–Dialog is a conference. I went once in 2018 and once in 2022. No one ever asked me to keep it or my presence a secret.
–My understanding was Thiel was one of its founders but no longer involved by the time I went. I never saw or talked to him in connection with Dialog.
–Nor did I see the other names I’ve heard mentioned, like Ted Cruz or Elon Musk or Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Jared Kushner. Dialog was not sold to me as a bunch of big names, which is part of why I went. I don’t need to go to a conference to hear what Ted Cruz thinks.
–You could be a Dialog member, but I wasn’t. I don’t think joining got you much except guaranteed invitations to future Dialogs. There were occasional dinners and webinars, but I never went to one. I would not have described it as a secret or a society.
–The panels were largely self-organized, so people would propose panels and hold them. I went to one on being a working parent and another on whether crypto had any real use cases and another on how to accelerate scientific breakthroughs. You’d usually have 8 or 10 people in a room. It was all very TED-talk adjacent.
–In 2018, I found it very optimistic, with an idealistic hacker-ish vibe. In 2022, I found the conversations and vibe more curdled and resentful. I didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t go back. (That did prove a pretty good signal of where tech’s politics were going though, maybe I should’ve paid more attention.)
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first half of his comment about it from X
Charles P Pierce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Pierce
If any of them are running the world, we're not seeing the results. The current level of competence at world-running is very low. Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, Xi, and whomever is running the UK this month are all worse than average for their job.
Yes? If by "running competently" you mean the prosperity of the general population and peace, sure, it's not that competent. But why'd you think that'd be their goal? If anything, Orwell's "1984" shows the mindset perfectly: keep the general public in misery, while skimming whatever cream there is; no need to try and grow the pie, there is enough for them, and the rest of the world can go buck itself.
Russian "elites" are now getting the political-science-101 education. In 2000-s, they traded their political rights in exchange for the right to skim off the state income. They were thinking that their personal connections and money would always get them out of trouble, so why bother fixing corrupt courts and the rubber-stamping parliament?
Well, now their assets are just fodder for the new generation of the "elites" from the FSB and a few of Putin's closest friends. And the former all-powerful elites can't do anything but wait in fear.
Somehow, people like Thiel and never understand that until it's too late.
(There is also a great deal of distance between "running the world" and "influencing some events for the benefit of a select few, no matter what the costs to the rest of the world". Personally, I find the latter far more likely, but also undesireable.)
"These results suggest that reality is best captured by mixed theories in which both individual economic elites and organized interest groups (including corporations, largely owned and controlled by wealthy elites) play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence."
1. https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
When if anything, that seems to support it being the result of shenanigans?
Those things are far more necessary for an Employee than an Owner.
Reality is a lot less forgiving of their delusions.
> "Turn's Out..."
There's been a psycho cabal of the idiot wealthy trying to run the world since the invention of currency...
Before that, there was a murderous cabal of warlords. They haven't gone away, they've just been joined by the idiot wealthy...
> The records sit in Airtable
A secret cabal running the world. On AirTable.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-th...
EDIT: Keep in mind that the right wing movements on which you have trained your impressions are almost always by definition the popular ones. Do people typically dig into niche groups that don't get traction for ideologies they already disagree with? Probably not, right?
Think about the political policies of Britain immediately prior to WW2. If a party today advocated just rolling back to those policies verbatim, they would be called Nazis immediately.
Just stop for a second before reacting - that's pretty weird, right? The policies of the heroes of the story who literally fought the Nazis, would today be put in the same bucket as the Nazis. Huh?
Same with American policies immediately prior to WW2. If a party wanted to roll back to that, literally Hitler! But that America fought Hitler. But that America would be lumped in with Hitler. Weird, right?
They went to war to fight Germany's, Japan's, and Russia's attempts at geostrategic hegemony. If Germany, USSR, and Japan had stayed in their geostrategic lanes, they wouldn't have invited a war on them.
This seems to imply a social ideology rather than a geostrategic one. The term "Nazi" is used for a specific brand of social ideology, not a general term for imperialist policy.
Which policy rollbacks were you talking about?
> registrants returned again and again to the same theme: that AI will reorder work, war, education, and belief within a few years.
lmao. nvm. they're idiots.
These things are already happening, whether we want them to or not. Elites will no doubt benefit from the destruction of all of it.
The right has been complaining for a while that billionaires want us to eat bugs and own nothing. Instead of forming a common cause, left wingers only complain about right wing billionaires while sanctifying left wing billionaires like Bill Gates.
What you're defining as a "Cabal of Wealth" is an allowance by the people because they believe in the concept of joining it. If this isn't clear I'm happy to expand upon it.
That said, the crimes of "the cabal of wealth" are still on those responsible.
