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arctotherium Profile picture
@arctotherium42
May 3 • 12 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
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I very strongly appreciate this essay and wish there were a hundred more like it for other orgs. The SPLC is one of the biggest and most important nodes in the closure of the Internet, coordinating debanking and censorship outside the formal state. Image
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Amazon, for example, incorporated SPLC judgements into their pipeline automatically, and this is the norm in the financial industry. Image
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The SPLC coordinated pressure campaigns against the private sector 2017-2022, specifically Internet companies and payment processors. The easy for any individual company to do is knuckle under, especially since most decision-making managers will be sympathetic to begin with. Image
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Major threats included "coordinated negative public messaging" and also legislative, executive, and regulatory action. Image
Industry employees are, right now, in 2026, afraid for their physical safety if they say things that hurt the SPLC. Image
The timeline: debanking really starts in earnest in 2017 in response to the election of Donald Trump, and was supercharged after Charlottesville. Image
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The SPLC explicitly included elected politicians and extremely high profile normal conservative political figures in their list of individuals and accounts to be debanked and censored. This is, eg, responsible for the ad boycott of Tucker Carlson*. Image
*And no, this isn't retroactively justified by Carlson being crazy; there are many crazy media figures.
The SPLC seamlessly moved from "debank actual terrorist organization" to "debank regular elected politicians." Image
What makes this all really funny is the SPLC getting hoisted on their own petard; they were the major voice calling for nonprofit financial transactions to be more heavily scrutinized by the government! Image
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Organization called "Free Press" 2021 EoY communication: "Our efforts have yielded numerous concrete changes. After years of pressure from Free Press and our allies, Twitter finally banned Trump... We’re now pushing [Facebook[ to permanently ban Trump." We're nonpartisan BTW. Image
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Anyways, I'd like to publicly thank Patrick McKenzie for writing this. I recommend all of my followers read the whole thing and purchase a paid subscription to McKenzie.

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More from @arctotherium42

arctotherium Profile picture
Jun 2
Thread with excerpts from Richard Pipes' Property and Freedom (1999). Pipes is a historian of Russia, and the thesis of the book is that private property, as something distinct and protected from public power and sovereignty, is indispensable to human freedom. Image
One of the fundamental differences between Russia and the rest of Europe lay in the weak development of private property; one of the major themes of Western philosophical history is the benefits and drawbacks of private property; Russian philosophers unanimously condemn it. Image
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Freedom, as used by Pipes, includes political freedom, legal freedom, economic freedom, and personal rights. It does not include the right to public support ("freedom from want"); such 'rights' are at best a moral claim and at worst an unearned privilege. Image
Read 67 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Jun 1
Red state pension funds tend to vote with management if management is providing good returns (ie, doing their job); blue state pension funds tend to vote with management if the company does leftist things (ie, ESG, or not paying CEOs very much). Image
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This reflects a general difference in attitude towards institutions; rightists prefer institutions do what they were created for (eg police should fight crime, the military should fight wars, companies should make money doing their business, schools should teach)...
...while left-wingers want every institution to have pushing the Party Line as its #1 priority (extremely totalitarian in that regard). The formers produces a better society, the latter is more politically powerful but destroys everything in the long run.
Read 5 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Jun 1
Training an LLM to be more politically evenhanded (as opposed to left-wing, as almost all LLMs are - so more right-wing) makes it more egalitarian in how it values the lives of people of different races without training to do so. PCT = Political Consistency Training. Image
LLMs trained in this way also value members of different religions, political creeds, and public figures coded left vs right more equally. Image
Almost all notable LLMs except Grok are left-wing on the US political spectrum, but in a very particular way, sort of like a superhumanly-knowledgeable Redditor or Wikipedia editor from the year 2018. Image
Read 4 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
May 9
Since 2009, medical schools have had to prove they sufficiently discriminate against white men ("achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes") to get accredited. Image
White men are now significantly underrepresented among med school students. Image
Fortunately, competence isn't that important in doctors, so purging white men in favor of "underrepresented minorities" (blacks, LatinX) who can't pass clinical exams shouldn't matter. Image
Read 5 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
May 8
European IQ's rising due to natural selection (as measured by PGS) continuing into the modern era whereas it stalled in East Asia could have been predicted from Gregory Clark's genealogical studies in both regions. Image
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Clark found that "survival of the richest" was the rule in England from 1300-1880 or so, with huge differences in surviving offspring by class and this was much weaker in Qing China because higher class women didn't have more kids due to elite polygamy. Image
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(IQ is not the only trait that goes into income or wealth, of course, so selection for wealth is only indirectly selection for IQ and also selects for a package of other traits, some of which are collective goods like IQ and some of which are not.)
Read 9 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
May 8
The Bancroft Prize (one of the most prestigious history awards, given by a panel of historians for works on diplomacy or the history of the Americas) was given in 2000 to someone claiming guns were really rare in colonial America (he committed fraud by changing quotes).
historynewsnetwork.org/article/what-c…
This should have been obvious nonsense to anyone who knows anything at all about colonial America, of course, and yet a panel of professional historians thought it was work at the pinnacle of the field until some random blogger pointed out all the fraud.
Read 4 tweets

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