Pongalh
2yr ago
Yeah Candace and Kanye are becoming a clique. The black version of Alex Jones and the Red Scare girls, or something.
Pongalh
2yr ago
But even the West's CIA predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine and that it would topple the country quickly. That doesn't sound like something the overdog anticipates, if it's comfortably over.
Pongalh
2yr ago
If greatness is born, achieved or occurs through happenstance, Zelensky may be among that last category, seemingly the most luck-oriented and difficult to predict.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I liked your inclusion of "trans women shouldn't compete in women's sports," for political balance.
It actually helps highlight what I think is the wrong assertion of stealth, competitive self-interest in so much moralistic thinking. Is that generally what's driving the right's dislike of trans involvement in women's sports, sticking up for their own daughter's spot on the team? Seems like a reach.
Pongalh
2yr ago
But it's also fairly effective at its core job if you consider how much more available drugs would be without any kind of war on them.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Well Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the only star in a film. Typically in Schwarzenegger films there are plenty of white men (speaking to my own demographic) speaking English and making cultural references I understand that more than outweigh how alien Schwarzenegger's body is, even if white.
Racial representation is not everything but it might be the single largest factor going into why I will gravitate towards something. Like maybe it's 30%, and various other factors represent 20% and so on. (If ethnicity is a combination of race and culture then I suppose that is really what I'm getting at.)
Slice of life-style dramas do need to be culturally familiar, again with race acting as a rough proxy. I recently watched the Polish series High Water, about the floods of the '90s. The main star was a heroin junkie. Now, I watched that series because the flood was interesting. I couldn't hang with just a Polish drama about a heroin junkie. But I know I could do that for its American counterpart.
Basically some other culture's/race's noir or rom-com is nowhere near as interesting as my own. There needs to be some wild external factor that would be interesting anywhere, e.g. in Squid Game.
Pongalh
2yr ago
This is intuitively correct. The kind of personality that goes into the helping professions are generally not indifferent go f*** yourself types.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yeah, I know quite a few people who smoke here and there, say when they're drinking. But not daily smokers or anything.
Pongalh
2yr ago
As far as I know they haven't begun to use chemical weapons, which is sort of in between typical arsenal and nukes.
Pongalh
2yr ago
My coworker brought this up just recently. When asked by another coworker why the Royal Family seemed (disputedly) to have it out for Megan Markle, they - they're trans, and by far the most politically vocal on the team - responded with "racism." The co-worker who had brought it up suggested it was because she was American. No, they don't like the Duchess because she's black, full stop.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yes the whole idea of touching grass can easily be construed as a form of escapist quietism.
I think if you care about the direction of society something you simply have to risk mental unwellness and a certain myopic obsession with politics.
Though there are weird implications of this, like conservatives being less interested in grillpilling and having families and instead staying single and devoting all their resources to politics, much like progressives do.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Isn't the nuclear warhead fact precisely the reason not to tussle with Russia?
The nuke fear was sky high during portions of the Cold War. Which was why it was important not to make it hot.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Well I would classify as right-wing and utilitarian. A materialist, empirically-driven ev. psych, sociobiological and economic pov I think ends up at least vaguely there.
People can quibble with what falls under the umbrella of "welfare state." I think something like seat belt and helmet laws would, and do, ruffle the feathers of a lot of natural rights libertarians but doesn't rise to the level of "holy shot this is socialism," which would put it unequivocally in the left wing, non-conservative camp.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yea. Everything is such an ensemble cast now. To tie this into politics, sure there's more minority representation but no given minority feels particularly represented. Everyone's getting drowned out by too many egos in the pot.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Can we talk about Sandman instead? Anyone watching that?
Or how about Cobra Kai? Though that one I admit is a bit dimwitted and downscale.
Pongalh
2yr ago
It's part of a long-standing trend you see in Western conservatism, where precedent-destroying economic activity is celebrated while simultaneously traditional gender roles and such is upheld.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Well there are conservatives who would like to claim the artistic class as their own, upset that it was ever ceded to the left.
This shows the limits of orienting one's political position around opposition to tribal enemies (if they're into it I'm out of of it) . It does injustice to political evolution in ideation.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yeah this is really testing the concept of "liberal conservatism." One must ask themselves are they more liberal or are they more conservative? I think what's confounding is that for many classical liberals, they truly believe they reinforce each other and cannot be broken up.
Pongalh
2yr ago
This is too totalizing and bleak. It's a matter of degree of censorship, and approximation to liberal attitudes on speech. It hasn't been exactly like it is now since forever, otherwise we wouldn't all be talking about censorship in the current era as if something important really has changed in the last decade or so.
Tangentially, speaking in terms of "we shouldn't let that happen again, so let's censor harder," fails to grasp that there are a number of disagreements within one's own tribe or political camp.
I think the perspective of someone like Hanania is to a large degree born of the way social media just presents an onslaught of topicality. It's non-stop news, which is entirely made up of object level details and the triggered sentiment that goes along with that. It's very difficult to think high level, more like a political philosopher. Everyone goes into second order intellectual mode ala journalism, not some kind of academic-style creative synthesizer. A low-key tabloidization of everything is where even the smartest people are basically at now, and they're beginning to rationalize it. "Great minds think about ideas, media minds think about events, small minds think about people" is being rendered almost impossible to uphold.
People have already talked about the way the age of books and newspapers allowed for more disembodied reasoning. Now it's a bunch of little thumbnails of someone whose face you just want to punch (in an online environment that mimics a small town, as Megan McArdle observed) and whatever argument is attached to that, well so much the worse for it.
The people on the right who think the problem now is we didn't censor enough back in the day, I'm not sure what could have been done then would have any bearing on where we are now. Who saw censorship largely occurring in private hands in a handful of companies in California? 99% of the discussion of censorship had everything to do with government actions until about 5 minutes ago.
Yea. But by far I put most of the weight of that on technology, which doesn't exactly lead one to New Right territory.
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