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Larry Sanger

@lsanger@sangerfeed.org
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Larry Sanger Larry Sanger @lsanger@sangerfeed.org ·

Maybe I’ll just go back to posting here. It’s lonelier, yes, but it’s realer.

On X.com, I now have 66,509 followers, which is 28K more than I had at the beginning of February. Also, somebody kindly paid for my X subscription. Still, my engagement is only marginally higher than before. I’m willing to consider seriously the possibility that I’m just not interesting enough to get engagement on X, or not anymore.

I hate to say it, though, but I just don’t think so. My argument is the same as it was before: for several years on Twitter, I *did* have a lot more engagement than I do now. What changed? Not me, I don’t think. But even if it’s true that I have become more boring and irrelevant, in the eyes of the X crowd, it seems to me that’s a good reason to focus my attention on people who I am very sure are (a) human (not bots) and (b) actually interested in interacting.

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Larry Sanger Larry Sanger @lsanger@sangerfeed.org ·

Apologies for not maintaining SangerFeed (this microblog). I’ve been spending my social media time on X.com, and it’s looking like I’ll switch back here soonish. After a few weeks of excitement over recent posts of mine, and after somebody (possibly, X itself) kindly got me an X subscription for a month, I was getting plenty of traction on some posts. But now I seem to be back to where I was before. I don’t know if my benefactor(s) will keep paying for it, but frankly, I won’t be doing so myself, or, not until I have some big news I need to announce.

For all I know, I never was actually throttled on X—it’s possible. But I do think I was, in fact. And, interestingly, only after a few weeks of excitement, I found that my account was starting to attract the old sort of pornbots of which I blocked many. One leading theory is that the pornbots are used by X to mark accounts that should be throttled. Who knows if it’s true.
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Larry Sanger Larry Sanger @lsanger@sangerfeed.org ·

What if I were to tell you that many successful people in this world spend most of their time, most days, pretending to be things they definitely are not, not at home or at least not in their heart of hearts—and they carry on such deception quite deliberately, for reasons they would never publicly admit, and some of them achieve great honor and power as a result—and that this deception brings them no end of pleasure, and they have very few compunctions about it? For them, life is a serious role-playing game, and the satisfaction of winning is all that matters. But about the realities underlying this game, they mostly have profoundly dark, cynical contempt. This can be seen in the sort of films and other cultural work they prefer to consume.

Not a few such people have infiltrated our churches. And government (all major parties). And academe. And the corporate, financial, and nonprofit worlds. Etc. (cont’d)

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Larry Sanger Larry Sanger @lsanger@sangerfeed.org ·

In case you’re wondering why I haven’t posted here in a few days, it is because I am determining whether my X.com account is capable of pre-2022 virality. Someone, maybe X.com staff, gifted me a Premium Plus account on X.com. That was at the same time that a tweet that I made to Elon Musk went absolutely viral. Following that, a tweet I made to President Trump was retweeted by Musk himself. This suggests that I am on the X.com radar, which in turn suggests that my account might have been unthrottled. So I am now just trying to see if that is the case. I suspect not. I have certainly got a bump because my follower numbers ballooned from 48,000 to 66,000 in the space of a month, most of that being in the space of a couple of days. But I just don’t know whether the effects will last.

To make a proper test I actually need try rather hard to see whether a well-written, timely, and otherwise excellent tweet will actually prove popular. The jury is out on that.
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Larry Sanger Larry Sanger @lsanger@sangerfeed.org ·

I’m gonna have to disagree with Greg regarding U.S. support of Ukraine. We plowed billions of dollars into a deeply corrupt regime, one at the center of global corruption in which the Biden family itself had their fingers. It always did smell to high heaven.

And we did not have the money; we went into more debt, which constituted a tax on all U.S. citizens. At the same time we were sending more billions to Ukraine, we let the people of the flood-ravaged South suffer without help. And it made no difference to the outcome.

Meanwhile, we must properly count the human cost of war, which is horrific and easy to lose sight of if your country is not the one in the war.

Russia has taken back what was, not that long ago, Russian territory (i.e., from before the Soviet Union), and the majority of which is Russian-speaking. As long as they don’t continue on their march, and are willing to accept a cease-fire, this is by far the best expectable outcome.

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Larry Sanger Larry Sanger @lsanger@sangerfeed.org ·

I found this rather disturbing, not just for Chaya and LoTT, who I followed since the time she had about as many followers as I have; not just because it reconfirms (what should certainly be) illegal involvement in media by intelligence goons; but because these people are just so obviously stupid and ideological. How did these idiots get into power? They should be working at McDonald’s tomorrow.

Source: x.com/ChayaRaichik10/st…
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Larry Sanger Larry Sanger @lsanger@sangerfeed.org ·

This is from 2023, but I am seeing it for the first time here. Richard Hanania asks “hypothetically,” in a Twitter poll, if it’s OK for Epstein to have sex with a 14-year-old if he pays $10M to a fund that the child will receive when reaching the age of majority. And if everyone involved “agrees.”

“Should this be allowed?” asks Richard Hanania. 👇

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