Oddbean

@0c1a9324 Note here that everything in 55 Tufton St is related. ERG, CRG, GWPF, IEA, NZW, Taxpayers Alliance, and on and on. It's a chaos actor system that generates Think Tanks, APPGs, Lobby groups using the same funding sources and the same players, over and over again. It wouldn't surprise me if they've automated it and use AI to identify niches to exploit. Like early chapters in Accelerando.

@6fce6863 My guess is the Tufty Club started out as an astroturf anti-climate-change front in the 1970s/1980s, hybridized with the tobacco lobby, then—obeying the iron law of bureaucracy—went hunting for new pretexts to justify touting for donations from their sponsors.

@6fce6863 @0c1a9324 Taxpayers Alliance?! That set off my hinky meter... it's bad enough 55 Tufton is so densely populated with fashy projects that it has its own Wikipedia entry, but the linkage to US anti-tax groups means there's yet another parallel path for spreading the same conspiracy theory crap. And there it is — Koch and Mercer, and Mercer get you Breitbart in both US and UK. Breitbart is the public-facing mouthpiece. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/55_Tufton_Street https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/111/176/316/694/458/533/original/66a657c3907f539a.png

@ed74f510 @6fce6863 The Tufty Club briefly owned a prime minister—but she was so incompetent her own party yeeted her after 55 days. (Can't say they owned Clownshoes Churchill, he was a chaos actor on his own behalf.)

@ef33f667 @6fce6863 Oh, I forgot about them. It's almost like all the poisonous hate speech besetting British politics bubbles up from a single wellspring. We could really do with a gas leak and an electrical short in the HQ of the leading libertarian pro-carbon lobbyists ...