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Grant Smith's avatar

To get a little meta, there's even somewhat of an open source race to communicate this exact message. I first saw it on eugyppius' substack, I tried my hand at it, I see you talk Gel-Mann amnesia which Mathew Crawford seems especially fond of including in any of his analysis of this issue, and now you deliver this gem.

I agree wholeheartedly that many captured institutions can be circumvented. I'm hoping to convince you that the American government needs to be recaptured as opposed to circumvented. I'm agnostic about this for other countries, but in America, I think we have a solid majority of the populace that subscribe to American values not shared by the managerial class controlling the government both in terms of elected officials and throughout the bureaucracy. I think if we can put our heads together there is potential for a populist political strategy to leverage this edge in popular support to achieve a similar end state for U.S.G. institutions as is already being achieved via circumvention with respect to institutions that don't have a monopoly on force. If successful, this effort also has the potential to shield these nascent attempts to circumvent sclerotic institutions against their inevitable attempts to defend themselves against this threat by leveraging state power (such as promoting another disinformation governance board).

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Kelly Em's avatar

I recall that corollary to Murphy’s Law, Silverman’s First Law of Journalism: “The closer you are to the facts of a situation, the less accurate the media coverage will be.”

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