It is so difficult to process the difference in orders of magnitude between the power of the left and the “power” of the right, even in office, that the pinpricks of the right are easy to paint as gigantic and unprecedented.

That’s why big things are easier than small things

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1970950679939383439

You simply can’t compare “Trump made a comment about a comedian who put a straight-faced lie about murder on the air” to “the Biden administration ordered the systemic censorship of social media.”

If we ramped our power up 100x, anyone could see that theirs was still 10x greater

Hey man I love Dilbert and hate cancer.

But nothing is as nauseating as the bloviating impotence of the normiecon.

Grok should have a “translate to English” button on this post. It would read:

“Surely someone is going to do something”

https://twitter.com/scottadamssays/status/1966990951706226705

Oh, we’re doing something. We’re getting a bunch of dickwads fired.

That’s great, especially when it lets us point out “cancel culture” was treating any evidence of dissent as if it was a sociopathic celebration of murder.

But it’s still a fundamentally rhetorical act

Everyone should read Bryan Burroughs’ Days of Rage and remind themselves that 50 years ago, in America, hippies were setting off like a bomb a day.

This didn’t end because the hippies lost. It didn’t end because they mellowed out. It ended because they won Our universities became hippie universities. Our kindergartens became hippie kindergartens. Our government became a hippie government and even learned to wage hippie war. Which involves a lot of JAG hippie commissars and doesn’t work very well.

Woke is just John Lennon hippieism

The Institute for Effective Democracy (IED) is a new nonprofit which builds open-source software that helps voters take back control of their governments.

This app, “Ulysses,” (after President Grant) could in theory be used anywhere in the world. Its first use case is the US How can we make democracy more effective?

Democracy meqns the voters control the government. The more power the voters have, the more democratic the country.

But the voters don’t have infinite energy. The more efficiently we use their energy, the more effective our democracy

Chris, the anon right isn’t patrolled. It’s curated.

A curated space is based on reputation, formal or informal. Noise in the space is just annoying. Bad ideas only matter if they infect good people.

A patrolled space is—what you’re used to. You can nutpick all day long and idc

https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1965799435386171796

What you are really asking the anon right to do is “read the room,” certainly always a professional necessity in any patrolled space. The admin is a patrolled space, and it has to be.

But as they say: you can read the room, or you can lead the room

Notice the “othering” of “Democrat Party”—an exonym. Democrats say “Democratic.” Always.

Anthropologically, exonyms are a normal aspect of martial hostility. What puzzled me when I started noticing this 20 years ago was an anomalous absence of hostility—given these circumstances

https://twitter.com/stephenm/status/1964511717037396058

Carlyle called it the “Universal Sluggard-and-Scoundrel Protection Association.”

This was in 1850. Odds are, if you’ve had a disease for 175 years, it’s a pretty serious freaking disease.

I used to be firmly against using martial rhetoric and it’s not really to my taste. But

All the pathologies of hardcore normie conservatism shine in this exchange.

One: delusional optimism. This chart shows the AfD *losing* in Saxony-Anhalt, a province of East Germany, 61 to 39.

The whole point of the AfD is that all the other parties are one party!

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1964236785929646572

Even in their stronghold, for Americans idk Georgia, these Neanderthal Ossies cannot get it up to crack 40%.

Even with what is being done to them. The “rape of Europe.” A *statutory* rape, I’d say

But still: incomplete combustion. Near total failure to activate the population

Indeed the paper shows “how easily transmissible hepatitis B can be”: not easily at all!

That you’re defending this, as though any reasonable person would expect your link to refute, not support, your argument, is depressing. I actually expected you to correct and apologize

https://twitter.com/ruxandrateslo/status/1963338866594910519

And it really shows the shitty, shitty state of ethical praxis in science today, because you’re obviously on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to genuine scholarship.

I dropped out of my PhD program 30 years ago when I realized people thought stuff like this was ok

Progressivism is a decentralized religion.

Our definition of “religion” points toward centralized/Catholic forms, away from decentralized/Protestant forms. And toward the supernatural.

Remove both magic and authority, and you’ve dodged the immune system. Unitarianism = cancer

https://twitter.com/carlylecollege/status/1954308902335729859

Neutralizing the political immune system, by eliminating both magical entities/rituals and religious authorities/doctrines, lets the cell line flourish on a third energy source: secular power

Harvard has been Unitarian for 200 years

Fundamentally, conservative donors focus on issues. Liberal donors focus on people.

When you’re focusing on issues, you’re taking a basically VC like approach in which impact replaces profit. When you’re focusing on people, you’re like: is this a person I want to own?

https://twitter.com/solocuplegends/status/1950594429443617179

So for a liberal donor, what matters is the scale and quality of their private army—and scale is more important than quality. This is the Mackenzie Bezos vibe.

For a conservative donor, philanthropy is about specific objectives, and (as in VC) quality is the most critical thing

Imagine thinking you could change this without plenary authority.

Conservatives used to think they owned the country. Then they thought they had to stop the train. Now they think they have to just give it a nudge, and the wheels will go back on the track. My brother in Christ

https://twitter.com/thombrady5/status/1950559248288567305

Conservative billionaires be like: freedom of speech will solve it! We’ll just have a big New England town hall, but on the Internet. And reason will prevail.

You haven’t lived till you’ve had to nag a billionaire to pay a $5000 research tab to some broke grad student. Seriously

You can’t even tell if these people:

(a) deny that civilians were held in fields behind barbed wire for months

(b) believe they flourished in these conditions, with suburban death rates

(c) believe the stats are a lie but only by 10x, not 100x

(d) believe it was a big oopsie

https://twitter.com/arctotherium42/status/1930391587416355051

They can reason logically through these points, but it makes no impression, because it does not match the vibe—their narrative of 1945.

Nothing like this could happen in their Marvel-movie 1945. I might as well have Logic that says a man-eating rabbit ate a million people

GM are you ready for some Content. Special welcome to New Yorker readers. It’s Wednesday but this Wednesday won’t be like the others.

I would like to experiment on your brain. A very special History—made from just one Wikipedia page.

You will be the same, but better. Thread It’s the Wikipedia page titled “Rheinweisenlager.”

DON’T read it until after the experiment. We’ll be using only screenshots. Elon won’t let me link.

Also it just messes with the procedure. (Don’t worry I’ve treated many IRL. All still living)

“Evil.” Reminder that your institutions killed 20 million people and then covered it up. Spare me the pearl clutching.

What I learned: actually, no one cares enough ABOUT POWER to create alternative institutions, then install them. Like you, they would rather just preen

https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1921826873807417469

The big lie from your fishwrap masters is that the libertarian billionaires they hate—because they are the only threat to the system—only care about power.

This is libs, who only care about power, projecting.

If I was trying to look good, I would be selling the same lie as you

I apologize for my ad hominem attacks on Scott Alexander.

I should not chastise him for once editing me out of his blog. I should praise him for mentioning me at all, thus unavoidably enduring a vast multiyear crapstorm. It’s Sunday and this is what Jesus would say.

Also Scott asks a perfectly fair question: why I used to pearl-clutch so hard about authoritarian populism in 2008, but am perfectly okay with the Trump administration in 2025–despite all its manifest errors, incompetences, and even cruelties?

Surely the answer is that I’ve Sold Out

Old regimes, like the Bourbons and the USSR, develop a suicidal energy. Nothing can harm them physically, yet they seem to want to harm themselves Glasnost was a terrible idea, for the USSR. So was calling the Estates, for the Bourbons. Many obscure regimes also die in this way, eg, Greek colonels