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Wesley Yang

@wesyang

10 Nov

Tucker basically says: so there's a few cases of fraud, but probably not on a scale to change the outcome

He of course surrounds this with a lot of grievance about those trying to silence those who doubt the election, but basically calls for litigating and recounting with little doubt it will ultimately affirm the result

I believe the technique is called “pacing and leading”

Read 10 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

8 Nov

A key question whose answer will be revelatory of the nature of the new regime is: "Will they deplatform Joe Rogan"?

"Regime" does not refer to the Biden Administration. It means the larger apparatus "fighting disinformation" to assert monopoly control over the flow of information.

The Spotify decision will tell us whether the removal of Trump will cause this apparatus to moderate, or whether it will see it as warrant to consolidate its control

Read 5 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

6 Nov

It's good that cities can serve as laboratories of democracy. A few places will try defunding police and it's possible that we'll gain valuable and replicable insights from the experiment. (Subsidiary to the main one, which will be "don't defund the police.")

In practical terms "defund police" means "take away union-protected jobs from a racially diverse, working class constituency and give them to middle class white women with advanced degrees in the helping professions."

I'm of course all for exploring less punitive approaches to solving social problems! But public safety is a primary social good and absolute precondition for progress in all other dimensions

Read 6 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

6 Nov

Ruy Teixeira interviewed in Persuasion on the "boutique social liberalism that is much more common in elite circles":

"They don't want to defund the police -- but they're against police brutality."

The Successor Ideology has never been popular -- it has always been a free rider on broader trends toward tolerance and egalitarianism.

It is an avant-grade that, like other avant-gardes, has pushed into cannibalizing its own professed values in its zeal to dictate outcomes

The ideology seeks control of elite spaces and is very good at obtaining it by morally blackmailing liberals into acquiescence -- even within the "elite", a supermajority dislike it, but effectively none can resist it.

Read 11 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

2 Nov

The thesis of the End of History is simply that there's not going to be a next stage that resolves all contradictions. The liberal democratic state is the terminus. You can revert from it but you cannot progress beyond it.

We abolished serfdom, slavery, aristocracy, and monarchy but will not abolish wage labor. Nor will we abolish differences in ability between individuals or the propensity of culture to generate differential outcomes.

The attempt to do the latter without doing the former is the task of what I call "the successor ideology."

Read 8 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

2 Nov

I think the polls will be proven right and the fevered speculation about post-election chaos will be proven wrong

The thing about democracy is that it is ultimately controlled by elites who interpret the national narrative and govern in accordance with that interpretation. The Trump spasm was a temporary aberration.

Whatever we can persuade a majority to vote for is what is. In this case, “had enough of that dude” is the thing.

Read 9 tweets

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