I think that's an important dynamic, and I do see it in places. There are two environments you can do this in, and they greatly affect your execution.
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In the first one, no one is paying much attention. You're not trying to outwit smart people who will critically evaluate if what you're doing makes sense; you're trying to come up with facially plausible excuses your enemies can't puncture with ten-second soundbites.
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(I think most politics is at this level. Why did California ban plastic straws rather than, say, instituting a Pigovian tax? They weren't actually trying to help the environment, and they didn't care about fooling anyone who was actually paying attention.)
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In the second environment, people do care, and they're paying attention. You're actually trying to deceive people who don't want to be deceived by you. A *lot* of what you do is exactly what you *would* do if you weren't lying, because you don't want to leak evidence.
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If Scott's playing to the second sort of audience, the McInnes thing was a serious slip up; people noticed it, and compared notes, and thought about what it says about his credibility. If he's playing to the first sort, we'll find that out quickly.
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Replying to @CoughsOnWombats @Outsideness
Sometimes mistakes happen when you don't know what you don't know. Scott is ensconced in such a leftist bubble that he might have thought that statement was just what a reasonable person would say.
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Replying to @CovfefeAnon @Outsideness
What I'm hoping. Six years ago, Scott wrote an article called "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" that let me crawl out of my ideological bubble. Hard to put into words how much I owe him for that. (...)
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That doesn't mean auto-agreeing with anything he says, or failing to notice when he gets things wrong, or failing to look for patterns in the things. But it does buy him an awful lot of screwups before I'd stop being fond of him.
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Replying to @CoughsOnWombats @Outsideness
Hmm, about six years ago he banned me from his comments section for making right wing arguments that he couldn't dispute and declared it the start of a "reign of terror" where he'd ban right wing commenters for any or no reason.
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Thanks, that's nice to hear.
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