Pongalh
1yr ago
Moral non-moralist? I suppose evangelism must then be subject to such a difference of degree than that it becomes a difference in kind. How would we even know that a moral non-moralist is not themselves a moralistic (too much moralism) or amoral (not enough). Some form of radar must detect it.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Spanish.
Oh and I buy all that, and the challenge it presents to my POV here. I'm just saying functionally that's how it "feels" on a work-a-day level and I think just how it goes in America.
They're all kinds of incidental and less obvious markers that can upset this schema.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Yes. My girlfriend has voted like five times in San Francisco this year. She complains they have too many elections there, but keeps voting anyway.
I haven't voted since 2008.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Well they want to hold the Atlantic writer accountable, not a politician. And even if she is on record having been on the wrong side before, people like her must never be allowed to forget. There is no moving on.
Never. Forget.
Pongalh
1yr 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
1yr ago
When you say in private in response to stated opposition, it suggests that they privately admit to this. But they don't even do that in private, in my experience. But they do often behave as if they believe it, yes.
Well there are many on the dissident right and weirdo left who believe that the world both before social media and orthogonal to it is the real mind virus. So they have a complicated relationship with acknowledging this kind of problem.
Pongalh
1yr ago
This reminds me of what the criminologist Mark Kleiman proposed years ago, before he died.
But as we know policy is now dictated by social media which makes anything smart almost impossible to implement. It's about competing vibes. And the vibe around this still looks far too right wing, I'm sure.
Pongalh
3mo ago
The "lying flat" movement in China would seem to buttress what you're saying.
Pongalh
4mo ago
The Italian School-loving New Right which seems to have a lot of sway here is quite overt about putting status and cool above any kind of lame moralistic principled considerations. There is only health, wealth, power, consequences, and demographic blocks determined by great men, not corny meditations on the morality of any given act - in war, or backroom political dealings - driven by resentful leveling.
Of course whenever it clashes with the east coast journalistic establishment it's shown up to be quite cringe and uncool. Maybe the tech/coastal crypto-right being so adjacent to edgy and cool - unlike the flyover populists who are distant and hopeless - makes them value it more than even the official culture industry, who take it for granted because they're directly at the center of it.
Pongalh
7mo ago
I'd add it from an employer rights or business rights angle - as opposed to worker rights - it also feels intuitively absolutely insane that you would be stopped from putting to use your own materials because of intellectual property, or unable to repair something on your own (ala Louis Rossman on YT).
There are a lot of insane things in this world. What one chooses to highlight gives away a bias.
Pongalh
8mo ago
It is eerie, and jarring. Like seeing Norm MacDonald be obsequious to The View.
Pongalh
9mo ago
Successfully pissing people off - left, right, up or down - is a strange thing to have become an accolade.
Pongalh
10mo ago
I wonder what "practicing" Marxists means here. Most of them are just people with an opinion.
Pongalh
10mo ago
Interesting that being concerned about corruption is for old, out of touch people.
Pongalh
10mo 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
10mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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.
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
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 had assumed melatonin wouldn't do anything for me. But I've been taking it, and it absolutely has an effect on me.
Tangentially - and I mean very tangentially - if you have any experience with those rhino erection pills? I had one recently and I was surprised that it seemed to work. I'm not entirely certain. Think a somewhat delayed effect, if there was one.
"people who have in fact silenced others..."
By this do you mean specific people or people who belong to a group you don't like? The difference is constantly being elided or not indicated.
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