pyrex

The media again builds a virtual public consisting of billionaires of a variety of positions and ask you "which one do you agree with?" This is a strategy to push the public closer to the beliefs of billionaires.

I don't know who these fucking people are. The real public in California still supports Biden by a 25% margin.

I don't understand why people take him at face value when he claims he's always been a Democrat up until now. He's historically made large contributions to candidates from both parties, but generally more Republicans than Democrats, and also Republican PACs like Protect American Jobs. Here is his personal record.

Since 2023, he picked up and donated ~$20,000,000 to Fairshake, a crypto PAC which predominantly funds candidates running against Democrats.

Has he moved right? Sure. Was he ever left? No, this is the voting record of someone who wants to buy power from candidates belonging to both parties. If it implies anything, it implies he currently finds Republicans to be corruptible.

Stuck in my brain: I used to work at a dating site for Indian people, and one of the things we tried was "LLM-generated pickup lines."

I don't remember most of them and we never made the feature public, but one of them sticks out in my mind for being the most incomprehensible.

Guy-to-girl:

What's your remedy for a Bollywood love affair?

I read his blog a while and I agree with you.

Overall the Dimes Square guys seem very similar to each other. To me they're interesting in aggregate, described once, but there's nothing to look at beyond the surface. If you read any two blog posts on Mike's site, you know everything about them.

Of course they have day-to-day lives -- every so often one of them releases a book or something, but this has no real purpose -- none of them ever change. It's not like a man with six funny hats becomes more interesting when he acquires a seventh funny hat.

The social pattern Mike is describing seems pretty fast-paced and destructive. They do a lot of signings and court a lot of press attention, and as long as you're still shocked, they're interested in you. Past that, you kind of have to behave exactly like them to get invited, but it doesn't seem like they actually like their own -- I would be really, really surprised if they read each other's books. They just kind of brood next to each other and engage in disaffected, ironic narcissism.

I can see why he'd be valuable to them, though. Mike has his own pattern -- he's clearly learned how to be entertainingly shocked, but only intermittently -- on other occasions he denies them supply, and sometimes he burns them by being a surprisingly coherent critic. He's hard to reach but ultimately attends often enough that they remember him.

If you substitute "affection" with supply in the form of outrage, and leave everything else the same, he's basically a pickup artist.

I suspect that the actions that make up Mike's pattern are deliberate, but when it comes to explaining them, he has zero self-awareness. He's doing it too well for it to be accidental though, as much as there's a lot of denial there, and when he makes comments like the one I've selected, I think that's the mask slipping.

This man's blog is intense, but I am not sure he comes off well! I clicked around and it seems like "wants to be at all the fascist parties, courts acts of violence to complain about on his blog" is, at least in 2024, a really accurate summary of his behavior.

Or, in his words:

I tell them that I’m actually pretty hated and feared by most of these people, and I can only stay around because I criticize particular influential figures in this counterculture so well that they want to fuck me, and so they keep me around to flatter them, to reflect their true hideousness back at them by elevating it to the status of myth, and then they lash out at me like the maenads devouring Orpheus.

Every rationalist I've met has been nice and smart and deserved better. These are nerds and not in a bad way, but in a way that gets them bullied and shamed and gaslit. And in practice I can come to agreement with them on lots of issues.

On this issue I can never pin them down -- responding with what I think are reasonable questions gets me shut down with what I believe is thought-stopping behavior. They rarely state the actual reasons and the actual reasons are always slippier when they have to verbalize them to people who don't agree.

No doubt if you're a cynical manipulator, "having your followers lie about what you believe" works for you. But a lot of these are going to be nice normal guys who are tired of being laughed at and, worryingly, tired of being made to think.

In this respect they have a lot in common with, say, high school kids who became communists in part to piss off their parents. I'm not saying that to mock those kids, because I was one of them -- and I think there's a huge part of this that they're not wrong about and they're entitled to demand to be taken seriously, and precious few people do take nerds seriously. And for that matter, there's philosophically sophisticated people doing the same work as them.

I don't know how we get them into spaces where something is actually done -- if not for humanity or whatever, for people very close to them who actually need it -- and where the seduction of ego and money isn't like, so readily and constantly available.

Is there an amount of testosterone that will turn me into a lizardman