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Chris Rufo is so clearly the rising star of the new-republican party. The guy is smart, knows how to hit back against his main ideological opponent in the woke & seems to be raking in the cultural wins one-after-another. He has an elite educational background while also living around west-coast liberals. Yet somehow, De Santis and republicans seem to trust him.
I don't necessarily agree with him, but watching him navigate these seemingly unwinnable fights and come out on top is fascinating.
I see him get called out for straw-manning & being a bad-faith actor, but his videos pretty much come across as a 'fight fire with fire' approach. The worst things people have to say about him, also apply to his ideological opponents.
Like him or not, he is interesting to follow.
I think his conduct in the video above is commendable but I still think he's too often a bad faith actor. One example happened after the spat between DeSantis and Disney, where Rufo jumped in to mention that a Disney employee has been arrested for child sex crimes at least once a year for the past decade, omitting that Disney employees 190,000 people and how that would compare to an average baseline.
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I don't think he's bad-faith, inasmuch as he's pretending to be something that he's not. He's openly a right-wing culture warrior, and he details exactly how he fights without reservation. When he was placed on the New College board by DeSantis, the NYT accused him of staging a "hostile takeover" of the school in order to roll back the "long march through the institutions" that had made such colleges left-wing bastions. His response was, essentially, "yes, that's exactly what I'm doing".
He's also strangely scrupulous for a culture warrior, refusing to engage in "groomer" rhetoric like his compatriots. Definitely a guy to watch for, as most people in his space develop acute Twitter Brain and self-immolate before they can have any sort of meaningful political impact.
Yup, he's a clear political operator.
It's a strange category error when leftists cite him saying "Do X to win" (e.g. make sure parents associate woke ideology with CRT or vice versa) as if it's him using a logical fallacy in a formal debate or in a philosophical paper. As if political maneuvering hasn't always included this (see the conveniently named "Don't Say Gay" bill which deliberately picks the less controversial LGBT minority as the target and ignores anything else)
It might also reveal something about the mindset of political operatives on the Left: they seem to believe that they win via socratic dialogue and good faith and that similar tactics to Rufo's (or even ones much bigger in scope) aren't being used.
Suffice it to say, I'm sure their enemies are equally skeptical of them.
Committed leftists tend to use a reasoning process which finds the at very least plausible, logical extrapolation of a particular position and see if it violates any well established sacred values. They then declare it illegitimate if it does, and by extension declare illegitimate anyone who might raise it. Ex: If X is claiming blacks are unequal, and he's not claiming that this is the result of white actions --> there must be something fundamentally flawed with black people. People claiming there are fundamental flaws with black people, and by extension that race is a useful proxy for eliminating flawed traits must be racists. There are obvious discrepancies in outcomes. QED: Conservatives are racists. QED: Conservatives are evil and not legitimate critics, they are racists.
It's the Emperor's new clothes, if no one was allowed to mention the nakedness of the emperor and some people had convinced themselves they weren't alluding to it even when they obviously were. Apologies for the spelling errors, I'm drunk.
I saw a lot of this sort of thinking on those EA forums that were linked over the Bostrom controversy. It's a fundamental problem with collectivist, authoritarian thinking. They can't just accept a descriptivist fact, it must be twisted into a prescriptivist dictate.
I mean if I tell you, hey that pitbull is charging for your child - there's a gun in the car, I technically haven't made any policy prescriptions. Nonetheless, it's pretty obvious what basic widely shared moral intuitions demand that you do with those facts. This is why I bring up the emperor. In the real world, your emperor being deluded enough to fall for invisible clothes implies that him and/or his advisors need to be removed from power and there's no way around it.
The general atmosphere of seemingly paranoid fear among the blue tribe is totally legitimate. In this country, the kulaks never lost their guns and blue tribe subjected millions of their children and it's own (Columbia students ride the subway too) to disgusting conditions... for nothing. What is mind-boggling for me, having recently realized what this is in fact what we were doing and defected to the other side is finding that the dog-whistles we were worried about weren't dog whistles at all, and that there are only marginal elements in the red world interested in doing anything about it's subjection.
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It's funny that I see a lot of criticism of him from other people who also criticize wokeness in the same way.
I think significant portion of those critics* are those who broadly agree with his ideological opponents except on a few issues or tactics and therefore are obliged to hate Rufo for working with The Enemy, even though that's basically the only way to achieve anything when one of two political parties is totally opposed to your positions.
Truth be told, there's a class of homeless leftists who I think are a) jealous that he can have an impact, b) have been browbeaten into ineffectiveness by the constant leftist smear that they're further right than they are and, unlike Rufo, aren't willing to bite the bullet and c) scared that by doing so he's empowering the right wing to achieve their other ends (e.g. weakening public schooling)
Ultimately, they're politically irrelevant, clinging on to some self-serving, slave morality definition of "good faith" in spite of its inertness on a policy level. I can see why they're resentful; they can't work with Republicans cause that's a no-no in today's polarized world, but their own side has cast them out as witches. Meanwhile Rufo is using all of their critiques** and winning.
* We know why his direct opponents don't care for consistency.
** I remember Katie Herzog being furious when Rufo (rightly) responded to a trans-skeptical feminist's accusation that he was appropriating their arguments without giving respect by pointing out that the feminists had either totally failed to hold the line on gender identity issues or had actively abetted the problematization of their own hard-fought privileges and so didn't deserve much respect anyway. Having the argument means nothing if you constantly lose or fold; Rufo was going to have to come up with the central piece -winning- on his own anyway, so it's a bit much to demand laurels.
You've hit the nail on the head. As much as I like B&R, Katie's comments on Rufo sounded more like jealously than disagreement. Katie has suffered some of the worst ostracization, while also having the least disagreements with her bullies on most issues. The lady was practically chased out of Seattle. It is natural for her to feel like she deserves the most credit, since she was the one who suffered most. Of course, your willingness to suffer quietly & ineffectively has nothing to do with who gets rewarded once the tide starts turning back again.
It's funny, because Katie's own co-host has written about a similar type of resentfulness from the monetary perspective. The good non-woke-liberal journalists rejected Substack to 'stick by the ingroup's rules', but were instead rewarded with paltry wages & editorial suppression at big media. On the other hand, the sub-stackers 'played dirty' by not following institutional rules, made $$$.
From the POV of on-the-ground impact, Chris Rufo is doing to the 'substack liberals', what the substack liberals did to institutional journalists from a monetary POV.
Harsh, impolite & more accusatory than was necessary....but fair.
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Here is the reference to this
Thanks but - side question- does Nitter just not ever work for anyone else?
nitter DOT net is based in Germany, and German instances seem to work worse for me. I use nitter DOT 1d4 DOT us which works pretty well. There is a list of public instances at https://xnaas.github.io/nitter-instances/
Interesting - your comment reads "twitter dot com is based in Germany," but I assume you wrote "nitter dot net is based in Germany,". A side-effect of the Nitter option in user settings?
Looks like it. I didn't realize bare domain names got automatically converted to links.
Let's test something:
twitter.com twitter.com twitter DOT com
twitter.com twitter.com nitter DOT net
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Yes! Although it seems to vary from day to day for me. One day it will load fine or after a couple of refreshes, the next day it just won't load no matter how many times I refresh. Now if it doesn't load after the third refresh I just cave and replace twitter.com with twitter.c0m like the quitter I am. I know I could change my account settings back to not redirecting, but nitter really is so much better when it works.
Edit lol I am dumb
I self-host my own instance, hadn't had issues since.
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Twitter's API has been throttling lately. Just keep hitting refresh periodically.
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Tends to work for me, but if it doesn't work for you there is a profile setting to not update the links to nitter.
Ah, that there is. Thank you.
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