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
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
"To make sure 85-year-old can live to 86?"
Yikes, I see a sentiment like this and it makes me think it's not the left that is on the side of some kind of youth cult that disrespects elders but rather the libertarian right, which is just the entire American right it seems, even when they're not talking about wealth creation and entrepreneurship. There's a flippant, distinctly young healthy male attitude to so much of their thinking
Pongalh
7mo ago
Being for a strong military as an expression of national virility but also being isolationist seems like a strange combination to me. What should the military do then? Lots of drills and restricting yourself to monitoring the coasts certainly doesn't seem particularly glorious as a display of male capacity.
I think the part of the New Right that is big on the former realizes there's tension here, and so they've actually gone in for interventionism to square the circle, and want to separate themselves from the loser-y defeatist vibes of the libertarian non-interventionists.
Not liking libertarianism is really big with the new right, and being anti-war there is a trope. So that ends up being implicated in their disdain for free market liberals. But of course if you go too far this direction you end up right back in NeoConland.
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
1yr ago
More and more there's a clear trend of "vibes" as legitimate source of political motivation.
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
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
Interesting, this concept of moralism being lower status. If so it suggests high status people are amoral, so populists are right to be suspicious of them. Everyone from Epstein and co. to Silicon Valley EA folk.
Woke elites suck all the air out of the room, consumed as they are by a so-called new puritanism. But a lack of puritanism may be a bigger problem. It's the broad PMC - the normies and 99% of the elite - that want to institute a moral framework whereaa the true high status people calling the shots are essentially still living in the carefree vaunted 90s.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I see pop culture as actually having a fascination with poor or working class white people, just as long as they are quirky somehow. Or criminal. Tiger King. The hatchet-wielding hitchhiker. Former mobsters moving to Oklahoma (Tulsa King).
Pongalh
1yr ago
Total overstatement. I feel the need to drag out the trope of East/West Germany and North/South Korea.
Pongalh
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
5mo 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
6mo ago
You can make $100,000 a year managing a Taco Bell??
And if so, are the dating prospects awful because despite your solid income because you work at Taco Bell? I suppose if you restrict yourself to the people that actually come into your store and buy a chalupa things aren't that bad.
Pongalh
6mo 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
9mo 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
9mo ago
Yeah the irony is the kind of people so transparently itching for a fight with dysfunctional black America is dysfunctional white America.
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
In Scott's last linkfest he hinted that he was no longer living in San Francisco. Not that that would help him much with an ability to return to his 2015 self, but I'm curious if he really is no longer in the area.
Pongalh
1yr ago
The idea that chat AI will just generate midwit liberalisms ends up undermining midwit liberalism if a societal goal is to learn to accurately detect chat AI-driven content and squash it.
This guy is working on tech that detects just that:
How do I know you're a human being with something human to say? You say horseshoe theory-confirming stuff, lol.
Well, I think critics were wrong about the 50s being degenerate but they're not that wrong now.
Tangentially, I think San Francisco is outrageously degenerate. But it generates wealth and competence in a way you would never guess by just looking at what's going on on the street. I think America at large is similar. Wanting congruence between the kind of people who can pump out a vaccine in a year and heroin addicts is very compelling, but apparently society can live with a messier arrangement.
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.)
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