Dispatches from the Group Chats, Vol 3

Trump vs Elon? Jews & Political Parties, Elon & Europe

1. Trump’s super power

“I had a long talk with someone close to Trump who said that Trump's superpower is saying things that get under his target's skin so deeply they're never the same after."

In 2016 I had breakfast with Steve Bannon just before he became campaign advisor. He said the thing people don't realize is Trump is a real student of Carl Junge psychology. Indeed DJT's skill is finding the Schwerpunkt. The weak point of inflection. That's why he generates mean nicknames to get under peoples skin... Very intentional strategy

2. Twitter is more important than flying cars

"It turned out Twitter was more important than flying cars.

“Or said another way, maybe it was what we needed in order to get them. 😂”

3. Trump vs Elon?

They're going to try to get under Trump's skin with "Elon is bigger" meme

They are terrified of the X / Elon eye of Sauron.

"president-elect is worth a *mere* $6.6 billion"

The NYT, America's hometown socialist newspaper, looking down it's nose at a mere single-digit billionaire

too good 😂

4. On Marc Benioff

“My impression is that Benioff lives the majority of his reality on these policy issues in “marketing world.”

The Q is what makes me look good, what will be lauded, what can I say that’s the socially acceptable thing to say here, what’s safe but “leader-like” and “generous”, etc.

As opposed to - how does the system actually work, what are the right incentives and accountability, what are the outcomes and how do we have to be tougher on the groups that are failing to redirect resources and effort towards the right outcomes, what’s the hidden corruption or power stopping us from doing that, etc. Literally unable to engage in risky topics of the underlying substance disconnected from marketing-speak or exposing themselves to the risk of attacking broken/corrupt orgs that might lash back or demonize him, vs just being universally praised for generosity.”

5. Random Matt Gaetz joke

“Maybe I smoked too tough. My swag was too different. My bitch was too bad. None of these things are crimes."

6. San Francisco

If you don’t believe in the second amendment, you can move to SF or NYC… where guns are banned, and only bad guys and cops have them

Now do abortion, immigration, and just about every other hot-button issue as an exercise in federalism.

SF is always and everywhere a glimpse at the American future: spectacular technology navigating itself around intractable social problems and over bad infra (the roads in SF are those of a developing world city).

But hey the bet might work. We're not going to solve the healthcare or government spending problem: we're just going to grow past them. Sorta worked so far.

7. DOGE

Person A: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/social-security-fairness-act-senate-republicans-unions-randi-weingarten-aeac9c0d?mod=hp_opin_pos_0

The WSJ is right that the GOP really doesn't care about keeping spending low

Neither party really cares

DOGE might save a few billion dollars per year, but it won't scratch the surface of the entitlements that GOP are just as quick to rubber stamp

Person B: There is no reason that DOGE can't identify and cut huge swaths of waste/fraud/abuse in Medicare/Medicaid as well

Person C: The waste, fraud, and abuse DOGE could cut is a drop in the bucket compared to simply slashing the number of workers in the government. Not because of their salaries, that is also a drop in the bucket, but because of the collective costs they impose on entrepreneurship and creativity. I am not stupid enough to think the federal government is comparable to running twitter, but most things get a lot better when fewer people are making decisions.

All over the government there are literally tens of thousands of people who get up in the morning and impose innumerable costs. Some see it as their mission and others just do it accidentally.

8. Which party is a bigger threat to Jews?

The bigger threat to Jews is clearly on the left right now (because global Islam is the bigger threat to Jews). It's a boring, non novel conclusion, but some remain in denial

Many liberal Jews would prefer their true enemy be American rednecks. It would be easier to fight that without losing social standing. Unfortunately the enemy is mostly people hailing from or in the 3rd world, and that's uncomfortable.

It's really hard to get even moderate Jews to admit that immigration policy is a serious issue for Western Jewry. But it's clearly the case. Even weirder, American rednecks are clearly their best allies! It reminds me of Louis CK's bit about getting #MeToo'd. The tragedy of finding out who your real friends are and how they aren't the "cool" friends.

I'm not even sure most Jews realize how weird the fandom can get: https://iamisraelfilm.com/products/i-am-israel-book

I have a copy of this book because it was sent to our office in bulk—and it's all evangelical fandom for Israel; they profile Tennessee evangelicals who go and volunteer to harvest some West Bank settler's vineyard as unpaid laborers

Democrats want to paint antisemitism as being driven by white conservative rednecks, Republicans want to paint it as the left working in concert with Muslims.

The actual reality is that it's non-white Trump voters is too weird to grapple with.

Person A: Obviously it's very easy to attack Democrats on antisemetism - the universities, DEI, tolerating people like Ilhan Omar, etc.

The flipside is that Republicans have cozied up to people like Kanye, have effectively landed on a strong "private companies should never take down or demonetize or shadowban hate speech for any reason" and are in the process of strong-arming tech companies into moving to the Elon standard of moderation, and have partnered with a bunch of antisemetic people to do minority outreach (Kanye's the funniest example, but all of the Muslim for Trump people always have terrible records).

Not trying to cast blame, I just want the percentage of people who say they dislike Jews to go down instead of up….

….I think if you wanted to take an engineering mindset to the problem, you'd want suppress antisemetic content on social media and do the workplace/university purge stuff.

Each party supports one but not the other. Hard to really know how important each one is relative to the other but I'd guess probably they're ~ equal in importance, if I had to tilt probably social media is a bigger deal.

Person B: Even if you are not a principled free speech person, it should be easy to understand why the right would have an allergy to content suppression. And should also be uncontroversial that the stakes of free speech on social media are broader than antisemitism. Like maybe it's the case that a widespread return to pre-woke, laissez-faire censorship levels increases nasty groyper replies by 20%, but it also makes the Bud Light boycott viable. It makes it possible/permissible to discuss lab leak or point out that the Canadian sex offender is male. Obviously, if we were to ban all hateful, deranged speech that encompasses group-level accusations of innate evil, we would ban most woke "antiracism", and maybe Dems would be better off if we had.

Person A: I think government/society should take a heavy-handed approach to trying to suppress negative-sum ethnic conflict.

Israel and Singapore did the extreme versions of this and were very successful, and one of my pet peeves is that the American left claims to care a lot about antiracism but isn't interested at all in learning lessons from their examples.

The leftist instinct to try to extend the special treatment we give race/ethnicity to other things like orientation or gender or other forms of marginalization was a mistake, because the point isn't about counteracting oppression, it's about social stability, which is the same reason why "whites are bad" is also bad.

Person B: If we agree this heavy-handed approach extends to all negative-sum ethnic animus though, what would it look like with respect to anti-white racism, a dominant ideology in sense-making institutions over the past 10 years? For example, when NYT publishes something like this, should there be a censorship response?

Person A: But with antisemitism specifically I think you have a situation where things really deteriorating fairly rapidly - 18 year olds are ~3x more likely to say they dislike Jews than 65 year olds and both parties have fairly strong ideological commitments and political interests that will prevent them from addressing the problem and so it'll probably get worse. Seems bad!

9. Democrats and Depression

^ for both men and women, mental illness = leftist

While I actually agree with the point you are making, there are alternate explanations to the data. E.g what if people on the right are just as mentally ill, they just don't go get help? Or coastal left wing doctors are quicker to diagnose?

I bet in reality the differences are probably not quite as exaggerated as this chart implies even if it is directionally correct.

Could be all of the above, but physiognomy is real. Leftists have lower testosterone, more mental illness, and lower fertility. This is arguably *why* they are in revolt against biology itself.

This is one of the reasons why a common media interpretation of men shifting right is largely incorrect

The narrative, from Scott Galloway and others, is that these men are angry bitter putty in the hands of an Andrew Tate style influencer. Maybe they're just normal? Maybe normal, healthy Zoomers don't see political expression as deeply connected to atoning for their own sins as whites/men?

I see Democrats using this narrative about incel males angrily voting Republican and think, "The popular SEC frat boys seem to hate you guys even more"

The sum total of the racial reckoning will in 15 years be educational and outcome gaps wider than ever before

Rich white people virtue signaling gave cover to malign social process that resulted in direct increases in dead black teenagers and the reversal of essentially all progress on a range of educational indices

10. Why are recent mega criminals effective altruists or EA-adjacent?

Person A: I do think the fact that we got two TPOT adjacent shooters in a week does honestly update me a bit toward the idea that the community might be criminogenic in some way - the odds ratio on that has to be crazy.

I dunno, maybe I could see the case for rationalist-style thinking/communication styles encouraging violence in the same way that effective altruism pretty clearly was criminogenic (SBF was the most famous one, but there were three super rich EA people convicted of financial crimes in the space of a year at the height).

It's just annoying because this doesn't actually cleanly fit into a left/right framework but both the left and right are eager to turn it into a left/right thing…..

Person B: I think many on the right are gunning for opportunities to flip this discourse because for about a decade, various policy arguments were met with accusations of "stochastic terrorism"….

Person C: ..2 main factors, imo:

1. Rationalists don’t trust intuitions and are good at decoupling emotional responses, so normal/common sense conscience pangs don’t have the usual prophylactic effect when they fall into the wrong framework. Add the capacity enhancing effects of high IQ/agency and we have something akin to the overrepresentation of engineers in violent jihadism.

2. Widespread encouragement of mentally taxing practices/regimens like lengthy meditation retreats and consumption of nootropics/psychedelics

….the "leverage research invented a bunch of social technologies that caused people to go insane and maybe kill themselves and others but also kinda lead to openai" is a pulitzer winning story one day

….If Brian Thompson was stabbed by a mentally ill homeless guy, sure, blame liberalism.

But if he gets shot by someone who was DMing Lindyman and was a ghost-gun printing enthusiast I don't really see what that has to do with blue state dysfunction.

...With Luigi, it seems clear he simply lost his mind. His former ideology may be culpable to the extent that it introduced him to mushrooms.

Leftists aren’t to blame for his behavior, they are to blame for the sanctification of his behavior.

11. Elon eyes Europe

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1870488903452676105?s=46&t=mEM1_PStobz6VQ1yJPz6BQ

Person A: Elon keeps raising the stakes. He now has to win every election to keep Twitter from being wrested from his hands. He is going all in on global right populist insurrection

It will probably work because all those countries’ left wing parties are just funded by DC. Once Trump takes over, the State Department will stop propping up its Western European satellite states.

European leftists can only hold on because American leftists have helped their pawns retain control in overt and covert ways.

Now DC flips from supporter to opponent, and the domestic opposition to the European left is simultaneously unleashed. Things may move quickly.

Person B: It is hard to explain to Americans where things are at in Germany (and some other countries in Europe). The despair is palpable.

The social contract in some of these countries is completely broken. AfD is a last resort party for many voters to protest the establishment.

What is truly frightening is what lies ahead if any of these populist parties actually come to power and then fail to deliver what voters want. Which is simply to reinstate the social contract: citizens pay taxes and government keeps the order at home and protect the nation from external threats. That is it.

We split these issues into categories like immigration, Islam, climate, etc. But at its core it is this contract between those who govern and those who are governed.

It is the same here in the UK. The elections in the summer produced a worse government for voters than the party that was voted out. It is insane. And this pattern has been going on for the last 30 years at least.

12. Should we be afraid of AFD?

Yes and no. It’s probably the only way to save Germany. But there’s a part of that party that is not just tired of apologizing but thinks Hitler had lots of great views and has scary implications for us Jews.

You kind of need them to win and pull the CDU more towards a bunch of their not-insane views to change the conversation on immigration and nuclear etc to get Germany to a healthy place, but it’s a high vol move.

…the German mainstream insists on importing millions of Syrians and Turks and Afghans while abolishing electricity as immoral but we can't vote for an alternative because a member (later kicked off the party list) said something weird about the Holocaust in 2016?

…”What's interesting here (and of course ignored by the Left, which will always claim the mantle of ethnic tolerance) is that Europe's right-wing parties are actually the most (or perhaps only) Zionist parties in those countries.

Geert Wilders Israel-posts constantly. Vox (the Spanish AfD) is the only party supportive of Israel. And of course, the candidate for the party right of even FN in France was a, wait for it, North African Jew.

It's not a question of who's pro-Jewish: more like which type of Jews this or that party claims as its own. Which is a subtlety lost in the discourse.

…It was insane to hear Viktor Orban denounced as "anti-Semitic" because he attacks George Soros when Budapest is probably the safest city to be a devout Jew in Europe."

13. JP Morgan healthcare conference

…i cannot name a single exec i know planning to go to JPM this year, insane how chilling it has been

….Anarchist terrorism is already changing behavior. Who wants to attend a healthcare conference in a blue state where they’ve abolished the police?

…There are bad union protests there too, which increase the risk frankly.

…I'm in a chat with some health AI startups and they're all very disappointed because JPM and other conferences are such an efficient way for them to break through on partnerships

14. COVID stimulus effect

Person A: https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/2024-12/wp24-22.pdf

The claim here is basically that covid stimulus was unusually inflationary because it all went into tradable goods which were supply constrained because of the ports.

It does imply that the macroeconomic gains to crushing the longshoreman union and automating our ports would be very large. It's probably more important than like, tax policy.

Person B: A more accurate explanation is that after the GFC stimulus, a lot of economically illiterate politicians learned that you can inject a ton of money into the economy without causing CPI inflation.

Which is mostly true. If you inject enormous sums of money into the financial system, what you see is asset price inflation (which makes owners of financial assets happy and exacerbates inequality).

But the COVID era stimulus was given directly to consumers, which produces a radically different (and extremely predictable) effect on the economy –– it massive boosts consumption. And supply chains are extremely well understood to be deeply inelastic in the short term (though quite elastic in the long run).

The strategy would have worked if we ~mostly met the lost incomes with equivalent levels of stimulus. But a lot of low-income individuals found themselves making more money from the stimulus than they were making from working. And when low-income get more money, they spend it on stuff!

I'm glad we're learning the lesson, but gosh this was really obviously what was going to happen.”

15. The group chats rejoice at more members in the administration

Celebrating our very own Sriram Krishnan and Emil Michael