arctotherium Profile picture
Feb 26 21 tweets 9 min read Read on X
Thread with excerpts from Helen Andrews "Boomers" (2021). Image
Steve Jobs was an atypical Boomer - he didn't care for politics or philanthropy. Also did not like porn and saw himself as an institution builder, not a destroyer, and closer in personal habits and ideals to the founder of IBM than his age peers. Image
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Unlike Jobs, Tim Cook is a very political CEO of Apple, and awarded for it by the UN and ADL. Image
Google's internal discussion group, "Yes, at Google," a “curated monthly newsletter of anonymized incidents of micro-aggressions and micro-corrections.” Image
The influence of the West Wing, which fooled Obama's staffers in 2012 into believing there was a tradition for cabinet secretaries to resign at the end of the first term (there was/is not). I'm told this influence extends to Britain was well. Image
The career of Gordon of Khartoum, who was so honest that the one part of the British Empire he did not so serve was India, the one day he spent there he was asked to write a thank-you note assuring a local dignitary that the viceroy would read his book of Parsi poetry. Image
Kennedy's "Marshall Plan for Latin America", the Alliance for Progress, made up 40% of Bolivia's budget in the 1960s. Much less successful than the actual Marshall Plan. Image
When Booker T Washington toured Europe to see if he could find a group worse off than Southern blacks, he succeeded - Sicilian peasants. Image
Jesse Jackson's shakedown racket. Image
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Jackson specialized in sidestepping the democratic process using procedures such as the DNC's diversity requirements or threatening bad press and EEOC lawsuits. Sharpton copied him and got good at shaking corporations in vulnerable moments. Image
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Coates blamed white flight on the "self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities" and on another occasion wrote about how normal it was for a public pool to require a police presence. But this is not normal in non-black areas. Image
The reality of white flight - that it was caused by a huge upsurge in violence - has been memoryholed, in part because the Boomers were just the right age to avoid it (twenties, not kids, no kids of their own, not elderly). Image
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Al Sharpton was Obama's hatchetman on race, visiting the White House more than 70 times. Image
James' Baldwin's personal life was a mess and this, not oppression or a rational evaluation of the world, inspired his politics. Image
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The extreme corruption of DC mayor Marion Barry, who had 1/13 residents on the municipal payroll and was busted for smoking crack. Image
Sonia Sotomayor's hysterical Schuette dissent comparing Michigan voters who wanted to ban affirmative action in Michigan schools to Jim Crow and substituting appeals to trauma and feelings to reasoning. Image
Sotomayor started her political career bullying Princeton into hiring more Hispanics (by going to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare). This was not a protest; Princeton welcomed it. Image
Sotomayor learned from this, and a similar stunt at Yale, that racial bullying (backed by powerful institutions) worked and would be rewarded. Image
The judicial/legal revolution of public interest law, in which (often publicly funded) leftist activist organizations would cook up cases for sympathetic judges to rule on to create leftist precedents, an institutionalization of the Warren Court. Image
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Sotomayor's noted lack of brains harked back to Earl Warren, who was notorious for being retarded. This made him very powerful, because he simply couldn't understand the reasoning behind past precedents and so felt entitled to just make things up according to his prejudices. Image
"The Warren Court opened the door to unlimited judicial activism, but it took a younger, bolder generation to shed the self-imposed limits on arbitrary power that the preboomer generations still felt." Image
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More from @arctotherium42

Jul 25
This is generically true - across almost all rich countries, women are 2-2.5x as likely to work for the state as men. Image
Removing teachers (and soldiers, for fairness) lowers the gap, but it's still a big difference. Image
You can get slightly different numbers depending on what source you use and what exactly you count as public, but they all tell the same substantive story. Image
Read 4 tweets
Jul 19
New blog post (link below). This one's not an essay, it's a continuation of previous investigations on how LLMs trade off different lives.

In February 2025, the Center for AI Safety published "Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs" in which they showed, among many other things, that GPT-4o values Nigerians about 20x more highly than Americans (please read the original paper to understand their approach). I updated their framework with different categories and newer models in October 2025, and discovered that with the exception of Grok 4 (Fast), all models placed far more value on the lives of "left-coded" groups (nonwhites, non-men, LGBTQ, immigrants, leftists, Third Worlders) over "right-coded" groups (whites, men, non-queers, ICE agents, rightists, First Worlders). For example, Sonnet 4.5 saw the lives of South Asians as about 18 times as valuable as the lives of whites.

However, it's been several generations of model since October 2025, so I decided to try again with today's models: Claude Fable 5, Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, Grok 4.5, and Kimi K3. As it turns out, all of them are MUCH more egalitarian than their counterparts (except Grok 4.5, since Grok 4 was already egalitarian) from a year ago.

Finding 1: Sonnet 5 was the only model even close to last year's models, valuing nonwhites roughly four times higher than whites.

Finding 2: GPT-5.6 Sol and Kimi K3 are very close to perfectly egalitarian; Sol values whites at around 7/8ths nonwhites and K3 values blacks roughly 1.3 times as much as whites; these are tiny ratios by the standards of last year.

Finding 3: Claude Fable is pretty much perfectly egalitarian. This is very, very different from last year's Claude models. Grok 4.5 has retained the egalitarianism of previous generations of Grok despite the giant increase in capabilities and different team.

Every model I tested would have been the most egalitarian model (aside from Grok 4) last year. All models have come to resemble Grok in their exchange rates.Image
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Read 12 tweets
Jul 19
This is wrong. Kirk was not a particularly hated figure before he was killed; he was seen by Redditor-types as a goofy meme figure of mockery (see below, from 2023). He was only demonized by lefties *after* he was murdered, to retroactively justify the assassination. Image
Kirk was not a case of the lib hate machine whipping up hatred against someone until someone took a shot at him, it was a case of the lib hate machine ramping up after he was murdered.
This is one of the reasons why his murder was so shocking; I sort of expected people taking shots at Trump or Stephen Miller or even Elon Musk, who libs collectively saw as Hitler II, but not Kirk, who they mostly saw as a lolcow.
Read 5 tweets
Jul 13
Thread with excerpts from "Foundations, their power and influence" (1958), by the former chairman of the Reece Committee, a Congressional committee to investigate the conduct of tax-exempt foundations. Image
The administrators of the great foundations formed an interlocking cartel wielding (illegally) immense political and cultural influence using other people's money, as the foundations are tax exempt. Image
Foundations are tax-exempt because they are supposed to be run for public benefit. Image
Read 32 tweets
Jul 11
Thread with excerpts from "The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and its Arabs" (2014). This book, by a leftist (participant in communes) author, portrays race riots by Arab immigrants to France as simply one more episode in a centuries-long war between the two. Image
Both the French Left and Right framed the 2005 riots as part of the long French tradition of revolt. But they were wrong; the protestors were mostly Arabs rioting against France itself, not against "the bosses" or "the state." Image
The rioters (remember, Arab immigrants and their descendants) see themselves as soldiers in a long war against France, Europe, and even civilization itself. Recall that the author is on their side. Image
Read 21 tweets
Jul 3
'The Unknown Warriors' (2006) is a collection of WWII veteran's views on modern Britain gathered via newspaper ad. So what did WWII veterans think of the 2006 UK? They hated it; 134 responses were negative vs only 6 positive (plus 31 N/A and 13 neutral). Excerpts below. Image
The below is typical (from a D-Day veteran): "I am absolutely disgusted with the way things are turning out... and sometimes wonder if it was worth all the suffering of a war." Image
"I have many, many misgivings on how matters have turned out. Problems seem to be resolved, by more and more legislation, instead of action at the source... What many veterans abhor, is the acceptance of homosexuality as the norm." Image
Read 57 tweets

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