Love that the right wing has decided a contract paying a 19 year old with no college degree and like 10k subs on youtube ~$100k/yr *before incentive compensation* is "jewish" and not, like, a good deal and an extremely impressive accomplishment for that 19 year old.
huge arbitrage opportunity on uploading supreme court decisions to claude and saying "please write the 10 key takeaways from this decision" to post on twitter
I have just finished reading Justice Clarence Thomas's 91-page dissent in the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down Trump’s birthright citizenship order.
It's incredible.
Here's everything you need to know: 🧵
There you have it, Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts just decided that little Josue born to illegal Haitians in Springfield, Ohio is just as American as you and me... because of the 14th Amendment or something.
I was thinking more about this write up and wanted to add that this debate was really was very, very stupid. Probably the dumbest debate I have ever listened to. The fun comes from stomping and hissing and realizing it's an intellectual farce so you don't have to take it or the speakers seriously. The fact that suit+tie is required makes me think the organizers don't want you to come away with that impression, but I did, so maybe this event failed by their own standards.
"BILLIONAIRES! Please give ME AND ALL MY FRIENDS lots of FREE MONEY AND HOUSES. Thank you for your attention to this matter"
- Man formerly given a sinecure (FAKE JOB!) by Peter Thiel pleading obliquely for his job back
The talk was about a mystery:
It costs $5-$15 million dollars to endow a Chaired Professorship. Say in Demography (immigration), Virology (virus origins), Public Health (vaccine safety, nudge, noble lies), Evolutionary Theory (gender), Political Science (color revolution technology), Near Eastern Studies (Islam as colonial empire), Economics (asset taxes), etc.
Yet our anti-woke Billionaires have not figured out that they alone can REWARD the academics like @MartinKulldorff or @jordanbpeterson, @BretWeinstein, @HeatherEHeying, @peterboghossian, @ConceptualJames, etc by reinserting them with no teaching duties and gorgeous housing / vacation homes and discretionary funds. Imagine 25 academics with giant huevos reinserted back into Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton present in every faculty meeting empowered to blow up the woke Mind Virus where it breeds. Imagine if every university learned the lesson that heroic behavior was actually admirable and REWARDED? Duh??
God this is so dumb.
Similar for journalists and editors at newspapers.
Yet…Something is wildly wrong with our billionaire/Trillionaire class. This is one of the most effective ways to destroy the revolutionary mental illness by REWARDING the academics who along with their families paid with livelihoods, pensions, their names, academic access.
Our tech/financial billionaires are mysteriously not yet serious. They don’t want to share almost a drop of wealth with the true heroes in my eyes to finish the job and put sane people back into the madhouses to make miserable the lives of those poisoning our society.
But calling on Billionaires to stop being woke-cowed may not be popular. So my talk still is not up days after the closing address was published.
This is about a collosal failure of imagination by those who could afford to finish the job but refuse to take on the Covert Operations group technology that is behind the woke revolution inflicted on US/UK.
What the heck is wrong with our billionaires? I assume it has to do with how many have the IC (and covert operations complex) as a client. This is so simple. I know what they talk about at dinners. This is the way to hunt woke by showing that it CANNOT DRIVE SANE ACADEMICS INTO PRECARIOUSNESS.
I am pushing for the talk to be released. It is not like any of the other talks.
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"If the combined forces of every venture capitalist and big tech hyperscaler have yet to come up with a meaningful use case that lots of people will actually pay for, there isn't one coming."
https://t.co/lRTfjIKwKE
By mid-2026 OpenAI alone reported ~50 million paying subscribers and ~$25B annualized revenue, with AI coding assistants and chatbots being paid for at scale, so 'people will pay for it' clearly materialized (even if unit profitability remains contested).
https://t.co/gdDYUf2uwt
Masayoshi Son is a client of ours, we’ve done the valuation of all of SoftBanks investments for years now. One year the team flew to Japan to present to him and the numbers were not where he wanted them.
He leaned back in his chair and explained that our valuations do not make sense because his investments are “as important to humanity as water. What is the dollar value of water to the human race?”
Best to ever do it
Here is a timestamped link to the Ezra Klein conversation that incited Ryan's video about populism and liberalism. In particular the comment about "the abundance mullet. Economic populism in the front and abundance in the back" (This topic pops up in a few other places, Ryan took issue w/ various comments Derek Thompson made about populism. Feel free to jump around by ctrl+fing the transcript). https://t.co/1GYGcy5fP3
When Ryan is talking about populism, this is the conversation he is weighing in on. LonerBox does not have this context and Ryan did not effectively refocus on the conversation off of defining populism as some form of ideology (like you are sort of doing, but oscillitating between that and also accepting it as a rhetorical strategy in the case of Newsom) he is talking about populism as a political strategy.
You can see in this video, nobody takes issue with the idea of marrying economic populism (freeze the rents! fast and free buses!) and abundance (legislation increasing housing construction in NYC). I am not sure what part of this creates some kind of pluralistic contradiction because there is none.
And direct response:
A. Why? Currently Platner is the clearest and most unanimously agreed upon example of left wing populism and seems to have inherited liberal pluralism. If he isn't a pluralist I would be surprised, I guess it's possible though! Why do you think he is not both of those things?
B. Your comment about the debate itself is also not right, whether populism is some coherent ideology or a rhetorical strategy is what is at issue throughout the conversation. Ryan defines populism as "a style of politics". Soy Pill defines it as "just a tactic", so your comments being oriented to the debate is just affirming that you agree with LonerBox, disagree with Ryan, and disagree implicitly with the understand of Populism held by Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson.
C. In this point you seem to perfectly grasp my thesis by saying "uses populist rhetoric to a pluralist end." If populist rhetoric can serve a pluralist end, populism is not inherently contradictory to pluralism, and the 95% claim does no work.
D. If you agree Mamdani is a populist, do you think Mamdani is anti-pluralist? If you do, you are the 1 person who thinks that! Why is this apparent harmony of populism and pluralism not dispositive of your view? fwiw I also do not like his endorsements.
There is probably some definition of populism where this is true but in America today, much of the "should liberals adopt a populist posture" discussion is a reaction to the rhetoric and success of Mamdani/Platner/Newsom, which people take to be populist. None of those figures strike me as standing in opposition to a pluralistic society, so the incompatibility you are pointing to seems not to materialize. Whatever definition you are insisting on, then, seems to not make contact at all with the definition of 'populist' American liberals -- even elite american liberals -- are talking about today. Perhaps you are superimposing some notion of populism you get from Orban or whatever onto American politicans and American notions of populism.