Astral Codex Ten

Ron Paul

4 min read

Ron Paul

Article

Ron Paul is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 10, 2021 and July 15, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “If you wanted to sound cool on Reddit ten years ago, you talked about atheism, Ron Paul”; “you talked about atheism, Ron Paul, and the RIAA”; “the “libertarian moment” that followed Ron Paul’s campaign in 2008”. It most often appears alongside Bernie Sanders, Clinton, Conservatives.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: July 15, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
Intellectual trends follow the laws of fashion. This isn't to say there's no underlying truth about which claims are right and important - just that some fields are "cool" at any given moment and others are "uncool". If you wanted to sound cool on Reddit ten years ago, you talked about atheism, Ron Paul, and the RIAA; five years ago, it would have been Bitcoin, Jordan Peterson, and "Drumpf" (I'm not cool enough to know what's cool today, sorry). Some of these trends seem to mirror obvious real-world changes in importance - distributors found better ways to sell media for affordable prices, so the RIAA has mostly left public consciousness. But they were broader than the change alone could explain - a moderate improvement in music distribution meant switching from talking about the RIAA all the time to basically not at all.
And also, New Socialism is looking less and less like an up-and-coming dragon-slayer. It’s hard to track the Google Trend because of the bumps from the Bernie campaign, but I feel like I hear less about it than I used to. Google Trend interest in Jacobin and Chapo Trap House have both been going down for over a year (although this is confounded by increasing distance from the Sanders campaign). The Twitter blow-ups between representatives of New Socialism and the woke establishment are less frequent and less fun to watch. Robby Soave’s prediction that 2018 was a “socialist moment” (a deliberate analogy to the “libertarian moment” that followed Ron Paul’s campaign in 2008) - and not the beginning of an inexorable trend towards more socialism - is starting to feel more prescient. I take no pleasure in reporting this; I disagree with socialism as a philosophy, but they had some good ideas, could have helped some people, and would have been a breath of fresh air after a decade of unremitting wokeness.
Inline links: Jacobin, Chapo Trap House, a “socialist moment”
Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
It either has to show up the same as welfare-queen-punishment, which is its polar opposite, in the fairness foundation like before, or find a home in the liberty foundation along with liberal social justice and, somehow, Ron Paul.
One counter-argument to this recommendation is perhaps that the best bits, like the elephant-and-rider idea, has seeped onwards into the broader culture where you can find it without the baggage of having to think about Dan Ariley, wrestle with a confusing and contradictory approach to meta-ethics, and work out how anyone could bundle Ron Paul style libertarianism and Ibram Kendi style social justice into one supposedly foundational pole of morality and call it a day.