I can’t get past his Wooly Willy eyebrows.
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Musk was talking about doing these things even while he was trying to wriggle out of the deal in court. The exodus of advertisers was foreseeable months in advance. The knock on effects of that were not hard to predict.
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Right-Wingers what people to think that their constructed reality is the natural order. That efforts to change are wasted efforts, you should just accept your lot in life.
Right-Wing thought is just neofeudalism.
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GeoCities was an engineering platform.
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This is a thing I’ve kind of wondered about: where is the intellectual center of conservativism? Like, I could name a few leftist thinkers, and a few neoliberal/centrist types, and I don’t really read a lot of theory. But when I hear about right wing “intellectuals”, it’s this goober and Peterson, who, uh, aren’t.
Did something dire happen to conservative thinkers, or did the populist swing towards repudiating knowledge and thought just make them kinda give up/not encourage a new generation of intellectuals?
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A common right wing thing is to make broad, absolute statements about stuff that cannot possibly be so cut and dried. So, strawmanning, basically.
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My sense is a lot of them are hiding in plain sight in places like the Federalist Society, where they can do real damage. Clowns like kapo Ben and Jordaddy serve them as distractions.
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The Dumbening was so successful, that those who orchestrated it didn’t realize it was working on them too.
The best the Con Right ever had was Buckley and even he was thoroughly trounced in debate by James Baldwin and Gore Vidal.
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Yeah, with the common theme of alt-right bro-“intellectuals” dying their beards black I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself picturing Ben dying his eyebrows.
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Actual conservatives are out there, like Bill Kristol and George Will. They despise fascist shitweasels like Shapiro and Jordaddy, despite their own role in summoning them into prominence. The difference is that the batshit crazy right wing nutjobs like Shapiro who call themselves “conservatives” aren’t - they are reactionaries, which is a whole different thing.
ETA:
Sooner and better said than I.
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well, there’s your next project. Leveraging Twitter servers as a free cloud computing service.
You can probably get a decent paper and some free travel/conference invites out of it.
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You’re right.I should have been more clear.
He did say that he was going to get rid of up to 75% of Twitter staff. Most of the reports in the media at the time felt that was an exaggeration, but that 25-50% could ultimately go. What I found shocking was that he got rid of 50% almost immediately.
As for the advertisers, I should have been more clear about that as well. I know that the mass definition of advertisers was predicted up front. What I was referring to was his attempts to humiliate (or threaten to have his followers boycott) any advertiser that stopped/paused their ads.
You should check out a newsletter called The Bulwark. It’s where I go to get a view of sane conservative arguments (keeping the balance and all). I disagree with a lot of their politics, but they’re not frothing nutjobs like the GOP.
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The Koch & friends network supports a lot of right wingnut welfare with a horde of interconnected “think tanks”, and people each with fellowships to a few of them.
But the people you want are probably lurking close to Quillette and the “Intellectual Dark Web”.
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Hard to call them “thinkers” or intellectuals, either though. The former is a notorious giggling neoCon fool, the latter is decades’ worth of bad-faith Reaganite arguments wearing a bow tie
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What is it with American conservatives and bowties?
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An “engineering platform”? Are you sure it isn’t an underwater house, Ben?
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Truth. Like most people, I struggle to find anyone who claims to be conservative who could also be classified as a genuine intellectual. Those were the closest I could think of, along with @Melizmatic’s example of Buckley.
Cutting off oxygen supply to the parts of their brains that scream “no, you moron! Modern conservatism is fundamentally contradictory!”
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