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Thread: Meaning and loss in American conservatism

I've written a lot about how Christian supremacism (expressed and implicit) is the underlying objective of most Trump supporters but the psychology of American conservatism is very important in its descent into madness.

 We're seeing it manifested heavily in the present moment as Trump and his followers are forced to contemplate the loss of the presidency but it's important to realize that losing is the psychic core of the U.S. right.
Trump's repugnant demeanor and prior history of political moderation is what made him so reviled by conservative activists and donors in 2015 but his angry victim complex so deeply resonated with the GOP base that this is why he won the primary.
American conservatism has been obsessed with death and loss since it emerged in the 1940s. The utter humiliation of Herbert Hoover and the rapid growth of federal spending and regulation under FDR was an existential moment for the corporate barons who started the U.S. right.
The rise of explicitly atheist Marxist-Leninism was also immensely triggering of long-time fundamentalist fantasies of persecution and death before the return of Christ. Most Christians don't see John's Apocalypse as a literal text but fundamentalists do.
The ethos of Revelations so utterly permeates modern conservatism even after the collapse of the USSR. The book's tale of two prophets called by God to witness for Christ in Jerusalem is foundational to evangelical support for Israel and for Christian nationalism in the US.
Outside the US, the idea of Christian witness is mostly personal but as successive presidents sought to ramp up public support for the Cold War, the idea that US was some sort of divinely created country became very widespread.
The religious concept of witness was merged into the identity politics of American conservatism from its very beginnings as in Buckley's first book "God and Man at Yale" and Whitaker Chambers's book "Witness."

Critical to both men's views was that they were on the losing side.
The founding slogan of National Review was that it would "stand athwart history, yelling Stop." It has been the mission and identity of conservatism in the country ever since.

Conservatives would witness against the godless wicked and die fighting for the truth.
I sat in many meetings of conservatives about various legislative tactics on budget bills or some regulatory policy and the phrase "well this is the hill that we'll die on" was uttered so often. There is this obsession with dying for Christ, even if only metaphorically.
This attitude is present at the very highest levels of American conservatism. And it keeps re-manifesting itself anew in different ways. This essay about Kayleigh McEnany is a great example of one person's view: https://t.co/pl4zVfJ7fT
Even non-religious conservatives are obsessed w/loss since the idea that "big government" is inevitable is actually true. Basically no one is going to vote to slash Medicare or to privatize Social Security.

Some of them, like billionaire Peter Thiel, blame this on women.
In 2009, he seemed to pin the growth of government on women having the right to vote. He also wrote that "the higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became about free-market politics — capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd" https://t.co/yiqXBEEKwJ
Trump promised an end to the losing. He told fundamentalist Christians that they would be in charge of society under his administration. But this was a lie, not only because he couldn't effect that but because fundamentalist Christianity has never been regnant in the U.S.
Realizing that their views were rejected by most Americans was something that started to happen among fundamentalist Christians after the Scopes trial in the 1920s. But the geopolitical struggle against the USSR resurrected the delusion that cultural victory was possible.
From the beginning, GOP electoral consultants knew that the public didn't support slashing the govt, but they figured out soon that you don't need a majority of the people if you can get a majority of the voters. And with the Electoral College, you don't even need that.
Elites have long known they didn't have majority. This is why McConnell won't kill the filibuster despite its medium-term benefits. It's also why Paul Ryan was obsessed with stopping society's "takers" and favoring its "makers."
The activists, however, really did believe that the struggle was winnable. That the public really did believe in Ronald Reagan in 1984.

The GOP's successive losses of the popular vote began shaking faith in the struggle. Trump's defeat in 2020 was the last straw.

More from Matthew Sheffield

Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
This Parler user explains it quite well here. Because of yet more security flaws at Parler, it's now possible for all that "free speech" to be shared and archived with the world, even if the posters tried to erase their not-at-all innocent videos and GPS data.


In slightly more technical terms, it seems as though Parler never closed some of their developer-friendly security holes (sort of the programming equivalent of game cheat codes made by devs) and as a result, their anyone with the right knowledge could have admin access.

Parler never actually deleted anything its users posted. And, stupidly, they also kept it accessible to admin users.

This meant that anyone with admin access could still download it.

Once Parler's two factor authentication feature was disabled, because it was designed for developer convenience rather than security, anyone with the knowledge could become an administrator. And that's how Parler just got owned.

People have been downloading the raw videos, photos, and text posts by the gigabyte and archiving it for later public distribution.

All that perfect, totally harmless free speech will still be searchable, even now that Amazon locked out Parler from its servers.
SOCIETY
Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
Thread: People love to rag on Nate Silver for his arrogance & they should, but he's merely an example of a larger issue that the web has made it easy to draw inferences from data without knowing the context in which it lives. 1/x

Alexander Pope's warning that "a little learning is a dangerous thing" has never been more true than an age in which we can obtain information about anything without being able to understand it.

Having data doesn't mean you can use it.

Western society has a very significant problem that expertise in one area is often conflated with expertise in others.

Men are the main culprit. We have been socialized to think we know more than we do. There are many studies showing this. Here's one:

Not only do men think we're smarter than we are, we also overestimate our own attractiveness:

Male overconfidence has lots of negative implications for society. The biggest is that too many men in media have amassed followings by speaking confidently about subjects they don't understand.

Nate Silver finds Donald Trump appalling, but his shtick isn't all that different.
LIFE
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Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
Thread: Conservative Policy and the Trump Presidency

On the last full day of the Trump administration, I think it's useful to examine why he accomplished so little legislatively. TLDR version: American conservatism has almost no policy program.

The most important thing to know about conservative politicking is that people do not vote FOR Republicans, they vote AGAINST Democrats.

The GOP is dominated by a minority of far-right activists and wealthy donors who have views that their own voters don't support.

American conservatism is premised on the twin ideas that the New Deal & Great Society were immoral and that God himself created America and that we should honor this creation by establishing full Christian supremacism in which LGBT people, atheists, and Muslims have fewer rights.

Because God created America, this means that conservatives believe in essentially no domestic policy of any kind. If it wasn't literally in the Constitution, then the feds shouldn't be doing it is their opinion.

This is not, however, how things used to be in the GOP.

For much of its history, American conservatism was a sort of intellectual parasite on the Republican party which was run by a mix of moderates and liberals. They actually had domestic policies. Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon had many policies that actually helped America.
TRUMP
Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
As a former conservative activist and journalist, it has been so frustrating to see my former compatriots spreading wild and unchecked claims about "voter fraud." @jacknicas of the NYT took a deep look at claims of "dead" people in Michigan voting. Link in next tweet.

While examining claims made by right-wing activists who are not credible individuals is a thankless task which elite media editors despise, this is vital and important work in this age of fake news. Here's the link:

As the co-creator of NewsBusters, the most prominent anti-media website, I was part of a decades-long tradition of complaining about media elites being "unfair" to conservative views. There is still much to that argument, but eventually I saw that I was missing context.

What I did not realize until I began expanding my work into creating actual media and reporting institutions such as the Washington Examiner (I was the founding online editor) was that U.S. conservatives do not understand the purpose of journalism.

This became evident to me as I saw that conservative-dominated media outlets were MUCH more biased than outlets run by liberals. The latter had flaws that arose from a lack of diversities (note plural) but they operated mostly in good faith. That's not how the former operated.
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Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
Thread: Rush Limbaugh and the conservative Id

On the day of his passing, it's worth doing a brief retrospective on how Rush Limbaugh's personal life almost perfectly paralleled American conservatism...

One thing that's not commonly known about Rush Limbaugh is that he began his career in sports, doing sales for the Kansas City Royals baseball team. That's significant because much of the tribalism and dumbed-down rhetoric in American TV news directly came from sports media.

Television journalism in its earliest days was a fantastic product with real investigative reporting, no filibustering live interviews, and no soundbites. This began changing in the 1970s when ABC Sports president Roone Arledge was put in charge of ABC News.

Limbaugh tried to be a conventional FM deejay but kept getting fired because his personality was too abrasive. After working with the Royals, he began a small political talk show for a Sacremento station. The Reagan repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made his show possible.

Rush Limbaugh's Sacramento show started in 1984 (he replaced Morton Downey Jr) and after 5 years, he was picked up by ABC Radio which was trying to copy some of the sensationalism that ABC News television had started. It was a perfect fit.
SOCIETY

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\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8I Support Our Military & Law Enforcement\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
🇺🇸I Support Our Milita...
@TheWiseOwl_AZ
1. Schedule:

The Military has told media stations to anticipate a public declaration of Martial Law by Sun. 24 Jan.

Military troops were well aware of to whom they should be loyal in the dual government forces over them: "I am a National Guard soldier from the...
GOVERNMENT
Murray \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
Murray 🇺🇸...
@Rothbard1776
NEW: @SidneyPowell1 in radio interview w/ @toddeherman when asked what her "Elevator Pitch" to the Supreme Court would be "The very night of the election many people saw something that they had never seen before in the history of our elections. They saw votes being changed on

2/ the screen in front of them, going from President @realDonaldTrump to @JoeBiden. On top of that, the morning after the election, even that night, the voting stopped. They stopped counting in multiple districts at the same time before the vote got to 270 electors for President

3/ Trump. That's never happened before. The only time votes have ever stopped being counted in this country on election night was when the Broward County problem developed over the Hanging Chad's in one county in FL. So for FIVE states to stop counting on election night is

4/ absolutely UNPRECEDENTED. And they did it because the vote count for the electoral college was about to hit [+ go over] 270 for President @realDonaldTrump, because of the massive outpouring of votes for him that night. By the next morning, multiple mathematicians had contacted

5/ me and told me they knew the algorithm that had been run to change the votes. It was that obvious to people with mathematical expertise. It is a mathematical impossibility for 100's of thousands of votes to show up for VP Biden alone, and to have been injected into the system
GOVERNMENT
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🇺🇸I Support Our Milita...
@TheWiseOwl_AZ
21. Military Intelligence Contact Update continued...

. . . He said one such Deep State attack scenario was being threatened in Las Vegas NV THIS COMING TUE-TO-SAT 26-30 Jan for which Deep State operatives with FBI / CIA related connections put out ads to recruit mass...
GOVERNMENT
J Michael Waller
J Michael Waller
@JMichaelWaller
1) It looks like Pelosi is covering up the reasons why there was insufficient security at the US Capitol on January 6.

Did Pelosi purposely create the stage, as political theater, for the US Capitol Police to be overrun? House GOP leaders are asking questions that need answers.
GOVERNMENT
Adam Briggs
Adam Briggs
@ADMBriggs
Most recent T&T data now out, covers 4th - 10th Feb

LFD use continues to rise but more slowly than last week and T&T performance remains consistent.

And as ever we don't know about who isn't tested and who struggles to isolate.

🧵

https://t.co/lffa72M9YJ


The number of people being tested each week remains high at around 3m, but this is due to increasing use of rapid lateral flow devices as PCR test use falls.


The number of LFDs used has increased five-fold since the start of Jan, and 35% in the past two weeks (although noticeable slowdown this most recent week).

By contrast, PCR test use for people with symptoms fallen week on week for the past month (PHE positivity data due later).


LFDs are generally used by people without symptoms to find cases that might otherwise unknowingly transmit disease. Current use focuses in places like schools, health and care, some workplaces, and community testing sites run by local gov for people who can't work from home.

There's definite variation in their use across the country (but note chart isn't pop adjusted) and as mentioned last week, will need to keep close eye on how use varies, particularly among more vulnerable and deprived groups.

Need to mitigate any unintended harm, esp around jobs
GOVERNMENT

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One of the First Imaams of the Hiraab Imamate was Mohamed Ibn Imaam Ahmed ibn Imam Ahmed Ibn Imaam Mohamoud Ibn Imaam Cumar Halol Al Yacquubi (Abgaal) during the year 1097 hijri.


After the collapse of the Ajuuran Abgaal nomads from the interior had started moving to take over the strategic port town of Mogadishu which was then under the muzzafar dynasty. By the 1600s Abgaal warriors had captured the city and set up their base in shingaani.


Mogadishu at the time was a large and well known port town. The Abgaal clan taking over control allowed them to obtain political power and world wide recognition.


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Ameda Ksetram is located in the banks of Vembanad Lake. Temple is very unique and Powerful Sarpa Kavu.
Parashurama did Prathishta here. Vilakku which was lighted by Parasurama is still seen inside the temple.


The oil from this lamp is given to bhakthas for recovering from illness.

Sthala puranam says that, Once, when Parashurama was travelling through Kerala, he reached this place. As it was evening, he stepped into the Lake for Sandhya Vandanam
At that Sapthamathrukkal 👇


(Brahmini, maheshwari, kowmari, vaishnavi, varahi, indirani and chamundi) were travelling there on a tortoise through the water. The tortoise was unable to move, because the Water had made its way for Parashurama. The place where the tortoise became Still came to be known as 👇


Aama Ni Nidayam' ( Aama means tortoise) and later become ‘Ameda’. Parashurama came to know about the journey of Sapthamathrukkal. Thus, he did Prathishta for the Sapthamathrukkal here.
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The main Garbhagriham in the temple is the Sapthamathrukkal. There are Sannidhi to Nagas, Nagayakshi and Vishnu too. Sarparadhana or snake worship is done here. Naga Panchami is famous here. Those who have Naga Dosham come here and get relieved of their Doshas.
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@nakulvibhor
On the occasion of youtube 20k and Twitter 70k members

A small tribute/gift to members

Screeners

technical screeners - intraday and positional both

before proceeding - i have helped you , can i ask you so that it can help someone else too

thank you

positional one

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4- Bullish from last 5

intraday screeners

5- 15 minute Stock Breakouts
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Thank you
SCREENERS , ALL , NAKULSMIX
Murray \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
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NEW: @SidneyPowell1 radio interview w/ @toddeherman "The new report has a truckload of evidence of foreign interference in the election in it. That's what people seem to want to deny, even though the FBI & CISA ... issued an advisory and alert back on Oct. 30th & updated on

2/ Nov. 3rd, so for them to deny that now is absolutely absurd. Plus, we have an affidavit from an expert cyber-warfare [individual] who even shows the diagram of all the attacks coming in. We know that the VPN ... the Dominion people left those open and unencrypted on the night

3/ of the election, so that anybody could get in. We know that the packets of information went to Serbia [note: over 100 Dominion employees scrubbed there LinkedIn profiles of any affiliation with the company after the election, many of whom were in Serbia], Liechtenstein,

4/ Spain, Venezuela, Hunan, China & Hong Kong. There was traffic all over into our election system that is supposed to be self-contained, not accessible by the internet at all. We have witnesses who document that it was connected to the internet. We have a study out of

5/ [the Dominion voting system in Antrim] MI, they know that it was connected to the internet. They erased their audit files & their adjudication files, where they dumped over 68% of their ballots into a bin that they call "adjudication" [that would've been thousands + thousands
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Nikita Poojary
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Mr. Vijay Kedia built a net worth of over Rs. 800 crores.

But you probably never read past that headline.

So I binged hours of interviews to learn his investing principles and strategies.

Here are 20 lessons on investing from @VijayKedia1 Sir:

Collaborated with @AdityaTodmal


Before I start, a quick disclaimer, please don't ape his portfolio.

As the entry price, horizon and risk appetite would be far different than yours.

Rather lets draw inspiration and try to learn his stock picking skills.

Now let's DIVE IN👇

1/ Started off as a trader:

- Soon, beginner’s luck started to fade out and loses started to mount, to an extent where his mother was about to sell her ornaments.

- Although he was able to dodge the situation.

- This incident taught him the biggest lesson to have a stop-loss.

2/ Punjab Tractors:

- In 1990, he made his first investment by putting in his 10-years savings of Rs 35,000 in this stock, based on a news trigger that tractor industry will witness a turnaround.

- It worked and fetched him 4-5 times which he calls it as a fluke.


3/ He believes that an investor must possess three qualities:

i. Knowledge,
ii. Courage, and
iii. Patience.
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