Pongalh
1yr ago
Interesting that being concerned about corruption is for old, out of touch people.
Pongalh
1yr ago
That's the one great legacy of covid. It took that big exogenous shock to move the needle toward remote work. The viability of such work was mostly speculative before then.
A giant blow against an Office Space-style quality of life pain point.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Interesting. Oppositional defiant disorder sounds like the opposite of "mass formation psychosis." Pathological consensus versus pathological anti-consensus.
Pongalh
1yr ago
That's interesting because "neurotypical" I thought to be genuinely merely descriptive.
I'm beginning to believe that anyone who pays close enough attention to politics can't actually approach these things as JAQ neutral liberal. Before you can sincerely suggest X is descriptive, someone will convincingly tell you that term has already been weaponized and is not just descriptive.
Those who lament the hijacking of liberalism are forced to participate in such hijacking lest they show themselves to be rubes who just fell off the proverbial turnip truck.
Anyone approaching politics in a "descriptive, neutral" way is a con artist or a moron.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I don't know, but I'm curious about the overlap between people who believe yes there were a ton of groomers in those "spaces" and now there are a ton of groomers at drag shows etc. Who is on record as being consistent in being alarmed all throughout?
Pongalh
1yr ago
I remember when there was just as much concern about grooming and pedophilia but it was all allegedly taking place among priests and boy scout leaders. Now there's just as much panic but it's aimed at progressive mileus.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I never did see Mississippi Burning,
A serious, grown up film from the late '80s i.e. my formative years that sounds similar.
Pongalh
1yr ago
The people at e.g. Palladium magazine are an example of the more nationalist but less populist High Right theme I'm getting at here.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I think it's been I dunno, a year or so since I promoted one of my interviews here (that included Yassine Meskhout and TW), so I wanted to link The Motte to my talk with Alex Hochuli of Aufhebunga Bunga podcast. Part 1 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=6OiZUUGNOr0) gets into - and this is mostly me here, not Alex - the turn in market thinking away from sunny, Milton Friedman-esque universalism and towards elitist and/or nationalist framings. Think the Hanania-esque or Caplanian disdain for the masses combined with a love of Jeff Bezos...whose companies serve the dumb masses. (Someone like Brink Lindsey otoh, representing the older right-liberal think tank crowd, still has affection for Joe Consumer Citizen.) As if the new point of capitalism is to give those of us with high human capital a properly challenging space to achieve, as a role model for us all perhaps, not to provide Count Chocula cereal. Objective standards vs. relativism of the market is also touched on.
In part 2 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=VUlgKio5f7k) we discuss the role of ideology: How viable is trying to be non-ideological? South American vs. Western left/right politics and the notion of false consciousness or citizens' latent revolutionary potential are also broached, among other things.
See too my interview with Anton Cebalo, author of last year's somewhat viral "The Social Recession": https://novum.substack.com/p/social-recession-by-the-numbers
Part 1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2dhbq3JxOrg
Part 2: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HGlkuScNNRg
My whole channel: https://youtube.com/@champagnebulge1/videos
Pongalh
1yr ago
Seems the general thrust of the "market right" in the last twenty years has moved away from competition - and its reliance on taking consumer preference/sovereignty for granted - as particularly important and toward a greater reliance on human capital and realism about the gulf between what the best and brightest in Big Biz know vs. everyone else. You can see how this dovetails with "state capacity libertarianism" or a more holistic, body-politic-as-organism kind of mentality. A corporate noblesse oblige that is more concerned about rival states and national striving than petty consumer preferences. Big business and government allies as tastemakers, not taste-takers.
We don't even hear chatter anymore about the importance of small, nimble companies, as somehow inherently better incentivized by non-complacent thirst for profits and local knowledge. That's all out. Who can even talk about that when AI and its reliance on behemoth companies' data collection is all the rage?
Pongalh
1yr ago
Seems prestigious shows have to actually resemble real life. Mad Men. White Lotus. Succession. These shows are huge with coastal PMCs. The proles have Walking Dead and Viking dramas. Things that take you out of the modern, as-is world.
Of course reality TV is a major rebuttal to this...
Pongalh
1yr ago
I remember a study or book years ago showing that nerdy black kids in all black schools got hassled less because they couldn't be so easily compared to Asians or whites.
(Of course who were they getting hassled by?...)
Pongalh
1yr ago
Liberals with a capital L, market enthusiasts and lawyers all sort of hew closely to this line.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Speak of the devil. I just attended a Curtis Yarvin, Delicious Tacos et al. event 5 days ago not 2 miles from Dodger stadium.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Post-liberalism has accepted as good everything ugly about politics the rationalists wanted us to get past. Clickbait is good. Sensationalism is good. Treating arguments as soldiers is good. Thinking ideologically is good. Just picking a damn side already is good. Thinking of people as ultimately political and not having some valuable quality that is outside of politics is good.
And so on.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I see. You're doing the No True Scotsman redefining of libertarianism to the stricter anarcho-capitalism only
Pongalh
1yr ago
Well the libertarian ethos that has defended wealthy weirdos and their right to innovate and Do Their Own Thing is certainly wedded to the uncomfortable subway person in spirit.
And America's love of rags to riches stories also suggests that the uncomfortable subway person may one day be a startup founder!
Pongalh
1yr ago
Yeah I've definitely moved further into the let's sacrifice innovation camp. If the most productive or ambitious or idiosyncratic feel kneecapped, so be it, for the sake of public order and a general ethos that supports regular people's dispositions.
Pongalh
1yr ago
San Francisco is actually experiencing mini renaissance within a broader decline, namely in AI. Think the neighborhood dubbed Cerebral Valley.
Maybe that has something to do with it. Those are the people buying those homes.
Pongalh
1yr ago
That's interesting. There's a new book called Inhuman Capital that pretty much makes this point, from indeed a Marxist pov. The endgame is no humans at all.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Interesting. Reminds me of the movie How to Blow up a Pipeline, which I saw recently. They actually have a red state conservative Christian type (literally the only one married with kids) on the team of ecoterrorists, motivated by government strong-arming use of his land to build, you guessed it, a pipeline.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I'm one of those who believe that this is a tragedy stemming from the end of forced institutionalization and the demise of law and order. This guy could have been alive being looked after and kept away from normies.
There does seem to be a cold new strain of secular right that just sees the guy as a worthless meat sack who shouldn't even exist. Seemingly confirming the progressive suspicion that the right would rather see whole swaths of humanity simply genocided.
On the one hand the right talks about upholding civilization, but the blase attitude regarding mediating institutions and recovering a government that was makes me think a primitive vigilante-ism strain that is quite anti-civilization is taking hold. A thrill of the idea of taking things into their own hands. Perhaps a kind of Fight Club style fascination with the manhood-testing the follows from the collapse of it all. An actual disappointment at 1955 law enforcement returning. The 1955 justice system would not just kill the guy. It was not that vicious. (You could say after 40 prior arrests it would...but Neely would never have gotten to 40 prior arrests. He'd have been put away permanently.)
Pongalh
1yr ago
I think this is true and it actually shows something about the evolution of political ideas in America. We know too much about each other's positions now. We genuinely and correctly feel there isn't much to be had by any more debate.
We all know where we stand. There is no more blood to be squeezed from that stone.
But race and gender would not be so salient if we could sufficiently get out of each other's faces, and that has a dry, materialist component, implicating techno-commercial and economic trends.
Tangentially, I wonder, who might be an example of a right materialist? James Manzi?
Michael Lind might count but I think he's sort of been slid into the right wing camp by default, via the left changing its tune.
The more market-oriented libertarians - as opposed to Gadsden flag-waving anti-government types - have been called the Marxists of the right, so there's that.
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