Dan Williams on preaching to your own side; Some conservatives preaching about technology; Samuel Gregg on classical liberalism; Andrey Mir on the future of journalism
Regarding Rufoism, Trumpism, and Muskism, I believe we should consistently remind them of the following:
The Tenth Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
According to my reading of the U.S. Constitution, education is not an enumerated power, therefore all federal funding of education programs should end. And the Department of Education should be abolished.
My impression is that Rufo et al would be satisfied if leftist cultural prerogatives were forced to stand on their own, rather than persist on the taxpayer dime. Plus, leveling the playing field (ala Caldwell) such that leftist prerogatives weren't given the force of law (under the guise of equal protection), while conservative cultural prerogatives are verboten (e.g. keeping men out of women's bathrooms and sports is itself cause for state and federal prosecution).
There is also a separate, but related, frustration around playing an iterated prisoner's dilemma with no consequences for repeated defection. If Mueller style lawfare is all upside and no downside ("the norms!"), then it will keep happening with greater intensity (as it did, with Jack Smith, Bragg, Tish James, etc. etc)
Finally, liberal tolerance is an exploit for a dishonorable adversary, who will push the limits of informal norms (right up until the formal limit) e.g. the pro Hamas or BLM "disruptors" would disappear if they got punched right in the mouth like they deserve (or run-over for sitting in traffic), but know full well that getting punched or run over will bring more harm on their adversary than them. They are cowards who rely on the protection of the very people and institutions they agitate against. It used to be that being an obvious coward was punishment enough, but not anymore. Now it's an exploit.
The GOP or whomever has carried the mantle for classical liberalism has not even attempted to address these issues (or their failure to carry the mantle). It still hasn't. "It gets worse every year, but we'll keep running on low taxes and deregulation" begins to sound ridiculous. David French is the meme for GOP impotence, "the conservative case for self-immolation"
The art of persuading opponents is losing ground to agitating allies. In recent decades I’ve noticed a decisive shift in tactics from winning people over to burying them in accusations, and it’s one of the most heartbreaking changes in general human discourse.
"I noticed that op-eds and online “debates” were not trying to persuade people who would disagree."
Even on Substack where there is impressive diversity and free speech there is big money in telling people what they want to hear. I believe Arnold has more or less already said this a couple of times in different ways.
I would put it differently. The big money has always been in telling people what they want to hear, just like in Hollywood, the big money has always been in showing people what they want to watch, hence the term 'infotainment'. But what people have wanted to hear in 'news' is not just what I call a "market to satisfy confirmation bias", but also what one might call the "social utility" of absorbing the content, you want to learn it because all the figures in your social milieu know it, and you want to be able to converse with them about it, bond by demonstrating aligned opinions or jockey for depth and cleverness of analysis to size each other up, sometimes spotting subtle ways the development could have personal impacts or provide opportunities, or to signal that you are an intelligent person who likes to stay reliably well-informed on current events and able to comfortably adopt and deploy the latest knowledge and ideas. Where I work people talk with each other about political news similarly to how they talk about sports news, and for similar reasons.
A combination of a variety of factors created a brief period in 20th century American history where limited numbers of organizations with national broadcast capacities and mass audiences but with a high degree of social churn and mobility combined with the demand for social utility in a manner which favored news-messaging consensus and uniformity instead of competition based on ideology and perspective and faction or class-based sorting and market segmentation. The point is that the social utility demand once worked to -check- the excesses of the desire to satisfy confirmation bias.
Those conditions are now long gone, and the big change is that social utility is now experienced in particular, infosphere-segregated (because virtually intermediated) groups, and thus social utility is maximized not by checking confirmation bias so that one can get closer to the normal median of the whole population, but in the tribal way of amplifying confirmation bias, so one can get closer to the views of one's own tribe, with an emphasis on going to extremes of celebration or demonization when the topic is that of tribal comparison and contrast.
Regarding Rufoism, Trumpism, and Muskism, I believe we should consistently remind them of the following:
The Tenth Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
According to my reading of the U.S. Constitution, education is not an enumerated power, therefore all federal funding of education programs should end. And the Department of Education should be abolished.
My impression is that Rufo et al would be satisfied if leftist cultural prerogatives were forced to stand on their own, rather than persist on the taxpayer dime. Plus, leveling the playing field (ala Caldwell) such that leftist prerogatives weren't given the force of law (under the guise of equal protection), while conservative cultural prerogatives are verboten (e.g. keeping men out of women's bathrooms and sports is itself cause for state and federal prosecution).
There is also a separate, but related, frustration around playing an iterated prisoner's dilemma with no consequences for repeated defection. If Mueller style lawfare is all upside and no downside ("the norms!"), then it will keep happening with greater intensity (as it did, with Jack Smith, Bragg, Tish James, etc. etc)
Finally, liberal tolerance is an exploit for a dishonorable adversary, who will push the limits of informal norms (right up until the formal limit) e.g. the pro Hamas or BLM "disruptors" would disappear if they got punched right in the mouth like they deserve (or run-over for sitting in traffic), but know full well that getting punched or run over will bring more harm on their adversary than them. They are cowards who rely on the protection of the very people and institutions they agitate against. It used to be that being an obvious coward was punishment enough, but not anymore. Now it's an exploit.
The GOP or whomever has carried the mantle for classical liberalism has not even attempted to address these issues (or their failure to carry the mantle). It still hasn't. "It gets worse every year, but we'll keep running on low taxes and deregulation" begins to sound ridiculous. David French is the meme for GOP impotence, "the conservative case for self-immolation"
The art of persuading opponents is losing ground to agitating allies. In recent decades I’ve noticed a decisive shift in tactics from winning people over to burying them in accusations, and it’s one of the most heartbreaking changes in general human discourse.
"I noticed that op-eds and online “debates” were not trying to persuade people who would disagree."
Even on Substack where there is impressive diversity and free speech there is big money in telling people what they want to hear. I believe Arnold has more or less already said this a couple of times in different ways.
I would put it differently. The big money has always been in telling people what they want to hear, just like in Hollywood, the big money has always been in showing people what they want to watch, hence the term 'infotainment'. But what people have wanted to hear in 'news' is not just what I call a "market to satisfy confirmation bias", but also what one might call the "social utility" of absorbing the content, you want to learn it because all the figures in your social milieu know it, and you want to be able to converse with them about it, bond by demonstrating aligned opinions or jockey for depth and cleverness of analysis to size each other up, sometimes spotting subtle ways the development could have personal impacts or provide opportunities, or to signal that you are an intelligent person who likes to stay reliably well-informed on current events and able to comfortably adopt and deploy the latest knowledge and ideas. Where I work people talk with each other about political news similarly to how they talk about sports news, and for similar reasons.
A combination of a variety of factors created a brief period in 20th century American history where limited numbers of organizations with national broadcast capacities and mass audiences but with a high degree of social churn and mobility combined with the demand for social utility in a manner which favored news-messaging consensus and uniformity instead of competition based on ideology and perspective and faction or class-based sorting and market segmentation. The point is that the social utility demand once worked to -check- the excesses of the desire to satisfy confirmation bias.
Those conditions are now long gone, and the big change is that social utility is now experienced in particular, infosphere-segregated (because virtually intermediated) groups, and thus social utility is maximized not by checking confirmation bias so that one can get closer to the normal median of the whole population, but in the tribal way of amplifying confirmation bias, so one can get closer to the views of one's own tribe, with an emphasis on going to extremes of celebration or demonization when the topic is that of tribal comparison and contrast.
"I would put it differently. The big money has always been in telling people what they want to hear"
And now it is on display for even people like me to see.