Pongalh
1yr ago
People seem to be abandoning the ideal of not relying on that. It's an anti-intellectual move.
"Where's your evidence?"
"I don't know, they're just like, ugh."
Pongalh
1yr ago
Yes in the '90s the education industrial complex and the media, news but especially entertainment, was left and Dem aligned. But the "daddy" side of government remained more Republican. But now that has overturned.
Local law enforcement is still largely on the Republican side however in keeping with the 90s. Local cops remain a target of national media.
Pongalh
1yr ago
More and more there's a clear trend of "vibes" as legitimate source of political motivation.
But those "personal preferences" for abstraction are more difficult to map on to any given object-level thing directly in front of you.
Are you making a kind of critical race theory notion that objectivity is actually just very much interested subjectivity?
"There's his opinion, her opinion and then there's the truth."
No no, the truth is just another opinion?
Pongalh
1yr ago
Another instance where Team Liberal realizes it's a fair weather friend to Team Right and Team Left.
There are just not very many people for whom truth matters. Most just grope around for issue sets, decide what and who they don't and do like, and then go full sacking of intellectual integrity in order to promote or bash their particular feelz.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Well there is the "Boston School" - as opposed to Chicago School - of individualist anarchism, which has arguably been channeled into a generalized libertarianism you see all across the US cultural-political spectrum, be it cold-dead-hands right-wingers or leave-the-homeless-alone left-wingers. And of course tech libertarianism and crypto.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra seems equally outlandish. Time for the flip-side I guess...
Curiously, when I googled Netflix Cleopatra the first story appears critical, at least at a glance: https://greekcitytimes.com/2023/04/13/queen-cleopatra-netflix/?amp
Article can't get enough of the turn "blackwashed" like some kind of anti-woke SEO strategy.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Actually no, I don't think every gross old rich guy does have whores. Much less famous pornstars.
Pongalh
1yr ago
At the time it seemed farfetched but since then we learned that he really did sleep with a pornstar. If these events had happened in reverse I'd find it highly plausible he did that kinky Russian prostitute thing too.
The bigger lesson is that rich and famous people really are engaged in crazy things that the rest of us don't get to do. A separate moral universe.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Interesting. My friend drove a Tesla, or rather had the Tesla drive him, from California to Vermont. But yeah I'm pretty sure he stayed on interstate 80 for most of that.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Amazon's primary source of profit is absolutely not original programming. Or any entertainment programming. Their humdrum commerce business subsidizes this stuff.
Pongalh
1yr ago
But not adhering to racial identity allows you to partner with others. Racial particularists wall themselves off from that possibility.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Yeah I think of the YouTube shooter as a kind of weird unsung hero or patron saint of those who are slaves to social media view counts. A uniquely 21st century kind of disgruntled.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I despair reading this. But the antidote to White identity - and woke identity - is likely Christian universalism. Hell (so to speak), even Muslims are not hung up on race, save for the Black Muslim heretics, an American phenomenon. They too are a colorblind universalist doctrine.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I walk a ton living in San francisco. But I also step over a lot of shit and see a lot of demoralizing stuff on the street. Couple days ago saw someone feeding a mouse near a dumpster to their pitbull.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I can't help it Australia is better on this for the same reason it was worse on covid lockdown. The natural rights libertarians that make up the US haven't quite made their mind up about reconcile things like this. But then they don't think much about city problems because they are just generally not city people.
I wondered why America is so uniquely bad at doing cities. It's vitally important to get away from our underclass in a way it's not in NZ or Australia. Because the distance between the underclass disposition and everyone else's is not so insanely large, I figure. Does it really boil down to America's essentially open and nature? We really did get all the poor miserable huddled masses. We got the worst people of Europe. The version of myself that remained in Ireland is less beset with personality defects.
I have a friend who lives in Australia. He says he misses the US, where he grew up, because Australia is boring. Plus he really really really hated lockdown. I guess the grass is always greener...
Pongalh
1yr ago
Interesting. I had no idea David Mamet was behind that movie The Edge. Interesting. That movie is kind of a "Hatchet" (remember that book?) for adults.
He has a background as a playwright which makes the outdoorsiness of that film an unusual fit for his repertoire, I would think.
Pongalh
1yr ago
There's an in-between zone of low code/no code skills that are useful and can keep you employed.
Pongalh
1yr ago
"Show me a hot woman, and I'll show you a man who's tired of fucking her."
Things will get tired. What you can imagine you can have will always be greater than what you can actually procure. One has to just live with that fact and begin de-prioritizing sexual variety.
There was about a two-year period in which I was with a woman who was into bringing other people into bed, but I knew it had a built-in but fuzzy expiration date. Kind of dysfunctional and couldn't go on for long.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Meghan had a lot of gall claiming that Aella was lying about her own experiences with prostitution. She said she was invested in giving it the most positive gloss she could because that's how she makes a living.
Kind of an aside, but didn't Contrapoints appear on Hillary Clinton's show/podcast thing?
More options
Context Copy link