Endowed chair of the Tocqueville-Rand Freedom Enterprise Markets Innovation Center. Bound but not protected, I lie but I do not pretend. 🚰 🏗
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Nov 19, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Flower moon pretty good. Weird to say this about DiCaprio or all people but Leo’s getting up there in age & his himbo character really needed someone younger & more obviously attractive. He was good in the role though. Also don’t see 3.5 hr late showing, I’m so tired.
that national review article about this being a “woke” film that hates white men seems pretty absurd. Yeah we don’t come off great in parts, but given the actual events what did you expect? Also the portrayal of the FBI/prosecution is pretty much entirely positive.
Nov 5, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I think my main view on social-political impacts of social media and the internet is becoming that some kind of friction in both putting out and accessing ideas is probably good, actually.
I have no idea how you would mandate this at a policy/internet governance level, but it's becoming more and more apparent that some kind of modest friction results in more thoughtful engagement or output with pretty much everything, especially when it comes to mobile apps.
May 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
this kind of tweet is an irresistible siren call for a certain type of really dumb guys
the problem with "trump, but he's competent and follows through!" ,which is what desantis boosters clearly think they have, is that it assumes that trump voters *want* those things enough for that to slice off a lot of them. very little evidence of this!
I think that they want a lot of high profile noise about hurting one out group or another, along with the occasional headline grabbing policy of cruelty, but I don't think that actually seeing it systematized is that big a priority for them.
May 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Elon exposing me to more conservative voices via boosting them on the platform has successfully burst my bubble and changed my views of them as a group: they're a lot fucking dumber than I thought, and I didn't think they were smart.
congratulations sir, in an epic populist move you have changed my association with the blue check from "vaguely important in some way person" to "someone I wouldn't trust to put gas in my car unsupervised"
May 15, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
bro my ecologies aren't inferring
fucking goddamnnit! sorry babe, not mad at you. it's just these goddamn ecologies and their failure to infer
May 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
gonna reiterate a kinda spicy take of mine: this kind of identity fraud is probably pretty widespread in academia, given the scarcity of resources and the ease of doing so. we only hear about the people that get too into the claimed identity and get caught.
other than my own shame, nothing at all stops me from claiming Latino ancestry and applying for funds earmarked for scholars from that background. if I wasn’t an idiot and didn’t make a performance of it, I’d probably never get caught. just quietly check the box.
May 1, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
no it just means being good at art doesn’t necessarily carry any special understanding of politics or insight into them, which is something that artists and the artist-adjacent are constantly in denial about
“damn I can’t believe that killer Mike was just a rapper with relatively normie politics who liked Bernie and not a actual hardcore Maoist revolutionary”
gyms not having towels is an exercise in degrading everyone who didn't drive there in a car and doesn't plan on going straight home afterwards
let me just let me just stuff a damp fucking towel in my bag, making it smell like shit all day, or walk around for like an hour with it draped around my shoulders like a member of some obscure religious order
Apr 24, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
killzone is one of the most hilarious examples of that 00s-10s thing where media would try and hamfistedly be ~deep~ by going "maybe the good guys are bad, huh? did I just blow ur mind?!" but the bad guys in this case are very obviously space nazis.
actually the planet of the facism mutants has very complex and nuanced politics, I'll have you now.
Apr 18, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
trump is the candidate of weird inchoate grievance. the base likes that shit, they like that he's mad at the same people they are. DeSantis is the candidate of the psycho ideologues who actually want that put into policy, & it mainly looks insane & freakish when you do.
DeSantis is the dog that caught that car candidate, basically. Actually putting right wing culture grievances into practice is an entirely different thing than just whipping people up about them.
Mar 29, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
remember in 2017 when Mark Zuckerberg was very clearly positioning himself for a presidential run?
we're slowly figuring out which political rules from the old world still hold water in the new, but the period where people thought that Trump's victory meant anything goes now was wild.
Mar 20, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
tbh I think there’s an element of narcissism to this kind of stuff among left/liberal intellectuals, this performative self flagellation of their class. I don’t think David Remnick’s endorsement mattered that much, or at all, in going to war.
the largest anti-war demonstrations in world history didn’t stop this, John Chait being in favor was something wasn’t really something that the Bush admin relied on for it to be possible
Mar 19, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
the thing is that fascists place such mystic importance on political violence as a process of proving something about themselves, and in a serious enough contest that kind of thing actually puts you at a disadvantage to those whose relationship with violence is more workmanlike
a mythologized relationship with violence is an advantage if the other guy doesn’t want it as bad, but if they do, then the side that wants to prove something by winning will be at a disadvantage compared to the side that just wants to win.
Mar 15, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
it's wild that actual republican officeholders are now proposing policy ideas that Tom Clancy in the 80s was like "yeah that wouldn't work"
"clear and present danger" is probably one of his more intellectually serious, closer to better authors like LeCarre books, I think. the american nat-sec state and cartel are portrayed as both being big complex bureaucracies with people jockeying for position and favor within.
Mar 15, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I'd be really interested in work on how the partisan coding of various cultural things changes over time and whether this change is pushed (something in the space changes people in it's politics) or pulled (their politics change for other reasons & they bring the space with them)
I'm specifically thinking about stuff health food and working out, "crunchy" granola wellness type stuff: used to strike me as a left-coded thing, now seems pretty firmly vaguely right wing.
Mar 12, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Vampires probably bank mainly with other vampires. Difficult to get appropriate financial instruments from mortals. Regulatory arbitrage really important if your time horizon is longer.
Risk-averse vampire who finally became convinced that this whole internet thing was here to stay and invested a bunch of money in start ups and crypto just in time to lose it all
Feb 15, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
PAY THOSE FATCAT POLITICIANS LESS!! is the kind of superficially populist take that presents obvious huge problems if you think about about it for five seconds, and anyone expressing unironically is either stupid or thinks you are.
“hahaha we cut those fatcat elite’s pay 😈, I’m sure this will have no systematic negative effects whatsoever”
Feb 14, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
an under-rated source of reactionary anti-public health sentiment sentiment is that a lot of the increased bureaucratic frictions and general annoyances that COVID caused never went away, even if they don't make any sense right now.
every university bureaucracy that I interact with now is far worse. sometimes it's just annoying. sometimes it's worse. what used to be something I could sort out in one visit to an office is now a couple days to a week of email tag with people.
Feb 13, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Feel like, assuming non lethal feeding is possible, you could incorporate vampires into society fairly easily tbh. People are born, give blood a few times consensually, have kids, & then when they’re in early middle age get vampirized. It just a version of like social security.
Definitely run into demographic problems, but if they don’t age after they’re turned they can remain in the workforce pretty much indefinitely, so it’s not as severe.
Feb 13, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Macklemore good. Yeah, that’s right, keep screaming “white” at me, it just makes me turn up the volume on “thrift shop”.
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