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Replying to
twitter.com/thinkagainer/s oops too many metaphors at once in that last tweet lol
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Framing choice: high status artists who realize an aesthetic vision but who might be better understood as status markers for the wealthy, journalists who might serve more as pawns in a war between the business and cultural elites than as anything else
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Heterodoxy and careful reasoning and being really critical of everything are kind of annoying, but they're good anti-grifting defenses. Someone compared these traits to an intellectual immune system, and it's not far off
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But immune systems can be overactive. Some grifts we've coevolved with, like the bacteria in our gut. Many normal and good activities have shades of grift in them
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There's a natural limit to how bad grifts can be. This ensures that both intentional and unintentional grifters are kept from doing too much harm. Outlawing all grifts would probably be very bad for everyone by pushing grifters to do something worse instead
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It's also possible for a victim of a grift to be in on the grift. This is in part because being grifted can give you the appearance of doing something about a problem, which is more important than feeling like you're doing something
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Robin DiAngelo (the White Fragility lady) ran a great grift whose ostensible victims were the companies that paid her for antiracism trainings. But the companies were probably in on the grift! They didn't care that it didn't solve racism, they cared about the appearance
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Grifts work because they're mutually beneficial trades. The grifter gets the money/clout, and the grifted gets the appearance/feeling of helping.
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Nancy Pelosi is the maybe the greatest grifter of our day. She's always out there making Dems feel like they're fighting Trump, ripping up his speeches, kneeling in her kente cloth. Her customers are wealthy liberals, and the product she sells is emotional satisfaction
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