It is the same factors that have since then made pamphleteering into a province of irrelevant contrarian weirdos that also make the system immune to the lowered cost of pamphleteering enabled by the internet.
I would be interested in hearing more about these factors.
It is basically an observation about the extraordinarily firm and secure grip on public opinion held by the official intellectual institutions nowadays. I don't have anything like a complete theory of how exactly this state of affairs came into being, or even of what exact mechanisms make their present influence so decisive and secure. (Though I could speculate at length.)
Whatever the mechanisms behind it might be, however, the influence of these institutions does appear to be so decisive and secure that no matter how cheap and convenient contrarian publi...
Today's post, Stop Voting For Nincompoops was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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