Dominic Cummings, Yarvin on Singer, Black People Magic, Vultures, and More
Best of Twitter, November 2023
Here are the best subscriber-only tweets from November 2023.
One thing I really enjoyed this month was this NYT piece on vultures. As I told you, the media is honest and good. You’re not getting this on InfoWars.
And although I’ve included it below, I also want to give away for free this video of black people reacting to Thomas Sowell, with a h/t to Tyler Cowen.
Maybe I’m trying too hard to be anti-racist here, and therefore being racist, but I was fascinated by this. The way that they engage with ideas is inspiring, and I found myself contrasting it with graduate school, where the people I knew read massive amounts of scholarly work but had become skeptical and jaded by the entire enterprise. Maybe they started out excited by ideas, but the demands of academia overwhelmed them, replacing love of knowledge with a life focused on mastering the right methods, being familiar with enough citations, teaching undergrads who had little ability to grasp the material and even less interest in it, and virtue signalling that they have the correct views on social and political issues. Or, more likely, they started out that way and were attracted to academia as a result.
People on the right sometimes joke that black people have a certain “magic” that tends to enthrall liberals and normies more generally. Maybe this is in part because whites have such a desire to be non-racist that they become hypnotized, but I’m convinced there’s more to it than that. Black people on average have higher levels of charisma, and the phenomenon is significantly underexplored. I couldn’t imagine anyone being as interested in a group of white people without any particular expertise or background in the subject discussing political ideas. A lot of conservatives seem bitter that poor whites get less attention than poor blacks, but that’s thinking like a loser, while I’m inclined towards believing that sympathy based on charisma is somehow earned, with more interest in understanding the phenomenon than struggling against it.
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