Pongalh
2yr 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
2yr ago
Yeah the irony is the kind of people so transparently itching for a fight with dysfunctional black America is dysfunctional white America.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Maybe they show that they care about the ugly by not wanting to explicitly refer to them as ugly and reify it.
Pongalh
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr ago
I wonder what "practicing" Marxists means here. Most of them are just people with an opinion.
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
There is no such thing as all black people and all white (or other racial groups) people getting along.
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
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
2yr ago
Interesting that being concerned about corruption is for old, out of touch people.
Pongalh
2yr 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
2yr ago
Interesting. Oppositional defiant disorder sounds like the opposite of "mass formation psychosis." Pathological consensus versus pathological anti-consensus.
Pongalh
2yr 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
2yr 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
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
I never did see Mississippi Burning,
A serious, grown up film from the late '80s i.e. my formative years that sounds similar.
Pongalh
2yr ago
The people at e.g. Palladium magazine are an example of the more nationalist but less populist High Right theme I'm getting at here.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I think it's been I dunno, a year or so since I promoted one of my interviews here (that included Yassine Meskhout and TW), so I wanted to link The Motte to my talk with Alex Hochuli of Aufhebunga Bunga podcast. Part 1 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=6OiZUUGNOr0) gets into - and this is mostly me here, not Alex - the turn in market thinking away from sunny, Milton Friedman-esque universalism and towards elitist and/or nationalist framings. Think the Hanania-esque or Caplanian disdain for the masses combined with a love of Jeff Bezos...whose companies serve the dumb masses. (Someone like Brink Lindsey otoh, representing the older right-liberal think tank crowd, still has affection for Joe Consumer Citizen.) As if the new point of capitalism is to give those of us with high human capital a properly challenging space to achieve, as a role model for us all perhaps, not to provide Count Chocula cereal. Objective standards vs. relativism of the market is also touched on.
In part 2 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=VUlgKio5f7k) we discuss the role of ideology: How viable is trying to be non-ideological? South American vs. Western left/right politics and the notion of false consciousness or citizens' latent revolutionary potential are also broached, among other things.
See too my interview with Anton Cebalo, author of last year's somewhat viral "The Social Recession": https://novum.substack.com/p/social-recession-by-the-numbers
Part 1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2dhbq3JxOrg
Part 2: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HGlkuScNNRg
My whole channel: https://youtube.com/@champagnebulge1/videos
Pongalh
2yr 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?
Good post. This kind of humility is a hallmark of classical liberal thinking. Such thinking has of course gone out of vogue lately.
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