@ConceptualJames One can speculate anything. In my experience, wisdom is more often found within those who more often resist that urge.

I see no inconsistency? It seems obvious he's using the secondary meaning of "sad", which is listed in most dictionaries of English. It means something like "disappointing" or "unsatisfactory". Which is a judgement placed upon a thing or person, not an emotional state. It's so weird when people get pedantic about an overly simplistic understanding of language.

Most people draw attention to themselves, often for the wrong reasons, but if I ascertain that it's for the right reasons I don't mind it. Personally, I'd rather pay more attention to people who "were right" more often, and I don't mind if they're the ones who draw attention to that fact. We won't always learn that someone has good predictive abilities or a track record of accuracy when what they tend to talk about is unpopular and others don't want to bring attention to him. So, IMO, merely honestly accounting for one's own success needn't carry such a stigma. And indeed, it's kind of a lazy cultural assumption, as plenty of cultures exist that would celebrate that guy, on the basis of exactly this sort of nuance.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I do agree that, ultimately, most people appear to "float" through life and take the easiest path, but I tend to think that is still almost always motivated by fear. I think that's kind of implied by "ease" in the first place—that which is "easy" is that which does not invite any consequences we would fear. I do disagree with the idea that the construction of mental barriers requires conscious awareness or intent. I think that construction is automatic, and is indistinguishable from learning itself. When we first touch a hot stove and so learn to avoid that pain, for example, I don't think that lesson is learned via consciously thinking anything like "be careful in the future around stoves or hot objects". I think the mind tends to automatically shape itself around new apprehensions of understanding absent a conscious intent to resist it. As social beings, being accepted into and supported by a community is essential to our flourishing. At some early point we learn that acceptance is contingent on whether our behavior, an expression of our minds, meets the approval of the others around us. That naturally creates a strong incentive to erect and maintain guard rails/mental barriers to ensure our mental explorations are constrained to safer paths so that we'll be unlikely to earn the ostracism we fear when we inevitably outwardly express what we learn an how we change via that exploration. I tend to think that being more unconstrained, and open to thinking broadly, requires one, or both, of (1) being raised and living in an environment where there are fewer things to fear or where courage in the face of many of the potential fears is actively taught and encouraged and/or (2) active and constant conscious effort to resist the automatic process of learning in some cases, where it would otherwise automatically create those mental barriers, and putting in the extreme effort to deconstruct them where they've already established themselves. But, I don't think it's easy to nullify the fundamental human desire to explore/learn/think itself. Fear, whether of ostracism or otherwise (there are many things people are capable of fearing), naturally constrains it, but within those constraints, most people still demonstrate excitement and engagement with new opportunities to learn. I can easily see how what you likely mean by "distractions" or "consumption" are probably motivated by that intrinsic curiosity, it's just perhaps sad that so many people feel constrained to a subsistence diet of such shallow and repetitive mental stimuli. It's like a starving person who thinks their only option is to dig through the trash for scraps, and has done that for so long they don't even think it's that bad, it's just normal to them. Perhaps extreme abuse might accomplish something like the death of curiosity entirely in some tragic cases. But even there, I think the mental consequences of extreme abuse can be restated as simply "teaching a human an endless list of things to fear". And, it wouldn't surprise me if some of what our society refers to as mental illnesses are mostly the consequences of elaborate flawed assemblies of mental barriers that enough of us are driven to construct that it gains a name of its own. Some of this does agree with what you've said. The mechanism of feedback from society/peer groups is acknowledged in the development of that fear of ostracism, though I think the feedback we receive from others is far more complex and not merely 1-dimensional. I agree that most people don't know what they believe, indeed because I think we learn automatically most of the time, without conscious articulation being a necessary part of it. Of course, I'm just talking about the underlying mechanism. Whether the outcomes of that mechanism are "right" or "wrong", or "meaningful", is a higher level question, and depends on culture and ethics. I am disappointed at the state of my fellow humans overall, but I think that the world we were thrust into, and the societies that we've created on top of that, haven't exactly been optimized to ensure the best outcome for the individual psyche. We're still stuck trying to survive in a baser way, most of the time. (If you're wondering why I am replying so many days later, I apparently wrote this and it got saved as a draft rather than getting sent, probably out of service at the time, and I only noticed now as I'm clearing out my drafts.)

I had some trouble following you. I partly wonder if you used speech-to-text for some of your posts, because some of the parts that didn't make sense seemed like they might rhyme (literally) with words that would make more sense in context. I try to follow the principle of charity in my communication with others, and I try to always communicate in good faith. In my initial question, I specifically said that I don't want to assume that the term was being used in a petty way, such as "it's just calling disagreements that", and that remains true. As much as people can often act like shallow idiots, I don't think people actually are that, and I'd prefer to understand people for who they actually are and get to the heart of what they genuinely want to convey. Separately, though, I still don't have confidence that I understand what was intended, if indeed something meaningful/specific/honest was intended. And, especially when it can seem like there's almost a uniform distribution of meanings in use for a given term, I prefer to just verify what is intended per-person or per-instance when I'm confused. In this case, I don't see a ton of similarity between @peterthiel and @esrtweet, given what I know about both of them (admittedly, not a lot, but not nothing either), which fed my confusion. Anyway, I'm happy to try to understand what you mean, too, and I appreciate you sharing your perspective. Unfortunately, many of the terms you used in your posts, like "extremism", "left", "reactionary", "revisionism", and "right", have similar multimodal meaning distributions, which makes it really hard to feel confident that I know precisely what you intend to convey. And, insofar as I feel comfortable guessing as to the broader narrative you seem to be presenting (which the screenshots are helpful in illustrating), that narrative seems to rely on a lot of extended assumptions and uncharitable framing and generalizations that I'm unable to follow very far without a lot more reasoning and supporting clarification. To be clear, I don't like any of the things in those screenshots, but I'm not sure that I'd naturally reach the same conclusions as to what story those screenshots truly tell. As it is, and I may well be misunderstanding something here and I'm open to reinterpretation, this does feel a bit like "you should just know"/"it's obvious"/"I know it when I see it". And if that is what's going on, that usually means that there's a lot of cultural assumptions at play, such that only other people who share those cultural assumptions would quickly understand what's intended. It takes tons of effort and care to even start to accurately transfer those kinds of ideas to someone who is an outsider, and most people won't put that effort in, especially on a site like this. So, I'm concerned that there's a low chance that I'll obtain the better understanding that I'd like in this case. 😟

@JJ_McCullough Just curious, is there a reason you didn't link to it?

Well, that's the legal notion of free speech in a particular jurisdiction and culture. The broader ideal of free speech is often defined by different people in both narrower and broader ways, sometimes at the same time. For example, one common, and historically established, articulation of the ideal of free speech is that it serves the human need for self-expression. This could easily exclude lots of what is legally considered speech, as not everything publishable is necessarily meaningful expression of one human's mind. And a common idea behind the entire notion or definition of pornography is that it is intrinsically not self-expression. Although "pornography" can be applied more broadly than only to sexual content, the implication for sexual content is that some portrayals of sexual behavior are artistic self-expression or educational, but some lack that merit and are thus pornographic.

@MrNoahJLevy @ConceptualJames But an obviously mentally ill person having another self-destructive, shocking, and entertaining manic episode! (I really hate people sometimes.)

I watched the clip in the actual post above, and I skimmed but did not watch the entire hour and a half long video linked in the quoted post. If the label was merely being applied to @peterthiel in the context of that video, I would indeed hope that watching the whole video would elucidate, and would watch it before determining whether I should ask for clarification. However, that video seems to be only @peterthiel speaking, and the label wasn't applied only to him. I was asking @jsnbase specifically what he means by the label because he was the one who used it, by applying it to some unspecified group ("they're Nazis"), and then to at least @esrtweet and unspecified others ("you're Nazis"). I can certainly guess as to who some of the unspecified others are, but I prefer not to guess, and I am specifically seeking clarity by asking. But even if I do guess based on the cultural narratives surrounding @peterthiel and his social network, it doesn't clarify for me what is intended by the term as @jsnbase used it. If the implication is "you should just know", well, I don't know what to tell you, I don't "just know". So, I ask questions when I don't know.

Could you explain what you mean by the label "Nazi"? I genuinely don't have a high confidence that I understand what you are trying to convey by labeling people as "Nazis". At least, I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and not assume you mean something petty like "someone who makes me mad", or "a political opponent". Do you believe all such people are members of a National Socialist Party? Do you believe all such people think that most of what the Nazis in Germany did a century ago was good or right? What's the actual idea you intend to convey here?

It might seem odd to those Americans that consider being required to do anything by the state is offensive to some historical American principles.

@1776Carolina3 @cb_doge Well, they do give birth, and life itself is the ultimate nemesis of entropy. So, in a way, they've been nagging it from the start.

Functionally, he is clearly willing to engage with ideas that reduce people to their perceived group membership, as opposed to always as individuals. That's a choice people can make in their mind, and I wish no one made that choice, but many do, including many people who would claim to be against "Nazis" and in favor of some sort of "good". I wouldn't be surprised if that choice/willingness were the dominant trend in humanity, making him, while very flawed and intellectually lazy in my opinion, fairly average on that specific point. But, hatred and bigotry specifically as concepts both rely on an intense stubborn emotional component, and mental illnesses can explain that specific difference in someone. Furthermore, if someone is ill for a long time, and surrounded by a common but flawed culture, the process that builds and maintains their worldview will be very warped. So, it does seem true that if you take someone prone to some questionable but otherwise sadly common errors in reasoning, and add in warped and exaggerated mental variance from mental illness and/or drug use, you could get someone who says these sorts of things if not worse. Personally, I suspect that a large component of the seemingly racist stuff is actually his being motivated by extreme grandiosity and a related desire to shock and rebel publicly, than actually representative of deeply considered and held beliefs. See also his separate assertions to being god, the lyrics of many of his songs, and much of his public behavior for a long time. Assertions to being god are a common manifestation of certain mental illnesses throughout history. Assertions of racism are probably more recent, but as it is a modern form of blasphemy, blaspheming loudly more generally is also a common manifestation of certain mental illnesses throughout history. I suspect he'd be saying even more deviant things if it weren't for the fact that most things that are even worse could easily result in his attracting serious legal consequences, and he's not so far gone that he doesn't have some self-preservation instinct. I personally think he fundamentally just resents everyone, almost certainly starting with himself. But, everyone's free to make up their own mind.

@FuxNet @Sturgeons_Law 🤷

I genuinely do not know what you're talking about, as what you've written here seems like a non sequitur in the context of what I posted. I'm guessing you think my post said something that it didn't actually say, maybe you think it implied something that I did not intend to imply. My post offered a speculative interpretation regarding how a random human might think about things such that they might plausibly say the things @JDVance and/or @elonmusk have said in this context, thus suggesting that it's plausible that they themselves could think in that way, despite there being no way to be sure. That is, my post was fundamentally merely an acknowledgment of the reality that sometimes people think in the ways that I described, whether or not that's actually how those particular people actually think or thought in this particular case. That's not "trying to add nuance [...] to racism", but it is an acknowledgment of the ever-present nuance in how people can think differently when presented with the same information. That people can jump (or not jump) to different conclusions based on how they internally understand different concepts.

Yes, of course, point well taken. I apologize, I'm not sure why I uncharitably interpreted what you initially wrote as something closer to... autism somehow being fundamentally incompatible with Nazism. A bit overly literal on my part, perhaps. I am not a professional in that field but I have had some relevant education and had opportunities to observe and study some cases. It's too sad for me, honestly.

@krassenstein @kanyewest

Simply judging by his behavior he seems pretty clearly manic to me, which means almost certainly be has bipolar disorder. Could also be drug-induced psychosis, I suppose. It doesn't really make sense to treat what people say in either situation as trustworthy. He may also be on the autism spectrum on top of everything else, but that alone doesn't explain the grandiosity and delusions and impulsive risk-taking behavior. (Also, although probably not relevant to @ye's case, and your personal anecdotes aside, there were almost certainly autistic Nazis at some point.)

@mgrczyk @Sturgeons_Law

Okay? Please keep in mind that I was offering a charitable speculation as to what @JDVance and @elonmusk might think about the situation and why they wouldn't necessarily assume that person is disqualified from working for the DOGE. I wasn't advocating/arguing for that particular perspective, as if people SHOULD think that way, I'm merely saying that someone COULD think that way, and maybe those two are examples of that. So, given that, if your point is that someone saying "I'm racist" is always necessarily being genuine or honest in doing so, while you are free to think that way yourself, it is certainly not the case that everyone would assume that. That includes me, regardless of the specifics, simply because I assume most people are willing to lie or misrepresent anything and everything if they have more to gain from it than they (think they) stand to lose. Sometimes people will even lie for something as simple as momentary self-amusement, which could possibly be the case here. (If you don't think you'd lie like that, I commend you, as I favor honesty myself, but I still know many people would even if you or I wouldn't.) Alternately, if your point is that it doesn't or shouldn't matter if he truly meant it—that saying certain things is unacceptable or disqualifying regardless of whether the statement truly represented an underlying sincere belief—well, I suspect many people might agree with you. But, not everyone would agree, obviously including @JDVance and @elonmusk, as that's the whole reason this conversation is happening in the first place.