Pongalh
2yr ago
I've never really understood this line of thinking, that the "real you" comes out when you're inebriated. Couldn't both sides of her - drunk and sober - represent what she really thinks, such that one could just as well say that when she's drunk she's being too impolite to say the truth?
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
1yr ago
I've heard progressives say that abolishing the Civil Rights Act is absolutely letting back in Jim Crow and full blown racism. They don't believe Constitutional talk of the value of federalism or decentralization and private, voluntary action. No, CRA removal is just an exterminationist aim.
Pongalh
1yr ago
The curious thing about Maine is that its most popular language after English is French. It makes sense being adjacent to Quebec but it's not a popular fact. (I remember reading this factoid about 10 years ago so maybe Spanish has now edged it out.)
That Walking Dead spin-off Daryl Dixon depicts this actually.
Pongalh
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
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
1yr 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
1yr ago
Wow. Nice. I stand to inherit a Ford hybrid. And that's about it.
"Better than a stick in the eye!" my dad likes to say.
Pongalh
2yr 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
2yr ago
They still do largely get along. The feeling they don't is a manifestation of the inescapeability and heightened new sense of memetic domination and the always-on media mindshare.
Pongalh
2yr ago
People seem to be abandoning the ideal of not relying on that. It's an anti-intellectual move.
"Where's your evidence?"
"I don't know, they're just like, ugh."
Pongalh
2yr ago
Another instance where Team Liberal realizes it's a fair weather friend to Team Right and Team Left.
There are just not very many people for whom truth matters. Most just grope around for issue sets, decide what and who they don't and do like, and then go full sacking of intellectual integrity in order to promote or bash their particular feelz.
Pongalh
2yr 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.
Pongalh
2yr 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.
I think the perspective of someone like Hanania is to a large degree born of the way social media just presents an onslaught of topicality. It's non-stop news, which is entirely made up of object level details and the triggered sentiment that goes along with that. It's very difficult to think high level, more like a political philosopher. Everyone goes into second order intellectual mode ala journalism, not some kind of academic-style creative synthesizer. A low-key tabloidization of everything is where even the smartest people are basically at now, and they're beginning to rationalize it. "Great minds think about ideas, media minds think about events, small minds think about people" is being rendered almost impossible to uphold.
People have already talked about the way the age of books and newspapers allowed for more disembodied reasoning. Now it's a bunch of little thumbnails of someone whose face you just want to punch (in an online environment that mimics a small town, as Megan McArdle observed) and whatever argument is attached to that, well so much the worse for it.
The people on the right who think the problem now is we didn't censor enough back in the day, I'm not sure what could have been done then would have any bearing on where we are now. Who saw censorship largely occurring in private hands in a handful of companies in California? 99% of the discussion of censorship had everything to do with government actions until about 5 minutes ago.
Pongalh
2yr 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
2yr ago
The millionaire/billionaire biz celebrity phenomenon - Elon musk, Mark Cuban etc. - has meant that a lot of the reason for the praise these days for rappers and to some degree athletes is because they are thought of as savvy businessmen. "He's ballin, he got business smarts" is it greater part of discourse around adoration and adulation for celebrities than it used to be, in black fandom, as it were.
More and more, artists need to have side hustles and sponsorships and other things going on (just like the typical American, shunted into "being their own boss" by driving for Uber on the side) because high-profile, steady gigs are fleeting and scattershot compared to ages back.
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
2yr ago
Well Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the only star in a film. Typically in Schwarzenegger films there are plenty of white men (speaking to my own demographic) speaking English and making cultural references I understand that more than outweigh how alien Schwarzenegger's body is, even if white.
Racial representation is not everything but it might be the single largest factor going into why I will gravitate towards something. Like maybe it's 30%, and various other factors represent 20% and so on. (If ethnicity is a combination of race and culture then I suppose that is really what I'm getting at.)
Slice of life-style dramas do need to be culturally familiar, again with race acting as a rough proxy. I recently watched the Polish series High Water, about the floods of the '90s. The main star was a heroin junkie. Now, I watched that series because the flood was interesting. I couldn't hang with just a Polish drama about a heroin junkie. But I know I could do that for its American counterpart.
Basically some other culture's/race's noir or rom-com is nowhere near as interesting as my own. There needs to be some wild external factor that would be interesting anywhere, e.g. in Squid Game.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Yeah the irony is the kind of people so transparently itching for a fight with dysfunctional black America is dysfunctional white America.
I remember the lesser AHAs of the aughts too. Ibn Warraq, Irshad Manji. But haven't heard their names in years.
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