Pongalh
10mo ago
That's interesting because "neurotypical" I thought to be genuinely merely descriptive.
I'm beginning to believe that anyone who pays close enough attention to politics can't actually approach these things as JAQ neutral liberal. Before you can sincerely suggest X is descriptive, someone will convincingly tell you that term has already been weaponized and is not just descriptive.
Those who lament the hijacking of liberalism are forced to participate in such hijacking lest they show themselves to be rubes who just fell off the proverbial turnip truck.
Anyone approaching politics in a "descriptive, neutral" way is a con artist or a moron.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I walk a ton living in San francisco. But I also step over a lot of shit and see a lot of demoralizing stuff on the street. Couple days ago saw someone feeding a mouse near a dumpster to their pitbull.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Interesting. But economics taught me that these Canadian healthcare workers aren't dealing with their own money, but rather taxpayer money, so why should they care about costs? They have soft budget constraints.
As for nudging, is there any such thing as merely making people aware of their options, or is that actually impossible? Any option you make people aware of you've necessarily nudged them toward?
Pongalh
3mo 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
11mo ago
Post-liberalism has accepted as good everything ugly about politics the rationalists wanted us to get past. Clickbait is good. Sensationalism is good. Treating arguments as soldiers is good. Thinking ideologically is good. Just picking a damn side already is good. Thinking of people as ultimately political and not having some valuable quality that is outside of politics is good.
And so on.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Right. One could consider it a fuck you to Marie Kondo striver culture, a "laying flat" as the Chinese under-zeitgeist has it.
Pongalh
1yr ago
She had another survey that looked at success of escorts by age and found younger more successful, which was apparently not particularly controversial.
But ageism isn't something that ever really caught on with current progressives. I still recall a prominent Babe.net (of Aziz Ansari bad date fame) defender trashing some critic by calling her old, without much pushback.
Your surprise at the reaction to this is why "radical centrism" is actually a thing now. Previously bland, no-shit-sherlock observational territory is becoming verboten.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Right, the boom in and trendiness of dramatized true crime, which blends fiction and fashion with the facts, makes one more suspicious than ever. Netflix in particular seems to be running away with this genre.
Pongalh
1yr ago
"Since when do we expect rappers to be articulate?"
I don't know. Rappers do truck in wordsmithery after all. The gift of gab is out front in that particular genre of music more than any other.
Pongalh
5mo ago
Just waiting for an article of the type, "In Defense of Cynically Referring to Liberal Principles and Then Totally Abandoning Them"
This comes across like anti-wisdom. As I've gotten older I think I've gone the opposite direction. Realizing beauty is only skin deep.
To the degree attractive women are more fun, it's because it's fun to be attracted to someone. Are they more pleasant on average? No I'd say not. To say nothing of moral character, more substantive.
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
10mo ago
I remember when there was just as much concern about grooming and pedophilia but it was all allegedly taking place among priests and boy scout leaders. Now there's just as much panic but it's aimed at progressive mileus.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I think this is true and it actually shows something about the evolution of political ideas in America. We know too much about each other's positions now. We genuinely and correctly feel there isn't much to be had by any more debate.
We all know where we stand. There is no more blood to be squeezed from that stone.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Well there is the "Boston School" - as opposed to Chicago School - of individualist anarchism, which has arguably been channeled into a generalized libertarianism you see all across the US cultural-political spectrum, be it cold-dead-hands right-wingers or leave-the-homeless-alone left-wingers. And of course tech libertarianism and crypto.
If you dislike Big Pharma e.g. because you think it promotes drugs that aid kids being trans, you are not going to find left allies. If you dislike Disney because you think it will make kids trans through acculturation, you're not going to find left allies.
So superficially the right is running away right now with a lot of the left's historical whipping boys, but if you dig deeper there's a throughline, a continuity.
This puts the left in awkward position, yes, feeling the need to defend some of these institutions by default but having to squeeze in, "but..but here's the real reason you should dislike X corporation!", trying to steal back that thunder.
Of course if you are very young leftist you're not particularly interested in stealing back that thunder. It was never your thunder to begin with. You care about different things. A lot of it seemingly representational and media-oriented.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Are they Kevin Sorbo, Andy Garcia and Scott Baio?
But seriously, someone like David Mamet comes to mind, as someone who has combined theater, to say the least, with right-wing political views. Although he may be more of an "anti-woke liberal" coming around only recently.
Pongalh
1yr ago
This is not surprising. I haven't even looked at Coinbase or touched my Coinbase credit card in like half a year. In 2021 those things were very, very important to me. That was a banner year.
Pongalh
1yr ago
San Francisco news interviewed local business owners/workers in the vicinity of Twitter HQ who are excited about Musk's plan to bring people back in the office. They want that lunch and dinner/happy hour business that's been missing since 2020.
So the cruelty of laying off WFH Twitter people is somewhat offset by that.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Yeah, I was reminded of the debate here regarding torture watching this Breaking Points video earlier, where torture comes up in the conversation with the implication that actually yea, it works. I think when that issue is not salient everyone falls back on "of course torture works." And introspection certainly tells me it does. The idea that it doesn't work was a weird 2000s era blip born of disliking George W Bush and company.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lS3vyB7gcNA (a little past 3:30 in)
Pongalh
3mo ago
"jealousy is the core of privilege discourse..."
Interesting. This seems at odds with the analysis of someone like Wesley Yang, that privilege discourse is a rhetorical weapon of the strong, a clever and perhaps counterintuitive domination of the weak. The "successor ideology," or the new way the upper class advances itself.
So, a jealous upper class?
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
4mo ago
In the popular imagination "grooming" is a conspiratorial right-wing thing, but it's true it's actually quite normative among younger people in general, that theme and accusation.
Colleen Ballinger aka Miranda Sings was accused of that and I'm pretty sure it wasn't coming from the right, who were never paying much attention to her.
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.
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