Leo Gura

This isn't some new thing. People must compromise to make a society work and no one gets exactly what they want. This is how things work. The problem with leftists is that they expect to win with no compromises. Leftists will never get what they want because survival trumps their ideals.

Yes, capitalists will always undermine socialists, because socialists want to take away their property and capitalists thrive on leeching labor from plebs. Also because socialism fails miserably when implemented by anyone anywhere.

They are allies relative to fascists. I am not saying they don't undermine far leftists. Of course they do. But MAGA wants to execute leftists. Just keep that in mind while you battle with centrists. Of course Dems will oppose socialists. This is not something to be outraged about. This is exactly as expected.

I don't particularly even care that liberals are organizing against MAGA and fighting fire with fire. I'm not some fool who expects politics to be squeaky clean. I still consider establishment Dems allies. I still consider Pakman, Destiny, BTC, and Kamala Harris allies. Centrists are needed to defeat MAGA. Realistically Dems need dark money to defeat MAGA because MAGA are ruthless barbarians who will stop at nothing to corrupt society. My blog post was about a larger issue about how easily social media influencers can and will be corrupted going forward. My points are never about some one political issue like defeating Trump. The issue is that this money and influence will be used to create biased propaganda that poisons the epistemic ecosystem. So my concern is about the ecosystem, not defeating Trump. Although of course I want to defeat Trump too. If all I cared about was politics, I wouldn't mind this Chorus thing because it can help win elections. But I don't like epistemic cost.

No. That's just chump-change and window dressing. It is funded by wealthy people who are dark so we don't even know who they are. Influencers are not necessarily told what to say but influenced what to say. This is as silly as a politician saying, "I took the money but I wasn't told exactly what to say". Her WIRED article speaks for itself. "To fund creators" is not necessarily a problem. The problem is who is doing the funding, why they doing it, what their agenda is, and their level of influence.

No. I encourage you guys to read the original article for yourselves. Nothing in the article has been disproven, in fact, proof of the contracts has been shared. https://www.wired.com/story/dark-money-group-secret-funding-democrat-influencers/

I watched all the videos, and more, and I watched the creator denial and debunk videos and attacks on Taylor. Taylor's story is solid. Nothing has been debunked. These creators take dark money to coordinate propaganda for corporate Dems.

@Elliott Again, Chorus was public but the dark money aspect of it was not. And their contract terms and details were not public. It's also disingenuous to say that this group supports progreszives. They only supports centrist progressives who will tow the moderate party line. There are many progresaive influencers who were not invited due to their leftist views. Plus, personally I was not aware of Chorus. If I had known about it earlier I would have also found it problematic. Coordinating news coverage is already a problem. Taylor has done a service just by making this Chorus thing widely known. It's not like we follow the inside baseball of these creators. How many people have ever heard of Chorus before this week? Zero.

It's not a nothing-burger. It's a very something-burger. Don't discuss the Taylor Lorenz person, address her factual claims. The YouTubers participating in this program literally have a meeting EVERY DAY where they get talking points for the day's news from this Chorus group which is funded by dark money. It's outrageously corrupt. The dark money aspect of Chorus was NOT disclosed until Taylor broke this story. That's the story. The Chorus group was public knowledge, but the dark money funding and other details was not. This is corruption 101. The excuses these creators have is cringe nonsense. They did not debunk Taylor in any way. A journalist being in a photo with a right-wing talking-head is a nothing-burger. Sagaar Enjeti is friends with JD Vance. Does this mean his reporting of stories on Gaza are false? No.

Those influencers are definitely being corrupted by that money. They are just in denial about it, as politicians are.

I did not delete it. I linked it recently.

It's amazing how bad the writing is, but the show is still watchable. That's quite a feat of Hollywood magic.

Eventually, but that might take 50 years since we live in the times of libertarian fantasies. Holding independent private actors accountable for not taking bribes is harder than holding politicians (public officials) accountable for not taking bribes. This tells you how difficult it will be. We can't even pass a law to stop a Senator from taking corporate money. Nevermind a TikToker.

@Davino A more general formulation of what you're saying is: mechanics. Logic, mechanics, structure -- these are interrelated. And of course Being. Being itself is logic and mechanics. Which is why science is so mechanical. Mechanics is God. Then again, everything is God, so....

Yes, of course liberals are corrupt. And the purest leftists are corrupt. Corruption is so deep that it touches everyone. We are only arguing over relative differences. What we want is to elect the least corrupt people possible. This means they will still be relatively corrupt. There is no way to go from our current system to one free of all corruption. That takes thousands of years of development to accomplish.

Yes, this is the larger point. It's not about these creators or Democrats. The larger pattern is that corporations and the ruling class will try to buy independent media as they did with mainstream media. That's the lesson here. That's why I shared the video, not because I care particularly about Chorus or these specific YouTubers. We want to understand how independent media will get corrupted in the years to come so we are not fooled by it.

Bro was smoking that Datura

I don't have a way of translating physics models to consciousness. These are very different domains and you should be suspicious of simple-minded correlations between them.

How naive does one have to be to think that this money is not being paid to influence creators? The only defense I've heard from the paid creators is that they will take the money but the money will not change their positions in any way. Which is exactly what politicians say when they take money from lobbyists. It is quite clear to me that this is a case of lobbyists trying to capture social media influencers as they do with politicians and mainstream media. Their contract clearly states that they are supposed to keep this influence operation hidden. I have listened to the rebuttals of these paid creators and it sounds full of rationalizations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf_X5m7u7JY

@ExploringReality I will make a Part 2 and 3. But you still need to contemplate it yourself since it's too serious a topic to take my word for it.

I don't know what that means. No, I have no problem enjoying it. I just don't take it seriously so my expectations are set properly. I enjoy the bad writing like watching a train wreck. I watch in a more meta way, like Red Letter Media does. I am a student of the enshitification of Hollywood thanks to hyper-capitalism.

@ExploringReality Explaining relativity is no small feat. Contemplate it for yourself. I have a video on it.

Because the point of being conservative is to defend corruption. But the point of being left-wing is to cure corruption. When a conservative is corrupt he is be authentic. When a leftist is corrupt he is a hypocrite. Trump is a pig, he acts like one, and pigs love him for it. A Dem cannot do the same because the Dems aspire to more than being pigs. At least true progressives do. The sad reality is that many Dems are also pigs.

Transparency is necessary at the least. The fact that these paid pundits now act like nothing is wrong, nothing to see here, makes it all the more damning. They are acting like they don't even know what conflict of interest is. Basically you need people of integrity, and that will always be rare. Most political pundits will be hacks. I can't really comment on how to best wage a political propaganda war. That's not my area of interest. I focus on truth-seeking and sense-making, which is different from political activism. Can you make a case that things are so bad with Trump that we need an anti-Trump propaganda campaign? Maybe. But I want no part of it. Don't forget that trying to astro-turf a left-wing Joe Rogan may backfire. Dems already had an authenticity problem. These kind of programs feed into the view that Dems are fake. Although of course conservative pundits are shamelessly fake and corrupt and they get away with it.