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Wesley Yang Profile picture
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20 Oct, 7 tweets, 2 min read
Bill Clinton; born to a single mother in Arkansas, now worth $100 million; Steve Bing, inherited $600 million, committed suicide with net worth under $300,000 after joining Clinton's Billionaire's Boys Club. ImageImage
townandcountrymag.com/society/money-…
Not ascribing a cause-effect relationship to these two trajectories, just noting the concurrence and the fatal attraction of the adventurer on his way up and the scion on his way down.
Democracy is among other things a way for those gifted with personal magnetism to lift themselves into the cultural and financial imperium as ultimate influencers. Obama perfected what Clinton pioneered.
The Netflix production deal is now the highest mantle to which anyone can aspire
This Vonnegut description of what a lawyer does is a thin and tame version of what a libertine ex-President can do Image
Watch Fox and His Friends for an anticipatory treatment of this theme

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More from @wesyang

Wesley Yang Profile picture
21 Oct
The laptop story seems almost deliberately fake sounding — almost like they were trying to bait the tech platforms into treating it as disinformation...
I’m referring here to the story of how it came into Giuliano’s hands
While the emails were always unlikely to change anyone’s minds on their vote, tech censorship is where the GOP is pivoting as one of its major issues
Read 4 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
20 Oct
We need but no longer receive unsparing but non-tendentious (not in the service of political partisanship or activist causes) accounts of the world
What truth-seeking individuals are forced to do is digest various tendentious accounts of the world and average them out to create a functional mean
This is a kind of activity that we do on our own and in small groups of sensible, sensitive, and informed friends who bring to bear their understanding of a range of different disciplines.
Read 4 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
13 Oct
NYT editor Dean Baquet makes highly revealing statement about the 1619 Project:

"The project fell fully within our standards as a news organization. "
The declaration is thus inclusive of the following practice
The historian who took to Politico to air her concerns did so because she shared the goals of the project but felt that factual scrupulosity was necessary to their attainment.
Read 16 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
12 Oct
In microcosm, this episode helps us understand how historical calamities like the Aral Sea disaster happen.

Systematic lies lead to systematic self-deception.

The will to bullshit others becomes the incapacity to see truth.
Having invested so heavily of its prestige into this thing, the Times was caught in a classic "sunk cost fallacy." It became necessary to pour more of itself into the widening, deepening sinkhole, until the commitment was total and came directly from the top.
The most telling moment was when a historian consulted on the lead essay told them that a major claim was false.

The Times ignored her objection and published it.

Only after she wrote about it in Politico did NYT issue a "clarification." politico.com/news/magazine/…
Read 5 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
11 Oct
This issue is a great litmus test for whether you actually care about saving the earth rather than creating pretext for massive new exercise of state power thebellows.org/we-need-a-nucl…
It’s not a silver bullet. It’s not without its own risks and difficulties (storing spent fuel). But if you actively rule it out, it’s because you don’t really care about saving the earth.
state subsidy for a form of energy, which the piece calls for, is qualitatively different than the use of the climate issue as a left wing “shock doctrine” to move toward a command economy, which Naomi Klein explicitly called for
Read 4 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
9 Oct
Interesting how the creator of the sound that defined 1980's jockdon was a half-Indonesian immigrant who spoke English as a second language and was bullied by racists in elementary school nbcnews.com/news/asian-ame…
I'm not focusing on the bullying, but on the arc of assimilation!
Read 8 tweets

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