Pongalh
6mo ago
I actually don't mind the login requirement. Employers snoop. Of course you can still see someone's most popular tweets of all time, without logging in. So if you wrote something controversial but also massive hit, you may be in trouble.
Pongalh
6mo ago
Seeing everything that's been going on, precisely where they are located, my whole life, "stable" is not the word I'd use.
Pongalh
10mo ago
Sounds like Epstein is 100% what they're looking for. The real deal. Drag queens far more speculative.
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
10mo ago
Seems prestigious shows have to actually resemble real life. Mad Men. White Lotus. Succession. These shows are huge with coastal PMCs. The proles have Walking Dead and Viking dramas. Things that take you out of the modern, as-is world.
Of course reality TV is a major rebuttal to this...
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
3mo ago
Wrt the advertising industry, there was an amusing but brief series with Steve Coogan on Showtime years back, called "Happiness" iirc, that depicted the downside of becoming middle-aged in advertising.
Pongalh
6mo ago
Okay. I've seem quite a few blue checks who don't seem to get any more engagement than if they had never shelled out for that. You can't get lower than zero likes or replies.
But maybe they're just really terrible at getting attention, or agreeing enough with any subculture of Twitter users. Premium gives them no boost.
Pongalh
8mo ago
How determinative is age really, on covid policy opinion? The youthful Briahna Joy Gray e.g. appears to agree with the oldies on this subject.
Pongalh
8mo ago
I'd love if we could get their health coverage in exchange for our military coverage.
Pongalh
9mo ago
I thought Huffington Post and Gawker and other "new Media" folk of the early 2010s were no longer relevant. But they can still wipe the floor with upstarts like Substack it seems.
Pongalh
6mo 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
9mo ago
Good post. This kind of humility is a hallmark of classical liberal thinking. Such thinking has of course gone out of vogue lately.
Pongalh
3mo 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.
Pongalh
3mo ago
Indeed. The movie Blown Away with Jeff Bridges covers some of this territory actually (lol, I know)
Pongalh
6mo ago
Armstrong and Getty are somethin else. They are so incredibly unknown among any of the right people, but they've been doing their thing for 25 years or so.
I used to listen to them while delivering flowers in Sacramento in the mid-2000s. The effect of aging has not yet affected their voice/delivery. They haven't skipped a beat.
Pongalh
9mo ago
I always thought that Ricky and Lucy not sleeping together was gay propaganda. Why are they not sleeping together? What are they saying about him? Is this some kind of sham marriage?
Pongalh
10mo ago
But race and gender would not be so salient if we could sufficiently get out of each other's faces, and that has a dry, materialist component, implicating techno-commercial and economic trends.
Tangentially, I wonder, who might be an example of a right materialist? James Manzi?
Michael Lind might count but I think he's sort of been slid into the right wing camp by default, via the left changing its tune.
The more market-oriented libertarians - as opposed to Gadsden flag-waving anti-government types - have been called the Marxists of the right, so there's that.
Pongalh
3mo ago
The "lying flat" movement in China would seem to buttress what you're saying.
Pretty convenient that elite realignments are cool and edgy (edgy though really?...VC and non-profit realignments as edgy?) given that's the easiest thing to get behind. Relatedly, inequality soars... inequality is actually cool!
And how about simply being not anti-semitic, not philo-semitic? In fact philo-semitism seems a good way of generating more anti-semitism.
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