(Link goes to Gift Link FT article)

Hooo boy... this is... deluded AF. This immediately made me think of the episodes on how Conservatism won. Think tanks get money from conservatives, produce "research" that supports conservative causes, and create more "research" citing the previous thinktank bullshit to create a circle of bullshit.

And this is peak bullshit:

>The debate over billionaires is part of a broader discussion over whether our system of democratic capitalism is fundamentally broken. It isn’t. One of the central moral promises of democratic capitalism is that people receive their just rewards. In our system, economic inequality is tolerable if it reflects differences in effort, risk taking, skill and choices. The evidence strongly suggests that this promise is being kept — remuneration is primarily determined by productivity.  Billionaires, then, have outsized wealth because they make outsized contributions. Income wasn’t “distributed” to them — they earned it. And the appropriate response from elected leaders is to celebrate and encourage success, not to denigrate it.

The thinktank approach has spread to In every field that has a "conservative" branch, there's an ecosystem of bullshit that supports it. Conservative legal scholars took over the field by citing each other and themselves until Leonard Leo got them to the bench. Neoclassical economics used this cite-o-genesis and ignored obvious criticisms of their work to create a new economic "consensus" that gave us neoliberalism. These same systems have tried to pierce the "hard" sciences but outside of specific cases (climate denial, evolution denial, antivax, transphobia), they usually wind up isolated in the "crank zone" (even those that are politically successful are still in the crank zone within their field).

The inability of academia to deal with the bullshit farm, which is going to be even worse when someone can say, "Chat GPT, write me 80 pages of bullshit to justify my crank belief" (What's that? The government is already doing that? Fuck.), is part of the reason we're where we are now. The worst part is *I don't know how we come back from this*. How can we fight back with truth when it's constantly drowned in the bullshit.

Dammit, I started with "lol this guy is a dumbass" and wound up working myself into despair. Well, time to close my door and cry for an hour (aka lunch).

Another example of think tank "Research": "We need more billionaires" says Groupthinktank man incapable of reading actual research or the room