Pongalh
9mo ago
Successfully pissing people off - left, right, up or down - is a strange thing to have become an accolade.
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
Good post. This kind of humility is a hallmark of classical liberal thinking. Such thinking has of course gone out of vogue lately.
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
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
10mo ago
Maybe they show that they care about the ugly by not wanting to explicitly refer to them as ugly and reify it.
Pongalh
10mo ago
Sounds like Epstein is 100% what they're looking for. The real deal. Drag queens far more speculative.
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
10mo ago
Cycle of violence my friend. I'm going to assume with a comment like that that your family ought to be Roman-offed.
Pongalh
10mo ago
Arnold Kling has a saying, a sort of right wing spin on this, that, "Markets are unfair. Use markets."
It has the same He Giveth and He Taketh Away result.
Pongalh
10mo ago
I wonder what "practicing" Marxists means here. Most of them are just people with an opinion.
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
There is no such thing as all black people and all white (or other racial groups) people getting along.
Pongalh
10mo 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
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
Interesting that being concerned about corruption is for old, out of touch people.
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
Interesting. Oppositional defiant disorder sounds like the opposite of "mass formation psychosis." Pathological consensus versus pathological anti-consensus.
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
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?
It is eerie, and jarring. Like seeing Norm MacDonald be obsequious to The View.
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