Thread by @KrisAtLarge

there's a curdled *spite* that's evident in people like @NateSilver538 and @mtaibbi and @bariweiss, not to mention the racist pseudoscientists and "dark intellectual" cranks they're inclined to heed—the @lesswrong / @slatestarcodex people. they stink of academic failure.

(1/x)

@AEI propagandist @charlesmurray is another example. a genuine scientist humiliated him and Murray still grumbles—he's still festering with resentment that he's been kicked into the right-wing fringe. the "American Enterprise Institute" may sound impressive but it's not.

(2/x)

Murray knows that @AEI is basically a fake, a right-wing imitation college or research institute, giving the world nothing but copious propaganda—and he regards that marginal position as something other than his own fault. it's Commies or Jews or "wokeists", or whoever.

(3/x)

same with @bariweiss and @mtaibbi languishing at @SubstackInc, and @NateSilver538 being @NateSilver538—these people are all famous, blessed with privileges and money and mass audience, and yet they still feel left out. they're not the smart and cool kids and it galls them.

(4/x)

SOMEONE is to blame for @NateSilver538's mediocrity, and it surely can't be Nate Silver himself—he's a genius! he's smarter than ALL those polysyllabic eggheads who laughed at him in school, every time he answered a question with a typical wad of pseudo-intellectual mush.

(5/x)

why they can even type more than one coherent tweet at a time. @NateSilver538 is especially irritated by that.

it's sometimes entertaining to watch the antics of a pack of spiteful children who are still nursing schoolyard grudges and delusions of intellectual greatness.

(6/x)

but it's also been ruinous to #journalism. the triviality of celebrity "influencers" like @NateSilver538 and @jonathanchait, with their shallow social-column approach to American politics, forever fixated on polls as if they were news, has been lethal to us.

~Chara of Pnictogen