If people think peak Twitter was super leftist imagine if they had encountered peak Tumblr

“I prefer Nazis to annoying leftists.”

Then they haul out the "Stalin killed more people than Hitler" argument, which is just a variant of "the slavers were Democrats."

For me the biggest WTF of the last ten years has been discovering how shockingly common this mentality is, especially among the supposedly highly-educated elite.

There are some deeply annoying and uncool weirdos on the left, but god the Nazis are so much more deeply annoying and uncool and weird.

Unfortunately USA has been absolutely sodden with anti - Communist propaganda since WW2. It seemed like a good idea back in Truman's day, but it has some unfortunate effects now.

Jesus. "This is not going to be good for them in the next election season hehe!" There isn't going to be "the next election season", you idiot.

Who are these horrible people?

"You see, Twitter injected all sorts of wacky ideas into the public sphere before Musk bought it, & it still does that, but now the ideas are Nazi-ideas. This is fine, actually."

📌

he's right about the dynamic with Twitter and the left, but the conclusion to draw from that is Twitter should cease to exist, not that it should become conservative

ehhhhhhhh "Twitter is the sole reason defund became a thing" feels too online by half

oh it's overstated definitely, arguments usually are, but I think it gets at a real thing the way that site is currently cooking conservative and centrist brains, not exclusively but importantly, I'd contend was similar up to a sign flip a few years ago on the left side of the aisle

maybe not as bad: Elon has a really heavy thumb on the scale ideologically now but the platform affordances are the biggest problem and those are pretty consistent

as we all know, the pandemic (and its effects: people becoming more online, shifts to remote work, major unemployment, general Anger At Things, cabin fever and a desire to be outside; all laying the ground for mass protest) happened because of twitter, dang leftists making a novel coronavirus

well no obviously twitter is not the only cause of political shifts in the world. Neither was TV and there was and is a robust literature on how its biases as a medium affect politics and social life, mostly for the worse. McLuhan and Postman on the entertainment bias it brings to everything

Some empirical work estimating declines in voter turnout as an effect of TV: web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/re... As well as a mechanical substitution of other activities for screen time if you’re watching a lot of it

I won’t contend the effect Twitter has on politics is nearly as well theorized or as proven as the one TV had but it seems intuitively clear it’s very large and in my somewhat informed opinion rather negative If TV makes everything entertainment, Twitter-like sites make everything conflict

Adding to this: the typical person is uninformed about good policy (bc they have no incentive to become informed). So if media increases political participation, then the average voter is less informed than before.

Thank you for this link, I'm writing something related to this. Would love any other refs you have!

I'd read 3000 words on how it did become a thing. I mean I have a sense of which organizations were pushing it but the bulk of the people who used and defended the slogan were not affiliated, so where did they hear the term and where did they use it

I think a lot of it is that the center basically had no ideas about, or interest in, stopping abusive policing (this is still true IMHO). So as that issue became more and more relevant, people flocked to defund because at least it was offering something.

“Pay cops more” being suggested in the smarmy contrarian voice everyone hated as a suggestion to what to do post George Floyd really drove a lot of people mad because it was so bad.

“You just have to break the police unions! We will do anything to support this politically? Absolutely not.”

And they were always afraid to say what the next step is, after you break the police unions (namely, it's "fire a bunch of bad cops", but they didn't actually want to _do_ that).

blackball the bad cops so they can't go get jobs at the department one town over and go right back to abusing the public

Yeah at the very least the state should run a licensing program, losing the license should mean inability to be deputized in any jurisdiction in the state

This publications ostensible reason to exist is to provide positive arguments for liberalism, not be reactionary slop at either the hard left or the right.

This is the take of Yglesias and every one of his friends, but this is just causing Trump to do horrible things which is very bad.

Those are basically the people I have in mind when I think of being noseblind to Hitler particles. It's not that I think they're secretly far right, but they've lost the ability to tell how bad it is or what's normal.

They are morally unmoored and this is not a new condition for them - it’s just newly obvious.

Yeah, it's been a very disappointing reveal.

They present themselves as reasonable liberals but they’re just reactionaries without the slurs. Their whole job is to discredit the left and left solutions in service of power, they consistently pushed Rufo’s agenda, who just wrote a purely fascist screed on “restoring the republic”.

I think it's true, but I don't know if they know that.

I’m not trying to be contentious with you, at all. I’ve just watched them for so long. They always grant acceptability to rightwing “thinkers” but dismiss leftists and ascribe nefarious motives to them. Abundists even said they want to pick a fight with the left and use that to gain political power.

They know they’re anti leftist. These are people that know what logical fallacies are and have access to all the research on every issue and left arguments. They are dishonest and manipulative with data, use willful misreading and fallacies, bad faith, ad hominem. But never attack the right that way

I think you could also argue part of the dynamic that made that stuff such a millstone for Democrats was a drumbeat of people drawing attention to them, but now the shoe is on the other foot Yglesias types are still focusing on wokes rather than nutpicking right-wing twitter

Twitter isn't real life... people who pay to discourse on substack, however...

They just need to come out and call everyone left of center "dirty plebs." These people are privilege assholes see the poor as disgusting and anyone helping the lower classes as pathetic. They're elitists. They need to maintain their meritocratic fantasies.

these are the kinds of people who will be subscribing to “the argument”, just the most brain rotted “enlightened centrists” in the universe

I feel insane every time I bring up this study blog.x.com/en_us/topics...

Why can't he just shut up? Any horrible "left" ideas on Twitter had precursors around long before that, and they didn't need Twitter to spread. Does he think that "right" types will burn themselves out and lose their manufactured "underdog" status, so all the cool tryhards will go "left" again?!

"Right" types only barely care about having any more credibility than "leftists". They WANT the rot! So with such a weakened and sold-out "left", they have it easy attracting aggro nerds. Only many ordinary folks and the most viciously dissident people hate "rightists", and they'll get attacked.

And what exactly is Andy Marks calling "crazy leftist positions" besides "defund the police"? Does his line in the sand drift "rightwards"? Scratch a "centrist" and even a Nazi would shudder at the asshole you have to deal with.

jesus

if you delete the contrarian angle ("I'm glad Elon made it a cesspool") the essence of this point is just "social media is bad" and yeah, it kinda is

Is she liking literally every comment? Because that’s the least disturbing option.

Nope - and she’s jumping in and arguing back against people saying Twitter actively works against left-leaning folks: bsky.app/profile/eke....

Hate to see Daryl Davis, famous fascist deradicalizer, being invoked to defend the platform of fascist radicalization.

It’s pretty funny because Davis is a fraud

It's a massive blind spot for liberals that when socialists/communists are advocating universal healthcare through democratic means we don't treat them the same as the right trying to solidify power though authoritarian police action?

I mean, the massive human rights abuses were the reason to oppose the USSR, the econ issues were always secondary but yeah, we should learn from where centrally planned econs failed, and Trump is working so hard to duplicate the repression of the party state

He's also trying to centrally plan the economy

That mindset, particularly right now, is absurd. They need to get offline if they genuinely believe that communists are an equal threat to the almost *openly* fascist government. 6 months in and there’s already military deployment in opposition-led cities!!

Communists are a threat only to the extent (and there is an extent) that they enable fascists.

wrong

Millions for this and not a penny for @sodrock.bsky.social . Crash out queen you earned it

I am saying

More like Jerusalem Dumbass

I just heard of this lady yesterday and boy am I glad. Big no thanks

why does she keep liking these insane comments?

Yeah it really undermines her point of "I'm speaking here as a reasonable non-rightwing person" doesn't it

because they agree with her

Because she prioritizes her own emotional and intellectual comfort over actual growth.

likes a suckup

she agrees with them?

Jerusalem Dumbass

Honestly, I hadn't realized her brainworms were this bad before she launched this outlet--I mainly knew her writing on housing, but that's it.

I hadn’t either, but somebody in the comments pointed this out, from 2024/12/31, and uh. Well,

That's very funny, remember when being anti-vaccine was (at least partly) a crunchy left thing?

So open minded her brain fell out.

ironically, it is really hard to read this stuff without coming to the conclusion that the author spends way too much time on a certain website staffed by nazis

You should, perhaps occasionally read the full piece instead of reacting to headlines.

Is there anything of substance in the article that you want to stand behind? Did you read it?

1) since it's long been known that a sizable majority people never read past the headline, it's maybe high time to start using headlines that actually agree with the article's text. 2) I remember that DOGE article. And it consistently reaffirmed that DOGE's mission was correct and that America's

aid agencies/programs were massively inefficient money sinks. It was a bad article that completely failed to defend government programs.

No; the article does not make any such arguments. Find me a section claiming that aid agencies are inefficient money sinks.

Come on - what are you arguing here? DOGE was already targeting aid organizations when this was printed! Anyone decent reporter should know that; it’s the basic context of the piece. Saying “DOGE might be a good idea” in that context amounts to an endorsement of aid cuts.

You should note that I said very clearly in my posts that I had. I confess that the second one is more of a stub adverting to a podcast which I haven’t listened to; but this stuff is terrible! It’s just patently false, as we all know now, having lived through DOGE for six months!

What? How is anything in the screen shots false?

I really really strongly disagree with this.

What in it is true or smart? Hopelessly naive is the best interpretation and that would fully disqualify them already.

I see little compelling evidence that government is terribly inefficient or wasteful, or that current entities like the GAO are insufficient. Especially enough to warrant embracing an obvious bad faith effort like DOGE/Musk

Insofar as there is inefficiency, it is often caused by republicans themselves so teaming up with them or adopting their rhetoric seems self-defeating.

By the way - here’s another thing that’s false: the interviewee in the RFK Jr piece directly implies that RFK Jr was radicalized by the COVID pandemic. This is absolutely not the case, as anyone who knows his history knows - it’s disproven by just looking at his Wiki page.

One of the DOGE guys themselves famously got fired for admitting openly that there wasn’t nearly as much “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government than they thought! This is the kind of vague, insubstantial stuff said by politicos who don’t actually know much about how government functions.

That doesn't address my question.

- and it’s strategically just stunningly myopic for anyone to expect that DOGE would target the waste that DOES exist in government. We knew what they were aiming at in January - they weren’t secret about it! Anyone listening should have known they did not care about fraud.

I see you quickly abandoned your "didn't read it" claim and have now moved on to being a baby brain.

I think a lot of Democrats in the government and general federal orbiters have taken government reform seriously? Especially sectors which are pretty wasteful like the hard budget splits between contract work and bringing jobs in house.

Like this is how the discussion is framed, and I think it's false both coming and going; taking the issue with how government HR and budgetary processes work is fairly normal in DMV circles on the left and I don't think the right actually does take this seriously at all, which DOGE basically proved?

"Move the Overton window about government waste" by shredding public services, illegally firing tens of thousands of people, gutting vital services, and treating the federal government as if it's a plaything for bored, amoral skript kiddiez with ketamine addictions.

I don't know if you've been living under a rock since January, but DOGE didn't find any inefficiency and instead cut jobs and services provided by the federal government to nearly nothing. There was no value to be had, Musk wasn't operating in good faith, as anyone could have predicted in November.

Which has nothing to do with the claims in the screenshots above.

your pretend naivete is incredibly goddamn grating

Lmao, make a better case then!

you're a mark, an idiot, or evil, which is it?

If there has been any serious governmental reform in recent years it is not by the Republicans or Trump or DOGE. You should know budget cuts are if anything the opposite of reform. Budget savings may result *from* reform, but reform itself costs money. The screenshots are absolute bullshit.

You can’t deal with bad faith actors on the “merits” of what they’re saying. You don’t “gotta hand it to them”

Her piece was fine but coming on here going “Hurr durr bet you leftists will be big mad” is her wanting the rage bait so she can sell clout to the right

lol

White bald dipshit defends woman supporting Nazi website, tracks

Maybe, but also I'm not going to try McDonald's new McShitter

my theory that only the stupidest of bitches get to run liberal magazines continues to be vindicated

The Atlantic dot com? Seriously, it's a Vichy publication and Demsas is less bad than many of its other writers

I would assume she agrees with them.

She's evil

If a socialist believes in the rule of law and free and fair elections (as most US socialists do), then there is no comparison to Nazis. Communists are bad... but scary? There are 0 communists members of congress, 0 communists own major social media sites, and a communist isn't president.

Yep, I doubt there would be much tolerance for RAF-like revolutionaries, but they are not part of the political map at this point because they simply don't exist in any organized shape. Nazis on the other hand...

I'll argue with any tankie that shows up in my feed, but they are a fringe. Fascists are in control of the country. Saying that you should be 'equally scared of both' is delusional. Like I should be equally scared of sharks and bears, even though I'm nowhere near the sea and a bear is running at me.

Just out of curiosity, can you articulate why "communists are bad"?

The short answer is that any authoritarian ideology is inherently bad and will lead to bad outcomes.

Longer answer: while a strong government is necessary, you need liberal forms of representation (elections, legislatures) to act as a check against government tyranny.

Exe. Where I think the Russian Revolution crossed the point of no return is when the Bolsheviks disbanded the constituent assembly. They detached themselves from public accountability.

Inevitable consequences ensued, and there was no way for people hurt by those consequences to respond, no way for them to influence their government other than violence.

Okay. I asked because I have fairly conservative friends who say, word for word, "we don't want communism" while knowing absolutely nothing about communism. Agree that all authoritarian government is wrong, disagree that communism requires authoritarianism or that the two are necessarily linked.

Also acknowledge that any attempts (all failed, of course) at moving towards communism have relied on authoritarianism to move that way to this point in history.

I guess where I struggle is that communism and socialism (especially in the US) are so often affixed to the ills of authoritarian history while capitalism somehow seems immune from being recognized for the violence it has inflicted on so many. It's authoritarians we collectively do not want.

Daryl Davis is a brave man and I'm sure he's seen success with his approach. But I wonder what the ratio is between successful conversions and the people who just called him the n word and threatened to lynch him

it's so funny to steal valor from Daryl Davis, who obviously did a good thing,but his work was offline. like one on one. that's a 180° from posting on Twitter

I just want to see posts that I think are good. I don't understand why people pretend like the calculus of which site you're on is or should be any more complicated than that for a regular user

Some people’s framing of “good vs bad” includes “props up Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism” in the “bad” column

I mean I fucken wish they were, tbh. Then they'd at least be incompetent when they crush our movements and fumble a bunch of shit and thereby enable us to actually get stuff done, the way they already do with fascists. Instead, liberals are MORE afraid of socialists and communists than of fascists

Is she just liking every comment? That’s basically the opposite of her position, it’s just also framed as hostile to the left.

I'm 100% in favour of these people staying on twitter, tbh.

Anyways I'm gonna be keeping a list, sign up today to keep bad takes away

Clicking so fast I sprain my finger

I spent all day yesterday moving and I sure am glad I missed all this discourse. I don’t know who Jerusalem is, but she appears to be trying to sell people on staying on Twitter, the site operated by a shitty white supremacist who bought the last election.

*laughs in Mamdani and Frey* The woke train will run all these idiots over

“Yeah man, I heard the word ‘Latinx’ like 5 times when Dems were on twitter. Thankfully now we have Nazis and mass deportations instead”

Surely the logical conclusion if the author sincerely holds these beliefs is that the left should abandon Twitter? Why would you want to compete for control of a clown college?

twitter has never been left-wing lmao

"I'm glad everyone's just accepted massive, corrupt police state. I'm sure this won't come up again."

it's also terrible analysis to not understand that the GOP is using twitter ideas and literally getting ideas on who to persecute from twitter. like it's not blown up in their face their beliefs are Nazi and fascist and they just workshop them together

yeah Democrats got demolished in November 2020 because of it right?

I actually don't remember "one Democrat after another (taking) crazy leftist positions" were they talking about nationalizing industry or...?

You don't remember it because it didn't happen, Andy Marks is a lying sack of shit

Wow I feel dumber just reading that truly a victory for high-quality discourse

The Argument wants leftists on Twitter because they have nobody to punch and sneer at in the comments without us. Maybe two, if I’m generous, of the people involved with this effort will have any good faith “debate” with anyone on the left. They’re currently busy dog piling Matt Breunig ffs. IGNORE!

Ah yes, crazy left wing ideas like "opposing state sanctioned violence doers who literally create more crime than they solve."