The Talentlessness Pandemic

"the aptitudes of the two sides are diverging"

I should probably just go back to sleep for a decade, because Walter Kirn always has it covered:

Walter Kirn @walterkirn

Yesterday's #TwitterFiles hearing should have been a sleepy affair. Most gov't hearings are. Instead, it was an engrossing match btwn sharp-witted, smiling champions of free speech & dull-witted, scowling establishment bubble-dwellers. The aptitudes of the 2 sides are diverging.

I was trying to be clever about this yesterday, but it should be said plainly for the space aliens who eventually find the ruins of our former civilization and have to use the surviving digital evidence to report to their superiors on the collapse of the earth losers:

The most striking thing about the average member of the contemporary political class — the “elite,” and yes, I know — isn’t that they’re almost invariably wrong, or that they’re never interesting, or that they have no wisdom of any kind that ever shines through anything they do, ever. Instead, the most striking thing about the contemporary political class is that most of them can’t actually speak, in the sense that you ask them something and then they think and then words come out. Here, watch:

The Recount @therecount

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) accuses Matt Taibbi of profiting from authoring the GOP’s "Twitter Files": "After the 'Twitter Files,' your followers doubled ... I imagine your Substack readership ... increased significantly because of the work that you did for Elon Musk."

Even in the screenshot, her face is pointed downward at a piece of paper. She’s only ever reading. She’s looking at prepared questions and giving voice to a script, like a much dumber Anne Hathaway. And, yes, what the script says is idiotic — Matt Taibbi gets paid for his journalismz!!!!! (unlike members of Congress, who take a vow of poverty and work for free) — but the more interesting thing to me is that this person, in her fifty-trillionth term in Congress, can’t say what she thinks without reading it. Mr. Taibbi, it says on this piece of paper that you are a very bad person.

They don’t know anything. They don’t think anything. They have no ability, no insight, no value to offer. So they make our laws.

In the cultural trough of our Brezhnev era, the process of negative selection is intensifying.

Greg Price @greg_price11

Kamala Harris explains the process of astronauts taking off in a rocket.