I mean, the trajectory in any of these cases I can think of is worse over time, not better. Barring some kind of Christmas Carol miracle, the famous-successful-iconoclast status seems to just curdle.

Always flip once they're out of power

Many of us have had to grapple with a beloved, seemingly insightful artist who turns out to be a hateful & harmful piece of shit: e.g., Orson Scott Card, J.K. Rowling, etc. Hard to process what the glitch is there.

100% this

They backtracked on that a few days later: www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/24/m...

About once a semester I get asked, "Can I do all the course assignments right now [in the first week]" and I need to say, "We will be learning something new each week, so that probably won't work", and they go "Oooooohhhhhh"

This is precisely the takeaway from Dorothy Thompson's 1941 Harper's Magazine essay, "Who Goes Nazi?"

I said this in a convo tonight.

omg so much this

This is good, but I'm not sure the billionaires do know the importance or reading & writing text. They genuinely seem like a bunch of soulless morons, and what they write usually comes off like a semi-literate kindergartner with a crayon.

Hey now, that's the GOP platform in 2028

Great observation. I haven't seen any Carol for a long time, but my instinct/impression was for the sudden flip right at the end. I was very pleasantly surprised by the gradual start-and-stop warming arc that was happening here. I came away thinking I'd remembered the other stuff wrong.

The "uh" suggests that's their normal response, adjusted on the fly for the rich guy in charge

And now for our section on problems with self-referential statements