If an English prof with a large following doesn’t understand something in another field, she should consider what those in that space recognize, instead of jumping to a naive conclusion and sharing it with the world.
But it should not be a surprise such people are often given a platform in the Atlantic or favorable New Yorker profiles: the point is not to elevate the most thoughtful evangelical voices, but the people who can be counted on to tell us the right things.
This is widely understood in other spaces: any savvy investor knows to take the opinion of someone pushed by a conflicted party—eg sell-side analysts—with a grain of salt.
I wish more would recognize the same about political voices pushed by the mainstream media.
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The digital age has disrupted legacy media models. As mainstream advertisers become more politicized and censorious, any "dissident" views are increasingly punished.
Yet such media projects can be more valuable than ever. 1/11
The suppression of such views—any outside the ever-narrower bounds of woke political correctness—is not limited to mainstream media. These views are increasingly self-censored or punished in workplaces, schools, and social settings. 2/11
Institutions and activities that once connected people no longer suffice for projects where alignment around an independent point of view (POV) matters. Without alternatives, the connections that predicate such projects simply will not occur. 3/11
Though @bpopken compares Musk unfavorably with Rockefeller and Carnegie for supposedly delaying serious giving, the bulk of Carnegie’s philanthropy began around age 65, and Rockefeller’s was also concentrated after age 60. Musk is 49.
2/6
Rockefeller and Carnegie had businesses generating significant cash flow for years by that point.
As recently as 2019 Musk was risking Tesla’s survival to bring out a lower-cost electric car (which could do more than billions of dollars of gifts to reduce emissions).
3/6
Given this record, shouldn't we reconsider the assumption that political "interference" is necessarily bad?
'"Yes, they were interfered with politically," said Lawrence Gostin... "But that’s not the only reason CDC didn’t perform optimally during COVID-19."'
A competent administration—one strong on common sense and a savvy understanding of risk—should exercise firm oversight over bureaucracies, recognizing their institutional biases and blind spots and treating their recommendations as only one of many factors.
By helping spare elite proponents of mob-inciting ideology such pain, we only prolong a trend that harms many ordinary people, such as this utility worker, who can less afford the cost and have fewer blue-checks rushing to their defense. ... nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdg…
The tide may actually turn—to a full rejection of this mob-inciting ideology, not just isolated forgiveness—when its elite proponents see their own friends destroyed by such mobs and personally feel the risk.
Radical thought: I’d always reflexively dismissed objections to usury, like any good Econ 101 student. But Plato’s objection to lending “without sharing risk” with the borrower—rather than to passive investment itself—recently stood out to me.
Maybe there are lessons for us. 1/4
@nntaleb has similarly noted that usury prohibitions in Islamic finance drove a more robust sharing of risk.
Such policies need not prevent the productive investment of capital (or return to the investor), but rather may encourage better arrangements of that investment. 2/4
In a society beset by financialization, perhaps policies—including usury restrictions—that discourage lending relative to equity investments would push a model of finance more focused on partnering with—and investing in—people than optimizing and levering assets. 3/4
I get that many evangelical elites dislike Pentecostalism, but it’s interesting to see them so focused on their faults here on this one issue, after rarely attacking them.
Even less congruent is the way many of these same evangelical elites (though I don’t know about Erick) have celebrated the church of the Global South—where Pentecostalism is particularly prevalent—even describing it as the future of Christianity.
I also wonder if the mockery of Pentecostal practices is as much about class as it is theology. Will some—eg @DavidAFrench—who mock them when they involve Trump be as eager to mock black Pentecostal churches where similar practices prevail?