Pongalh
7mo ago
A curious premise.
The prevalence of climate change is impervious to anyone's opinion about climate change. But people's opinion about anti-semitism does seem more "dynamic," in relation to the actions of anti-semitism orgs.
Pongalh
11mo ago
I remember a study or book years ago showing that nerdy black kids in all black schools got hassled less because they couldn't be so easily compared to Asians or whites.
(Of course who were they getting hassled by?...)
Pongalh
11mo ago
San Francisco is actually experiencing mini renaissance within a broader decline, namely in AI. Think the neighborhood dubbed Cerebral Valley.
Maybe that has something to do with it. Those are the people buying those homes.
Pongalh
3mo ago
On the other hand he's anti-Christian, anti-populist and pro-euthanasia.
(His dismissal of the Palestinian cause stems from lacking any bleeding heart Abrahamic universalism.)
Pongalh
3mo ago
Indeed. The movie Blown Away with Jeff Bridges covers some of this territory actually (lol, I know)
Pongalh
5mo ago
Right. How many wealthier conservative white men who aren't particularly culturally aggrieved - but are economically savvy - have attained that status, indirectly, by advertising (read cultural) trends that do not put the likes of them front and center?
Pongalh
6mo ago
Exactly how I feel about the Ukrainians. They're not going to win against Russia. Their stubborn refusal is going to get them killed. It's irrational.
Pongalh
7mo ago
You make a good point. Strictly speaking an economic analysis of this stuff should be culture-free, with no implicit notion that the employers are conscientious, bright and noble and their employees are parasitic drag-em-downs. They are just two groups of actors engaged in contractual dispute/process. Whatever emerges from that just is the market. There's no reason why a victorious union should not be thought of as the clever, superior stock of human capital.
But the US-style Daniel Plainview conservativism always leaks its way in.
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?
Speaking of QAnon, the focus there seemed to be Jeffrey Epstein and his ilk, or a bunch of wealthy straight guys diddling young girls. How has that morphed in the last few years into an obsession with drag queen groomers?
Is the continuity just a focus on the intersection of children and debaucherous sexuality that just follows where the news and vibes go, almost unconsciously?
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
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
7mo ago
Well hasn't Hanania said he doesn't value free speech for its own sake, and that he's surprised that conservatives get away with as much speech as they do, because if he were in charge he wouldn't let progressives get away with anything?
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
10mo ago
Allende is set to opposed the threat of a good example. But now Pinochet exists as an example of a bad capitalist.
I have a friend from Chile who is absolutely opposed to the woke (and to a somewhat lesser degree the broader left) but wants to vomit when you bring up Pinochet. His family personally suffered.
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
10mo ago
That's the one great legacy of covid. It took that big exogenous shock to move the needle toward remote work. The viability of such work was mostly speculative before then.
A giant blow against an Office Space-style quality of life pain point.
Pongalh
10mo ago
I don't know, but I'm curious about the overlap between people who believe yes there were a ton of groomers in those "spaces" and now there are a ton of groomers at drag shows etc. Who is on record as being consistent in being alarmed all throughout?
Pongalh
11mo ago
Liberals with a capital L, market enthusiasts and lawyers all sort of hew closely to this line.
Pongalh
11mo ago
Yeah I've definitely moved further into the let's sacrifice innovation camp. If the most productive or ambitious or idiosyncratic feel kneecapped, so be it, for the sake of public order and a general ethos that supports regular people's dispositions.
Pongalh
3mo ago
Are Davos people jealous? Are they the 1% or the 10%?
I'm probing as I'm curious how this reconfigures political understanding. So, a right-populism that hates the top 10% virtue-signallers - but only superficially for class-based reasons, as it's really cultural and psychological - and is joined by the top 1% the loser top 10% are jealous of. Which raises the question, why are the top 1% not also virtue signalers? Do you really stop seeing successor ideology antics at that strata?
Unions are as much market forces as the entire edifice of corporations and business, which are also protected by government.
This idea that all the weird and specific permutations of business ownership is natural oh but unions are artificial and imposed by government is wrong.
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