The recent history of PG's twitter outpourings has been about the danger posed by political correctness and progressives more generally, in the face of criticism of things like AI bias.

I think he argues that progressives are a misnomer, political correctness a compromise with orthodoxy.

Progressives don't necessarily agree with other progressives. At least a subgroup wouldn't self describe as such.

This was tried to communicate very often, for example with reference to diversity of opinion. It was, perhaps with some reason, seen as an argument against diversity of skin colors.

I can only read the discussion of "aggressive conformism" at the end as a giant subtweet of cancel culture. There's a real, and sudden, movement in the political center against this idea (c.f. the Harpers letter), and pg is clearly picking a side.

Which is fine, I guess. I personally didn't think the letter was so awful. It's hardly the worst problem in a world where we have federal paramilitary units being deployed to pick fights with hippies, but there are excesses (David Shor for sure shouldn't have been fired).

The problem is there's a baby vs. bathwater issue with the reasoning. The same people who spit bile about Shor are the ones who just pushed BLM from a fringe idea that couldn't get purchase into something approaching social consensus. Did anyone see the ballgame last night? What's your position on Kaepernick now?

The Harper's letter was hardly from the political center as most people conceive; Noam Chomsky signed that letter.

It's complicated. There's for sure a generational skew here, most of the signers were older established voices[1]. While there was some diversity, there were very few truly progressive voices, and what ones there were tended to come out later expressing that they were mislead about the way the letter would be presented.

The text of the letter is hard to argue against. The context in which it was presented, and especially the way it was leveraged on the right as an "a-ha!" moment to disparage many of the demographics that were supposed to have "signed" it was quite different.

Republicans view that letter as an admission of guilt on the part of the left, when the intent was to call back absolutist rhetoric everywhere. It didn't work.

[1] From the perspective of the activist left: the powerful looking to suppress checks on their power from new voices.

Paul Graham moved back to the UK years ago. He hasn't run Y Combinator since 2014. Of course he still has many social and professional connections to the bay area, but he doesn't have to worry about what some activists in SF will do.

Maybe he should get a real job again then? Might help him get back in touch with reality.

Is there a single instance of a hundred millionaire/billionaire having a "real job"? With "real job" defined as doing something you'd otherwise not do if it wasn't for the pressure of having a place to live and food to eat.

> so he is using coded speech

Please give us the decoder, because "it's code for whatever I feel like it is" is really not helpful.

Those Girard books that Peter Thiel wants you to buy because (1) Thiel got a commission and (2) Thiel doesn't know anything academic that didn't happen at Stanford.

Girard seemed to think that the great cultural problem of the world was "The Court of Versailles" where nobles who have no real problems just compete to be the same as each other. It's a compelling problem if you're a vendor who makes fancy stuff for the palace (e.g. one of those mirror makers who got assassinated to protect the secret of making mirrors) but for the 99% of people who grow rice, wheat, corn whatever it is that supports the life of most people and the vendors who serve the palace, it is just designed to erase your perception of your own life and make it a pale shadow of someone else's narcissism.

Sorry, I meant the decoder of what you feel he's really trying to say through some obfuscated means. I suppose you've attributed some ideas to him, otherwise why the talk about the "smackdown from LGBT activists", but you just alluded to it instead of writing "he says this, this, and that, but he's using the following code: ..."

That's hardly useful, because it's more mysticism, and there's no testing your opinion, and so it also can't be rejected .

PG is living in England, with his wife and kids.