Astral Codex Ten

Warren

6 min read

Warren

Article

Warren is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 14, 2021 and February 20, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “I myself am a Democrat, voted Warren (IIRC) in the primary”; “I wondered if maybe Sanders or Warren or O’Rourke would win”; “I lost a bit of money on some other bets, including Warren winning the nomination”. It most often appears alongside Trump, alt-right, artificial intelligence.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: February 14, 2021
  • Last seen: February 20, 2023

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.

Statement on New York Times Article
February 14, 2021 · Original source
4. They further presented a more general case that I am six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style linked to right-wing / pro-Trump figures in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel. This is true – I can think of a friend of mine who also knows Peter Thiel. In fact, I met Peter Thiel once, kind of unexpectedly, at a party, long before Trump was in the news, and exchanged about two sentences of conversation with him (I don’t think he had the slightest idea who I was, nor was there any reason he should have). I have never personally met the other right-wing figures named in the article. I wrote a 30,000 word condemnation of one of them on my blog a few years ago, and we have since had some email exchanges about to what degree this was unfair. I received a sympathetic email from another of them about the Times article. Others I have had literally no contact with. Again, it would not surprise me if I was a few degrees of social separation from some of these people. I don’t feel like this means I have done anything wrong, and I assume most people are a few degrees of social separation away from a Republican or Trump supporter. I myself am a Democrat, voted Warren (IIRC) in the primary, and Biden in the general.
Inline links: a 30,000 word condemnation, would not surprise me if
Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
April 19, 2021 · Original source
I also think events proved me right in saying that the media was going crazy in a particular way where they would read racism into anything. During the Trump administration, we got stories about how Trump watching fireworks at Mt. Rushmore meant he was "glorifying white supremacy", about how Bill de Blasio was blaming the Jews for coronavirus, and about how Pete Buttigeg was "openly racist" and riding a tide of "white supremacy". Elizabeth Warren is a fascist who supports ethnic cleansing, the Boy Scouts have effectively become a fascist youth group, JK Rowling is aligned with white supremacists, etc. And don't forget the stories about how a prison guard's tattoo secretly encoded white supremacist symbols (it ended up being his college football uniform number), that the number of words in Homeland Security documents could be interpreted as a white supremacist code, or that Melania Trump had secretly encoded the letters "KKK" into the new design for the White House Rose Garden (for a totally different conspiracy that the new Rose Garden encodes Nazi symbology, see here). At some point you just have to admit everyone went crazy for a few years and seeing started seeing Nazis in trees and rocks and grilled cheese sandwiches and Trump was an especially tempting target.
Inline links: Trump watching fireworks at Mt. Rushmore meant, Bill de Blasio was blaming the Jews for coronavirus, Pete Buttigeg was, fascist who supports ethnic cleansing, effectively become a fascist youth group, aligned with white supremacists, prison guard's tattoo secretly encoded white supremacist symbols, Homeland Security documents, Melania Trump had secretly encoded the letters "KKK", see here
- Predicting that Biden would win the Democratic nomination. I bought up a thousand shares of Biden for 16 cents a share in early 2019, which was an amazing move - then proceeded to screw it up in as many ways as possible. I wondered if maybe Sanders or Warren or O'Rourke would win, so I bought a bunch of them too. Then the one week when Warren was doing super-well, I panicked that I had missed out on the real winner and bought a lot of Warren, then sold her for really low again once she crashed. None of these mistakes were able to completely wipe out my gain from buying so much Biden so early, and I made another $200 or so.
Along with these good bets, I lost a bit of money on some other bets, including Warren winning the nomination, a lot of speculating on Trump's exact number of tweets and various candidates' exact polling averages, and a disastrous assumption that surely they couldn't elect Binyamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister of Israel yet another time, could they?
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
On the other hand, everyone will have underestimated the extent of crisis in the Democratic Party. The worst-case scenario is Kamala Harris rising to the main contender against Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary. Bernie attacks her and her followers as against true progressive values, bringing up her work defending overcrowded California prisons as a useful source of unpaid labor. Harris supporters attack Bernie as a sexist white man trying to keep a woman of color down (wait until the prison thing gets described as “slavery”). Everything that happened in 2016 between Clinton and Sanders looks like mild teasing between friends in comparison. If non-Sanderites rally around Booker or Warren instead, the result will be slightly less apocalyptic but still much worse than anyone expects. The only plausible way I can see for the Dems to avoid this is if Sanders dies or becomes too sick to run before 2020. This could tear apart the Democratic Party in the long-term, but in the short term it doesn’t even mean they won’t win the election – it will just mean a bunch of people who loathe each other temporarily hold their nose and vote against Trump.