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

Conservatives love to complain that everyone is against them: professors, journalists, intelligence officers, social media companies, and so on.

I used to as well until I considered that maybe having problems with everyone else isn't their fault, it's yours.

I was reminded of that realization when I read this important NYT article about how Facebook keeps weakening news source quality controls because conservative content gets disproportionately effected by them.

Unfortunately, this great piece of reporting by @MikeIsaac, @sheeraf, & @kevinroose didn't mention the greatest challenge in AI news signal processing: Humans can barely separate conservative & far-right content. Which means computers can't either.

This techno-semiotic conundrum originates from the fact that in the US, because there is no moderate conservative tradition, the gravitational center of the right is far removed from the political center.

More plainly, this means that almost all the energy and organizing on the right exists on the far right.

This is not the case on the US left where there is a strong moderate tradition capable of organization and force projection. Ask Bernie Sanders if you disbelieve.

For the past 6 years, I & a few other journalists have been trying to get the mainstream press and political elites realize the major danger posed by the radical right. Unfortunately, moderate and liberal elites deluded themselves into thinking that conservatism wasn't a cult.

There is no secretly powerful "Republican establishment" that will fix things. There are thugs, deluded people, and there are quislings. There is no one else in the GOP. Instead of focusing on the radical right's danger, editors wanted stories about Trump tweets.

Instead of calling out the dangerous radicalism of the GOP, television debate shows and opinion pages invited the enablers of fascism to speak and write about how we all needed to give powerful insane people the benefit of the doubt.

Unlike Trump, who walled off the White House months ago into a fortress, Nancy Pelosi did not take the terrorist threat seriously enough to demand better security. She has the budget and the authority and did nothing similar. Now, fascists are on the floor of Congress.

Of course, it is Trump who bears the responsibility for this but the Capitol Police have totally disgraced themselves by not fortifying the building the way that the Secret Service did to the WH.

This is the view of numerous congressional staffers of both parties.

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.

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.

My highlighted passages from The Psychology of Money by @morganhousel. Thread below

1. The 401k - the backbone savings vehicle of American retirement - did not exist until 1978. The Roth Ira was not born until 1998. If it were a person it would be barely old enough to drink

2. NYU professor Scott Galloway has a related idea that is so important to remember when judging success - both your own and others': "Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems."

3. Margin of safety - you can call it room for error or redundancy

4. "Every job looks easy when you're not the one doing it because the challenges faced by someone in the arena are often invisible to those in the crowd."

5. "The average equity fund investor underperformed the funds they invested in by half a percent per year, according to Morningstar - the result of buying and selling when they should have just bought and held."

THE TRUTH BEHIND WHY ONLY 2% OF PEOPLE SUCCEED AND 98% OF PEOPLE FAIL

(Plus a 30 minute exercise to get you into the top 2%)

//Thread//

Quick PSA: If you get value from this thread, please share some Knowledge Karma and retweet the first tweet 👆

Thank you.

Now let's upgrade your life..

I'll start by addressing the elephant in the room.

This is not another thread about "positive thinking" and us ing affirmations to get what you want.

You will need to take action for this to work.

If you are willing to do that

Read on 👇

Psychological Fact #1 : Reality = What you experience in your mind.

Reality is not objective.

This is why a man with a million dollars can say he's "depressed"

While a man with nothing in his pocket can say he's "happy"

and they can both be right at the same time.

A plastic surgeon noticed a pattern in his patients.

Even though a patient underwent transformative surgery and OBJECTIVELY looked more beautiful

Many came out of surgery and still saw an ugly person in the mirror.

How is this possible?

It all boils down to self belief.

[🔞 hopekook, rimming] happy vday if you celebrate it, last night i fell asleep thinking about a horny hopekook date where they set aside time to cuddle and watch something soothing and mindless. jk chooses a nature documentary, more for background ambiance than anything else.

they start out with hobi laying crosswise on the couch, and jk crawls between his legs, rests his head on hobi's sternum. he likes to cuddle like that because he can hear hobi's heartbeat. also hobi will usually skritch his scalp when they're in this position.

he's doing that now, running his fingers from jk's forehead to the nape of his neck, but then he scoops along jk's ear instead. fingertips smoothing along the shell curve and then gently tugging on his earlobe. he keeps doing it, repetitive. the apartment is warm.

and quiet, too, except for the doc in the bg and the soft sounds of their breathing. hobi's fingertips keep tugging easily, gently on his ear lobe and all of a sudden jk realizes he's getting hard. he doesn't pay it much mind, one or both of them often do when they cuddle, even

if it's just a cuddle session & not anything further. but then hobi moves his leg, feels it, laughs softly, & moves his leg again - this time, deliberately. jk smiles, rubbing his mouth against hobi's sweatshirt. he rolls his hips, real slow like, and feels hobi's dick, too.

You wanna know the truth? My best friend just dropped me for no discernable reason in December when I was going through an unrelated mental breakdown (started in October) that required new treatment. To this day I have no clue what happened.

This has, without a doubt, been the most traumatic event that has ever happened to me. I had felt that maybe there was distance there, but I was trying to take care of myself. He reassured me he loved me just 1 week prior. Then, he said he was going to quit working with me.

He had been my business partner and literally helped me co-own my business. He requested his name be dropped from the company completely and that he needed to "put my family first" and find a different job. I don't know what that family first comment meant at all...

Then, he stopped communicating with me as frequently. This lasted a few days. He started acting extremely squirrelly and dodging direct questions. Very innocent questions like, "are you doing okay?" Again, this whole time I'm dealing with a genuine mental breakdown.

Last, he sent me a bizarre vague message, telling me that he didn't want to talk to me "in the foreseeable future" and cited some of the - honestly - most paranoid reasons for this. We live literally across the globe from one another. One of the things he accused me of was ...

Stick with me for a story about how the logic of lockdowns can turn into something really sinister.

It begins with a Golden Retriever named Neesha

Neesha and her little pup sibling Harley were lost on an hike, taking in the outdoor air in the Wicklow Mountains.

If you've never been to Ireland, you should understand that these are 1) right near the city where most of the country lives and 2) the most beautiful thing you've ever seen

The dogs had bolted, and the owners had only ben able to find Harley. They thought Neesha was dead. But miraculously, two doctors on a hike in Wicklow found Neesha almost two full weeks later

She lost a third of her body weight, but now she is at home, snuggled up and warm with her family.