mottizens would overwhelmingly vote for US Democratic party

I know it's been a while since @tracingwoodgrains has done one of his surveys, but if we take them at face value the most common political affiliation on the motte is Democrats, followed by various 3rd parties. Mottizens voted overwhelming for Clinton in 2016 and gave a slight majority to Biden in 2020.

Most of issues debated here are issues where existence of God/Supreme Being/Great Architect/Intelligent Designer is not relevant at all.

I disagree.

If only ;-(

Look around. It might not be obvious to you because it's the water you're swimming in but from the outside it's not to notice.

Most of issues debated here are issues where existence of God/Supreme Being/Great Architect/Intelligent Designer is not relevant at all.

I disagree.

Well, in the last days, this space is mostly dedicated to Elon Musk and his Twitter escapades. What is the religious/biblical perspective on this current event? How could this issue be even explained in Biblical terms?

Poor man Sveneicus was watching from his window road to his town, and suddenly saw rich man Elonus on the road, traveling, as was his custom, on elephant covered with gold and jewels shining far away.

Sveneicus climbed to the roof and yelled loudly: "Rejoice, citizens! Great Elonus is coming to visit our town! What great honor for all of us!"

Elonus heard Sveneicus and was very displeased. "Stop it! I have many enemies, some of them might heard you and try to harm me. Do you want to have my innocent blood on your hands?"

Who is in the right, Elonus or Sveneicus? What would Jesus say to them?

How is this a W? What part of banning liberal journalists is a W? Was their credibility somehow based on not getting banned from Twitter?

What part of banning liberal journalists is a W?

They (PMCs) are declared class ennemies of technocapital and kulaks. Evil being done upon them is a political good if you are a kulak or a technocapitalist.

Principles and rules might have held back such moves before but they violated the compact that made those principles and are therefore free game.

What was the compact?

Don't conspire to systematically silence your ennemies using informal power when they're right. Pretend the constitution is more than paper.

I can list the violations but you know them. And now we even have hard evidence of the ill intent behind them.

If you censor for expediency, and refuse to play the game of the marketplace of ideas, you don't get to use it as protection after that. It's dead.

You're acting as if being ruled by PMCs changes the reality of their class interests. But it doesn't. Money doesn't even have much to do with this, it's corporate holdings and the public v. private status of the corporations you should be looking at.

Technocapital is aristocrats, men of skill, not of prestige. Elon and his programmers, Twitter HR and CNN journos. These people are much closer to each other than the other group in thinking and political interest. They are the same or allied classes.

Most live under PMC rule but PMC they are not, there's a reason the journos fucking despise the "cryptobros" for instance, or why Zucc and Dorsey have their culturally libertarian instincts kept in check by the system.

Not Gates; Gates grew up rich, just not AS rich.

Was their credibility somehow based on not getting banned from Twitter?

Yes.

There is no such thing as credibility any more for the chattering classes; only popularity. And you can't be popular if no-one can see you.

And yet, their publications will go on to be cited as reliable coverage in the halls of government, academia, etc. They'll be given a more favorable look as historians look back. The people who support them will still do so and the people who hate them won't. Not really seeing how much they lose if they can't cultivate a twitter persona.

Gee, I guess they’re really silly to be so upset about it then.

That's like asking why someone with good healthcare coverage would care if you punched them. That it doesn't impact the rest of their life doesn't mean you didn't do something wrong to them.

This is not to argue the bans are unjustified, I have no opinion on that right now, only that this logic does not hold at all.

You said you didn't see how much they lost by losing a twitter persona. Being punched is painful or frightening, hence an actual loss.

Why would it be a loss?

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Streisand effect says otherwise. I hadn't heard of any of the banned journalists until my timeline was flooded with people talking about the banned journalists.

Are you going to start following them on Mastodon (or on Twitter when they return in a week), or will you forget most of them in a month's time?

I feel like so many invocations of the Streissand Effect are like that meme that's structured like 'Awareness + ???? = Profit'. Being kicked off a platform of immense visibility is surely at counterwinds with the small bump of notoriety you receive for a week.

When someone high-status like Elon Musk tweets "That is because The New York Times has become, for all intents and purposes, an unregistered lobbying firm for far left politicians," it hurts their credibility.

But he's not a neutral figure anymore - the left sees him as an idiot and the right as a daring truth-teller.

This idea that he's hurting them only works among the people who don't have an opinion on the left-wing part of the mainstream media, but trust Musk as some objective truth-teller. How big is this group supposed to be?

No, it hurts Musk's credibility. The NYTs credibility is unassailable.

To echo what I said to @pointsandcorsi, I an amused by the implication that the NYT has credibility to assail.

I think it illustrates how different our worlds are, you're always here acting like "Epstien didn't kill himself" and "the NYT are a bunch of partisan hacks" are whacky, out-there, Alex Jones-tier takes when in my experience they are the popular consensus. I know you live in Manhattan but every time you make one of these comments I find myself biting back the urge to ask if you've actually met anyone who isn't a registered democrat or under the age of 70?

The NYT has credibility because they are among the definers of credibility. The truth doesn't matter; if you go against the NYT you're automatically wrong, among anyone who counts. Think of it like the BATF and machine guns. Sure, you know that a shoelace isn't a machine gun and I know a shoelace isn't a machine gun, but if the BATF says a shoelace is a machine gun it is, and anyone with a shoelace is liable for prosecution. And the prosecutors will prosecute and the judge will go along and so will the higher courts and no amount of pointing out that it's a shoelace will save you from jail time. And to add insult to injury, if and when all this commences, all those law-n-order conservatives who agreed that indeed a shoelace was not a machine gun will say "Well, what did you expect? You knew a shoelace was a machine gun, BATF said so." They don't actually believe a shoelace is a machine gun, but they believe in institutions and the institutions said it was.

Same with the NYT. What they say is truth will be taken as truth, by anyone who matters. Even if it's patently ridiculous.

And the prosecutors will prosecute and the judge will go along and so will the higher courts and no amount of pointing out that it's a shoelace will save you from jail time. And to add insult to injury, if and when all this commences, all those law-n-order conservatives who agreed that indeed a shoelace was not a machine gun will say "Well, what did you expect? You knew a shoelace was a machine gun, BATF said so."

Somehow I suspect that it is hyperbole and not what you actually believe, but I am not really sure.

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Why? He doesn't seem to be saying anything unreasonable.

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This is, to a large extent, self-referential. The NYT is always credible within the "mainstream" narrative because the NYT is a core part of the network of institutions that sets that narrative. But I've got scare quotes around "mainstream" because the NYT and allied outlets simply don't represent any sort of board social consensus anymore. They represent the official line of establishment Democrats, with space occasionally given to more extreme leftist positions to keep activist groups on-side. Their function is to align elites within these spaces and sell Blue Tribe normies on what those elites want.

Republican politicians and other explicitly right-wing public figures and organizations can already almost entirely ignore the NYT, because none of their supporters care what it says. Only 14% of Republicans and 27% of independents have confidence in mass media to report accurately (source).

The danger for "mainstream" media in Musk's Twitter takeover is that Twitter has deep reach among Blue Tribe normies. Musk is going to allow 'unapproved' narratives to spread to and among them, and these narratives will in many cases likely outcompete those coming from above. This could have the effect of seriously undermining the ability of Blue Tribe elites to sell any large constituency on their views, with obvious electoral consequences.

If that were actually true, then nobody would doubt the credibility of the NYT. But there are plenty who used to find them credible and no longer do. Whether Musk will cause more people to lose credence in the NYT remains to be seen, of course, but their credibility most certainly is not unassailable.

There are people who will tell you on a survey they doubt the credibility of the NYT. The next day they'll be credulously repeating whatever it is they read in the NYT and sneering at "Faux News".

Are you seriously asserting that nobody doubts the credibility of the NYT, or that they have not caused at least some people to lose trust in them?

Nobody who is anyone doubts the credibility of the NYT (obviously "deplorables" or "MAGA republicans" do), and the NYT (and mainstream media in general) has gained trust over the past few years even as they've gone more off the rails. For some reason COVID got everyone who was wavering back in the fold and then some.

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The problem is the right has been completely unable to actually create a right-wing alternate to the NYT because there is no audience for that among the Right - it's all DailyWire/Brietbart pushing out the sensational stuff or the day or it's money-losing magazines being propped up by rich donors. There is the WSJ, but it seems unwilling to move beyond its place focusing on business news.

The actual problem is 90% of what the NYT is reliably truthful, even to an ardent right-winger.

I suspect actually that the right has been unable to create a right-wing equivalent of the NYT because that sort of centralized top-down narrative setting is a holdover from an earlier era. The natural means of narrative formation and spread today is social media. Traditionally structured media outlets can't hope to produce narratives as memetically fit as those honed on Twitter, so largely just write sensationalist stories built on top of those. It's not just the right; this describes younger media outlets on the left as well. Even the NYT itself is not immune to this. One now regularly sees echos of Twitter discourse in is coverage.

(All of this is why establishment journalists were so eager to place themselves or their ideological allies in positions that allowed them to influence what ideas could spread on social media, via "trust & safety" councils, official labeling of "misinformation," etc. and why many seem to be practically unraveling in response to Musk getting rid of these things.)

So was Pravda's. Now its name is synonymous with propaganda

Pravda was always synonymous with propaganda. There is no news in the Truth and no truth in the News.

Pravda's name was always synonymous with propaganda. Even inside the Soviet Union.

More so inside the Soviet Union than in America, though.

More likely to find a Pravda believer on the faculty at Yale than in Moscow.

Among who, though? Looking back on the USSR everyone wants to say "oh yeah we knew the whole time," but I call bullshit. I bet a sample of American opinions on NYT is similar to Soviets about Pravda in 1955. And when the NYT falls, whoever writes about it will do so in the same manner.

As Amadan has alluded to, it's one of those "those who know" kind of things. Sure, you can argue that a preference cascade happened and everyone flipped their opinions from what was clearly the opposite, but I personally choose to believe that the actual heart-of-hearts sentiment was indeed the opposite of what was publically-permissible to say pre-1991.

There were some naive people who took it seriously, but the disparity between propaganda and what your eyes saw was far, far greater than anything NYT ever wrote until the late Obama age decline.

Everyone else was simply afraid to speak up, because you had a permanent record* you couldn't check or dispute and were you known for saying stuff like that, it'd have ended noted there.

And your children would have zero hope of getting into university, and were you to persist and became an actual dissident, only the worst jobs would be available to you. If you persisted for years and were good at it - eventually the state would stop treating you like others and encourage you to leave the country.

*I'm assuming that they had, given it was done in satellite states.

Don't just "bet" on things that conveniently fit your worldview when you don't have an accompanying historical knowledge of the times.

We'll see who wins. They way your reply is written, it's ambiguous, to my readings at least, who you are saying has hurt whos credibility. I think you mean Elon hurt the NYT, but frankly it goes both ways. To the sorts of people like my in-laws who swear by neoliberal propaganda, Elon hurt himself by opposing the neoliberal media establishment. Elon's "approval rating" has been dropping. Is that even a real thing? Does it matter? Who knows! But you don't goto war with the neoliberal media establishment and come out unscathed.

I'm reminded when Trump went to war with the machine. Everyone, myself included, loved how Trump got the media to beclown themselves. Expose their naked hypocrisy. And yet at the end of the day, most of his policies were stymied, and they still made him a one term president. In all the ways that mattered, they won. Credibility be damned.

It's hard for me to expect this fight with Elon to go much different. The media will build this unquestionable narrative that Elon has gone insane, that Twitter is harming people, it will be taken off the app store, he'll declare bankruptcy, he'll lose controlling interest in SpaceX and Tesla, and the neoliberal establishment will take them over and shit them up same as they have everything else. That they will have further burned their credibility among non-NPCs doesn't matter. A boot on your face does not require you to believe in it's moral integrity.

The media won against Trump in the end, but it cost them some amount. If they win against Elon, it will cost even more. Eventually they won't have enough left to burn.

The media won against Trump in the end,

With numerous assists from Trump himself, who repeatedly made life for his supporters much harder than it had to be.

Their credibility is self-sustaining. It's taught in the schools, repeated in the media and by government agencies and innumerably "reputable" NGOs and other international organizations. If something that goes against the narrative on Fox News or in the New York Post it's false -- just ask NPR, the New York Times, any given college professor or teacher, etc. All Musk can do is move Twitter to the "not credible" category with the New York Post, Washington Times, Fox, etc.

All these institutions have going for them is credibility.

I'm not sure all they have going for them is credibility. Many of them are monopolies. Many of them have the ties via informal business relationships or regulatory capture to strangle all competitors in the crib. Many of them are government agencies, so "monopoly on violence", etc, etc.

And even with the media, the degree to which they are loss leaders/propaganda outfits funded by nonsense advertising budgets cannot be understated. CNN doesn't get $628m in ad revenue because of their ratings. Nor is it the default channel at airports or government lobbies because of it's clear quality. It's the neo-liberal regime scratching the back of it's propaganda outlets. Literally 2 people in the world could be watching CNN of their own free will, and the ad dollars would still flow, because it's about maintaining the legitimacy that the ad spend relationship gives CNN and the company advertising.

All of that is correct, but credibility is what keeps the government institutions (e.g. CDC) alive. If your average GOP voter believed that 3/4 of government agencies need to be dissolved, things would look quite a bit different.

CNN isn't doing great, but their reputation still has a long way to fall.

credibility is what keeps the government institutions (e.g. CDC) alive

It's credibility huh? I thought it was our tax dollars that are extracted from us under threat of being thrown into a rape cage.

Short term yes, long term not as much

I'm really disappointed with the way Elon is handling this. Why isn't he fighting the obvious target of his plane's location being public information? That's an interesting debate to have, and he just so happens to own the perfect platform to host it. Instead he's banning people merely boosting this info. I don't think that's a trivial thing to do, I think it's definitely rude at the least, but it doesn't actually make him or his family any safer. The cherry on top is that he specifically said he wouldn't ban ElonJet because he believes in free speech that much.

I don't really have any object level disagreements with who he's banning, but the way he's going about it is so chaotic and wrong.

Why did you not post the reason for that, which is that these accounts were posting or linking to the real time location of Elon Musk (and in some cases, inadvertently his children)?

As Musk put it,

If anyone posted real-time locations & addresses of NYT reporters, FBI would be investigating, there’d be hearings on Capitol Hill & Biden would give speeches about end of democracy!

This is absolutely true. If I had an account tracking the location of the editors of NYT, and one of my followers even blocked their car and jumped on their windshield wearing a mask, I would be: fired from any corporate job, investigated by the FBI, sued for harassment, have my own death threats against me, doxx’d by the NYT (including location of my home), and so on.

I think Elon Musk has greater chances of being killed by a left-wing vigilante than anyone else in America, because he’s now controlling what they previously controlled. There’s no substantive argument for why a person’s real time location should be shared publicly.

It was also the same link for a substantial amount (possibly all) of the suspended accounts.

These people talk to one another. It may have been coordinated with the intent of creating a news story about Elon banning liberal journalists.

I love it. These media narcissist were the biggest whiners, pressuring Twitter into selectively enforcing rules, or writing new ones1. Not that I think Twitter needed to be pressured that much. They are used to effectively writing the rules, not having them enforced on them. For many of them, this sort of unearned class privilege is all they've ever known. I wouldn't be shocked if many of them became "journalist" just to bask in it. Their lamentations are totally worth $44B of someone else's money.

  1. Case in point, how the hacked materials policy was applied in the Hunter Laptop case (assuming you take it on good faith that twitter believed it was hacked materials) versus how twitter handled journalist doxing random conservatives from hacked donor lists. Donors of the trucker convoy were publicly identified by journalist and harassed by mobs. Twitter took no action against many, many journalist participating in that digital lynching, despite how obviously their hacked materials policy should have applied.

I don't think the other poster said that they posted a real-time map of his car. (Such things do exist, but they're mostly behind-closed-doors at the car manufacturers and Apple for now.)

Presenting the flight records in real-time and likely landing spots do have risks. There are certain realities of private aviation that make securing things hard, and that mean someone paying attention from the ground can usually identify all the cars from a specific aircraft's passengers for anything smaller than Oshkosh, with a significant time advantage on them actually leaving the FBO office or tarmac. ADS-B Exchange has this data, but it's notoriously obnoxious to use, even for aviation people (and it's controversial among aviation people).

There's a better author than I with a pretty long piece on the ethics of this sorta thing. On net, I'm against a policy treating this as doxing (or otherwise bannable), but I don't think it's nearly as straightforward or banal as first glance.

I'm worried he's boiling the toad too fast--he's pushing even harder than PastTwitter did with the frogs.

And I'm pretty sure there's an attempt to get high profile regime-affiliated people banned to promote mastodon. It's what I'd do. (Then again, would a coordinated attempt to act like the worst people in the world look any different than usual?

Still, I can't but focus on the fact that Twitter isn't letting you tweet any link to mastodon, e.g., mastodon.social/explore

Absolutely this. If he was going to start banning journalists, he needed to do it with a lot more leadup that started with banning people who were tracking the locations of people who weren't politically sensitive, then issuing threats that he would ban journalists too if they didn't stop. Or something like that. Something to focus the attention on the types of bounds he's trying to set, rather than letting the headlines freely read "Musk bans journalists who disagree with him" and such.

As someone who's committed to free speech, I don't see much value in banning people for posting personal locations of billionaire's private jets. That's been public info freely available on the internet for a while. Either Musk should go all-out on banning doxxing of all stripes, or he shouldn't draw the line at all.

From the brief reading I did last night, it appears they were banned by a possibly automated process after insisting on linking to real-time location doxing, including offsite, after an incident in which Musk's child was threatened by a possibly crazy person.

Per normal standards as I have come to understand them:

  1. Twitter is a private company.

  2. Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.

  3. The people involved were directly encouraging stochastic terrorism, which is not protected speech.

Twitter is a private company.

Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.

The people involved were directly encouraging stochastic terrorism, which is not protected speech.

I so want to rub this into the faces of people who bombarded us with that inane messaging for years now. And apart from satisfying my bloodlust, I think it would serve a useful purpose too: it would devalue moronic arguments like these, get the marginal person to think, and taxes the people who have been poisoning the well of public debate over the years.

Thing is, I can't. The people in my personal life aren't online enough to have noticed - and when they do, it will be sanewashed and 3 steps removed from the original incident to a degree that it won't be recognizable anymore; I have been banned from reddit for wrongthink and facebook fights carry too much of a potential professional cost.

Anecdotal evidence, I know. But the hallway monitors of the world have very effectively managed to never be confronted with their own hypocrisy.

I was fine with Twitter pre-Musk banning whomever they liked and I am fine with Twitter post-Musk banning whomever they like. Twitter is not the public square in my opinion and it can control what people can say and who can say it as much as it likes. It can take sides and it can be as transparent or not as it wants. If Musk wants to ban everyone to the left of the secret love child of Thatcher and Reagan that is entirely his prerogative.

Having said that I have derived some little dark amusement at Elon's public free speech absolutist attitude colliding with the reality of a social network, like Wil E. Coyote running into a painted on tunnel. Censorship is a tool and like every tool whether it is good or bad depends on context. I am glad he is learning that censorship is at times a positive thing, because this is an attitude I hold myself. I think a man as smart as Musk should have already learned this lesson a long time ago, but I will take what I can get when people get closer towards my own belief set. He may choose to censor different things than I would in his position but it means in some ways our values are now more closely aligned than before.

It may be "fair" on some most basic level of fairness to invoke "your rules applied fairly". But it is not honest, not when you spent all your time speaking out against those rules, while pretending the issue was with the rules and not that it wasn't you applying them.

I don’t see how this is applicable to me at all, you have it exactly backwards. I don’t think Musk banned these people for badthink, I think he did it for reasonable security reasons. I'm simply noting why every person whining about this is a disingenuous hypocrite, and, per their own standards, an enabler of stochastic terrorism.

I can agree with that. Musk can and is justified in doing that, but you bet I'll hold any previous and future free speech absolutism of his against him, as well as of his supporters against them.

I mean, maybe. But that cuts both ways when the people falling on their sword to expose Elon's "hypocrisy" spent the last 5 years screeching about the intersection of speech and safety, and the "hypocrisy" they are exposing involves doxing a family's whereabouts after there was already an attack.

It's hypocrisy the whole way down.

He did not seem crazy at all. He’s a left wing protestor/terrorist/insurrectionist or whatever word we’re using now.

Ah, that detail was missing from what I had seen. So, firmly in the established bounds of stochastic terrorism, then.

Am I reading you wrong, or do you mean there's a video out there?

There is, Musk actually posted it

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603235998263123969

He said it was due to them doxxing his live location. Do keep in mind though that last month right after he bought twitter, he said he'll keep Jack Sweeny's ElonJet account (which tracks Musk's private jets in real time) on twitter even though it does track his live location, only to change his mind two days ago.

EDIT: It seems he's also suspended Donie O'Sullivan for tweeting a police statement.

A lot of people claiming to be banned or suspended for other things have turned out to have linked to the ADS-B Exchange for an in-progress flight, or to posts that are primarily or predominately about links to an in-progress flight. I'm not sure O'Sullivan's in that class, but it's worth noticing the 'seems'.

He says he suspended them for doxxing his private jet location.

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