Pongalh
28d ago
Definitely messier, but that's what happens when you relax rules of expression. I for one like the democratization of ads. So random now, showing Americans' quirky idiosyncrasies in all their guy-or-girl-next-door glory.
Disclosure: I'm a proud producer of what is arguably definitely AI slop. (Check out my cheeky YT shorts channel, in fact: https://youtube.com/@ShockJonesy/shorts)
Pongalh
1mo ago
Wow, didn't know all that! Thanks.
I actually wrote one piece for Takimag 15 years ago. Just one, after 5 failed submissions to his daughter who managed the site at the time. Something about BART lunacy in SF.
Pongalh
8mo ago
I think it's part of the optimization of everything. Increasingly, if you're about X, you need to have been about X for as long as possible. People who are constantly going from one line of work or lifestyle to another are slipping through the cracks and becoming sort of invisible, on the outside of success looking in. It's associated with being kind of a loser, relative to decades past. Indeed it's kind of a Boomerism, to have worked in e.g. a department store and then one day a guy comes in who makes movies, you hit it off, and a few years later you're firmly ensconced in the movie industry with some success.
Pongalh
11mo ago
Really? The biggest relationship of my life was with a black woman. Reasons to get an "ick" vibe from RH #398
Pongalh
1yr ago
About 10 years ago the economist Stephen Lansburg got in trouble with his progressive students for floating some kind of thought experiment that they found offensive, and I believe it involved rape. An early example of cancel culture in action. They wanted his head.
I remember thinking to myself at the time, "See, this is what distinguishes conservatives from emotional progressives who get triggered by seemingly coldhearted and objective forays into political thought."
That needs reassessment.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I feel like the definition of deadbeat junkie has moved from parasitic freeloader who has debts to...software engineer not living his best life.
Pongalh
2yr 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
9mo ago
My sister likewise has no intention of having kids. She just recently got to the other side of 40, so I'm extremely certain it's a permanent decision.
And indeed she moved to England years ago, has a great job in the arts, married to a great guy. Loves to travel as well.
(I feel like for women, if you don't have a great career, have a family. Men have to have a good career to have a family, otoh.)
Pongalh
2yr ago
Part of a seeming trend of the left benefiting from participating in their protests. Had a girlfriend who got intentionally arrested at a Bay Area protest years ago, maybe for Trayvon Martin, I don't recall. Not only did it not hinder her career to have that on her record, it bolstered her credentials.
Woe be unto thee who is discovered to have been at January 6th or Charlottesville however. I recall news of a guy who worked at a hot dog shop in Berkeley who lost his job after it was discovered he attended the latter.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Sure, my mom likes her. Boomer Republican, doesn't miss a 49ers game. Not Waspy rich or Jewish or anything like that. My mom works at Home Depot.
Pongalh
1yr ago
From years of reading fact checking sites for my job, this seems true. Snopes liberals fend off right wing accusations implicating and sullying Antifa with incredible regularity. Meanwhile something like smiling Covington kid, Damore and other stores that take off on the right isn't really their beat.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I believe it's because Marxism better comports with Christian egalitarianism.
Pongalh
9mo ago
A hereditary union (not officially) segregated along racial lines. Sounds right up the alley of some of the folks here, interestingly.
In what ways could these unions be considered EHC? I mean they've clearly managed to get one over on all of us. That takes skill.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I alluded to that same point regarding Israel vs. US interests/American people with a conservative on Twitter named Katya Sedgwick (who I interviewed a while back partially in the topic of the Ukraine proxy war, which we were both against, but October 7th has put us at odds).
The argument of cultural affinity and geopolitical good sense was the answer I got, to differentiate Israel/Jews vs. Somalia/Muslims. Highly questionable in my opinion, both as far as blowback and a Jewish ethnostate not particularly resonating with Americans on the ground nor their interests.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Speaks to the leveling instinct even among the right. "They get to do things you can't!"
On the other hand it's the American right, which contains a lot of Jeffersonian liberalism built-in.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Premium Twitter seems to be paying off. It was almost embarrassing or shameful at first to actually shell out for the blue check but more and more people are clearly doing that.
Grey Enlightenment has talked about this alot.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I think something different about today's moralism, or why youth are no longer suspicious of it, is because they see it as largely enforced by themselves. Enforced horizontally rather than vertically. While it is also wielded vertically, it doesn't seem like that's where it finds it's legitimacy.
Youth of the 80s and 90s felt the power was being wielded vertically and in an illegitimate fashion they couldn't agree with, fundamentally. They were also less consumed by credentialism, theory and, well, words. So while they had a vague sense of their own moralism it's nowhere near as self-conscious and cohesive as that of Gen Zs and Millennials. Not to mention reinforced through documentation everywhere they look within the new information environment.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Yeah there seems no reason for Barbie and Oppenheimer to be wedded like they are. Somebody put the Barbenheimer idea out there and it took off like wildfire, like some kind of random evolutionary mutation. So here we are.
For a minute there was a focus on their rival soundtracks but as far as I know Barbie has one and Oppenheimer doesn't. I'd seen someone put together a tracklist for Oppenheimer that included Joy Division of The Cure and other gothy groups and thought it was real, I admit.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I was living in San Francisco for the past few months (and may return in the new year) and when riding Bart in the odd hours I decided to just ditch the fair. I felt like a chump paying when so many others neglected to; and when the machines didn't work, and there was no one around to help. You just want to get the hell out of those rotten stations as quick as possible at ~midnight in any case.
So I saw how deterioration of norms can come after the bourgeois too. I never skipped fare before but this year was a tipping point.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Some of these reasons sound like just-so stories. When Ron Paul would routinely wear an oversized suit I could say something like, "That's relatable, it's like your cousin Joe who has that one imperfect suit he wears for special occasions!"
But RP went nowhere with most.
I love that the Motte has broached this subject. If you're not familiar with comedian Justin Whitehead, his whole shtick is essentially watching My 600 Pound Life and tearing into the people who appear on it. Not a particularly admirable way to get laughs, but it's a guilty pleasure: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4GLent9Zk6E
He went viral a while ago when a big guy started following him through a Walmart, knew who he was, ending in a confrontation in the parking lot.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Yes. In the US there's a sense that you don't have the freedom to escape the pressure to try to be rich. It's up or out, striver for everyone. (Unless you want to join the ranks of the homeless, dropping out of any semblance of a normal middle class existence.)
I've been doing contracting jobs for years in tech and anyone not already looking over their shoulder at the next job when they're only a week in to their current one is kind of a sucker. An endless hustle.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Exactly how I feel about the Ukrainians. They're not going to win against Russia. Their stubborn refusal is going to get them killed. It's irrational.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I remember that as well. It was essentially secular population reductionists against often religious pro-natalism types.
The fashionability of Westerners telling people in the Global South to have fewer babies has diminished since then, weirdly putting progressives closer to Catholic conservatism stateside that hated the efforts of the United Nations etc.
Part of the problem is that so many of us are former libertarians, who see rent-seeking aka banal corruption everywhere already. So Trump just seems a more blustery iteration of something already underway.
Or, ideology-free corruption > bad ideology operating transparently and on-schedule
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