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Yascha Mounk Profile picture
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11 Feb, 4 tweets, 2 min read
As many people believe QAnon is "at least somewhat" accurate today as believed that the moon landing was fake in 1999.

The lesson of QAnon is not that Americans have grown more willing to believe crazy stuff. It's that 6 percent have *always* been willing to believe crazy stuff. ImageImage
As Gallup wrote in 1999:

"Taken literally, 6% translates into millions of individuals. [But] it is not unusual to find that many people in the typical poll agree with almost any question... The best interpretation is that this particular conspiracy theory is not widespread."
"33% believe there’s a government conspiracy to cover up the truth about the North Dakota crash. There was no unusual crash in North Dakota. Researchers included it as a placebo to see if people would endorse a conspiracy theory that didn’t exist. 33% did"slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/bus…
I am *not* saying there isn't a significant number of people who believe in QAnon. I am *not* saying we shouldn't be outraged that Taylor Greene is in Congress.

I *am* saying that we should not sensationalize or be keen to believe that half our compatriots are complete idiots.

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More from @Yascha_Mounk

Yascha Mounk Profile picture
11 Feb
A Pakistani-American doctor was fired *and is being prosecuted* because he gave an opened vaccine to anyone he could find rather than letting it go to waste.

Apparently, it would have been more "equitable" to throw the vaccine out.

This is madness.

nytimes.com/2021/02/10/us/…
🤦‍♂️
"Too many Indian names."

Is this the society we are trying to build?

Will this sort of logic help us build a fair and tolerant society?

If you think the answer to that is "yes," I just really don't know what to tell you.
Read 4 tweets
Yascha Mounk Profile picture
5 Feb
Amazing how many people have gone from "allowing internet providers to transmit video content at higher speed than other kind of content would be the end of the internet" to "just let the tech companies de-platform whatever they happen to dislike lol" in less than five years.
(And as with most large-scale political shifts that involve people switching their positions but not which side they are on, I bet that most people of whom this is true are genuinely unaware that they used to believe something diametrically opposed to their current position.)
Yes, there are differences between ISPs and social networks. But:

1) The main argument for net neutrality was that any commercial entity prioritize some form of content would impede speech.

2) Social networks, when acting in concert, are functionally very similar to a monopoly.
Read 4 tweets
Yascha Mounk Profile picture
3 Feb
No, GameStop isn't an effective action against big finance carried out by the ideological descendants of Occupy Wall Street. Duh.

But, yes, GameStop was fueled by rage at big finance and the days when some hedge funds bled did feel very satisfying for that reason. Duh.
Hey, this kid in school just stuck his middle finger out at a teacher the whole class hates. Was this an effective rebellion against the pedagogical system?

No, duh. And if he's a little smart, he knew he'd pay for it in the end. But I bet it felt pretty damn good anyway...
It was deeply irresponsible for some people to pretend that Reddit was about to strike a deadly blow against capitalism (and encourage their followers to buy overvalued stock).

But it's obtuse not to see why so many people found deep satisfaction in this saga.
Read 4 tweets
Yascha Mounk Profile picture
3 Feb
A lot of folks have so bought into the lie that those of us who worry about people being gratuitously fired for minor offenses just don't want anybody to be criticized that they see it as an amazing gotcha when we say that people should be criticized for terrible behavior.

🧵
As @jon_rauch explained, there is a big difference between somebody being criticized and somebody being canceled.

persuasion.community/p/the-cancel-c…
In the tweet that people are dunking on, I explicitly say we should *not* be canceling the cancellers.

But when people gratuitously accuse good-faith interlocutors of thought crimes, they *should* suffer reputational harm: we should all just roll our eyes.
Read 5 tweets
Yascha Mounk Profile picture
30 Jan
This is about as scientific or sensible as the fears that the religious right had about the Simpsons corrupting America's youth.
Liberals have traditionally been skeptical about television shows ruining the young or video games turning nice kids into mass murderers.

And yet, many of us now embrace ideas about how conspiracy theories spread that make similarly simplistic and sensationalist assumptions.
"Wait, I've got it! It's because of all the Easter Eggs in Bojack Horseman! THAT's why people now, for the first ever time in human history, are willing to believe in batshit conspiracy theories."
Read 4 tweets
Yascha Mounk Profile picture
27 Jan
I support (the option of) statehood for Puerto Rico on an ur-American principle: "no taxation without representation."

But it's a little weird that so many people assume that a) Puerto Ricans would definitely vote for statehood and b) their Senators would always vote with Dems.
Puerto Rico has a deeply entrenched partisan political divide that does not map neatly onto the American one.

And its Senators would, primarily, have an interest in getting the best treatment for PR.

It really isn't as simple as "they're brown so they'll just be Democrats."
Of course, all of this is even more reason to offer PR a vote on statehood.

This shouldn't be some partisan maneuver to "rebalance" the Senate. It should be pursued because we owe Puerto Ricans a chance to decide on their own future, whatever the consequences for US politics.
Read 4 tweets

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