Not your main point, but the "this is an ancient feud" line is a mystifying trope. Jews lived in peace and safety among Muslims (and Christians) all around the Levant all the way through the Ottoman era, especially compared to their brutal persecution in Europe. The precipitating shift was modern Zionism, a European settler colonial project with an explicit goal of displacing the inhabitants of Palestine to create a supermajority ethnic Jewish state.
This Thiel interview clip is amazing
Watch Ross Douthat realize for a moment in real time that he's spent a decade making ideological bedfellows with a techno-futurist, fascist Right that wants to see the birth of a "machine god" & is in no way enthusiastic about the survival of the human race in universal terms.
Ezra Klein is the biggest mark on earth. His newest podcast description starts with:
Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trump’s term, they tell me. We’re not ready.
Oh, that's what the researchers tell you? Cool cool, no need to hedge any further than that, they're experts after all.
Bari Weiss, IDW star, founder of The Free Press and author of "How to Fight Anti-Semitism" publishes and then approvingly tweets excerpts from not-very-convincingly-ex white supremacist Richard Hanania explaining that
These stiff-armed salutes are not expressions of sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it's no longer in the opposition.
Quite uncharacteristically, she deleted her tweet in shame, but not before our friend TracingWoodgrains signal boosted it, adding "Excellent, timely article from Hanania." His favorite excerpt, unsurprisingly, is Hanania patiently explaining that open Nazism is not "a winning political strategy." Better to insinuate your racism with sophistication!
Shortly after, realizing he needed to even out his light criticism of his fascist comrades, Woodgrains posted about "vile populism to right of me, vile populism to left of me", with the latter being the Luigi fandom (no citation that this is leftist, and contrary to the writings of Luigi). To his mind the latter is worse "because there is a vanishingly short path between it and more political murders in the short-term future", whereas open Nazism at the highest levels of the American conservative movement doesn't hurt anyone [important].
Post from July, tweet from today:
It’s easy to forget that Scottstar Codex just makes shit up, but what the fuck “dynamic” is he talking about? He’s describing this like a recurring pattern and not an addled fever dream
There’s a dynamic in gun control debates, where the anti-gun side says “YOU NEED TO BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS, YOU KNOW, THE ONES THAT COMMIT ALL THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS”. Then Congress wants to look tough, so they ban some poorly-defined set of guns. Then the Supreme Court strikes it down, which Congress could easily have predicted but they were so fixated on looking tough that they didn’t bother double-checking it was constitutional. Then they pass some much weaker bill, and a hobbyist discovers that if you add such-and-such a 3D printed part to a legal gun, it becomes exactly like whatever category of guns they banned. Then someone commits another school shooting, and the anti-gun people come back with “WHY DIDN’T YOU BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS? I THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO BE TOUGH! WHY CAN’T ANYONE EVER BE TOUGH ON GUNS?”
Embarrassing to be this uninformed about such a high profile issue, no less that you're choosing to write about derisively.
I don't know about "magically immediately" (?), but the benefits of racial and economic integration in American schools is actually incredibly well studied and documented; you don't have to argue from first principles unless you just want to ignore those benefits and do the thing you wanted to do all along.
She's listened to anecdotes "about kids who are like my kids" (👀👀👀), and that's quite enough engagement with that system, thank you very much.
Prominent EA/rationalist cult member Kelsey Piper taking a break from defending tech billionaires for going MAGA to angrily insist on her duty to keep her children segregated from the Oakland masses: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1817335817515532694
No. That is not at all a mystery, Kevin. For exactly all the very same reasons why there is no mystery to the question of whether "the rest of us" will grow wings and fly around after drinking a Red Bull. You fucking dunce. You absolute shit-for-brains. Fuck's wrong with you?
Cathartic
In my skim of the two posts I didn't get to any suggestion of "used to be favorable, then realized they're led by duplicitous misanthropes" as a pathway.
Perhaps present-day humans are more obviously aided by questioning literally any aspect of hyper-capital. Better to cast out to the far future and insist (without any real basis) that fellating billionaires is the best course.
I missed our friend Kelsey Piper joining the fray deep in this quote tweet thread and crashing out defending Big Yud: https://xcancel.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1954785099964383313