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Replying to
In general, it is bad for liberal democracies if the actual challenge of keeping them liberal and democratic is outsourced via privatization to an eccentric individual billionaire to do illiberal and undemocratic things with.
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I do think liberal democracies and their institutions (and twitter is one, as are literal football stadiums) can get trapped in local minima, and sometimes need an external kick in pants to break out. I think things like space programs and pandemics serve that kind of function
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A monarchist believes in a very particular source for the “kick in the pants” external force liberal democracies need: identify god-emperors to elevate above the rule of law. There is a certain deep appeal to this “solution” that hooks Straussian Great-Man theists in particular.
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Me, I’m much more in the Terry Pratchett’s Sam Vimes camp: anti-monarchist on principle. He’s descended from a guy who assassinated the last king of Ankh-Morpork, turning it into a neoliberal shaky weak rule-of-law oligarchy that only works because the top noble Vetinari is wise.
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Elon Musk is talented, but his talents are not exactly those of Lord Vetinari, which would be the *minimum* I’d look for
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I mean if you think you need to take Twitter private to “solve” it and it’s supposedly the town square, logically you’re just delaying the actual big move: taking Congress private to “reform” liberal democracy… which is what Putin did to Russia and Trump wants to do to the US
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If you can’t fix Twitter while it’s public you can’t fix the larger problems twitter’s are a microcosm of anyway. So why bother. Let twitter remain the true microcosm of larger problems at least.
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Aside: good evidence of my “70% are natural conservatives” is actually Facebook, which is far larger and solves the scaling problem by letting people atomize into relatively homogeneous groups and messaging groups, rather than actually discoursing in one big public space.
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Also 70% is actually only reflects the US. Most of the world is 80-95% trad. Non-white countries like India are way more trad-conservative. Immigrants here are far more conservative than you might think, and tend “left” in the US mainly out of anti-majoritarian fears, not values.
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Replying to
However nominal, the ability to own even a minuscule fraction of a company and vote with your dollars is partway to just being able to vote in an election. There’s room/need for things in all positions of the spectrum from completely privately owned things to public utilities.
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The notion of free speech in a world where everything worth anything is privately owned is sort of vacuous. It’s empty blather at best, and something that will get you thrown in a Putinesque prison at worst.
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If you give people the right to say absolutely anything they want, while taking away more and more of their right to *do* anything of consequence because all the means are in private hands, have you created a free speech utopia or an empty speech dystopia?
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I see some comments along the lines of if nobody can technically be thrown out via terms of service etc (eg trump) you get some sort of true utopia. It parallels the bitcoin maxi type argument. In practice, when the terms of service are absolutist, you get a lemon market.
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Ie, bad actors chase out the good. In economics, bad money chases out the good. The place to fight for freedom is at the level of the whole society, ie government. Any subset like Twitter that tries to larp “rule of law” through terms of service simply enables lemon markets
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Exit vs voice applies. People only fight to create healthy cultures of voice under if they can’t easily exit bad ones. The place to fight free speech battles is Congress/Supreme Court. If you lose there, what you get is an actual refugee crisis of people exiting entire societies
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If you disagree with things like privileging CDC statements over random “do your own research” advice… I mean, there’s a way to address your concern: run for office, get a bill through to reform/dismantle the CDC etc. To his credit, Trump took his grievances to the right arena.
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I’d say 70% of the actual issues this crowd is moral panicking about is just work-in-progress large scale monitoring-and tagging algorithm design, weak/understaffed due process for appeals, and a feed algorithm with weird biases that don’t map clearly to political lines
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It’s a case of an Altavista era of social waiting for a Google-level algorithmic innovation, not a shadowy woke cabal seeking Total Societal Control. If you want to solve the problems twitter is a microcosm for, run for office. If actual twitter problems, study algorithm design.
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Tldr: Elon is gonna Elon. He’s a force of nature. But you get to choose your ordinary mortal reaction and whether you want to live in a god-emperor world or one where ordinary people get to muddle through as best they can, bickering collectively.
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If your answer to every difficult question is “shut up and take my money Elon” (substitute member of your personal pantheon of Great Men and Women), well.. I guess we deserve the world we live in.
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I’ve lived almost my whole 47-year-life in a world enthralled by Great Men/Women, starting with Reagan, Thatcher and Welch. In this entire period, believing ordinary people — only capable of and desiring ordinary lives — had a right to exist was the most unspeakable sin.
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The idea that rule by/for/of the “people” in the sense of mediocre people of mediocre abilities and ambitions, had any value at all, came under relentless attack, to the point that we now seem to think we need Great Men to tell us how to put on socks in a Noble, Optimal Way.
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A world that relies on Divine Intervention to function at every level is one where ordinary people increasingly degenerate to a guilty, apologetic, shame-ridden learned helplessness where their fundamental worthlessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Wasn’t going to go to this inside baseball level but why the hell not, since a lot of this just normification of NRx by people who may or may not know the term, as others have observed… So let’s go there. Thread after-party begins here 🤣
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Replying to @vgr
I’m personally exceptionally skeptical of the nrx path as in practice the right of exit isn’t that easy to implement
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You see, the reason NRx and Woke hate each other is that they recognize they’re essentially the same thing: People with a deep-rooted Fear of Being Ordinary (FOBO) in denial of their own mediocrity BIRGing idealized greatness to recast themselves as At Least Chosen by Greatness
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To be NRx is to believe Great Men like Musk can Save Us, and that you can transcend your own mediocrity by at least recognizing that fact, with some help from Straussian priesthoods interpreting the esoteric greatness in exoteric ways for your small mind.
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To be Woke is to believe Great Principles like Social Justice can Save Us, and that you can transcend your own mediocrity by at least recognizing that fact, with some help from Straussian priesthoods interpreting the esoteric greatness in exoteric ways for your small mind.
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In either case, what you get is a “get out of hard thinking jail free” via much simpler kind of gamified thinking within a Great Discourse whose point is to prove to yourself that you are Saved and Chosen via Proof of Recognition of Greatness.
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Great Principle or Great Person is a distinction without a difference. In either case the Easy Thinking Games™ are administered by a priestly class gently educating you on right-thinking. What’s the proof? Doing it right gets you Proof of Chosenness via esteem of friends.
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Each side can see through the self-congratulatory fictions and easy-thinking games of the other side, to the essential mediocrity being denied, but not their own. What neither will do is simply cheerfully accept mediocrity and ask how one can live well and build a world with it.
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You know why? Because to actually think about hard problems is to constantly be reminded of your mediocrity. It constantly triggers your FOBO. Why not just trust distant Greatness and enjoy chosenness instead?
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What makes supposedly Great Men great is that they are unreasonably effective and extraordinary in a narrow domain or two, but run into exactly the same FOBO problems outside, and flail and struggle and fail in thoroughly undignified and ungodlike ways that destroys the illusion
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What makes supposedly Great Principles great is that they are unreasonably effective and extraordinary in a narrow domain or two, but fail spectacularly when naively overextended to Universal Truth status without lots of ifs and buts and compromises.
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What kinda works is mediocre people who recognize they’re mediocre working with rules and laws they recognize as janky work-in-progress hacks that are at best imperfect heuristics for a time and place. Muddling through, committed to the infinite game of simply continuing to play.
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This is why the Woke vs NRx battle, which has dominated my corner of social media for a decade now is so damn silly. Great People above Great Principles or Great Principles Above Everybody are both equally wishful fantasies born of FOBO… that there are easy answers.
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Even the fact that NRxies (and their non-western equivalents like Hindutva types in India or Juche in North Korea) are usually ethnonationalists with genetic privileging of a Chosen People, while Wokies are in principle about everybody being Chosen makes no difference. Why?
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In both cases the actual principle of Chosenness is the same: acceptance of Greatness, denial of the existence of mediocrity and ordinariness (let alone statistically tautological dominance of it), and violent repression of behaviors in themselves and others that trigger FOBO.
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We have now wandered very far from should-Elon-buy-twitter, but we’re still circling the same broad question: should the ordinary be reduced to abject helplessness, in thrall to apparent greatness? Or should the ordinary be let alone to simply do it’s best to continue existing?
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I stan weaponized mediocrity wielded by the unchosen, who shrug off FOBO and simply half-ass life one day at a time, trying to live to half-ass another day, making do without religions of greatness, accepting that they’ll die some day, at which point it’s not their game anymore
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